I liked Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self bunches, but I’m somewhat at a loss to explain why exactly. The best I can say is that there’s a realness to the characters that I connected with, which is somewhat disconcerting because disconnectedness is a running theme throughout the stories. But sincerity in characters isn’t sufficient reason for me to read a book through in just a sitting or two (which is what I did). There’s something more here that I can’t quite figure out. I suspect I’ll see or hear someone else describe why they liked the book so much and I’ll have an a-ha moment. This is well worth reading.

The first adjective that comes to mind to about the characters in Danielle Evans book is that they are sad and melancholy. The stories feature mostly middle class blacks in not quite everyday situations, but not exactly extraordinary ones either. I’m not sure how to classify that. For instance, in one story a returned soldier from Iraq babysits his ex-girlfriend’s kid, but tells a story where he’s the girl’s father and it spins beyond his control. Because these aren’t tales of extraordinary people, everything they do is understandable, even when it’s clear they aren’t exactly doing the right thing. Or even that they are doing the right thing for themselves. But all very human.

What makes them seem sad is that they are very disconnected from their families or loved ones. They try to make connections during these episodes to fill a sort of sad void, but they mostly fail. In Virgins, two girls head into the city to spend a night clubbing after the local high school boys annoy them. They want someone to treat them well. The thing is, the attention of the city men is not effectively more meaningful, though they don’t readily recognize it. The story is filled with abandonment. Both girls leave Michael, their guy friend and escort, Jasmine leaves Erica, Erica leaves Jasmine, Erica leaves Michael (again). Looking for connections, but leave the ones they have. Other stories include the disconnect in ways other than abandonment.

Race in the United States infuses the stories, several of them explicitly. They don’t confront overt racism, the David Duke kind. Somewhat more subtle but still damaging prejudice appears. One story follows two girls dealing with reproductive issues: a white college student makes money selling her eggs, but no one wants to spend thousands for an egg donor with brown skin. Another features a school that is nominally integrated, yet the students from the whiter, richer neighborhood still receive preferential treatment. The smart black girl still does well, and might possibly be used by the administration as an exhibit for their fairness. But each character isn’t just a black person, but also a soldier, or a woman, or a parent, etc. Intersectionality is the term I would guess fits best, though I’m not knowledgeable about the sociological term to be quoted on that. Still, this is more complex than being about black life.

That’s about all I can say coherently (and that’s a stretch even) at the moment. Maybe after I see some other blog reviews something will pop into my head and I’ll leave a comment or two. I expect to see a few laudatory reviews, as it showed up on quite a few Currently Reading side bars during my searches just now.

Other blogged reviews:

• Postbourgie
• [tk] Book Bites
• 50 Books for 2010

Title: Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
Author: Danielle Evans
Imprint / publisher: Riverhead / Penguin
Format: Advance readers copy
Length: 229 p.
Publication date: September 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-59448-769-9

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program in return for providing a review of the book on LibraryThing. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I will donate $17.13 (the cost of the book on Amazon) to the A.L.S.A.

I’ve generally liked the Lucius Shepard stories I’ve read in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best collections. Some of them I’ve really liked. So when I saw a Shepard book in the piles at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library semi-annual book sale, I grabbed it.

Technically, this is a literary collection. The book starts with a non-fiction piece expanded from a story Shepard wrote for Spin magazine about hobos. Yup, actual train riding hobos. I didn’t realize people still did this, but they do. There was a kerfuffle about a hobo gang that was murdering hundreds of people, and Spin asked Shepard to investigate. I’m surprised I missed this, because the primary purveyor of the hobo gang story was a Spokane Washington detective, and I lived in the area at the time the story came out (1998), but I missed it.

For some time, Shepard rode the rails seeking to talk to members of the Freight Train Riders of America (F.T.R.A.), the gang involved in the murderous rampage. Only it turns out, of course, that the gang is mostly homeless drunks. While they do get violent sometimes, they aren’t exactly the scourge they’d been portrayed as on Americas Most Wanted and other shows.

Shepard gets philosophical about the train tramp life. Hard and short-lived in many cases, but he asserts it has many charms:

Freight routes cover portions of the country never seen by anyone apart from those who ride the trains, and there are places of great beauty that will be forgotten. With no one to look at them, even if only through drunken and corrupted eyes, it will be as if parts of our map have vanished, in a very real sense restoring that map to something resembling the unfinished depiction of the continent that was deemed accurate more than a century ago.

After Shepard’s non-fiction piece, the book includes two short stories. The first, Over Yonder fits in very well with my impressions of Shepard’s Year’s Best stories. A hobo named Billy Long Gone (because his real name is just too prissy to tell others) catches a train out of Oregon that takes him to a magical place called Yonder. Magical, but not wonderful. Downright stupifying, in fact. Residents lose all their cares, which is not a good thing. Billy Long Gone is one of the few who retains any hopes at all, and his is to cross a distant mountain range, where rumor has it monsters abound and a fabled city exists. Very enjoyable story, though I didn’t understand the ending much at all.

The second short story was of a non-fantastic variety. Jailbait tells a story of a romance in the railyards between Madcat and Grace. Grace is new to the hobo life. She’s a gutter punk, runaway from home and sees riding the rails as a romantic step up from life on the Ave (or Spokane’s equivalent). Madcat is a cynical type who couldn’t care less about Grace (or anything), but avails himself of Grace’s body which Grace uses in her own cynical way. Mutual symbiosis in the face of extreme violence. But it turns out really not to be as cynical as it could be.

Title: Two Trains Running
Author: Lucius Shepard
Cover creator: John Picacio
Imprint / publisher: Golden Gryphon Press
Format: Hardcover
Length: 112 p.
Publication date: 2004
ISBN-10: 1-930846-23-1

In a few weeks, Big Mouth Press (aka Small Beer Press) releases Holly Black’s collection of short stories, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories. It’s a mix of fantasy and horror, most featuring adolescent or college age characters. These well-written stories aren’t light, happy reading. But then, you should expect dark and complex with a title like The Poison Eaters.

Most of the stories feature characters who are somewhat outcast. They fight themselves more than they do anyone or anything else. Sometimes that sort of inner conflict bores me to yawns, but each of these characters have personality that makes them interesting.

One side note, just to get my opinion out there. Nominally targeted at the young adult market, this collection contains dark stories that include sex (not graphic) and that glorify drinking and partying. These stories don’t teach lessons about how it’s better to behave like an adult. These things are by no means foreign to young adult stories, so my opinion isn’t unusual. My opinion: kids can handle anything and everything thrown at them in a book. I’ve never once met a teen that needed to be protected from anything in any book I’ve ever read. Stuff like this book is the antidote that adults get to counteract the bullshit sheltering they received when they were younger. Worries about what kids can handle are really worries about what the adults can handle.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

This story made a couple of Year’s Best anthologies for good reason. Vampires have the coolness factor that they do in Twilight, eternal life (undeath) and eternal parties, though they are quarantined off in Coldtowns in most cities because of how infectious they are. Matilda has been bitten, but is trying to sweat out the incubation period rather than give in to the blood lust that would turn her. She doesn’t want to be a vampire. Her ex-boyfriend who she’s still in love with and his new girl want to become vampires though. One of the few vampire tales I’ve read in a while that really engaged me.

A Reversal of Fortune

A teen signs a pact with the devil to save her dog. If she beats the devil in a contest, the dog is saved. If she loses, she loses her soul. The contest she chooses is an eating competition, and she gets her overweight brother to train her. I think what makes the story is the set-up where Nikki meets the devil on the bus and then spend the day working at the mall, which isn’t the fun time she imagined when she took the job.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

This story was left out of the review copy I received.

The Night Market

A second deal with the devil kind of story. Set in the Philippines, Tomasa’s sister Eva has been snared by an enkanto, a faery of some sort, and lies wasting at home. Tomasa tries to get the enkanto to make her better, and when it refuses ventures into the faery night market looking for someone who can. A little more confusing than the previous story though.

The Dog King

Intelligent wolves terrorize the countryside, but the residents of the stone-walled city are safe inside until people mysteriously start dying. The king promises his throne to the knight who can kill the wolf causing all the havoc. Of course, it can’t be the king’s tamed wolf, can it? This one had me rooting for the wolf.

Virgin

Jen has a thing for Zachary, a homeless teenage junkie. He’s got the looks that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. But Zachary tells a wild tale about watching his mom die in the woods after which a unicorn befriends him. Messed up kids have messed up lives, and this ends up messed up for everyone.

In Vodka Veritas

The lightest story in the collection. The king of the prep school nerds gets stood up by his fellow outcast best buddy Danny on prom night. The friend actually got asked to prom. Our hero’s plan is to get dressed in a tux, break into the old abandoned home of the school on the edge of campus with a bottle of vodka, and get drunk. I’ve had similar plans before when I was young and lonely. His plan is foiled by the Latin club. No one expects the Latin club.

The Coat of Stars

Semi-closeted gay costume designer makes costumes for faeries to try and bring back is youthful crush. Good story, but a little too much clothes-whoring for me to get into it. I dress up as a means to an end, not an end to itself. So I don’t get costume-lust like other people do.

Paper Cuts Scissors

Really liked this one! Justin’s girlfriend Linda knows how to put things in stories. As in, the book in your hand is now changed to include the things Linda wants in it, and those things are no longer in the real world. It doesn’t change the book for other people who have it; just that copy. After an argument between the two, Linda puts herself into a classic Russian novel. Justin, heartbroken, goes to library school to get her out of the story. I mostly don’t like stories written for other writers, but I go ga-ga over stories like this that are written for readers. Perfect.

Going Ironside

A loopy story of faeries attempting to get people to impregnate them. Not my thing.

Untitled (A Modern Faerie Tale Story)

The second story not included in this review copy.

The Poison Eaters

Inventive story of three sisters. They are poison. Touch them and die. It’s hard to explain this story without getting into spoiler territory. Well worth the read.

Four of the stories are must-read: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, A Reversal of Fortune, Paper Cuts Scissors, and The Poison Eaters. All the rest were well-written too. Can’t go wrong buying this one.

One other blogged review:

• Book Nerds

Title: The Poison Eaters and Other Stories
Author: Holly Black
Imprint / publisher: Big Mouth House / Small Beer Press
Format: Advanced reading copy
Length: 156 p. (published version will have 256 p.)
Publication date: Feb 2010
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-63-8

Small Beer Press provided me with an advance review copy of this book. In accordance with my policy on review copies, I’ve donated $12.14 (the price of the book on Amazon.com) to the A.L.S.A.

Usually when I review a collection of short stories, I’ll include a paragraph for each story. Not this time. This time will only appear a fairly brief review for the entire collection. That’s because I didn’t get it. I’m missing something. I thought Chekhov was supposed to be the epitome of the short story writer, but I’m not sure what I should be noticing about the writing. Mostly idle Russian noblemen fret about their lives. Is there some symbolism I’m supposed to notice? Are these particularly classic views of Russian life? My quick reading of SparkNotes’ Chekhov entry doesn’t really explain why they are masterful in terms I can understand. I guess part of my problem is that I didn’t give a rip about any of the characters. So the possible fact that they were particularly good examples of pathos or something like that went right by me. If he was a trailblazer, I think I am glad his literary descendants read him and used him and not I.

For the record, the stories are:

• The Black Monk (1894)
• The House with the Mezzanine (1896)
• The Peasants (1897)
• Gooseberries (1898)
• The Lady with the Toy Dog (1899)

Title: Five Great Short Stories
Author: Anton Chekhov
Imprint / publisher: Dover
Format: Paperback
Length: 94 p.
Publication date: 1990 (stories originally published in 1890s)
ISBN-10: 0-486-26463-7

The protagonists in Miranda July’s collection No One Belongs Here More Than You are all quirky. In some stories, like Juno, that’s charming. But Juno is a movie not written by Miranda July and it does not appear in this book. In the stories that do appear and that are written by Miranda July, quirky is not charming.

These characters each have a quirky inner world, meaning they daydream and think of weird, quirky connections between things, usually between them and someone they imagine they are dating. Thing is, these inner worlds are just weird, plain wrong, and have no connection to any world recognizable to me. One character daydreams a relationship with her downstairs neighbor while sitting with him on a shared patio when he’s having an epileptic seizure. Another imagines her ideal lover as a dark nameless shape that inhabits the body of a boy in the special needs class where she is an assistant. Sometimes they make decisions that are quirky, like the couple who break up because they spent everything they had emotionally acting silently as extras in a movie.

Aside from trying to make her characters just a little bit but really way too far off, Miranda July made these stories very clever. For instance, she has a woman teaching old people how to swim without a pool. By flopping around on a floor with a bowl of water in front of them, which one is suitably scared of putting her face in. And thus she is the coach of a swim team. Isn’t that clever?

There’s a pathos about all the characters. Lives of quiet desperation and whatnot. Except that it lost all potency with me because I didn’t care about the actors in these stories. They didn’t seem real to me so why would I give a rip about them? Perhaps I should have appreciated their child-like nature, but I didn’t.

Title: No one belongs here more than you: stories
Author: Miranda July
Imprint / publisher: Scribner / Simon & Schuster
Format: Paperback
Length: 201 p.
Publication date: May 2008 (hardcover 2007)
ISBN-10: 0-7432-9941-8
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9941-1
Subject: Short stories, American
LC classification: PS3610.U537N6 2007

I’ve heard John Kessel’s name a few times, and read a few of his stories that have appeared in anthologies, but I’ve never made an effort to read his work before. Small Beer Press released this collection of some of his short stories last month, and licensed them under a Creative Commons license. Smart move, methinks. It got me to download the PDF of the book and read it. Color me impressed with the work.

The theme of the stories in the book is that most of them are responses or homage to other works of fiction, most of which I am not familiar with. The opening story takes on Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, while some in the middle are responses to science fiction works, to the last story which combines Pride and Prejudice with Frankenstein. I liked almost everything in the collection, with the exceptions being several of the more experimental stories toward the end.

Worth purchasing I think, and definitely worth downloading.

The Baum Plan for Financial Independence

Well, this collection is off to a great start! Dot (a.k.a. Dorothy) worked for a rich family which owns a summer cottage in the woods. She and Sid plan to break into this summer cottage where Dot believes the family has left $10,000. They get to the house all right, but can’t find the safe. What they do find is a secret door and stairwell down to a subway station. I’m probably missing a lot of the layers of this story. But I just love the suspicious bewilderment Sid adopts, as well as the nonchalant attitude from the people they meet.

Every Angel Is Terrifying

That’s one helluva cat! This one follows an escaped criminal and his cat. I can’t write how good this story without giving any of it away. Read this!

The Red Phone

Not deep, but pretty cute. A quick riff on the idea of executives who have their help make their phone calls for them. In this case, they are doing this with phone sex. And the best part is the help embellishes the calls and makes them so much better.

I double your investment, going short on Euros in the international currency markets while shaving your balls with a priceless ancient bronze Phonecian razor of cunning design.

The Invisible Empire

A story of a night of one of the female vigilance societies in the 1800s. Alternative history. Also a very inventive story like the previous three. Four for four so far!

The Juniper Tree

Here’s the setup: Jack, estranged from his ex-wife Helen, steals his daughter Roz away (she wants to go) to a new colony on the moon. The colony of Cousins is matriarchal, as well as sexually open. The idea of the social experiment is similar to that of female-only education; without men in charge, the dependency girls feel will be broken and can achieve their full destiny. However, the story isn’t really about the social experiment so much as the personal relationship between Jack and the two women in his life, Roz and Eva. Jack has a really hard time adjusting to the different mores of the colony. I’m having a hard time putting into words just how messed up he is. Suffice to say I think he would need medication even if he in a place he found normal. Actually, his history indicates he did have problems there too. He can’t let go of Roz as she grows up, and he can’t even have a conversation about her without losing his cool. Good story.

Stories for Men

There’s a lot going on in this story set in the same Cousins lunar colony as the previous story. It’s mostly the story of Erno and a provocateur who goes by Tyler Durden. Obviously there is a connection between Fight Club and this story. Erno is a young male who has a lot of anger and grievances against the colony which oppresses his sex. Tyler impresses on young Erno the male ethos as coming from the 20th century. Tyler Durden without the anti-corporate message, but continuing the non-conformity. Tyler would bring down the Cousins. Several views of sex roles came to my mind when I read the story. One is that there is little difference between men and women; our roles are primarily cultural. Put women in charge and you could easily just have a reversal of roles. The women in this story certainly do not behave ideally when in charge. This could also be viewed as a story turning the tables on men from the current situation in the U.S., and how would we feel. Show men being objectified in a non-positive way and see if male readers might have an emotional reaction. I certainly did. And a third look is that men are denying their basic nature when they subsume the macho. If we don’t indulge ourselves, we lose something essential (but also destructive too). If nothing else, the story will make you think.

Under the Lunchbox Tree

The two previous stories looked at the Cousins society from the perspective of men. This one looks at it from the perspective of a girl, Mira. She’s sent off to a summer camp, becomes homesick and doesn’t like the other girls (boys don’t get to go to camp). She escapes by social engineering one of the older male servants at the camp. In other words, she gives him a sob story that’s a complete lie and he agrees to take her home. Of course, it doesn’t take long for Mira to be missed and her escape is thwarted, putting her pawn in jeopardy. There’s a little but of exposure of female to female relationships. Mira also has a small epiphany about how her brother is treated differently.

Sunlight or Rock

Now Kessel returns to the story of Erno in exile (his punishment for his transgressions in Stories for Men) in a non-Cousins lunar colony. Surprisingly, it doesn’t deal too much with Erno’s adjustment to a non-female run culture. A little bit, but not much. Destitute, Erno attempts a big gambling score by hawking everything of value at a pawnshop.

The Snake Girl

This is a non-genre story. Ben is an awkward lad in college, starting his experimentation with drugs and other forms of slackery. Linda takes a liking to Ben, and initiates a relationship. But to her, it’s just a college fling. Ben makes a fairly common mistake though and thinks his first love is forever, but is devastated when it isn’t. Also, Linda owns a snake. The story didn’t seem particularly original, but I still really liked it. Sometimes it’s just nice to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for a bit, and it’s easy to do that with Ben.

It’s All True

I’ve read other stories where people from the future travel to their past (i.e., around now) and snatch people to use their genius in the future. I’m pretty sure I’ve even read one about abducting Hollywood people to make movies. But I can’t recall any of them that make the characters as interesting as Kessel does. I’m in the home stretch of this collection, and I’ve liked every single story (though some more than others). This one is about a blackballed talent scout who gets another chance to land Orson Welles for the future, something that no one else has been able to do.

The Last American

This story is a review of a biography of the future last president of the United States, Andrew Steele. I guess I shouldn’t have written so soon, as I thought this story was pretty blah. Though Kessel probably meant it to be more than speculation on how the United States and it’s culture would end, that’s all that came across to me. And that’s not a topic I usually find all that interesting.

Downtown

I didn’t get this one at all. I have no clue what to write about it. It’s short. Definitely short.

Powerless

I didn’t completely dislike this story. Parts I liked. Parts I didn’t. Part a story of a guy trying to invent a Foucault engine, powered by the rotation of he earth. Part ruminations on the Foucault’s (the other Foucault) philosophy of power. A couple other parts thrown in. Some essay style. Some third person. Some second person. Just wasn’t my style.

Pride and Prometheus

I’ve always assumed I wouldn’t really like Pride and Prejudice and so I’ve never read it. Although it is good social commentary from what I’ve read, I’ve thought it would be too subtle for me to appreciate and I would get bored with the language and lack of action. I could be completely misinformed on the contents of the book though. Here, Kessel combines Jane Austen’s work with Frankenstein, with Dr. Frankenstein traveling the English countryside. It’s kind of slow at the beginning, and I had a hard time keeping my interest up. But toward the end when the action picks up and the two novels are pushed together to expose a common theme, then things got interesting. I liked it.

Title: The Baum plan for financial independence and other stories
Author: John Kessel
Cover creator: Nathan Huang (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Small Beer Press
Format: E-book
Length: 316 p.
Publication date: April 2008
ISBN-13: 978-1-931520-50-8
LC classification: PS3561.E6675B38 2008

This book has a really cool cover by Hendrik Dorgathen. I didn’t like much else about the book. This was an impulse buy based on the cover. Let that be a lesson to me.

Each of the stories in this collection centers on some sort of family, and mostly from the point of view of one of the characters of each story. The stories are mostly something akin to inner dialog. In some, particularly Twilight of the Superheroes, Eisenberg includes some sort of narrator-like pronouncements. All of it feels overwrought. The reviews I’ve read of it praise Eisenberg for her insight into human nature. I don’t see it.

One of my shorter reviews.

Title: Twilight of the superheroes
Author: Deborah Eisenberg
Cover artist: Hendrik Dorgathen
Imprint / publisher: Picador / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: 225 p.
Publication date: January 2007 (originally 2006)
ISBN-10: 0-312-42593-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42593-7
Subject: New York (N.Y.) — Social life and customs — Fiction
LC classification: PS3555.I793T87 2006

I’ve decided to start blogging a Sunday Salon entry, at least periodically. My current reading routine is to sit at The Black Drop starting in the late morning and read for a few hours prior to heading to my mother’s. However, The Black Drop is closed Sundays. So I need a new routine. We’ll see if this one works for me.

Though I’m not sure exactly how this routine will work. Ms. Hamel’s Sunday Salon page describes a large room where lots of people read. I tend to think of The Black Drop when I read that. Nearly every time I’m there about half the clientèle can be found reading a book, though usually it’s a textbook in front of a W.W.U. student. Here, I’m sitting at home. It just doesn’t feel very salon-like to read in bed. Perhaps I’ll head downstairs to my sofa and read there. It’s winter though, and this townhouse seems to have a problem keeping the first floor well heated. Like at The Black Drop though, I will have a cup of something hot to keep the insides toasty, despite the dearth of heat in my living room. I picked up a Bodum De Chine teapot with infuser from Remedy Teas in Seattle. I’m not drinking one of their teas today though. Today I am drinking a Market Spice tea. My mom gave me all her loose-leaf tea last week, since she no longer can drink it and my step-father is a Folgers coffee person.

For today’s reading I’ve grabbed a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories from my ever-growing stack of books to read. He’s the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which became Blade Runner in the cinematic world. A number of his short stories were also turned into movies as well. Four of them are included in the tome I just started.

Fair Game

Extra-dimensional aliens watch a nuclear physicist, who realizes what’s going on. He becomes obsessed and determines they are watching him because he is the pre-eminent nuclear physicist in the world.

The Hanging Stranger

A man emerges from a day of work in his basement. On his way to the store he owns, he sees a body hanging from a post. Strangely though, everyone else doesn’t seem to pay it much thought. Including even the police officers who arrive to take his statement when he calls the authorities. He figures something is wrong and begins to run.

The Eyes Have It

This isn’t so much a story as Dick using a character to ruminate on some figures of speech.

• his eyes slowly roved about the room
• his eyes moved from person to person
• his eyes fastened on Julia
• he put his arm around Julia
• she asked him if he would remove his arm
• we split up
• Bibney lost his head again

Look at those lines again. Taken literally, we’d have some pretty amazing bodies that could do those things. Wouldn’t we be aliens if we could do those things?

The Golden Man

Mutants! Every time I read a mutant story, I really want to know whether it predated or postdated the X-Men. The X-Men was a comic that was used to examine prejudice in a non-threatening fashion. It wasn’t completely analogous to race or other stigmatized traits. Black people, by the color of their skin, are not a threat to anyone. Mutants, on the other hand, can do things like start flamethrowing from their hands! The comic used the fear of such actions as a proxy. And an appropriate question to follow is, why would you be afraid of someone because of what they can do rather than what they have done or what they’ve threatened to do?

Dick’s story is about a Golden Man. A mutant. The government is quite afraid of mutants. Not individually, however. The agents who find and track the Golden Man are pretty sure they can subdue any individual mutant. The fear is that mutants will breed and that will out-compete regular humans. The Golden Man is fast, lightning quick. And he can see the future. So, for instance, he knows where a gun will be fired, and its aim. He can move quickly enough to get out of the way.

What always gets me about these stories is similar to the same reaction I have to the argument against allowing homosexuals to marry. The other doesn’t threaten you. Mutants aren’t threatening normal humans in the story. Not individually. And not as a group. Not one normal human is harmed in the writing of this story. The fear is that, as a group, they will be replaced. The fear is that in the future, there won’t be people like themselves anymore. That’s it. If white people were to decline in percentage of the population because they were not having as much sex, would I feel threatened because 100 years from now there won’t be any pudgy sunburned bald white guys? Not hardly.

The Turning Wheel

Dick must have seen some sort of connection between Scientology and Buddhism, because this story imagines a future where the two are welded. Combine the Buddhist idea of reincarnation into higher or lower forms of life with the idea that karma is Scientology’s state of clear and you get this. It’s somewhat of a straw man though, as few people espouse the idea that the world is exactly as it should be and should not be changed. That’s the cosmic plan ascribed to the religion in the story. Good job knocking this one down Philip!

The Last Of The Masters

In the future, people tire of government and overthrow it. Except in one isolated area, where a small town-like place continues to exist. The rest of the world is ungoverned, and has no technology really either. Members of the Anarchist League patrol the countryside, looking for renegade governments. If they find any, they issue a call to arms to overthrow it.

The Father-Thing

Charles realizes one day that his father is no longer his father. Something has taken over his dad.

Strange Eden

After landing on a distant planet as part of some sort of expeditionary force, Brent finds the planet is inhabited. A strange but beautiful girl entices him. In the process Brent nearly becomes a rapist. This was a strange aspect to the story. Of course, things are not as they seem. It’s a Philip K. Dick story. Every single one of them so far has a fair amount of the paranoid schizophrenic component to the story: something has taken over someone’s body, aliens secretly have taken over the government, that sort of thing. I knew Philip K. Dick wrote dystopias, but I didn’t realize everything was a short story version of They Live. It’s good for a story. Perhaps even a decent movie. But story after story? I may have to recommend against reading this book even though I’m generally liking each individual story. We’ll see after I read the rest.

Tony and the Beetles

Tony is a kid on an alien planet. The aliens are the beetles, though that’s just the derogatory term most humans use for them. Tony is beyond that though. He and his Pas-udeti playmates. That’s the alien children. Anyhow, there’s a war going on between them, but the planet is human run and occupied. The aliens live by the sufferance of the humans. But the tide is turning halfway across the galaxy, and attitudes on the planet may be changing too.

Null-O

Lemuel is child devoid of normal human emotion. He sees things only logically. He sees the ideal as a universe of perfect uniformity. As in, everything reduced to Null-O, pure energy. Cue Information Society song please.

To Serve The Master

In the future, only Companies exist anymore, no governments. The Companies are governments, after a vast war, the result of which was that all fancy robots have been destroyed because they were on the losing side. Applequist is a letter carrier, and he stumbles upon a robot while out serving his route. He doesn’t reveal he found the derelict robot, but he starts asking questions. Of course, the company hierarchy in its not-so-infinite wisdom has decided that no one should really know anything. People should eat, do their jobs, and little else. Asking questions is verboten. So he sneaks parts to the robot, which repairs itself and in return answers Applequist’s questions about life before the war, and the history of the war. But again, all is not as it seems.

The Crawlers

Due to some sort of radiation accident, children in Ernest Gretry’s locale have been born without arms, legs, or pretty much anything that looks human, except for faces. Big amoeba-like worms they are. Most want to play in the dirt, and build underground tunnels. The populace looks at them with disgust, and the government finds them and puts them on a deserted island to play in the dirt to their own heart’s content. Yes, there’s a twist at the end. Yes it’s got indications of paranoia.

Sales Pitch

Now this is a truly brilliant story! Ed Morris is some sort of office worker on Ganymede. His home is on Earth. He travels in a Jetson-like personal space ship. Here’s the key though: there’s advertising everywhere. It’s transmitted straight to your ears and eyes as you drive by. It’s overwhelming. And once Ed gets home, a robot intrudes upon his domicile to give him yet another sales pitch, for a fasrad, short for Fully Automated Self-Regulating Android (Domestic). In other words, it’s selling itself. And it won’t take no for an answer.

Shell Game

Hey wow! Enough of stories with paranoid tendencies! How about a story about paranoid schizophrenics??! As in a ship full of them on their way to a hospital crash-lands, leaving them stranded. They construct not-so-rational delusions about themselves and how unknown outsiders are attacking them. Until one of them chances upon some tapes that reveal them to be paranoid schizophrenics. But even that could be a trick…

Upon The Dull Earth

This one is almost a fantasy story. But still, depressing. Silvia has a sixth sense for ghosts or angels or something from the beyond. She talks to them. She makes plans to join them early. But of course, her plans go awry and they take her too early in fact. Her fiancé Rick is understandably upset. He calls the beings from the beyond himself and implores them to return his beloved Silvia. They agree but warn that they are inexpert in returning people, and that the price could be fairly heavy. Rick says, not so shockingly, any price is worth it! And like all parables of this sort, we then get to see exactly how high a price Rick pays. It’s fairly inventive! Something that actually got me to think to myself Wow! That would be horrifying! But I’ll leave the spoiler off the review.

Foster, You’re Dead

Mike Foster is the son of John Sloane! No, that’s not an obscure literary reference. Let me explain. Mike Foster is a character in this story. The government has whipped up a frenzy of Soviet-fear. For years! And businesses sell new models of personal defense systems, bomb shelters, etc. every year. They make much money at this. They have new models to fight the latest movie-plot threat (Bruce Schneier should use this story). Mike Foster’s dad thinks it’s all a bunch of malarkey designed to sell these gadgets and refuses to pay for them. He’s a blowhard skinflint, like my friend Jason Sloane’s father. Mike Foster is the butt of jokes in school and the reject kid because he’s different, because of his family’s refusal to buy all these personal defense gadgets.

I personally love the nice little digs at the libertarian anti-government crowd that Philip K. Dick works into the story. One of the reasons why all the hype is blown up and geared toward products that individuals should purchase, is that the government won’t pay for the common defense. Because then it’s part of the commons and you run into the free rider problem. And people don’t value what they don’t directly pay for. No marginal cost, then people treat it like it has infinite marginal utility.

Pay For The Printer

This story fell flat for me. Post-apocalypse, an alien race discovers humans on Earth. Benevolent aliens that they are, they set up shop here and help humanity recover. The aliens have an ability to copy (print) any object they can get their hands on. Need a car? An alien can make a copy out of spit and ash, so long as he has an original to examine. Or a previously made copy. But now the aliens are dying, and people aren’t so happy.

War Veteran

A homeless veteran is found in a park. He’s not very healthy. But at the hospital the staff discovers that this veteran has an I.D. number from the future. And his war memories are of a war that hasn’t occurred yet. About to occur though. The hospital owner is one of the prime war proponents, because he thinks he can profit from it. But the vet’s memories of the war are that humans (as opposed to mutant human residents of Mars and Venus) lose. Decisively. And so the hospital owner begins to reconsider his support for the war. At first this story appears pretty complicated, but it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

The Chromium Fence

Don Walsh lives in a future where Purists and Naturalists are the political parties. The Purists want to force people by law to have no body odor, no unsightly hair, no halitosis. The Naturalists want everyone to be natural. Don Walsh thinks people are just find however they want to be, and doesn’t want to pick a side. In his view, it’s silly to kill people over body odor issues. The rest of society, however, disagrees.

We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (inspiration for Total Recall)

Now, when filmmakers get hold of a book, they often butcher it. This is not exception. Total Recall is not this story. But after reading the story, it’s pretty apparent that this wouldn’t have worked as written as a film. Nevertheless, the story is way better, just not suited for film treatment as written. Doug Quail has had a lifelong dream to go to Mars. But he can’t afford it on his government clerk salary. So he goes to Rekal, Inc. to have them implant a memory of a trip to Mars in his head. It will be just like he went there; he won’t even know it’s an implanted memory. But something goes wrong. In the film, Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doug Quail ends up going to Mars to figure out what’s going on, and finds out he’s a secret agent. The climactic scene is when a nervously sweaty man gives himself away as a real man when he’s trying to pass himself off as an implanted memory. The film version is more like Shell Game than this story, with people trying to determine if their memories are real replacing schizophrenics trying to determine whether delusions are real. But in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, Doug Quail doesn’t have quite as much problem determining what is real. Read the story.

The Minority Report (inspiration for The Minority Report)

And now we have a story about precognition. Kind of standard knowledge of the future kind of story. If you know what the future is, can you change it? In this case, the government runs Precrime instead of the police. Precrime uses precognition to determine who is going to commit a major crime, then arrests the suspect before he can commit the crime. We begin when the precognitive savants/computers pick out the head of Precrime as the next murderer. It makes for a better movie than it does a short story actually, cause I’ve read this story before, just by other writers. And one irritating thing is how the former head of Precrime makes a speech about how immoral it is to incarcerate people based on crimes they won’t commit. Uh… I know Philip K. Dick had to have seen how obvious that was, and how out of character it would be for him to make the speech. Sure it’s classic irony, but it just doesn’t fit.

Paycheck (inspiration for Paycheck)

Here’s a question. What would your price be to lose some of your memory? Let’s say two years of your life. Not even your past memories. The proposition is: come work for Rethrick Industries for a couple of years and we’ll pay you an ungodly sum of money. The catch is, Rethrick will remove your memory of the incident. Now that’s an intriguing proposition to me. But that’s not even the real subject of the story. As in the movie, when Jennings comes to after having his memory erased, it turns out he’s decided against taking the money. Not that he can remember making the choice, that part has been erased along with the rest of the two years. Instead of untold riches, he gets seven little trinkets, and has to figure out what use they are. They must be worth more than the money, or he wouldn’t have picked them. I didn’t think this plot was anywhere near as interesting as the willingness to have one’s memory erased.

Second Variety (inspiration for Screamers)

The movie version is set on another planet, where two sides are at war. One side has created little robots, screamers, which kill soldiers (and other life) indiscriminately like roaming minefields or cluster bombs. Dick’s original was written well before the cold war was over, and it is all about the Americans versus the Soviets. Same scenario though, just played out somewhere in an apocalyptic France, halfway between the former countries. Only the robots are intelligent, and they start manufacturing new varieties of themselves. The new varieties look like people, and they can trick soldiers into letting the robots into protected bunkers. So which of the soldier-survivors left is robot, and which is human. More paranoia writing. For a better exploration of this in film than Screamers, check out Battlestar Galactica. At least the robots there are hot women, not ugly men with three day stubble.

Title: The Philip K. Dick reader
Author: Philip K. Dick
Cover artist: Zina Saunders
Imprint / publisher: Citadel Twilight / Carol Publishing
Format: Paperback
Length: 422 p.
Publication date:
ISBN-10: 0-8065-1856-1
Subject: Science fiction, American
LC classification: PS3554.I3 A6 1997

It’s kind of surprising that I’ve never read anything by Sherman Alexie, given that he’s pretty close to what Seattle has for a literary star. Plus, isn’t The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven the best title you’ve heard for a book in ages? Please come up with something better that isn’t a Philip K. Dick work.

This collection of short stories is set primarily on the Spokane Indian Reservation. There’s a lot of drinking involved, but in the introduction to this 10th anniversary edition, Alexie notes that “When I write about the destructive effects of alcohol on Indians, I am not writing out of a literary stance or a colonized mind’s need to reinforce stereotypes. I am writing autobiography.” The Indians in his stories are laconic, as best as I understand the word. They spend much of their days drinking, waiting for something to happen. It reminds me a lot of teenagers, but without the frenetic impulsiveness seeking to find feeling of the teenagers I know. But there’s a sense among these stories that the Indians will live forever. That stories about each of them will go on without them, and that’s more important than actually living.

Some of the later stories in the book though veer into territory that isn’t quite my bag. They go from realistic stories tinged with metaphor and simile to something else. Not exactly magical realism. Something more akin to essays, where the play of language with time and nature seeks to evoke images.

However, much as I don’t get that kind of writing, Alexie is pretty damn good with turning the phrases. “I am in the 7-11 of my dreams, surrounded by 500 years of convenient lies.” “They all had the gift of storytelling, could pick up the pieces of a story from the street and change the world for a few moments.” “We touched hands and our skin sparked like a personal revolution.” There’s a lot better in the book than these even, but I didn’t paperclip the pages like I should have.

Title: The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in heaven
Author: Sherman Alexie
Cover artist: Wendell Minor
Imprint / publisher: Grove Press / Grove/Atlantic
Format: Paperback
Length: 242 p.
Publication date: 2005 (original edition 1993)
ISBN-10: 0-8021-4167-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4167-5
Subject: Indians of North America — Fiction
LC classification: PS3551.L35774L66 1993

I really liked this collection of stories by Denis Johnson, but I am having a really hard time writing about it. Long time readers will probably have noticed my disdain for literary works that I don’t understand. I don’t have the literary theory background to intelligently get much out of them, and consequently these works are often just confusing to me. In many respects, I’m just a schmo. Those with a good theory background will probably have a lot more to say about Johnson’s work than I will, and some of my gleanings may very well be wrong. Literary work often just makes me feel stupid for not getting things, and there’s a niggling suspicion in my mind that this holds true for Jesus’ Son. Nevertheless, I’m going to spew forth my non-English major opinions anyway!

In Jesus’ Son, the stories drew me in to a world that seems very much like that of the students I mentor in the local high school. The characters are drug-addled, but unlike some portraits of drug-users, these people feel. Everything is immediate. Everything is raw. I didn’t just read the text, I experienced the words. Johnson’s language is powerful. I’ll give a quick example. I just opened the book at random and picked a few sentences, resulting in this:

Georgie and I had a terrific time driving around. For a while the day was clear and peaceful. It was one of the moments you stay in, to hell with all the troubles before and after. The sky is blue and the dead are coming back. Later in the afternoon, with sad resignation, the county fair bares its breasts.

The writing isn’t confusing. Sometimes it’s very jarring. And sometimes it’s hard to follow the jumps. Dreams and drug visions and different scenes from the narrator life blend together. But Johnson gives the reader time to catch up. For some reason, I was able to stop myself from trying to figure out what was going on and and slide smoothly along with the emotional current. That’s a tribute to Johnson’s writing.

I don’t really know how to characterize the stories themselves, so I’ll quote the review by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times: The narrator of these interlinked stories is a young man, reeling from his addiction to heroin and alcohol, his mind at once clouded and made gorgeously lucid by these drugs. The stories themselves are vignettes, more sketches than anything else. Most of them have a couple of scenes which blur together, most without conclusion, like a hazy memory of something that happened while high. The first few occur in the midwest, Chicago and Iowa. Later stories take place in the Northwest and Arizona. The storyteller has attempted to go clean and sober in these later ones, though it’s hard to say how successful he is at it.

And for search engines’ sake, here’s a list of the stories. I’m not going to review them individually like I usually do for story collections. The plots aren’t the strong part, and the writing is pretty equally impressive from my point of view.

• Car Crash While Hitchhiking
• Two Men
• Out on Bail
• Dundun
• Work
• Emergency
• Dirty Wedding
• The Other Man
• Happy Hour
• Steady Hands at Seattle General
• Beverly Home

Title: Jesus’ Son
Author: Denis Johnson
Imprint / publisher: HarperPerennial / HarperCollins
Format: Mass market paperback
Length: 160 p.
Publication date: 1993
ISBN-10: 0-06-097577-6
LC classification: PS3560.O3745 J47 1992