IT'S A LONG, LONG ROAD TO NOWHERE WHEN YOU'RE TRAVELING ALONE

I've been reading up on sf book opinions from the hivemind and occasionally I come across a general consensus agreeing that China Miéville writes a lot of unnecessary filler. Well today I say: to hell with you, internet message boards.


The defense is normally along the rails of, "but of course PSS is long, the city is a character!" I also say to hell with you. The city is a setting, and Miéville does a nice job detailing it.

I'm not going to pretend that there aren't parts where PSS doesn't slow down, and I'm not going to pretend to be well-versed in the trilogy it's a part of, considering I've never read the next two books in the series (I do have The Scar on my shelf - the ever-knowing brain suggests that Miéville cuts down on the filler, but it looks just as long to me!).


So right now I'm going to talk about Un Lun Dun. ULD is a children's book that was published by Del Rey in 2007. It is Miéville's first (and only) children's book. It's a crazy, whimsicle story about two girls who are sucked into a bizarro London because there's some prophecy about how one of them is going to be the decaying world's savior in a war against an ever-growing mass of smog. The smog is feeding itself through normal London, and it plans on taking over the real world once it's through destroying the real-fake world.

I don't know how most people read it, but I found it to have a pretty strong environmental agenda. Un Lun Dun is littered with trash from the real world, except in this world the trash is alive (the main character is followed by a sentient discarded milk carton that acts like a dog). The standard of living seems way low, but the inhabitants seem fine with that.

One thing I've come to appreciate about Miéville stories is the imaginative detailing of his fictional worlds. One of my favorite moments in ULD is when the main party arrives in a place where the buildings are constantly shifting around like a slide puzzle. One of the characters who is well-travelled suggests that there are mailmen who are trying to track down homes to deliver mail to after years of searching. This is, unfortunately, a minor moment in the book, as it appears in one of the shorter chapters (although not the shortest by a long shot - one chapter is only a few words long). This is present in PSS, although we tend to spend more time exploring New Crobuzon as there are more minor characters that Miéville revists.

Un Lun Dun is something that I'd recommend to any sf/childrens' stories fan who wants a nice quick read to break up sessions of harder novels. Although it's not too quick - it's still a respectable length, and despite it being a children's book there were a good number of difficult words I actually had to stop and look up. 'It wouldn't be Miéville without some of that.

I read this book some time ago and I decided to revist it for a bit today, and it's every bit as magical as I remember it. "Magical" is probably the best word I can think to describe it despite it being somewhat improper; it's kind of grimey. Grimey magical. It's like a grimey, trippy and magical Alice in Wonderland. It's like Alice in Wonderland meets Alice in Wonderland. I think it even says that on the cover.

POETIC JUSTICE

Summer has sprung, so they say in the business. Up until this year, my summers have been relatively carefree. Sure, I went to classes and sure, I've had a job to tend to every summer since I was fourteen, but up until this moment in time no summer has been quite as taxing as this very one. For you see, dear reader, this is the summer in which I must relentlessly search for a real job. Not these jobby jobs I've been pulling, but a real, honest-to-God, my-life-is-pretty-much-over job. I need to get on the road to my career. Whatever that may be.

It's also the summer in which I will have a freakishly large amount of free time on the count of me having no life. And so, this summer will be codenamed: POETIC JUSTICE, because no matter how hard I try and how much I try to accomplish, something completely ironic in stature will happen to me. I'm not sure what it is, but when it happens it will happen! There will be nothing I can do to stop it.

I've already started working on two books. One of them is actually codenamed POETIC JUSTICE, but that might not be the final title because of the 1993 Janet Jackson flick of the same name. I've also begun a short story collection. I'd like to post more about them, but I don't want people stealing my precious ideas that will probably never come to proper fruition.

Anyway, this is what I've been reading:



On the Beach by Nevil Shute is a post-apocalyptic novel that takes place in Australia. The entire northern hemisphere has been killed off by nuclear war, and the radiation is slowly traveling down to the southern hemisphere until the world is inevitably enveloped in its deadly blanket.

This novel is wonderfully written and tells the story of a few people who are facing their final months of life. They live in the last city to be wiped out and occasionally live in a disillusioned state of mind where they may wind up surviving and this is all a terrible dream.

I'm not going to ruin much, although I must say that I was only able to find this book on eBay (for a dollar!) so if you are so motivated to read it then I applaud you. It is probably one of the best, frightening and enlightening post-apocalyptic novels you could ever possibly read. But I must say, it is the only book I've ever read that made me cry. I cried like a little bitch for pages. I've never cried during any medium - no movie, no tv series, no song has ever moved me to tears. This book did. So if you want to be sad, try this out.



I'm currently crotch-deep in Rudy Rucker's Software, the first in a quadrilogy of -ware titled novels. I also have Wetware on my shelf, but I might not read past that unless I'm really motivated. I'm reading Software now because apparently it is one of the first cyberpunk novels.

I gotta say, it's a solid book. It's very fun to read, the characters are interesting, and I guess I'm probably not even qualified to say it's anything less than stellar because Rudy Rucker is the fucking man. But I don't think this is really cyberpunk. Maybe I define cyberpunk differently than everyone else, but it's mostly about the grimey city aesthetic, the anti-hero protagonist, his addiction to drugs and sex despite his sexless life... and I mean, there are elements of all that in Software, but they feel more like the absolute prototypes for what would become of the unrelatable crazies in books like Neuromancer and When Gravity Fails.

But it's definitely a cool read and I'm looking forward to Wetware, which I will knock off after I finish the Foundation series which I just recently ordered. I've never read those and I bought editions of them with cool covers.



Last, but certainly not least is The Essential Ellison, 35 years of Harlan Ellison's short stories. I was originally skeptical about this, as eBayers listed its price as $30+. I thought that it may just be a difficult book to get. I managed to score it for a mere $15 and, after receiving it, I understood the original high prices. This book is massive. It is well over a thousand pages. It's a god damn massivology.

I was so inclined to get it because it contains one of my favorite short stories: "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream." I hadn't read much Ellison beyond that and so I figured this would be a good place to start. This is a great place to start, although not all of Ellison's work is science fiction which makes the order of stories a little disorienting.

And so, my attempt to turn a potential summer of solitude into that of glorious nerdening begins with a bang. More on this story as it develops.

HERE COMES A CHOPPER TO CHHHHHHHHH

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine brought to my attention an off-broadway production of every high schooler's collective favorite dystopian future novel, 1984. I, not being one to miss such a heroic attempt at live-action, low-budgeted adaptation, sought to buy tickets to see a Saturday matinee performance of it. At a paltry $25 per ticket (plus applicable convenience charges), this 80-minute uninterupted spectacle of postmodernism is well worth the price of admission.

Without spoiling too much, this envisioning of the 1949 George Orwell novel does a more-than-adequate job at capturing the disconnected, lonely feeling of Winston's troubles throughout the course of the story. Naturally, minor details are cut in favor of cramming the main plot points into something that's just barely under an hour and a half, but the important bits are there. It's done by a group of artists known as the Godlight Theater Company, who have worked on similar adaptations of other novels such as Blindness, Slaughterhouse Five, Farenheit 451, and so on and so forth. I could go over their merits as a company, but to be honest this is the first time I've ever heard of them, so if you're so inclined to learn more about them you can just click on the link. That's the magic of Al Gore Presents : The Internet, Hard at Work!, hard at work.

The acting was delightful, especially the pasty, soft-spoken yet intimidating man who played O'Brien, although Julia looked somewhat similar to a girl I once dated who dumped my loser ass swiftly, so that totally took me out of it. I also very much liked how the actor who played Parsons reacted in an explosion of nervous fury when he was sentenced to Room 101, as his sentiments very closely parallel mine whenever I'm told I have to go to school, or work, or outside, or basically anywhere that involves leaving my basement.

Perhaps the most interesting of design choices involved the lighting - there was often a square of light in the center of the stage, which was treated differently in each scene (for example, in one scene it's treated as an imaginary table). The telescreens were depicted by four women standing at the outer edges of the stage, quietly chattering away as the action unfolded in the center and wonderfully illustrating the claustrophobic feel Big Brother hammered down on the doomed city.

It's currently being shown at 59E59 on 59th Street between Madison and Park, and it's a grand old time and highly recommended by this sci-fi fart in the wind, so take that as you will.

HE KNEW IT WAS HAPPENING ALL OVER AGAIN

I have a tendency to have frightening dreams based on whatever I'm critically engaged in at the moment.

A few weeks ago, I had begun playing killer7 for the Gamecube again, a videomajiggy that features co-design credits of Shinji Mikami, creator of the campy Resident Evil series. In this game, enemies would laugh maniacally before slowly crawling towards you, invisible, and if you didn't take them down quickly enough they'd grab you and explode, wrecking your shit. I had a dream where I was running down tight corridors, and I heard the laughter and got very frightened, as if an army of invisible bad guys were waiting behind every corner.

Again, just last week after a hardcore 1984 session, I had a dream that involved telescreens. I had, apparently, broken some mortal law that was about to be scrutinized by the Party, and I had done it in front of a telescreen, which has the ability to watch the viewer at all times. Knowing that I was about to be erased, panic began welling up inside my chest. To me, in a nightmare, there is nothing scarier than knowing you are, undoubtably, going to die. Not even death itself is a scarier concept than knowing that your inevitable doom is slowly spreading through you like the slowly retracting jaw of a snake, ready to attack and strangle its prey for a quick meal. Holy mother of balls.

Needless to say, I have woken up the past few nights in a cold sweat. Sometimes I wake up with the fear still inside of me, as if the dream hadn't ended yet, and it has somehow manifested itself into my waking life.

So perhaps it is not a good thing that I have begun reading Ring, Koji Suzuki's horror novel that spawned the popular films. I briefly mentioned this in my last post, which I will not dignify with a link (scroll down). I, admittedly, have never seen the movies. I'm not much for the horror genre, in case you can't tell. But I find the book engrossing, at least in the first fifty pages, and despite the morbid air and atmosphere it is a casual, fun read.

The translating/publishing house is Verticle, who also has a hand in translating a few of Tezuka's works including Black Jack, which is fucking awesome. It's about an unlicensed surgeon who has the ability to perform miracle cures on patients. He is generally considered an outcast and a thief, considering how loner qualities, deformed appearance, and outrageous doctor's fees. However, we know he's grossly misunderstood - Black Jack is unbearably tragic, constantly the victim of circumstance and a bastion of moral indignity - he is essentially the human, adult version of the serialized Astro Boy and repeating his laundry list of woeful sorrow would be best left for a post later on, when volume 3 is released later this month.

Unfortunately this blog post must be cut short; I have decided that taking a winter class that forces me up at 6AM was a good idea, and so my recent nights have been cut tragically short. I shall end this post with a YouTube video of the Talking Heads, because if I can't see David Byrne live then I can at least close my eyes and pretend I'm there.