Book Review

Some Good Old Classic Sci-Fi

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I have to admit that when it comes to the good old classic sci-fi, I have some blind spots, and, until recently, Stanislaw Lem was one of them. When my friend heard that I had never read any of his work, he promptly sent The Cyberiad to my kindle and insisted I read it right away. I was not disappointed.

The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories, one more of a novella, that have taken our technologically rich world and pushed it to its illogical extremes. There are two inventors (apparently mostly mechanical themselves) at the heart of the stories who are in constant, mostly friendly, competition in building robots and thinking machines and all sorts of devices to solve the problems of rulers and worlds.

Now, while the stories themselves are engaging, it is the sardonic and caustic attitude of the telling that makes them such a treat. Not to mention the illustrations by Daniel Mróz. I guarantee you’ll be laughing your ass off while still not getting all the jokes. Well, maybe my father would, but he’s a physicist, and these jokes are of the same caliber as the highest brow XKCD mathematical puns.

At the same time though, these stories really make you stop and think about what we are using our technology for today, whether we’re genuinely putting our knowledge and skills towards the best efforts or are we really just concerned with making better masturbatory machines. Literally, I’m not joking, there’s at least two stories involving machines like this, one meant to break a prince of his inappropriate infatuation and the other to so engage a ruler so as to prevent him from noticing that it was trying to kill him. And then there is the story about the two inventors creating a machine that writes poetry and how out of hand that gets as poets come from around the world to duel with it.

I highly suggest picking this up to read at least one or two of the stories in it. It took me a little while to get through because its hard to read more than one of the stories at once, the complex and convoluted language tends to leave your brain spinning just a bit, but its totally worth the verbal vertigo.

My Kind of Fantasy

/ Rebecca Demarest / 2 Comments

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a sucker for fantasy, and I blame it all on my father. He started me young with the speculative books, and I’ve never forgotten them. One of the series that I have had on my shelf as long as I can remember are the Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede. Like, I have no idea where they actually came from, I’ve owned them that long. And they have had a profound influence on my taste in books and my style of writing.

And the best part? I went back and re-read them just last month and they are still just as good as when I was reading them as a child. Do you know how hard that is to pull of as a YA author? Go on, I dare you to go re-read your favorites from before puberty. You’ll wince. But not these; the writing and the characters, and all of it are so vivid and excellently written that they withstand the scrutiny of an MFA wielding writer 25 years down the line. Now that’s just impressive.

But back to the books themselves. They are the most delightful parody of classic fairy tales you could ever wish for. On her site, Ms. Wrede claims inspiration from the land of Oz and the “Fractured Fairy Tales” of Rocky and Bullwinkle. You can certainly feel it in the quirky and determined heroine Cimorene in the first book all the way through to our overly polite hero Daystar in the last book. They take every fairy tale trope and turn it over, shake it hard, set back upright and paint a new face on it.

The reason I went back to these stories now was because I wanted to capture that feel of intelligent irreverence before going back to edit my own fantasy novel, Mark of the Storyteller. Ms. Wrede’s grasp of language, comedic timing, and knowledge of fairy tale lore is unique in her genre, and it is worth studying—and studying hard—before moving on to your own fairy tale parodies. Or for reading when you’re stuck sick in bed because it can always make you laugh, even when you have the majority of it memorized.

What Would You do to be King?

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Rudyard Kipling has long been a favorite author of mine because of his Just So stories. They filled my childhood with wonder and I can still picture the animated version of “How the Elephant Got its Trunk” that I must have watched hundreds of times. Then when I was hunting for novellas for research on the form, I came across The Man Who Would be King. 

Yes, a movie version of it came out in ’97. Yes, I was too young to actually watch it, but you can be sure I’m going to hunt it down now. ‘Cause…Sean Connery, how can you say no to that? But back to the novella…

This story is structured like many adventure tales of the time: there is a narrator who is not at all an actual part of the story, but serves as a vehicle for the actual adventurers to expound upon their tale. This format worked great for The Time Machine, it doesn’t work so well with this one, unfortunately.

Basically, you’ve got a reporter who ends up being nice to a couple of gentlemen down on their luck, watches them ride off, determined to make themselves kings in the Middle East, then watches one come back broken and nearly dead who tells him of the marvelous time they had wherein they did indeed become kings and then were betrayed by the desire for a woman. And I didn’t give one whit about the reporter, I wanted to be off gallivanting with the adventurers because they seemed like they were having so much more fun than the poor writer. The way in which the story was told kept the reader at arms length from the action, unlike the time machine where the story still managed to be immersive. And this story had such amazing potential, too! I could have been riveting.

Someone obviously agreed with me on that front, so they made a movie. Which I’m now going to go watch, because if Connery gets into the same kind of trouble that these men did, its going to be amazing…

Don’t Ever Be the Redshirt

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I love sci-fi. I am an avid fan of it in all formats and I am even more fond of the parodies that bad sci-fi inspires. Galaxy Quest, anyone? So I was particularly happy to hear that John Scalzi had written a new parody entitled Redshirts.

For those of you who are not familiar with the genre slang, Star Trek, in their original series, had a bad habit of sticking extras in red shirts on away teams for the sole purpose of killing them off. Or grievously injuring them. You get the picture: red shirt = bad news for your character.

Now along comes Scalzi’s new book were our protagonist and all his supporting characters are Redshirts; fully expendable, high casualty rate, Redshirts on the good ship Intrepid. Its not long after they are assigned to the ship that they start to notice just how absurd the casualty rate is, nor do they content themselves to hiding from the officers like the rest of the crew seems to be. No, Andy Dahl and compatriots take it into their hands to figure out why such ridiculous things keep happening. I mean, Ice Sharks? Really? That’s almost as bad as the crewman who was eaten by the Morgrovian Sand Worms.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable book, if a bit slow to start off. The prologue had me a bit confused as to who the main character was (he’s not there, fyi, his name is Andy Dahl and he shows up a few pages later) and a lot of the secondary characters I had trouble keeping straight, but that’s because they functioned as tropes, and very well, at that. Once you get past the slow start and into the meat of this story though, you won’t want to put the book down. It takes meta to the meta in poking fun at poorly written sci-fi series and Scalzi certainly did his homework. I wonder just how many bad shows he had to watch for research…and I wonder how I can convince my SO that watching the entire series of Pretender while I’m working is research as well…

Overall, this was a fun, if occasionally mind-bending, read. I can’t tell you much more about it without ruining some of the fun twists, but if you like a good B sci-fi movie, you’ll love this book.

Who is the Crazy One Now?

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In investigating classic novellas, I stumbled across Machado de Assis‘ The Alienist and subsequently couldn’t put it down. This Brazilian work was written at the end of the 1800’s and explores the rising field of psychology and the dangers of judging what is sane or insane.

Now, I really don’t want to ruin the various twists in this rather short novella, so I’ll only give you with a short summary. The protagonist is a doctor who learns of psychiatry and decides to build a sanitarium in his town to which he starts to commit most of his neighbors. But that’s just the first third. Suffice it to say you are left a distinct impression that no one in the town is strictly sane by the end of it all.

But this book explores some interesting themes on the topic of mental health, ones we can relate to today. How do we define what is normal and what is insane? Are we, as humans, even capable of making that distinction for ourselves? And if everyone around us could be dubbed unstable, does that not make the stable ones the abnormalities?

Beyond these heavy philosophical arguments, the book is stunningly well written, with a compelling plot and characters. You definitely feel sorry for the doctor’s wife by the time all is said and done. And, of course, it’s gorgeously presented by Melville House.

But I’d love to hear some of your thoughts on these philosophical quandaries, particularly if you’ve gotten a chance to read some of Machado de Assis’ work for yourself. What do you classify as insane, what gives the medical community the right to make these judgment (and if you didn’t know, this week marks the newest release of the guidelines for those judgments)? What if we’re entirely wrong about who is the normative human beings, and which are the non-normative?

A Lot Funnier Than I Thought It Would Be

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I feel like I’m going to go to hell for this, but Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt made me laugh, a lot. Everyone I’d ever talked to about the memoir said it was horribly depressing if well written and so I’d put off reading it as long as I could, but the guilt of having it sit on my shelf unread got to me and I finally picked it up.

Then I couldn’t put it down. Yes, it is the really rough story of growing up dirt poor in Limerick, Ireland with siblings dying around him and his father drinking away any money he earns, leaving his poor mother perpetually pregnant and begging for food for her children. This memoir follows McCourt from his birth through till he earned/stole enough money to get himself passage to America.

But beyond this dark and dingy situation, there is the shining humor and strength of Frank shining through. You’ll be going along reading a really horribly depressing scene about the death of someone down the lane and then you get this one liner that just has you busting at the seams. Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m just a horrible person. Or maybe McCourt is just that good of an author and he ratchets your tension so high with the deaths and the disease that when he throws you a “Kids Say the Darndest Things” line, it hits you harder than most and you laugh to keep from crying about everything else that happened to him.

I would very much suggest people pick this book up as it is worth every moment of your time. Beautifully written, and a stunning look into times past in a country that has not had the smoothest of histories.

A Horror of a Different Sort

/ Rebecca Demarest / 1 Comment

When one sees the name Mary Shelley, one is usually reminded of her most famous work, Frankenstein, but I want to introduce you to another of her works, Mathilda. Mathilda is a novella of a different sort, almost a love story, and frequently thought to be somewhat autobiographical (I shudder to think so). Fair warning, lots of spoilers past here, but this book just got my dander up and I have to let it all out.

In this novella, Mathilda is a young woman, having grown up abandoned to her hideous Aunt’s care and she lives a restricted childhood where she is not allowed to socialize with any of the local children for fear she’ll adopt their country accent. Her mother had died in childbirth and her father was so grief stricken that he could not even look upon his daughter without pain, so he went galavanting off to Europe. 

Now, this is starting to sound like a fairly typical Victorian romance, but here’s where things get a bit weird. Her father comes back when she is a teenager and immediately dives back into her life. They spend every waking minute together talking and planning their futures together. Mathilda is over the moon about all of this, and then her father becomes moody and quiet. She hates that he has withdrawn from her and in desperation she presses him about his pain until he admits that he has withdrawn because he feels a sexual attraction towards his daughter.

That’s right, he wants to bone his daughter. I guess she grew up looking a little too much like her mother.

Wracked by pain and the guilt that he even told her this, her father commits suicide. Mathilda, wracked by the grief of her father’s death fakes her own suicide and runs away to live in the wilds all by her self. There she meets a poet equally wracked by his grief over the death of his fiance and together they cry and boohoo for the rest of the book until Mathilda gets consumption from being outdoors in all kinds of weather bemoaning her pain and loss and dies. 

Frankly, my only thought was good riddance. Before her father’s death, she was constantly talking about how no one’s love for another could be stronger than that she had for her father. After he died, she was insistent, in fact insisted on just about every page, that no one could ever know the depths of her sorrow. In fact, the poor lonely man who comes to visit her constantly who had just lost the LOVE OF HIS LIFE couldn’t come close to the darkest depths of her sorrow. 

I just wanted to reach into the book and shake her. Slap her once or twice until she snapped out of her sniveling pity party and woke up to the fact that her father abandoned her, then wanted to sleep with her. That’s not really someone you should be mourning. The only good thing he did was tear himself away from her the second time. But, hey, what do I know, I’m a modern girl who thinks parental responsibility is worthy of love and incest is icky. 

All that being said, the novella is beautifully written. And I did read all the way to the end, I couldn’t not. I may have cheered when she finally died, which I don’t think was Ms. Shelley’s goal, but at least I had feelings for the main characters and that’s the goal, right? Even if the feelings were utter repugnance…

He Was Very German

/ Rebecca Demarest / 1 Comment

I was very excited to learn that one of my favorite authors, Michael Strelow, was coming out with a new book. I had absolutely loved The Greening of Ben Brown, and hoped that his next novel would be as quirky and engaging as his first. I was not disappointed.

Henry: A novel of Beer and Love in the West, is the story of Henry Weinhard, brewer and entrepreneur in the Wild West of Portland. It’s loosely based around the real brewer’s life, but this novel takes us on a whirlwind tour of his life, as told from Henry’s perspective as though he’s rambling on about his life to his grandchildren towards the end of his life. Maybe not his grandchildren, there’s too many lady’s of misfortune for that. But his drinking buddies for sure.

I worried when I first picked up the book that I was going to inundated by the minutia of beer making and the business that entails, but it was just a delightful background to a thoroughly fascinating story. This man apprentices to a brewer in Germany, then makes his way to America and then works his way out to the farthest reaches where they still needed a decent German brewer to make something other than piss-water for the soldiers and lumberjacks. It was then only a natural extension to his business to acquire several pubs, and once he had those to stock the upstairs with slightly more delicate wares. It is a beautiful story of his life, including his love for a woman of poor repute while still carrying on his professional life and marriage.

There is a lot of talk about myths and tales, both those from his homeland and his new land, focusing specifically on the tales of Joshua, man of mystery in the west. There is a lot of philosophizing on staying true to his German heritage while at the same time using it to his advantage. The language of his love is beautiful and stark, showing just how much he truly cared for the woman. He is a complex man, and his is a compelling story.

As for the writing style, I urge people to have just a bit of patience with it. I was used to the round about storytelling style from Strelow’s first novel where its a deliberate choice to fracture the character’s world at the very beginning after his accident. Here, its a much softer swirling of consciousness that ultimately coalesces into a heart breaking series of events. It may seem that his philosophizing or stories about Joshua are tangents, when in fact they are simply the interior support beams for a rather satisfying and emotional climax.

So, if you enjoy excellent writing in a historical fiction setting, this is definitely a novel worth checking out.

Finally Read the Original

/ Rebecca Demarest / 1 Comment

So, there are certain canonical books that have spawned countless reinterpretations, and The Time Machine by H.G. Wells is no exception. I am a little ashamed to admit that I had never actually read the original until quite recently. And, to my surprise, I rather enjoyed it.

A lot of the fiction from the late 1800’s/early 1900’s I just find to drag on with unnecessary philosophical discussions or endless discussions at parties, but Wells keeps this story short and sweet. It is about a young inventor who develops a time machine and travels so far into Earth’s future that there is hardly anything left that is recognizable as human. The human race split long ago into subterranian and surface-dwelling races, with the surface people living on fruit and the cave dwellers living on their surface cousins. When our traveler leaves this world, he travels even farther into the future to find a desolate wasteland peopled by hideous creatures and living under a dying sun.

As many of the pieces from the time, it is presented from the perspective of a companion of the main character, though in this case he does not travel with the protagonist; instead, he is hearing the man relate his travels at a dinner party. This allowed the story to have a much smoother and leaner view of the protagonist’s adventures that made it seem almost like a modern adventure novel.

The book also offers an interesting judgement on humanity, hinting at the splitting of our race into the pretty useless people supported by the people who live below who make the world run. I’ll leave it to each individual reader to decide just how much of the social commentary they choose to read into it. Personally, I prefer just the hint of it to flavor the adventure of it all. Though I can’t help but feel that his commentary is even more relevant today, with the rich beautiful people marrying and producing useless pretty offspring (*cough* Kardashians *cough*) while a good portion of the world sinks into the darkness of their own uneducated worship of these creatures.

All in all, its a fun, and fast, read. I suggest giving it a go if you’re a fan of classic science fiction, especially if you’ve enjoyed any of the iterations that have since followed.

In Honor of Fitzgerald…

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I know, I know, it’s been a long while, but I promise, I’m back now! Things have been more than a little crazy. But, since this weekend is the opening of what I am sure is a glorious rendition of The Great Gatsby in theaters across the nation, I wanted to pay tribute to one of Fitzgerald‘s lesser known works: The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.

This novella has the same flair for the dramatic and absurd indulgence as Gatsby, but this story is actually a retelling of an old fairy tale, The Glass Mountain. It’s once again the neighbor’s point of view (after a fashion) of a young lad who is befriended by the family that is at the crux of the story. He is invited by a mysterious schoolmate to visit his family’s hidden home which is actually built on top an enormous diamond in an inaccessible portion of the Rockies. Our protagonist marvels at the splendor, falls in love with the sister, and eventually escapes the mountain fortress with the skin on his back barely intact.

I personally found this little novella to be quite enjoyable. Even moreso than The Great Gatsby. While I enjoyed the ludicrous nature of the parties and Gatsby himself, I struggled to identify with the story in any fashion. But the protagonist of Diamond is different. I could really sink into this little fantasy world and enjoy it to its fullest, with Fitzgerald’s flair and verbosity serving well to emphasize the fairy tale underpinnings.

You can find this in various formats, both print and digital, but my favorite is by the Melville House Art of the Novella series. They are gorgeous little books and I am determined to collect them all at some point. And I am seriously tempted by the subscription option…

Cover of Diamond as Big as the Ritz