The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

The Sandman: The Dream Hunters - Neil Gaiman

(From the author of Neverwhere, and American Gods...)

The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories

There was a time when we looked at the stars and we imagined worlds like ours - ready and waiting for us to walk out of the rocket doors. We imagined a cosmos full of pristine worlds, much like our lost Eden left-behind: new continents, new planets, a new frontier. We also imagined space filled with races that looked like us, or were enough like us, that all it would take for everyone to get along would be some time in mutual translation sessions.

Those days seem to have passed. Our imagined alien worlds have become more ... alien. We lean towards the likelihood that our delicate cradle, the Earth, is the only spot capable of fostering our kind of life. Even if free water, nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres, and carbon-based biology are out there, we can't deny that our organism would likely be poorly equipped to handle the biota, microscopic or otherwise, of an alien ecology.

Still, maybe we haven't forgotten the old dreams. They just seem much, much less likely. If, in the first place, we can even believe that we aren't alone. In an infinite universe, though, infinite possibility would seem to suggest that other life is "out there" even if you don't happen to believe in an infinite creation: we cannot reject the null hypothesis. And in all of that possibility, maybe there is a world out there, verdant under strange moons, where quiet oceans ebb and flow, and dewy grass-stuff awaits the first footfalls of a new Adam and a new Eve... Try and deny that it doesn't set your heart racing.

I had Anderson's The Queen of Air and Darkness on my shelf because it won the Hugo and Nebula for best Novella/Novelette. Anderson, better known for his works of Fantasy (The Broken Sword and A Midsummer Tempest), taps into a rich SF tradition in Queen's tales. These are stories of colonization, of pioneering, of pushing outwards away from the maddening crowd. Each story approaches the enterprise from a different angle. In most of the tales, humans find someone already there and then make difficult decisions - decisions that should make us feel uneasy, while in other tales things seem to work out as harmoniously as we could imagine. Anderson describes a galaxy in which mankind has left a crowded, wasted Earth on bootstrapped machines that take decades to reach even nearer stars. A minimum of equipment is carried along with the colonists, who are expected to establish basic industry from blueprints brought from their homeworld, and then redevelop - or not develop - their civilization as they see fit. Contact between worlds is tenuous, and visiting out of the question: cost and distance make interstellar travel a last resort. This is not a universe of recent Sci-Fi's FTL deus ex machine: taken into account, Anderson's galaxy may well be more realistic than first blush would suggest. FTL refers to vessels capable of traveling "faster-than-light" - a necessity in order to span the distances between stars that would otherwise take improbable amounts of time. FTL is variously explained in much contemporary Science Fiction by the use of fantastic devices and "drives."

After their long voyages in cryo-sleep, Anderson's colonists step off their rockets, more often than not into fresh, green grass. But then what? Should they stay? Is it right to start the whole thing over again? Are the old ways necessarily the good ways? What do the locals think of the newcomers? Can we live in peace? These are wide-eyed questions, pondered during a wide-eyed era. This is heady pre-New Wave stuff! If we don't believe in the simplicity of the questions anymore, at least the nostalgia for those days warms the blood: I think that on some level, we still want to believe... I'll admit that these stories, in some camps, might be called dated - while reading them Bradbury and Blish, and even a little Burroughs come to mind. But silver hair or no, that seems to me good company to keep. Are the scenarios likely? Yes and no, no different than their iconoclastic children's. Do they make for a worthwhile and enjoyable Science Fiction read? Absolutely! The title tale, the one that I've actually made little reference to, nearly overwhelms the reader with richness of description and imagination within the first two pages. Should it shock us that our dreams, our hopes of new worlds might reflect some of the things we dreamed of in the past - Thomas the Rhymer's traverse, for instance? The first story asks one clever question further: and what if this were manipulated...?

A disjointed review for a collection of tales that might be regarded themselves as variations on a theme. The theme is familiar I'll grant, but it's not one likely to be abandoned by the human imagination any time soon, and it's this familiarity that makes them read, for me at least, like SF comfort food. Bon apetit!

Final Grade: B+/A-
Re-read: Humid jungle night in Mexico? I'm there!

The Generator Speaks

Next train:

The Years of Rice and Salt - Kim Stanley Robinson

(disclosure: again, I haven't read a novel by Robinson that I didn't liked. Seriously, the Mars trilogy sprang from this man's pen! And now an alternate history of the world supposing that the Plague wiped out European civilization? Ambitious, yes. Credentials to pull it off? Also, yes.)

Galactic Pot Healer

We don't have to love everything the man wrote.

You have to admire Dick, though, for his vision. I get the sense, reading Galactic Pot Healer, that he had expected the work to come out vaster, more weighty than it did. Here, admirably, Dick tackles some of his favorite themes - the crushing weight of conformity, what it means to be useful v. what it means to create ... the nature of perfection. The problem is, clocking in at just under 200 pages, these vast ideas come off feeling a touch undercooked. There are moments of profundity, no doubt, but these are few, and seem to duck quickly off-stage as though embarrassed amidst the light hurly-burly of the rest of the novel. You know that friend that you have, who really means what he's saying about the terror of neo-liberalism, but can't help turning his convictions into purile jokes at the party because he doesn't want to be so gauche as to seem sincere? Yeah, that's what this book was like...

Galactic Pot Healer, which I, like you, originally assumed dealt with the interstellar medicinal qualities of marijuana, actually chronicles the existential traverse of one man from a future totalitarian Earth (about as bleak as you might expect from Dick) to a backwater planet where a vast, godlike alien has summoned him to help restore a sunken, mystical cathedral from the depths of a stygian sea. Along the way Dick makes his typical satirical jabs at authority - not hard enough to draw meaningful blood, but enough to identify the joker as a rebellious sort. Dick's protagonist muses over which seems worse: an impossible, mysterious quest, or a meaningless descent into madness as a cog in a broken machine called Earth. Is it better to burn out, or to fade away? The book proceeds because he chooses the quest, and we are introduced to a team of galactic experts assembled to provide different aspects of what at first blush appears to be an alien undersea archeological project. And then things get wierd. The rest of the novel's plot twists are more the surrealist variety... We likely all have our favorite modes of the Surreal (Make Mine Murakami!) and those surreal modes which seem jarring, manic and annoyingly self-indulgent (*cough* Vonnegut *cough* Slaughterhouse Five *cough*). Guess how I felt about the rest of the novel? Actually, later in the film I started to imagine scenes from the novel in terms of visuals from the conclusion of Miyazaki's Spirited Away... I'm not sure that's what Dick intended. And I liked Spirited Away way, way, way more... To the point that I began to think "I feel like dropping this silly novel and going to watch Spirited Away..."

I'd prefer not to resort to a silly review just because I felt that this was a silly novel. The protagonist in the novel's trade is that of a "pot healer," that is, he is able through some future technology to heal ceramics in such a way as to leave no trace of their former brokenness. Sound metaphoric? The alien female with whom he pairs' specialty is removing the age-old encrustations of coral from sunken relics. And beneath a vast ocean lies the mystical ruin of Heldscalla, the alien cathedral... The ocean threatens living death - an eternity of decay, without hope of release into nothingness. The godlike alien is compared again and again, annoyingly overtly to Faust, though I wonder just how familiar Dick was with that work - the comparison rang false. World-spanning themes like sacrifice, identity, and the magnificence of human imperfection are danced through: not laughed at, granted, but sort of waved at, as though from the window of a truck being driven by a rope-tailed Werj. There was plentious material here - and I scented some great ideas. But something about this soup just didn't marry. The prose was good, even haunting at times. The characters less good, and in the end the story just not very compelling.

I don't know, maybe the novel wasn't that bad. It's one of those books about which I'd say try for yourself and see what you think. And then not at all be surprised if it became your new favorite Dick novel, or if it caused you to swear off Science Fiction for a few months in disgust. All I know is that I saw potential, and then not much payoff. Which, in a sense, is what the book is about...

Final grade: B/B-
Re-read? Not likely.

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

The Queen of Air and Darkness and Other Stories - Poul Anderson

(title story won the Hugo for best Novella in 1972, and the Nebula for best Novelette in 1971)

What's the Big Deal about Pornography?

Well?

Pornography is a big deal, and a big deal not seen on this scale by a lot of other cultures in history. Whether you love it, or you hate it, most of us would admit that sexually explicit materials are available in our society, and to every segment of our society (including minors) in amounts likely never equaled in history. Yes, we have classical vedic art, yes we have Japanese woodcuts, yes we have erotic long poems from most cultures. And in the last century we've had print and celluloid media since pretty much the start. What Dr. Manning is talking about is the availability of high fidelity film and stills, along with text, available to every member of society, absolutely anonymously and absolutely free - on demand. As you may or may not know, such access is widespread - Dr. Manning quotes studies suggesting from 80-90% of High School students being exposed. And so the question is, what do we do with this information? How is this going to affect us as a culture? What about our values relating to sex and family life and gender and equality and even respect for other individuals? Is this not likely to cause exponentially more upheaval than the advent of a magic little pill did in the 1960's?

So, it is a big deal, and I tend to agree with Dr. Manning. Now, if you're looking for answers to some of the questions above, you'll get a cursory treatment of the sociological implications in Big Deal - other more meaty explications have been done and Manning references them, notably Pamela Paul's seminal Pornified (for which the wikipedia entry is somewhat pathetic given that this book in its time was itself a Big Deal). Manning's audience is teenagers, very few of whom are sociologists - very many of whom, though, are developing dangerous habits surrounding pornography. And so Manning targets her information at three classes of readers: accidental pornography viewers, habitual pornography viewers, and people who would like to support loved ones with destructive pornography habits.

Remembering her intended audience, problems with prose are made up for by Manning's sincerity. The text doesn't skirt the issues: it does drag out in the open something that blindsided and ensnared many of my generation. We didn't know! Our parents had no idea what was going on on the internet. The analogy, for some, would be similar to parents providing vending machines in their home that produced crystal meth, having been told that they only produced "healthy snacks." Again, and again, I hear stories about marriages and peers whose chains and suffering were forged during the 90's when we didn't yet have our wits about us. But someone had their wits about them... The multi-billion dollar industry that now grosses more than the top American tech firms combined (yes, I include Microsoft).

Manning provides strategies for the above mentioned classes of people affected by pornography. These seem helpful - especially useful was the chapter for parents looking to prevent the problem before it takes root. I continue to type "problem," because yes, I agree with Manning: modern pornography is a Big problem - and we understand but poorly how it will affect our homes and society, though she describes a few chilling indicators. A wise man recently spoke:

"Stay away from it! Avoid it like the plague because it is just as deadly, more so. The plague will destroy the body. Pornography will destroy the body and the soul. Stay away from it! It is as a great disease that is sweeping over the country and over the entire world. Avoid it! I repeat, avoid it!” (Gordon B. Hinckley, 1997)

Morality discussions aside, you don't have to agree with me to appreciate Manning's contribution. Even if you think that some pornography in moderation is alright, you must admit that parents should have tools to at least address this more-than-pressing issue in their homes. I liked Dr. Manning's book, and I appreciated her bravery - this will likely continue to be an unpopular subject. But the infernal thing about pornography is that, for those caught in its snare, its chains are forged in the very flesh, and despite the good advice available on the subject, despite the programs and steps, little apart from divine intervention is able to deliver the captives. And, to be honest, if you're not into the divine, a broad road of suffering and loss may well portend. Even AA recognizes reliance on a higher power.

I apologize for the grim review. While there is life, there is hope - this I believe. But I tend to believe that as individuals, men, women and families, we will all wash against this bleak shore at some time in our very modern lives, and we had best come prepared. Maybe with some hope, too, thanks to the rare voices of positive thinking and encouragement like Dr. Manning's.

But my friends, I say this: the dark Emperor has no clothes.

Not that our ultimate victory isn't foretold, of course...

The Generator Speaks

Next Train:

Galactic Pot Healer - Phillip K. Dick

(what can I say? My blurb is already contaminated by having started to read the thing...)