Asimov's SF, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Sad to say, I very seldom get to re-read my favorite books. The relentless onslaught of new material demanding attention militates against such repetitive pleasures. (Am I complaining? Not really, but...) Yet a year or two ago, I made an exception: I wanted to go back to Philip K. Dick's Ubik, which I had not read since it was released in 1969! The experience was wonderful, confirming my high estimation of this novel in the phildickian canon. And now, much to my delight and surprise, I get to dance with Ubik again, in the unexpected form of Ubik: The Screenplay (Subterranean Press, hardcover, $35.00, 182 pages, ISBN 978-1-59606-169-9). As Tim Powers details in his enlightening introduction, this was Dick's attempt in 1974 to interest Hollywood in one of his most grippingly visual concepts. He poured all his potent talent and enthusiasm into this new medium, and the results are outstanding. Dick showed a keen insight into the requirements of the cinema, staging scenes with lots of movement and dramatic flair. Sure, some of the speeches go on a little too long, but in general the dialogue is crisp and invigorating. The idiosyncratic speech patterns and oddball vocalized thoughts that Dick gave to his characters in his books were always among the prime attractions of his work, and in this effort they dominate, to good effect. The entropic set-pieces and sense of ineluctable decay are almost more powerful in this presentation than in the novel form. If this version were to be filmed exactly as is, I venture to say that the resulting film would rank as the most faithful and stirring PKD movie ever. Even unspooling it in the cinema of your mind is a rare privilege.

  Once upon a future time, there was a brave and resourceful—albeit cripplingly asexual—Native American lad named Broadway Danny Rose, son of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Confused? Let's start again. Nick DiChario has written a new bonkers novel, Valley of Day-Glo (Robert J. Sawyer Books, trade paper, $15.95, 240 pages, ISBN 978-0-88995-415-1), which channels the proud and seminal shades of Robert Sheckley and George Alec Effinger into a vivid and unique tale of some outrageous and bizarre post-apocalypse doings involving a handful of hapless survivors. The backstory is this: sometime a couple of centuries from our era the planet has undergone the Reddening, a disastrous collapse that left the environment stripped and barren. Indians are the only group who have managed to remain extant on the North American continent, and they have done that only by plundering the buried remnants of the earlier civilization. Taking their personal names from movie titles, revering such tomes as The Microwave Cookbook and The Modern Book of Baseball, they live spartan lives interspersed with deadly internecine rumbles. One legend, however, remains a common inspiration: that somewhere exists the Valley of Day-Glo, a utopian earthly paradise. Part one of this novel finds Danny embarked on a quest to discover the paradise. Having done so, in part two he becomes something of an elder statesman, with all the headaches that entails, while also managing to find true love. The final short coda brings Danny and his love Millie to an ultimate reward (?). DiChario's dry wit and antic imagination, harking to such other ancestral voices as Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) and Neal Barrett's Prince of Christler-Coke (2004), propels this weird odyssey at an unflagging pace, and carries the reader effortlessly along.

  Any regular readers of this column know of my fondness for the Dungeon books of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim. These graphic novels are miracles of off-the-wall plotting and outré panoramas and lurking eyekicks; of spark-spitting concepts and charming characterizations. So it will hardly be any surprise to learn that the latest installment delivers the reliable true goods. Dungeon Monstres 2 (NBM, trade paper, $12.95, 96 pages, ISBN 978-1-56163-540-5) centers around a climactic moment we've already witnessed in earlier volumes: the moment when the world of Terra Amata blows apart into inhabitable chunks. Divided into two dovetailing stories, this volume follows Marvin the Red, our scary bunny ninja, in his quest to find an occult map of the new world order. Opposing Marvin, besides a host of lesser competitors, is Herbert the Duck, Dark Lord and Grand Khan. Toss in the beautiful catwoman Nicole and the equally gorgeous daughter of the Khan, Zakutu, rivals for Marvin's affections, and you have enough substance for any three lesser novels. Trondheim and Sfar have painterly help this time around, the artists Andreas and Stephane Blanquet, with each creator doing a story apiece. These newcomers replicate the patented Sfar-Trondheim look without slavish imitation, bringing subtle signature differences that only highlight the wonderfully eccentric cosmos that is the Dungeon World.

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  Single-Author Poetry and Story Collections

  Publisher John Klima, at his Spilt Milk Press, is most well known for his fine zine, Electric Velocipede. But he's started doing chapbooks as well, and if their quality continues as high as with the present offering, he might very well become famous instead as a book publisher! The collection in question is Psychological Methods to Sell Must Be Destroyed ($5.00, 80 pages, ISBN unavailable) by Robert Freeman Wexler. With an introduction by Zoran Zivkovic, this quietly stunning assemblage of six stories (one of which appears here for the first time) wears its magical-realist allegiances on its sleeve. And a fantastically embroidered sleeve it is! A four-armed giant lies musing, recumbent in the snow of a city street, as mundane passersby react to him. A man learns how to tune into the useful gossip exchanged by sentient breadstuffs. Two New Yorkers separately experience an odd sourceless film and a floating head—both with life-changing results. All these intriguing conceits and others are couched in the most restrained yet emphatic and subtle prose, a style simultaneously droll and tragic, despairing and optimistic, wounded and triumphant. Readers who enjoy the fictions of Jeffrey Ford, Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, and the aforementioned ZZ will embrace Wexler wholeheartedly, and anticipate his forthcoming novel, The Painting and the City, a sample of which generously caps this volume.

  Johnny Strike's new collection, A Loud Humming Sound Came from Above (Rudos and Rubes Publishing, trade paper, $12.95, 165 pages, ISBN 978-0-9778952-0-5), is dedicated to “the neglected writers of pulp literature,” and its contents harmonize beautifully with that invocation. The fast-paced, gonzo stories here might have appeared in Black Mask or Weird Tales, as part of some Gold Medal Paperback Original, or maybe as the script for an EC horror comic. They exhibit the forthright bluntness of a Spillaine or Cain, the creepy involutedness of a Lovecraft or C.A. Smith, and sometimes the quirky skewed perceptions of a H.S. Keeler. I suppose you might dub them “postmodern,” but they possess none of the winking irony or distancing of that mode. Additionally, they nod to more polished masters, such as Borges and Ballard (the latter quite specifically in “Jimmy Ballard's Hospital Review"). For the most part, the doings here are fantastical: an alien invasion, a cursed painting, a mutant underclass, a master assassin. “Boiled in Miami” is a rare mimetic excursion, albeit of the private-eye category. Taken together, the stories affirm the potency of pure storytelling. And the superb Richard Sala illos contribute to that feeling as well.

  Unlike the Strike offerings, the stories in George Allan England's collection, The Supreme Getaway (Wildside, trade paper, $14.95, 172 pages, ISBN 978-1-4344-0251-6), are all mimetic: no ghosts, aliens, or mad scientists make an appearance, and all events are rationally explainable. Yet identically to the Strike volume, this collection is filled with such pulp vigor and delight in the bizarre and extravagant that its contents might as well be supernatural. Plus, the antique settings (the stories appeared from 1906 to 1932) lend them an air of fantasy, to the eyes of 2009. So reading these engaging tales will repay the attention of any genre fan. England (1877 to 1936) did, however, have impeccable SF credentials, producing five SF novels, including the well-respected Darkness and Dawn (1914). So it's also instructive to get this mainstream angle on his career. Most of the stories in this volume revolve around crime and criminals, sometimes humorously, sometimes with macabre tints. The title piece is one of the comic ones, recounting how two con men are almost undone by a pretty woman. “A Flyer in Junk” is another account of a con artist
humorously outsmarted. But then, showing England's range, comes the Poe-like “The Silo,” a version of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” “Rough Toss” presents a simple working man with a deep moral conundrum, while “A Worthwhile Crime” is something of a Sherlockian piece. At times sounding like O. Henry or Will Rogers, England was fond of slang and jazzy plotting. He liked to trick and surprise the reader with reversals. And although his prose was generally pedestrian, he occasionally hit stylish heights, as with this opener to “Test Tubes.” “I have seen daisies growing on an ash dump. I have seen perfumes made of evil chemicals in test tubes. Steel forms itself under the slag, in crucibles. Freud tells us we are merely psychologically reacting automata, slaves of external stimuli. But some believe in free will. Does anybody know anything? All things are possible."

  Some day our field will wake up and make Bruce Boston its official Poet Laureate. With over forty fine books to his immense credit, he is the indisputable doyen of fantastical poetry. And he remains unrelentingly prolific and concerned with quality and innovation, producing at least one book's worth of hard, bright-burning gems per year. Of late, he gifts us with The Nightmare Collection (Dark Regions Press, trade paper, $9.95, 95 pages, ISBN 978-1-888993-59-2), and it's another winner. Thematically pure, it omits any SF tropes in favor of fantasy and horror effects, as well as some purely naturalistic frights. (I'm thinking of a poem like “California Noir,” with its evocation of raw “everyday” murders.) Formalistically, Boston experiments with line-length from the shortest to the longest—the latter instance producing what amount to prose-poems—and stanzas of varying dimensions as well. The various formats seem ideally suited to their respective subject matter, with a piece such as “Interrogation at City Gate” evoking something by Lord Dunsany. He gives us several cycles of poems, interwoven throughout the text. We have the “People” Cycle ("Gargoyle People,” “Bone People,” et al.), which reimagine what our world would be, if homo sapiens were exclusively one different morphology or another. We have the “Curse” Cycle, already familiar from other collections ("Curse of the Siren's Suitors,” “Curse of the Giantess’ Husband,” et al.). And four “Surreal” poems cluster together to good effect. Although the majority of the poems produce a grim and ghastly ambiance, there's a leavening of humor, as in “How to Survive the Inferno.” Need I say that one of the lines here is “Drink plenty of fluids"...? Finally, Russell Morgan's interior illustrations are a perfect complement to Boston's verse, and the ultimate effect of the whole package is one of craft, passion, and creativity.

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  Anthologies

  A few years back I had the pleasure of contributing an entry to Jeff VanderMeer's delightfully oddball project, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. For those of you who have not yet bumped into Mr. Lambshead's compendium, I will explain that it was an encyclopedia of imaginary ailments presented as fact. No overarching narrative, or even full-fledged individual stories: just many mock-scholarly essays, some of which had narrative vignettes embedded in them. The whole result was utterly unique and lots of fun—for the writers and, judging by good sales, for many readers as well. Now comes a companion volume of sorts, along the same lines and equally witty. Edited by Janet Chui and Jason Erik Lundberg, with contributions from over four dozen writers, and featuring marvelous illustration by Chui, A Field Guide to Surreal Botany (Two Cranes Press, trade paper, $12.00, 76 pages, ISBN 978-981-08-1017-7) has so many strengths it's hard to know where to begin the praise. Maybe with Chui's drawings, which combine a National Geographic specificity with a Edward Lear-like whimsicality. Then there's the precise and logical arrangement of the book into regional taxonomies that lend ecological and evolutionary credence to the strange plants. The editorial insistence on uniformity of style and division for each entry also contributes to the whole scholarly apparatus. And when it comes to the individual pieces, by such folks as Jay Lake, Vera Nazarian, and Steve Berman, we find that the authors have really exerted themselves. Most entries consist of brilliant blends of history, scientific jargon, outrageous conceits, bizarre nomenclature, and resonant fakery. Reading this charming book is like taking a visit to a richer parallel Earth where Nature, already prolifigate and extravagant, went on a real bender.

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  Non-Fiction

  One of the pieces in Cory Doctorow's stimulating first non-fiction volume, Content (Tachyon, trade paper, $14.95, 288 pages, ISBN 978-1-892391-81-0), appeared in this very magazine ("When the Singularity is More than a Literary Device"). Several others saw the light of day in Locus, while others debuted in various newspapers like The Guardian and business publications such as Forbes. Still others were speeches. But despite disparate original venues, they are all unified by two things: a concern with the shape and tenor and prospects of the digital landscape we are all inhabiting more and more intimately; and the engaged, funny, optimistic Doctorow sensibility. Having them all together in a single volume is like being slipped an intelligent passport to the future. Doctorow's mission here is not an esthetic one—he does not prescribe any literary program or point the finger at stodgy writers—but rather a practical one. He is concerned with limning the way information makes it way around the world, and promoting its freedom so as to maximize dialogue and novelty. His enemies are old-fashioned thinking, greed, fear, and short-sightedness. Tossing off funny lines and surprising yet intuitive metaphors, he tramples all the ogres and gatekeepers that stand in the way of disseminating whatever ideas the world needs to lift itself out of its current fix. Perusing this book is reminiscent of reading Harlan Ellison's two Glass Teat volumes—if those Ellison books had been purely about the nature of TV as a medium, without reference to any content of the shows.

  A good work of criticism should not only illuminate the literature you already know in a new and informative light, but also shine its scholarly beams upon previously dark places. By this standard and by many other evaluative measures, John Rieder's new work, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, trade paper, $24.95, 200 pages, ISBN 978-0-8195-6874-8) is a superb volume. It's written in crystalline, albeit complex prose. It defines every term and theory in comprehensible fashion. It lays out its theses straightforwardly. Its logic is impeccable. It employs both expected and unexpected examples, and synopsizes them vividly. In short, you'll emerge from a reading of this book both enlightened and delighted. After giving us thorough introductions to both the notion of colonialism and the early years of SF, Rieder begins a determined march through the categories of alien invasions, time travel, and lost world motifs, as found in the SF of the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century. He utilizes such famous and familiar examples as the novels of Wells and Verne and Haggard's She (1887). But then he'll produce a brilliant lateral move such as his exegesis of the little-known Jack London story, “The Red One.” (Rieder uses and acknowledges the excellent research of E.F. Bleiler as his map through these territories.) Positing three different attitudes of colonizer toward the colonized—discoverer, missionary, or anthropologist—he examines how hidden biases have shaped what we have long taken to be innocent adventure fiction. Concluding his narrative with a stimulating look at Kuttner and Moore's classic “Vintage Season,” Rieder leaves us hungering for him to extend his study to the post-WWII years.

  Copyright © 2009 Paul Di Filippo

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  Department: SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR by Erwin S. Strauss

  It's hard for Asimovians to go wrong with any of the general-interest events over the Memorial Day weekend. Plan now for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of con(vention)s, a sample of SF folksongs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me an SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on
my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con 5 months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard.—Erwin S. Strauss

  MAY 2009

  15-17—MobiCon. For info, write: Box 161632, Mobile AL 36616. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) mobicon.org. (E-mail) dragynwing@gmail.com. Con will be held in: Mobile AL (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Asbury Best Western. Guests will include: S. Green, L. Elmore, D. Wiles. SF, fantasy, comics, gaming.

  22-24—KeyCon. keycon.org. Radisson Downtown, Winnipeg MB. General SF/fantasy con, with literary emphasis.

  22-24—MarCon. marcon.org. Hyatt, Columbus OH. S.R. Green, P. McCracken, J. Kare, C. Conway. General SF/fantasy con.

  22-24—ConQuest. conquestkc.org. Hyatt Crown Center, Kansas City MO. J. Scalzi, O. Zell, E. Datlow. General SF/fantasy.

  22-24—Oasis. oasfis.org. Sheraton Downtown, Orlando FL. Peter David, Toni Weisskopf, Johnny Atomic. General SF/fantasy.

  22-24—ConDuit. conduit.sfcon.org. Radisson Downtown, Salt Lake City UT. Eric Flint, Howard Tayler. General SF/fantasy.

  22-24—Timegate. timegatecon.org. Holiday Inn Select Atlanta Perimeter, Atlanta GA. Dr. Who, Stargate, other SF.

  22-25—BaltiCon. (410) 563-2737. balticon.org. Marriott, Hunt Valley (Baltimore) MD. Stross, Van Name. General SF/fantasy.

  22-25—BayCon. baycon.org. Hyatt, Santa Clara CA. M. Lackey. L. Dixon, T. Kirk, J. Brozek, F. Patten. General SF/fantasy.

  22-25—MisCon. miscon.org. Ruby's Inn, Missoula MT. Steven Brust, John Kovalic, Michael Stackpole. General SF/fantasy.

  22-25—WisCon. wiscon.org. Concourse Hotel, Madison WI. Authors Ellen Klages and Geoff Ryman. Feminism and SF.

  22-25—MediaWest*Con. mediawestcon.org. Holiday Inn South. Lansing MI. Media SF/fantasy. A long-running media con.