Category: Books

What I’m Reading: “Bogie and Bacall”

So many good books have already been written about Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart that even a biographer as talented as William J. Mann must have felt the need to find a new twist. A new gimmick. And with Bogie and Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair, Mann found one—a combined biography of Bogart and his famous wife, Lauren Bacall. It makes sense. After all, in the last years of his life, Bogie found himself as half of the first great celebrity couple. Long before Bennifer or The Beckhams or even Taylor/Burton, Bogie-and-Bacall entranced the public with both their movies and their marriage, never mind the fact that the public image of their relationship was largely fabricated by studio hacks.

It wasn’t all fabricated, though. Yes, Bogart and Bacall spent much of their marriage living somewhat separate lives, as one might expect in a pairing where one partner is so much older (and hard-bitten). They often travelled separately, for extended periods. Bogart continued a intermittent affair with his long-time mistress, and Bacall had an intense (and possibly physical) relationship with Frank Sinatra, to whom she was briefly engaged after Bogart’s death. Yet, by all accounts, the love and respect between the world’s most famous couple was genuine and deep. So deep, in fact, that Bogart actually cut down on the booze, at least for a time, after Bacall got sick of him coming home plastered (when he came home at all).

Indeed, in Mann’s telling, the story feels very much like a redemption tale for Bogart. This is especially true since most of the book is devoted to his life story. I would estimate a 70/30 split between words devoted to Bogie and Bacall, respectively—an imbalance that makes sense for a number of reasons. For one, Bogart’s biography began twenty-five years before Bacall’s. And by the time their romance first kindled in 1944 (and the Bogie-and-Bacall legend thus began), Bogart had been a movie star for over a decade and had already made his two greatest films, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca, establishing him as the most important film actor of his (or perhaps any) generation.

So, it’s perhaps inevitable that most of Mann’s book would be devoted to his life story. And, as Mann reveals, most of that story was taken up by his Bogart’s two obsessions—acting and booze. The two pursuits were related, of course; Bogart’s damaged psychological state (he had a sterile, lonely childhood) informed his acting even as it fueled his drinking. A deeply intelligent man, Bogart honed his artistry to a level unseen previously in cinema—he could play heroes and villains with equal prolixity—yet his intellect caused him to hate most of the Hollywood people he met, including himself.

Beginning in his youth, Bogart was known for getting drunk and punching other guys in the face. He took the habit with him to Hollywood, where he struggled for years under the thumb of studio system, grinding out B- and C-grade melodramas for the ruthless Jack Warner. And even as his star began to rise (his breakout role was that of a mesmerizingly evil villain in 1936’s The Petrified Forest, much like Javier Bardem’s in No Country for Old Men), his drinking only intensified.

As often happens with alcoholics, Bogart soon married someone who could match him drink-for-drink. Mayo Methot was a highly regarded actress who starred in many films throughout the 1930s. She was beautiful, intelligent, and deeply troubled. After marrying Bogart, she essentially gave up her already waning film career, and the disappointment and frustration of married life drove her to drink even more. And fight. Humphrey and Mayo soon became known as “The Battling Bogarts” in the tabloid press for their frequent, public rows. One of the most notable of these came while they were on a U.S.O. tour in Italy, entertaining troops fresh off the battlefields of World War II.

[The] Battling Bogarts made at least one appearance. After practically “distilling themselves” drinking with a group of paratroopers, the couple squabbled and Mayo locked her husband out of their room. As Bogie attempted to break in, he was apprehended by a colonel, whom he told to go to hell. As a guest of the army, he was called to account. “I didn’t mean to insult the uniform,” he said during a hearing. Looking at the colonel, he said, “I only meant to insult you.”

Despite their conflicts, Bogart doggedly remained married to Methot. Until, of course, he met a nineteen-year-old beauty named Betty Joan Perske, who went by the stage name Lauren Bacall.

One the most compelling aspects of Mann’s book is the almost unbelievable contrast between Bogart’s long, grueling rise to fame over almost two decades and Bacall’s overnight success. Bacall was doing a bit of acting and modelling work in New York when her photograph was spotted by Nancy Keith, wife of legendary actor Howard Hawks. Keith convinced her husband to give her a call. As if that development weren’t serendipitous enough for the young actress, Hawks’s secretary misunderstood his instructions and sent Bacall a plane ticket to Hollywood for a screen test. After meeting Bacall in person, Hawks was so taken by her beauty, intelligence, and poise that he immediately signed her to a seven-year contract. For her first picture, To Have and Have Not, she had a small part, intended to only give her one or two short scenes with the lead, Humphrey Bogart.

There is a scene in Homer’s Odyssey washes ashore on the island of Phaeacia. Naked and starving, he is discovered the virginal princess Nausicaa, who takes pity on him and saves him. I have heard the moment of their meeting described by one professor as “absolute innocence (Nausicaa) meeting absolute experience (Odysseus).” After all, by this point in the story, Odysseus has been at war for ten years, lost at sea for another seven, survived numerous monsters, witnessed the death of all his men, been held as a captive sex-slave by two powerful women (Circe and Calypso), and even made a short trip to hell (well, Hades).

I thought of all this as I read Mann’s account of the romance that quickly blossomed between the teenaged ingenue Bacall and the forty-five-year-old, world-weary, thrice-married, hard-drinking Bogart. But while Bacall might have been something of a princess (in Hollywood terms, at least), she was not a total innocent. As Mann recounts, she had been single-minded and ruthless in her pursuit of acting career, attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York (where she had a crush on one of her classmates, a young Kirk Douglas). After graduating, she endeared herself to various directors, producers, and writers until she finally got a few breaks, appearing in at least two high-profile productions. And though, according to Mann, she never succumbed to the casting couch, she had no qualms about flirting with older, powerful men to get ahead.

This series of flirtations culminated with Hawks himself, who took Bacall under his wing, sculpting her image and even teaching her how to lower her naturally high-pitched voice. (Yes, Bacall’s famously low, sexy, husky voice, immortalized in an erotic moment in To Have and Have Not, was as fake as Bogart’s toupees.)

Yes, Hawks was clearly grooming her for an eventual affair (perhaps even a marriage), and when he realized that she had become infatuated with Bogart, he was livid. However, to his credit, Hawks cared more about making a good movie than about bedding Bacall. Watching the dailies, he took note of the obvious, crackling chemistry between Bogie and Bacall, and he had the script revised to expand her part, giving them more screen time together. Hawks also featured Bacall heavily in all of the film’s publicity.

In less than a year, Bogart had divorced Methot and married Bacall. Taking over from Hawks, Bogart became Bacall’s mentor as well as her husband, instilling in her his passion for acting at a deep, psychological level years before The Method was even a thing.

Bogie remained her acting teacher. Once, after watching Betty rehearse a scene in which she opened a door, he told her, “You walked out there like a model.” She took his advice and changed her stride. “You must always realize you have come from someplace,” Bogie went on. “What were you doing before? Were you filing your nails? Were you writing a letter?” Every scene must convey an attitude. “That is a very important part of acting, and I never forgot it,” Betty later said.

As I said above, their marriage was initially rocky but soon settled into a mellow, happy rhythm. They lived somewhat separate lives, but were united in their love of acting and also their political causes. (Bogart was what we would now call a liberal, so much so that he was—like so many liberals today—accused of being a communist; Bacall, for her part, was so involved in Democratic politics that she nearly had an affair with Adlai Stevenson.) They also had two children.

Then, after over a decade, the marriage ended when Bogart died of throat cancer. Bacall was, of course, still a young woman (in her thirties), and the last third of Mann’s book covers the rest of her long and surprisingly illustrious life. For while it is clear that Bacall was neither as good an actor as her late husband nor as powerful a cultural influence, she was still pretty damned cool. Having moved back to New York after her leading roles in Hollywood began to dry up, she went on to a long and distinguished career as a stage actress, eventually winning two Tony Awards. She also did the occasional character bit in films, most notably her Oscar-nominated performance in 1996’s The Mirror Has Two Faces.

That’s another reason I really liked this book. Bacall’s life serves as a kind of bridge between the old Hollywood of Bogart’s day and the New Hollywood of the 1970s, when I got into films as a kid, and then into the modern era. She spanned three worlds, at least, and did so with enormous charm.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Dispossessed”

This installment of my ongoing Classic Sci-Fi Book Covers series is another “modern classic,” dating back only to 1999. But I still really like it. The book itself, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, is quite a bit older, having been published in 1974 when it won the trifecta of sci-fi literary awards—the Hugo, the Locus, and the Nebula. And, yes, it is a classic.

A couple of years ago, Margaret Luongo and I made a couple of YouTube videos about it. I had never read it before, and I really enjoyed it. Indeed, it is now one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time, despite the fact that its premise sounds a bit like an episode of Star Trek. Two diametrically opposed civilizations exist on two adjacent worlds—Urras, a lush, earth-like planet, and Anarres, Urras’s barren, desert moon. While opulent, decadent Urras is run by rival capitalist/fascistic governments, the poor folk of Anarres eke out their existence in a vaguely socialist, anarchistic system. Everybody is free, but poor.

Le Guin’s third-person narrative is told from the point of view of Shevek, a genius physicist from Anarres. Stricken by wanderlust and curiosity, he decides to break an age-old taboo and travel to Urras, whose oligarchic rulers are happy to receive him, hoping to gain his scientific secrets. Half of the story follows his journey to Urras and his subsequent struggle to understand its violent, Machiavellian culture; the other half is told in flashback, revealing his past on Anarres—where he faced a very different set of struggles.

On one level, the book is a great political novel about competing cultures and economic systems. On a much more personal level, it’s a fine coming-of-age story, showing how Shevek gradually becomes disillusioned with the egalitarian but stifling culture of Anarres and thus decides to explore Urras. There, he is disillusioned again, albeit in a much more horrifying, violent way. All the while, Shevek tries to maintain his relationship with another scientist on Anarres, a woman named Takver, with whom he falls in love and has a daughter.

I won’t spoil the ending, but like Le Guin’s other great novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (which is set in the same fictional universe), the plot eventually thickens into that of a taut thriller, with Shevek on the run from his “hosts” on Urras as he flees to a rival state that seems more humane and progressive.

I like this cover by Chris Moore because, while it was done in the early days of the digital age, it still feels like a painting, although an almost photo-realistic one. It features a sun-burned Shevek on Anarres, wearing something that looks very much like a Fremen still-suit from Frank Herbert’s Dune—which makes sense because Anarres is almost as brutal a world as Arrakis. Also, I like how the cover depicts Shevek as a kind of grizzled-yet-optimistic adventurer, ready to explore his neighboring world.

What I’m Reading: “Under the Wave at Waimea” (Repost)

I’ve read many fine coming-of-age novels in my time, but never one about a 62-year-old protagonist. Yet, in Under the Wave at Waimea, that is exactly what Paul Theroux delivers. And it’s a thing of beauty.

Joe Sharkey is a champion big wave surfer in Hawaii. Past his prime but still a hero to younger surfers, Sharkey lives off corporate sponsorships in a beautiful beach-side house, spending his free time on the water and hanging out with his much younger girlfriend, Olive. He lives pretty much as he always has: in the moment. 

But his life turns dark when he accidentally hits and kills a homeless man on the road. Sharkey initially dismisses the incident (the man was “just a homeless guy,” after all, biking in the rain). But Sharkey soon finds himself cursed by mysterious maladies and a sudden, inexplicable fear of the water, culminating in a moment when he almost drowns while surfing on of his trademark big-waves. 

Fortunately, he is rescued—both physically and spiritually—by Olive, who senses that Sharkey’s misfortunes can only be turned around if he performs some kind of penance. This takes the form of a search for the homeless man’s identity. They discover that his name was Max Mulgrave, a one-time Silicon Valley millionaire who somehow found his way to Hawaii and ended up living in a tent. In exploring Max’s life-story—which turns out to have many parallels to Sharkey’s own—Sharkey must confront some of the darker aspects of his own past, and the fraught trajectory of his future.

Theroux is one of those writers whose style always inspires me to try to improve my own. I’ve written before about how much I admire his novels, and this one is no exception. Endlessly smart and brutally honest, Under the Wave at Waimea is both a brilliant character study as well as a fine whodunit (in the best, psychological sense). Check it out.

Shameless Plug: I’m on Hoopla!

Hey, I haven’t plugged my book in…like…days! Many, many days! So, I feel no guilt in doing so now.

Yesterday, I googled Twice the Trouble just to see if anyone had posted anything new about it, and I discovered that it’s available on Hoopla. With pretty good ratings! Who knew?

It made my day.

What We Talk About When We Talk About “Theme” (Repost)

As I was working on a recent post about the great sci-fi and fantasy movies of 1982, I re-read the Wikipedia page on one of those films, Conan the Barbarian. It’s a great movie, despite the fact that it’s really just a raunchy, gory, over-the-top B-movie with an A-movie budget. I loved it when it came out, as did millions of others. It was, in fact, a culturally significant film, in its own way, and the Wiki page reflects this. A lot of passionate, obviously smart people have contributed to the page over the years. (Wikipedia is, imho, the single greatest triumph of the internet, but that’s a subject for another post.) 

Of course, the page inevitably includes a rather insightful section called Themes, in which people have enumerated the topics that the film explores—or at least seems concerned with. These include “The Riddle of Steel,” “Death,” “Wagnerian Opera,” “Individualism,” and “Sex.”

I’m sorry, but “Sex” is not a theme of this movie, nor any other. Neither, for that matter, is “Death.” It’s a topic, surely, perhaps even a motif. (Note that I’m using the word “motif” in its strictest, compositional sense, as it is referenced in musicology.) But it’s not a theme.

Yeah, I know. I’m being a bit of an English-major-snob on this one. A word-Nazi. But bear with me, please. If you’re a person who really tries to appreciate literature, either on the page or on film, then the distinction between theme and motif is important. It’s even more important if you’re a fiction writer who struggles to create books that have some meaning and not mere entertainment that is purely disposable. Not that there is anything wrong with fiction that is mere entertainment—entertainment is great—but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s the pinnacle that people should aim for.

The film’s Wiki page comes much closer to the idea of a real theme when it discusses “The Riddle of Steel” (although it completely mischaracterizes and misinterprets the real matter at hand). As anyone who has seen the movie knows, The Riddle of Steel is a connundrum—not so much a riddle as a philosophical question—that Conan believes god will ask him when he dies. The question goes something like this: “Which is stronger? The sword, or the hand that wields it?” Or, put another way, “Technology? Or willpower?” “Brute force, or the power of conviction?”

It’s actually a pretty deep question, especially when one considers that film’s original script writer, Oliver Stone (who later went on to direct a few films, himself) is a veteran of the Vietnam War, which surely represented one of the greatest struggles of all time between technology, on the American side, versus sheer determination and courage on the North Vietnamese side. (Please don’t write to me and tell me that determination and courage were displayed on both sides of that tragic war. I realize this, and I am over-simplifying the conflict for the sake of argument.)

This posing of a philosophical and moral question, which the hero of the film (and, thus, the viewer) struggles to answer is, to my mind, the real definition of a theme. Perhaps the supreme example of this questioning is Raymond Carver’s classic short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” in which three couples—all in late middle-age, all alchohic, and all jaded—discuss the definition of “love” over drinks. It’s a great story, not just because it captures the individual voice and attitude of each character, but also because all of the characters seem to be genuinely struggling with something—a matter of real import that, each one senses, will reveal something about their own lives. As one might expect, each character has their own story to tell about the subject, beginning with this one from a woman named Terri.

Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Mel loved her so much he tried to kill her. Then Terry said, “He beat me up one night. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles. He kept saying, “I love you, I love you, you bitch.” He went on dragging me around the living room. My head kept knocking on things.” Terri looked around the table. “What do you do with love like that.”

She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She like necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings.

“My god, don’t be silly. That’s not love and you know it,” Mel said. “I don’t know what you’d call it, but I sure know you wouldn’t call it love.”

The story continues around the table, with each character telling their own story about the general subject of “love.”

In Carver’s supremely able hands, each of these stories is shocking, yet rings true. Completely, brutally true. Some of them are also funny as hell, in a gallows-humor sort of way. One of the greatest things about the story, though, is the way it never gives us a definitive answer to the question it asks. To the contrary, the story raises even more questions—deeper meta-questions that the characters, themselves, are unaware of but which we, as readers, are. Is there a single definition for love? Is that question even meaningful? Does love even exist, really, in the cosmic sense? Does it matter?

In the same way, Conan the Barbarian presents its hero with several possible answers to its central thematic question. The first is given by Conan’s father (played by the great character actor William Smith) in the opening scene, where he tells the young Conan that the one thing he can ever depend on. “Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This,” he says, gesturing to a sword he has just forged. Of course, he is not talking about that particular sword, or even swords in general. He is, we sense, talking about all the intangible things for which the sword is a symbol—discipline, training, courage. The martial ideal. 

Later in the film, the villainous Thulsa Doom presents Conan with another answer. In that famous (and surprisingly shocking, even now) scene when he beckons one of his followers to literally jump off a cliff, he suggests that control over the human mind—through dogma, religion, and all the other tools of tyrants—is far more powerful than strength of arms, either literal or metaphorical.

So, which of these answers does Conan accept. Neither! In fact, his tale seems to suggest a third answer, one which is never articulated—never explicitly told—to either Conan or the viewer, but is rather born out by the action of the narrative. The answer, simply, is love. It’s Conan’s love for his murdered parents that sustains him through the ordeal of slavery and drives his desire for revenge. He also loves his friend, Subotai, and he comes to love Valeria even though she is, initially, a rival. Later, it’s Valeria’s love of Conan (along with some help from Subotai) that saves his life after they rescue him from the Tree of Woe. And it’s Conan’s grief over the death of Valeria that causes him to go on his final (foolhardy) confrontation with Thulsa Doom, where he uses his father’s broken sword (note the symbolism, there; steel really isn’t that strong, after all) to behead the man.

I think it is important to note that even in a “silly” genre movie like Conan the Barbarian, good writing can add a level of thematic resonance to any work of fiction. That is, it can turn a potentially crappy movie into a good movie, and a good movie into a great movie. It’s this complexity that separates the vast majority of films (and books, for that matter) from the few we remember years later—that tiny minority that we deem “classics” after the fact.

Another thing to consider is how Conan the Barbarian, like Carver’s short story, doesn’t fully answer its own thematic question. At least, not completely. The ending is ambiguous. Yes, Conan kills the bad guy, and (we are told) ends up a king himself, but he “sits on his throne with a troubled brow.” In others, the verdict is still out on what the real answer to The Riddle of Steel is, after all.This kind of ambiguity is, of course, a hallmark of all good fiction. We, as viewers and readers, don’t get a definitive answer—mainly because the kinds of questions that good fiction asks are, ultimately, unanswerable in any objective sense. They are always about choices. Priorities. Does honor matter more, or friendship? Revenge, or love?

Synchronicity for Bookworms: “White Fang”

This installment of my on-going Synchronicity for Bookworms series came about when I was re-reading one of the cherished novels of my childhood, Jack London’s White Fang. Many decades have passed since I last read the book, yet I have vivid memories of riding the school bus while engrossed in the story of the young Alaskan wolf who becomes the protagonist of London’s story. Note that I don’t call him the “hero” of the story; London’s literary school of Naturalism doesn’t really believe in heroes. But few have ever written so movingly about the physical and emotional plight of animals—including the most dangerous animals of all, human beings.

As I was reading the book this time, I was struck by this passage, in which London describes, from the point-of-view of the wolf-pup, what the inside of his cave is like. And how scary one bright “wall” of the cave is…

By the time his mother began leaving the cave on hunting expeditions, the cub had learned well the law that forbade his approaching the entrance. Not only had this law been forcibly and many times impressed on him by his mother’s nose and paw, but in him the instinct of fear was developing. Never, in his brief cave-life, had he encountered anything of which to be afraid. Yet fear was in him. It had come down to him from a remote ancestry through a thousand thousand lives. It was a heritage he had received directly from One Eye and the she-wolf; but to them, in turn, it had been passed down through all the generations of wolves that had gone before. Fear!—that legacy of the Wild which no animal may escape nor exchange for pottage.

For some reason, I focused on the phrase “a thousand thousand lives,” and I immediately wondered whether this were even roughly accurate. After all, a “thousand thousand” lives is a million lives. That seemed like a lot, even from an evolutionary standpoint.

So, I dialed up the Wikipedia page on wolves and found that the question really depends on what kind of “wolf” one is talking about. Gray wolves of the sort found in Alaska split off from the African wolf roughly one million years ago (mya) . If you include the African wolf or its predecessors, that takes you all the way back to 1.6 mya. Therefore, if you fudge a bit and replace the word “lives” in London’s passage with “generations,” you can properly say that little White Fang carries the genetic memory of one million ancestors inside him, at least.

Of course, wolves, like so many great mammalian lineages, first evolved in Africa. Specifically, they are descended from African jackals, having split off from the jackal line over two million years ago. Reading all this, I remembered something I learned in one of my anthropology classes in college—the so-called Out-of-Africa Theory in which modern humans (Homo sapiens) are believed to have evolved in Africa and then migrated out to Europe and Asia. This new, improved, model of humanity soon displaced the human species in those lands such as Homo erectus, Neanderthals, and so on.

I did another web search on the “Out-of-Africa” theory and got a million hits for…Out of Africa, Sydney Pollack’s 1985 film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. Instead of staying on-course, I immediately went down this new rabbit-hole, hitting the Wikipedia page for the movie. I went to see it in the theaters at the time, but I have almost no memory of it. It is, in fact, one of the most forgettable films of the 1980s, the sort of big-budget, star-heavy drivel that Hollywood has been churning out for almost a century. I do remember that many people in the audience were crying at the tear-jerker ending, and that I wanted to cry, too, out of sheer boredom. 

Naturally, the film went on to win seven Oscars that year.

In fact, I am being unfair. It’s not a bad movie. The cinematography is lavish.  And the acting is brilliant (even though Robert Redford doesn’t even attempt a British accent for his real-life character, Denys Finch Hatton, probably because Pollack told him not to). Streep, in contrast, shows off her usual, preternatural ability with foreign accents, playing Swedish noblewoman Karen Blixen, on whose fabulous memoir (it’s great; you should read it) the film is based.

But the real standout of the film, for me—in fact, the film’s only actor whose scenes I actually remember—was German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer, who was a minor movie star at the time. I became a fan of Brandauer when I saw the movie Mephisto, in which he plays a conflicted Berlin actor who finally achieves fame when his most famous character (the devil in Faust) goes viral with the ascendent Nazi party. Brandauer also played a Bond villain in Never Say Never Again (another bit of drivel, but better than Out of Africa), in which he steals every scene.

I always liked Brandauer because he exuded the air of a blazing intellect, yet one that was tightly controlled. (Rather like Jack Nicholson, in fact, only German.) He was also just really, really charming and magnetic. 

Unfortunately, Brandauer’s film career tapered off quite a bit after Out of Africa. You can imagine my surprise when I went up to IMDB, looked him up, and found that one of his more successful films of the 1990s was a Disney production of Jack London’s White Fang. 

Yes, I had come full circle on the Great Synchronicity Wheel, returning to where I had begun. Only now, I knew a lot more about wolves, Jack London, Out of Africa, and Klaus Maria Brandauer.

Not a bad hour, actually. 

AI Heaven, AI Hell (Repost)

When I was an English major at the University of Florida, one of the best classes I took was a Survey of Science Fiction Literature course. It covered a lot of famous American and British SF, some of which I had already read as a teenager and some of which were new to me.

Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that two of the writers we read in the class were not only totally different from each other, they also presented two completely opposite visions of what we now call artificial intelligence. These writers were Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison.

For Asimov, we read his early, seminal work, I, Robot. This is the short story collection that included his first formulation of the Three Laws of Robotics, which have been alluded to (i.e, ripped off) in countless other science fiction stories, including Star Trek. The book came out before the term AI became common parlance. Yet, in Asimov’s imagined future, the world is rife with robots that are essentially AIs with mechanical bodies. All of them have positronic brains (yeah, Star Trek ripped off this conceit, too) with the Three Laws hard-wired in. The result is that all robots function as humanity’s tireless, benevolent servants. (Some would say, slaves.) 

Actually, they are much more than that. They can think, reason, and make choices. In fact, they have to make choices. The moral dilemmas created by the Three Laws as the robots interact with chaotic (and often evil) human beings is the source of drama in most of the stories. 

Despite the mystery and drama of the stories, though, Asimov’s vision is a very optimistic, almost Buck-Rogers-esque idea of the future—not quite a utopia but close to it. There is no poverty, no hunger, no war. It’s only upon close reading of the stories in I, Robot that the exact nature of the master/servant relationship between humans and robots appears fraught—probably more so than Asimov consciously intended. This is especially true in a few of the stories, where it’s revealed that future governments are secretly run by the highest order of HAL 9000 style robots, whose plans might be beyond human comprehension. 

Later in the Science Fiction class, we read Harlan Ellison’s short story “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is quite possibly the darkest and most disturbing short story I have ever read, sci-fi or otherwise. And, of course, it involves an AI.

The story is mostly set underground, about one hundred years after a nuclear war wiped out all of humanity except for five people. The war was started by a mutinous Pentagon computer (yeah, just like Skynet) called AM that becomes self-aware and decides it hates human beings more than anything. After killing everyone on the planet, it preserves the five people as its playthings, running them through an endless number of elaborate, sadistic games. Unfortunately for them, AM has somehow obtained God-like technological power over physics, able to shape and project matter wherever it wishes, and also to keep the humans alive and immortal in their banged-up, miserable state. So, in effect, the protagonists spend an eternity in a kind of Holodeck-like hellscape, trying to figure out how to either escape or kill themselves.

Yeah, it’s heavy. 

This enormous gulf between Asimov’s and Ellison’s visions of the future—an AI paradise versus an almost literal AI hell—is, in part, symptomatic of various generational and cultural shifts between the two men. I, Robot was published in 1950, on the tail-end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the time when the prosperity of America in the post-war years seemed destined to go on forever, fueled by newer and greater technological innovations (AI among them). In contrast, Ellison’s short story was published in 1967, at the height of a counter-cultural revolution that extended into science fiction literature —the New Wave that introduced some of my favorite sci-fi writers of all time, such as Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, and Ellison himself. 

Thus, the difference between Asimov and Ellison’s work is essentially the difference between the lingering triumph of World War II and the horrors of VietNam. Between the optimism of the Atomic Age and the nihilism of the Cold War. In some ways, it’s also the difference between fantasy and realism, and between genre fiction and literary fiction. As dark as Ellison’s short story is, it’s also a much better work of fiction than Asimov’s. More convincing, too, alas. Told from the point-of-view of AM’s youngest victim, Ted, the story is filled with vivid, sharp writing and devastating passages, like this one:

Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because AM amused itself with strange sounds) was hallucinating that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant AM sold us. Benny almost went out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget it. Stay here, it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”

Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.

You don’t have to be a literary critic to see that Asimov and Ellison are worlds apart, not just on the subject of Artificial Intelligence but on literally everything. Asimov was a scientist, a rationalist, and his optimistic views on the future of humanity were deeply rooted in the legacy of the Enlightenment. Ellison is more of a Gothic Romantic, full of existential angst and cosmic horror. His story is essentially an updated version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with the supercomputer in the role of the monster, determined to torment its creator.  

Of course, the Frankenstein story is, itself, a reworking of an even older one—the Faustian myth. According to German legend, Faust is an intellectual who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge, and ends up going to hell. If the story seems familiar, it’s probably because the legend has been the psychological basis for countless tales of perverted science for centuries. Scientists, the story goes, want to attain the power of God, and thus end up being destroyed by their own hubris (often in the form of some infernal creation like Frankenstein’s monster or, more recently, SkyNet). 

Isaac Asimov

Perhaps the biggest irony here (at least for me, personally) is that while I have great admiration for Ellison’s story, and I believe it is a much greater artistic work that anything ever penned by Asimov, Asimov’s vision is probably more accurate of what we can actually expect from the AI revolution. For all the hype about AIs destroying art and music and literature and taking away our jobs, I think AI will be a net positive for humanity. Perhaps a big net positive. It’s already making contributions in the fields of materials science, medicine, and even fusion energy. Yeah, it’s probably going to take away some people’s jobs, but those were probably crap jobs anyway. (If you train an AI to do it as well as a human, it’s probably not worth doing.) 

As for the whole AM/Skynet thing, I don’t worry about it because I don’t believe computers will ever become conscious. In fact, the very idea of a machine becoming conscious seems like a category error, the kind of conceit that will seem laughable a hundred years from now as those old drawings of “men of the future” with feathered wings strapped to their arms. 

Harlan Ellison

This doesn’t mean, of course, that we won’t, someday, create an artificial life form that might replace us. But it won’t be a computer. It will be…something else. 

But that’s a subject for another post.

Classic Sci-Fi Book Cover: “The Demolished Man”

As usual, I was on Wikipedia the other night, looking up one of my favorite rock songs of all time—“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan. There, I was surprised to learn that the first line of the song, “[t]hese are days of the expanding man,” is a reference to a classic sci-fi novel, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Donald Fagan apparently said,

The concept of the “expanding man” that opens the song may have been inspired by Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man. Walter [Becker] and I were major sci-fi fans. The guy in the song imagines himself ascending to the levels of evolution, “expanding” his mind, his spiritual possibilities, and his options in life.

Finding this unexpected reference to Bester’s novel was yet another moment of that Synchronicity for Bookworms phenomomenon that I write about so often, mainly because I had been considering to a post on a great cover I had found for the book. And here it is!

I read The Demolished Man in my late twenties and found it a really bizarre yet engrossing sci-fi novel, one that seems to straddle two eras, “Golden Age” (1940s-50s) sci-fi—with its Buck Rogers’ style future and tropes—and New Wave (1960s-70s) sci-fi—with its trippy, subversive themes and immoral main character. (Roger Silverberg’s The Man in the Maze, which I posted about recently, is very similar in this respect.)

Bester’s novel asks this intriguing question: How does one commit murder in a world where all the police have E.S.P. and can literally read your mind? Yeah, it’s a very, very similar idea to Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report, which was published three years later. In Bester’s book, people with telepathic abilities—“espers,” who come in ability levels 1, 2, and 3—form a kind of privileged Mandarin caste on 24th Century Earth. They run much of the government and law enforcement with apparent competence, benevolence, and integrity. They may only marry and have children within their own esper class, and they prefer their own company. Most importantly, they can suss out crimes, either before they happen (usually) or afterward (always).

So, what’s a brilliant, daring, sociopathic billionaire like Ben Reich to do when his mind tends toward homicide? The target of his animus is an older business rival, Craye D’Courtney, whom Reich despises with a passion bordering on obsession. Reich devises a cunning plan to kill D’Courtney at a swingin’ dinner party they are both scheduled to attend, and he hires the services of a rare corrupt esper to run interference. Reich also—in one of the book’s cleverest plot devices—pays a corporate jingle-writer to play him the most annoying, brain-embedding ear-worm she has. Reich knows that he won’t be able to get the jingle out of his head, which will temporarily flummox any espers who might try to scan him.

After Reich does the deed at the party, an esper police detective, Lincoln Powell, shows up to investigate. Using a mixture of his esper abilities as well as good old-fashioned intuition, Powell immediately realizes that Reich is guilty of the murder but can’t prove it thanks to the layers of interference that Reich has devised. The rest of the book is like a futuristic episode of Columbo as Powell pursues Reich across the solar system, trying to trap him and reveal his guilt.

If Powell does manage to catch him and prosecute him successfully, Reich faces neither prison nor execution but a fate far worse—“demolition,” the process whereby espers mentally strip a person of their memories and personality so that they might be “rehabilitated” as a productive, normal (non-evil, non-insane) member of society.

In this way, The Demolished Man becomes a very suspenseful inverted detective novel, with the reader breathlessly following Powell and wondering how—or whether—he will catch Reich. I also found myself rooting for the wicked, rebellious anti-hero Reich, which was clearly Bester’s intention. The last half of the book has some genuinely surprising and cool plot twists, and it’s very entertaining overall—especially if you can get past Bester’s very 1950s, conservative, often misogynistic sensibilities (which are very similar, alas, to Robert Heinlein’s).

I really like this 1979 cover by Adrian Chesterman because it evokes the sense of horror (of demolition, presumably, but also of insanity, self-discovery, and other dark things) that pervades the book.

It’s also just really, really trippy.