Imagineer This

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow

A few years back, I asked printmaker Rosemary Feit Covey what she thought of fellow printmaker Edward Gorey (of Gashlycrumb Tinies fame, &c). She told me something I didn’t understand at the time: she had a hard time appreciating Gorey’s work because she got too caught up in analyzing his technique. It was a problem she had with art in general, but especially with the work of other wood engravers.

At the time, the only art I understood was writing, and, well, I was a hack. Okay, a worse hack. But now I think I finally get her point. And man, is it ever annoying.

Cory Doctorow’s 2003 debut, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, is one of the most original novels I’ve read this year. It’s also one of the most predictable. It’s a question of content versus form: I found the content to be fresh, but the form was strictly by the numbers. Here’s the deal (and you’ll find this, or something nearly like it, in just about every self-help writing book you’ll grab off the shelf):

(Hey, this might be a spoiler. If you care about that, skip the numbers and read on.)

1. Start with a likable protagonist.
2. Throw some adversity his way.
3. Throw some more adversity his way.
4. Bring him low, very low.
5. Lower still.
6. Mmm . . . no, lower still.
7. Has he lost everything yet? Good!
8. At the last moment, wrench him from the jaws of defeat . . . oh, and make sure he has learned something in the process.

Okay, there it is, my one and only gripe. A story this fresh — and Doctorow couldn’t manage to throw in a surprise? Can you say formulaic?

This isn’t a negative review. Really. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a cool book, and now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest, I’m going to tell you why you* need to buy it.

Our hero, Julius, lives in an era where death and disease are ancient history, and none of the essentials are in short supply. Money has been replaced by the only things that matter in this post-scarcity world: esteem; prestige; reputation.

Whuffie, in other words.

This novel’s universe has all the trappings of cyberpunk without any of the drear. Imagine Gibson on Ecstacy and Prozac. Peoples’ brains are permanently online (quite convenient, since they’re always checking each other’s Whuffie to see who’s top dog), and by periodically making a backup of one’s personality, immortality is assured. If you die, your most recent backup gets plopped into a force-grown clone. Told you Down and Out had all the trappings.

They call this the Bitchun Society, by the way — as in, bitchun wave, dude.

So what do folks who have everything do to keep busy? They stoke their Whuffie, naturally. (No money, but humans are as greedy as ever.) One way to build Whuffie is to find new and better ways to entertain the fun-seeking multitudes.

Disney World has long been Julius’s port in the storm, a place he returns to whenever his life hits the skids. He loves this place with an irrational passion, the way a Texan loves Texas. Now he’s living out his lifetime dream: he has become a member of the Ad-hocracy that runs Liberty Square and Tom Sawyer Island at Disney World. It’s Julius’s dream job, and it’s one hell of a good gig for racking up Whuffie.

The Haunted Mansion is part of Julius’s domain, as is The Hall of Presidents. But not for long, for the aggressively Whuffie-mongering Debra, seasoned veteran of Disneyland Beijing, has her sights on The Hall of Presidents — and maybe all of Liberty Square.

Sinister intrigue . . . murder (as much as anyone can get murdered in this world) . . . love . . . betrayal. If this is starting to sound a bit like hard-boiled fic, there’s a good reason. I’ve read lots of SF novels that tried to ape hard-boiled fic, but this is the only one I’ve read that works, largely because Doctorow knows better than to follow the genre too closely. Down and Out is a murder mystery in the same way The Amazing Lebowski is a detective movie. He has a sense of fun that reminds me of certain other genre writers, like Elmore Leonard, or Carl Hiaasen.

Parting thought: Doctorow must really love Walt Disney World to have written a story like this, and it must have been painful as hell having to avoid all those copyrighted characters. You won’t find Mickey or Donald in these pages. Oh, just think of the set pieces Doctorow had to forfeit to avoid getting sued.

D.

*All of you, except for my parents. I know you guys wouldn’t like this. Oh, and those of you who have already read it? I guess you’re off the hook, too.

Remain in Light

Light, by M. John Harrison

I love Neil Gaiman. Mind you, I don’t worship the parchment he writes on (Neverwhere had a bit of the bloat, and there were one or two dogs in Smoke and Mirrors), but he sits squarely in my category of Authors I Read So I Can Do Better Next Time. So when Neil Gaiman calls something “A remarkable book — easily my favorite SF novel in the last decade, maybe longer”, I listen up. I buy. I read.

And Gaiman is in good company. Similar effusions abound in the first few unnumbered pages: from Stephen Baxter (“The first classic of the quantum century”), Iain Banks, China Miéville. Given that we live in an age where Margaret Atwood feels it necessary to disavow all connection with us SF geeks, Miéville’s quote is worth repeating:

M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt — that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind.

Yay! Of course, he goes on to say that Light “puts modern fiction to shame” (I can’t argue with him there) and “It’s a magnificent book.”

Ahem. (You remember what ahem means, don’t you, my minions?) Light is the sort of book that makes a satirist’s fingers twitch in eager anticipation of a keyboard. Sixty pages into it, I began scribbling reminders on a post-it note: every last one of Harrison’s stylistic tics which, if the Harry’s Bar and American Grill folks ever tire of Hemingway and discover Harrison, will enable me to write one rippingly good lampoon.

But you thought you were reading a book review.

Light weaves the stories of three characters. Michael Kearney, a PhD researcher whom we discover on page 3 to be a not very nice man*, is pursued by the Shrander, a supernatural being from whom Kearney stole a pair of dice. Four hundred years later, Seria Mau Genlicher is a woman who has given up her humanity to merge with a K-ship, a primo-bitchin’ enough craft that you would give up your humanity, too, if you had the chance. Lastly we meet Ed Chianese, AKA Chinese Ed, a pilot-adventurer whom we are given to understand has BEEN THERE, DONE THAT to such an extent he now seeks his kicks dreaming in a tank. Like Kearney, Seria Mau and Ed are also on the run: Seria Mau, by a pack of thoroughly creepy aliens; Chinese Ed, by the Cray sisters, a nasty pair whose names, I suspect, are meant to stir memories of the Brothers Kray. All of their paths lead to the Kefahuchi Tract:

a thousand lights out of the galactic Core, the Kefahuchi Tract streams across half the sky, trailing its vast invisible plumes of dark matter.

It’s a mysterious region where physics ain’t quite right, and where pirates like Seria Mau and plunderers like Ed love to hang out. The Kefahuchi Tract is one of the marvels and victories of this novel, largely because Harrison doesn’t bother to spell it all out.

Harrison is a show, don’t tell kind of guy (a plus), and he puts due effort into character development (also a plus). He knows how to instill a sense of wonder. He can sometimes turn a phrase that is so pristine and elegant you’ll want to weep.

So, why am I pissed? It’s those stylistic tics.

Harrison isn’t the kind of guy who believes in invisible prose. Words like cheongsam, aubade, and etiolated draw attention to themselves, particularly when they are repeated over and over again. Within a single line of dialog, phrases are often repeated again and again. (Sure, people talk like that, but it doesn’t make for good dialog.) Characters call each other by their full names. Adverbs abound. Uneven lists abound. The stupidest things happen during sex. (Okay, I’ll grant him that one.) Weird noises filter in like Vonnegut’s pooteeweet: “Yoiy Yoiy Yoiy.” “Er Er Er.” I mean . . . huh? Various constructions keep reappearing like kudzu — for example:

She said (line of dialog).
She said (line of dialog).

Some constructions only have to show up once to be irksome.

What happened was this:

And so I ask you: do you have to be a writer to find this kind of thing annoying? Am I being (gasp) overly sensitive? Or am I simply in a jealous rage?

There’s so much goodness in Light. So much that makes you want to tip your hat, curtsy, clap your hands, you name it. Why did Harrison have to ruin it by shoving himself so firmly into view? Someone as obviously talented as Harrison could easily take the next step and tone himself down. Wasn’t it Elmore Leonard who said, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it”?

Before folks start egging me for wanting to turn M. John Harrison into Elmore Leonard, let me explain where I’m coming from — what I consider the ideal of fiction. John Gardner is my guru. Gardner writes that fiction is a consensual dream, one shared between the author and his readers. Although this will brutalize Gardner’s delightful words, I’ll summarize: whatever promotes the dream is good; whatever breaks the dream is bad.

Final verdict: I’m not sorry I bought Light. I’m not even sorry I read it. I may very well reread it.

But . . . damn.

D.

*I promised myself: no spoilers this time.

Old Man’s War: The Distaff View

Regulars here know that a few days ago, I gushed over John Scalzi’s novel Old Man’s War, calling it, among other things, “an old-fashioned pulpy joyride”. I thought it was a hoot. So much of a hoot, in fact, that I convinced Karen to read it.

She zipped through it in two days, called it entertaining, and set it aside. A day later, she came in to the office and declared that she’d been thinking things over in the shower that morning and had decided that Old Man’s War was derivative, war-mongering, simplistic, and morally bankrupt, and that all extant copies of it should be burned.

Mind you, I suspect Scalzi would be delighted if some extant copies were burned – preferably in Mississippi, and ideally with tons of publicity. Burned books never go out of print, and the smoke casts an unnaturally favorable patina on all remaining copies. Just look at that bit of slag, Catcher in the Rye. (Where do the ducks go in the winter? South, dickwad!)

But back to Karen. I think she has an interesting viewpoint, and I’d like to share it with you. Here are her arguments.

SPOILERS!!!

1. The book reads like one long ad for the US military. The recruits in OMW are outfitted with new, young bodies that are faster, stronger, and have heightened senses relative to us ordinary humans. Karen finds an uncomfortable resonance between these soldiers and the folks depicted in those commercials showing US recruits over-achieving, physically and militarily. The few, the proud.

2. Some of the aliens – the Consu in particular – have a discomfiting similarity to traditional US enemies. They are religious fanatics who feel they will, with death, go to a better place (think suicide bombers, from kamikaze to present day Iraqi insurgents). The Consu religion is an odd blend of Islam and Buddhism. They believe in reincarnation, but they also believe their death will improve them.

3. Early in their training, the Colonial Defense Force recruits are taught that the cute, fuzzy, Bambi-like alien is the one to fear. (Like many of Scalzi’s aliens, the Salong – ‘a vaguely deerlike creature with cunning, almost human hands, and a quizzical face that seemed to speak of peace and wisdom’ – has a taste for human flesh.) Karen: “This provides a justification for soldiers to kill innocent-appearing people, because you just can’t know who is and isn’t your enemy.”

4. The protagonist, John Perry, suffers pangs of conscience after stepping on hordes of inch-tall Covandu. His lieutenant’s response is, essentially: We all felt that way at some point. We all got over it. Then there’s a redirect, and our protag substitutes sadness over his dead wife for his moral misgivings re: being turned into an inhuman killing machine.

5. The military commanders are blind-sided from time to time, but they never screw up through their own faults. They know best. We never learn the brass’s motives, and the only soldier to question those motives ends up dead in a hurry (see 6). There’s an elaborate scheme for justifying all of the bloodshed, shunting responsibility away from the humans, onto the aliens. Message: It’s not our fault. We’re in a war for our own survival.

6. There is no intelligent, respected counter-voice to the military party line. The only soldier who thinks diplomacy deserves a chance is an obvious straw man, an inexperienced asshole who must be motivated not by a desire to ‘give peace a chance’ but by his own ego. “We had all decided that Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender was well and truly full of crap.” You know from the start that this guy ain’t gonna end well. After the inevitable happens (at the hands of a chanting “congregation” of civilians – another hint of religious fanaticism), our protagonist says, “He’d probably say he died for what he believed in.” His superior officer – and the only person even a bit sympathetic to Bender’s point of view – declares, “Bender died for Bender.”

This superior officer, Viveros, believes Bender had the right goal (peace) but the wrong methods. Her plan is to “Stay alive. Make it through our term of infantry service. Join officer training and work our way up. Become the people who are giving the orders, not just following them.” In the meantime, it’s business as usual. There’s no room in this man’s army for order-disobeying creeps like Bender.

By the way: after the alien civilians take out Bender, they thereby become enemy combatants and are promptly mown down.

7. Karen thinks the clincher is the fact that Scalzi has agreed to provide to our service men and women, free of charge, an electronic version of OMW. A quote from Scalzi’s blog: “From my perspective I may give up a few dollars in sales, but these folks are giving up a lot more doing their thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is just a small way to say ‘thanks.’”

I’m inclined to take him at face value. Karen sees darker motives (conspiracy-loving vixen that she is). She says, “Why do you think he’s doing this? Because he sees them as his intended readership.” My counter-argument: anyone who wants to read your book is a worthwhile reader. But she worries that OMW will, by its gung ho mentality, encourage our troops to disengage their brains, just follow orders, and (potentially) commit atrocities.

There, Karen: does that about sum it up? (Karen: “Pretty much. Since I didn’t read it with a hatchet job in mind, there might be other things.”)

For my part: I see her point, but for me, OMW was sufficiently SF that I didn’t read in any deeper meanings. I thought it was a romp . . . but hey, I’ve said that already. Funny thing is, I had just the opposite reaction to the film Starship Troopers. Though some folks labeled it a parody of jingoism, I didn’t think the parody was sufficiently obvious. Compare that to Team America: World Police, in which the author’s message is summed up in a weltanschauung composed of dicks, pussies, and assholes*. Although a dick might go around screwing lots of pussies, it takes a dick to screw an asshole; and if the dick doesn’t screw the assholes of the world, then those assholes are just going to shit all over everything.

Hard to miss the satire in that line.

One parting comment. Search Scalzi’s blog on words like ‘Iraq’ and ‘Bush’ and you’ll discover he’s as big a lefty as yours truly. Why, then, would he write something as reactionary as OMW? I don’t know, but I suspect he didn’t have any dark motives; I think he merely tried to write a fun novel in the tradition of Starship Troopers. By that metric, OMW is a success.

D.

*I defy anyone to use ‘weltanschauung’ in another sentence which includes the words dicks, pussies, and assholes.

Old Man’s War

On his seventy-fifth birthday, John Perry visits his wife’s grave – and then he enlists.

In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, the universe is a nasty place. Intelligent species are common, generally hostile, and good real estate is as common as a cheap oceanfront lot in California. The Colonial Defense Forces must fight tooth and nail (and tentacle, and claw . . .) for every livable planet.

Why sign up a bunch of geezers? Their experiences are invaluable to the colonies, so the logic goes, and they have nothing much to lose. John Perry in particular has nothing to lose. His beloved wife is dead. They had planned to enlist together, but she died from a stroke eight years ago.

And why do the geezers want to join? Blind faith, really: thanks to the CDF’s interactions with alien races, they are technologically advanced relative to Earth. Surely they must be able to turn old farts into killing machines. (Oh boy, can they.) No one down here on Earth knows; one condition of enlistment is that the recruit agrees never to go home again.

Before long, John is a green recruit struggling through basic training. After that, he’s a cog in the CDF machine, traveling to foreign worlds, meeting unique races, and killing them. I’d say, “And that’s when the fun begins,” except that Old Man’s War is a romp right from the start.

OMW is bound to stir memories of The Forever War and Starship Troopers. It even reminded me (pleasantly) of Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero. Like Bill, and like Forever War, OMW is all about entertainment: action, adventure, humor, and even a poignant love story which did not feel the least bit grafted.

Scalzi gives more than a passing nod to Robert Heinlein in his acknowledgments. The novel’s main Heinleinism – the way the action intermittently grinds to a halt to allow the characters to hold a roundtable discussion – is my primary quibble. (I have other quibbles, but they’re petty enough to qualify me as a snark, so I’ll shut up.) Fortunately, this does not happen too often. And, unlike Heinlein, Scalzi does this for the sake of exposition rather than political diatribe.

Perhaps less obvious is the debt Scalzi owes Jack Vance. I see Vance as the consummate author of cultural science fiction (his short story “The Moon Moth” is a great example). One of the coolest things about OMW is the Consu, an ultra-advanced race who think they’re doing us a favor by killing us. As in Vance’s stories, the Consu culture is more than just local color – it’s a key plot element.

Old Man’s War is the most fun I’ve had with a science fiction novel since Snow Crash. This novel doesn’t try to blow your mind with post-Singularity trans-human gobbledygook, and it doesn’t pretend to be cyber-punker than Gibson. It’s an old-fashioned pulpy joyride: Scalzi has made entertainment paramount.

D.

Tales of the Dying Earth

I live in a place where we have to drive 90 minutes to get to a real bookstore (Borders in Eureka). Amazon will only get you so far; sometimes a guy has gotta browse. This last Sunday, I picked up Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth: all four novels in the series are now available in one volume.

I found a nice bio on Vance here at Answers.Com. Vance is my hero: 88 years old and still chugging out novels. Can’t get much better. Here’s a link to his latest, Lurulu.

At least, I think it’s his latest. This guy stays busy.

D