I’ve read a lot of trippy science books in my time, but Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light is probably the trippiest. The only one that sort of comes close is Frank Herbert’s Dune, which makes a lot of sense considering both were written in the 1960s by two extremely smart and talented writers. (One of Zelazny’s other books, This Immortal, actually shared the Hugo Award with Dune in 1967.)
In fact, there’s not really a name for what Lord of Light is. Technically, it’s science fiction fantasy (a sub-genre I’ve written about before). That is, it looks and feels like a fantasy novel (as does Dune) until you realize that the plot has a sci-fi underpinning. Lord of Light is set on an alien world in which the population is stuck in a pre-industrial state, ruled over by gods of the Hindu pantheon. These gods interact with mortal humans on a daily basis, using magical powers and objects to control their destiny. Throughout the novel, however, Zelazny drops carefully crafted clues that the “gods” are actually the crew of a starship called The Star of India, which crash-landed on the planet centuries before.
These faux-deities use high-technology to set themselves up as gods, complete with a kind of immortality (they can transfer their consciousness to new, young bodies when the old ones wear out). They rule over the common people (who are revealed to be the descendants of the passengers of the ship) with an iron fist, doling out justice and retrobution from a floating, anti-gravity city (“heaven”). This reign is, ostensibly, for the people’s own good (tyrants always say this, right?). But when one of the last democratically-minded crew members, Sam, takes on the role of Siddhartha, he poses a threat to the status quo, which has kept humanity stagnant for generations.
This 1987 edition from Avon was the one I read in college, and I still own it. Its cover was done by an English illustrator named Tim White. I really like it because it captures that essential trippiness. At first, it looks like a pop-religion book, depicting figures dressed like Hindu gods. But what’s with the blue electric bolts? Or the floating city? And why is one of the Hindu “goddesses” blonde?
I learned many things from reading the excellent nonfiction book Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? For instance, I learned that the Vatican has its own astronomical observatory, which is run, in part, by the authors, Guy Consolmagno and Paul Mueller. Both men are also Jesuits. (The current Pope, Francis, is also a Jesuit—that’s another thing I learned).
Now, I was raised Catholic, and I thought a knew a thing or two about the religion. But not only did I learn from this book that the Vatican has its own observatory, but that it has had one for hundreds of years. In fact, I was so taken by this discovery that I Googled “Vatican observatory” and, to my amazement, found that the Vatican also runs an observatory in Tucson, Arizona.
Talk about synchronicity! When I was twenty-two years old, I went off to attend grad school at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, and I distinctly remember the first night I spent there. I impressed by the size of the city—much larger than my little hometown of Gainesville, Florida—but also by how beautiful the desert sky was. Even in the downtown area, the stars were clearly visible. This was no accident; the city, I was told, purposely kept the streets relatively dark, in deference to the many astronomical observatories that surround the valley, which could not function if too much light pollution bled from the metro area.
Apparently, the Vatican’s observatory is one of them.
On those rare occasions when I choose to read a big, fat, thick-as-a-brick book about a famous person, I usually pick one about a politician. David McCullough’s Truman is a great example. I tend to gravitate toward books about political figures because, in the course of reading about their lives, you also get a free history lesson. That is, the story of Harry Truman is also the story of World War II, the atomic bomb, Korea, the founding of Israel, and the Berlin Wall.
Biographies of artists are more problematic, for me. I just finished reading de Kooning: An American Master, by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan. It chronicles the long life of the great painter—a life barely contained within the span of the Twentieth Century—in which de Kooning lived to be the celebrated, Grand Old Man of modern American art. He became, in fact, the only American artist whose figure and reputation approached those of Picasso.
I was going to make a new Christmas Sci-Fi List to go with the first one that I wrote some years ago. But…well…I flaked out. So, here is a belated list of some of my favorite science fiction novels. And why not? New Year’s Day is a time to think about the future, right? RIGHT?
Anyway, here’s the list…
Trouble on Triton
Samuel R. Delany’s Trouble on Triton (published as Triton in the U.S.) is one of the finest written, poorly known works of literary sci-fi in publishing history. Perhaps this is due to the fact that it’s a short work—really a novella—with a post-modern, elliptical plot, not to mention some gender-bending content that was way ahead of its time. Set in a dome-style space colony on the farthest moon in the solar system, it tells the story of Bron, an ordinary schlemiel who’s in love with a mysterious, beautiful performance-artist. What really makes this book fascinating is its depiction of a high-tech, post-scarcity society that anticipated Iain Banks’s Culture novels by decades.
The Peripheral
William Gibson pretty much invented cyberpunk, so it’s fitting that he should write one of the best twists on that genre to come along in years. The Peripheral begins in what appears to be standard Gibson territory. Set in an economically devastated near-future, the story centers on Flynn, a young woman who makes her living as a remote contractor who works in the virtual reality of cyberspace. She thinks she is testing on a prototype for a video game set in a much farther distant, higher-tech future. But when she witnesses a murder in this other, virtual world, she realizes that it’s not virtual at all, but an actual, alternate future earth to which she is connected through a mysterious Chinese server.
The rest of the novel involves her getting to know her future-based boss, Wilf, and helping him solve the murder mystery. Wilf, in return, gives Flynn money and technology to help her and her friends change their timeline, hoping to avoid the environmental catastrophe—a.k.a. “The Jackpot”—that has denuded the planet in Wilf’s. (He explains that their timelines are now independent of each other, so she won’t be messing with his present.) It’s one of Gibson’s best, tightest books with a page-turner plot and some brilliant twists.
The Man in the High Castle
Speaking of alternate timelines, have you ever felt like you were stuck in the wrong one? And it’s not a good one? This is the experience of all the characters in The Man in the High Castle. Set in the 1960s, the book imagines an alternate earth where the Axis powers won World War II. Nazi Germany controls the American east coast, Japan the west coast, and the midwest serves as a vast DMZ between the two. Like most of Dick’s novels, the novel involves several interlocking narratives concerning characters from all classes, high and low, each of whom struggles to be a good person in an insane world.
The Girl with All the Gifts
In the last twenty years, there have been so many zombie apocalypse novels, movies, tv shows, and video games that one would expect it to be completely…well, dead. Played out. Void of new ideas.
That’s what I thought when I picked up The Girl with All the Gifts. You can imagine my surprise when I found it to be one of the best written, engrossing, and often thrilling novels I’ve ever read. Its great strength lies in its central twist on the zombie story: the hero (actually heroine) is, herself, a zombie.Sort of. Ten year-old Melanie is infected with the fungus that turns people into zombies, but despite an almost irresistible hunger for human flesh, she retains her human intellect and sensibility. A prisoner in a military-run research station tasked with studying zombie children, Melanie has super-human strength, a genius I.Q., and a love of Greek mythology. She also loves her “teacher” (actually, a sympathetic scientist), Miss Justineau.
When the research station is overrun by zombies, Melanie becomes the savior of her former captors as they make their way across the English countryside, trying to get back to human-controlled territory. The great irony of the novel is that most of the evil Melanie confronts on her journey comes from humans, not zombies. (Or maybe that’s not so ironic, after all.)
The Wave
Known primarily for his mystery novels, Walter Mosley is just a damned good writer, period. The Wave is a rip-snorting, old-school sci-fi novel with a modern sensibility. It’s about a working-class stiff named Errol who comes home one night to find that his father has paid him a visit. No big deal, except for the fact that his father has been dead for years.
The explanation lies is an sentient extremophile that lives so deep in the earth’s crust it has never been discovered…until now. Intelligent and deadly, it can take the shape of any biological form (including poor Errol’s dead father), accessing the target’s memories and consciousness in the process. Errol soon finds himself on the run from scientists who want to study the entity and military men who want to kill it. Good stuff from one of the best.
I’ve been seeing a lot of on-line ads for the new Nosferatu movie directed by Dave Eggers. It looks like a pretty good movie, although, judging by the trailers, it seems to be emphasizing the horror (e.g., slasher) elements of the classic Nosferatu/Dracula story over the erotic angle (which most film adaptations have veered toward).
Or does it? Looking at the poster, the hook line poster reads “Succumb to the Darkness.” It’s a seductive line, which doesn’t quite seem to go with the image portrayed—that of a beautiful young woman in a nightgown lying on her back with her mouth open, while a skeletal, monstrously taloned hand reaches for her face.
Erotic? Not really. Gross? Yeah, kinda. This thematic confusion between the film’s trailer and its poster reflects, I think, the difficulty in adapting the Dracula story to the screen. (Yes, I know that Nosferatu is not the same as Dracula, but close enough.) The difficulty is made worse in our present time, the 21st Century, when porn is only a few clicks away and the idea of truly transgressive sexual activity is more and more difficult to imagine.
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.) I don’t want to jinx the man, but the fact that Kirk Douglas still lives is an unmitigated source of joy for me. If you believe, as I do, that movie stars become movie stars because of some internal life-force, whose aura is palpable even when projected onto a silver screen, then Kirk Douglas seems like the best proof of this theory.
At 101, Douglas is a living bridge to Hollywood’s second Golden Age—the 1940s to late 1950s. A bone fide movie start by 1949, Douglas was, along with other mavericks like Burt Lancaster, one of the first major actors to become a power-player in his own right. In an era when the Hollywood studio system traded actors like cattle, he formed his own studio and made his own films. He fostered young writers and directors—most notably, a brilliant, aloof young filmmaker named Stanley Kubrick.
I have a theory about horror novels. The secret to a good horror novel, I think, is not gore, or violence, or even suspense. The secret is empathy. The empathy we, as readers, form for the main characters, and the empathy the main characters feel for each other.
This should be obvious, but it’s not. I have read (well, started) many celebrated horror novels, some of them very well written, only to set them aside after a chapter two because I didn’t care about any of the characters. Contrast this with the very best horror fiction from masters like Stephen King. King is famous for creating main characters who are kind, decent, spirited people with whom the reader instantly connects (and worries about). King’s characters also tend to be underdogs and outcasts. Nerds. Geeks. Handicapped kids. Fat kids. Gay kids. Such types are the most vulnerable in our society, and therefore most vulnerable to whatever monster Kings pits them against. Their underdog status makes them even more sypathetic to readers, and makes their courage even more admirable.
This is not to say that protagonists of horror novels should be all good. Far from it. In fact, King often presents the reader with deeply flawed, erratic main characters who must discover their own inner resilience and courage to face the evil that confronts them.
Recently, I found myself thinking about such matters as I read Lois Murphy’s excellent novel Soon from 2019. Like many great horror books (or many great books of any kind), Soon stays with you long after you finish the last page. It’s got some genuinely creepy stuff in it. Most of all, though, it has a likable, sympathetic, and funny main character named Pete.
Pete is a retired cop who lives in the tiny town of Nebulah in rural Australia. Nebulah is a new twist on the concept of a “ghost town” in that its inhabitants are literally tormented by ghosts. Rather, by a strange, evil entity called The Mist that descends upon the town every evening. From this vapor, a hellish gallery of semi-corporeal spirits attacks any person foolish or unlucky enough to be caught outside after sundown. The victims suffer grisly, violent deaths, but their bodies are never found. (Their remains dissolve mysteriously in the mist soon after being discovered.)
Not surprisingly, the town’s population rapidly dwindles from a few hundred to a few dozen, and then down to just eleven. Most people leave. The rest are picked off one by one. Pete is one of the de facto leaders of this tiny remnant of hard-core town folk, most of whom are too poor or feckless or otherwise attached to the place to ever leave. Pete is neither poor, nor attached, nor feckless, but he stays anyway, mainly to protect his friends. These survivors meet each night at one of their homes and spend the night together, trying to hear the demonic wailings and thrashings coming from outside the windows and doors. (The Mist, rather like vampires, can’t cross the solid threshold of a home unless there is some gap that would let it in.)
I find myself admiring much of Ms. Murphy’s writing, especially in the way she renders the character of Pete. The plot also has some genuinely surprising twists and interludes, such as when Pete goes to visit his estranged daughter in a distant city.
Most of all, I liked the psychological realism of the book. Everyone left in Nebulah has some damned good, practical reasons for not leaving (just ask them), but none of these seems greater than what we suspect is a fundamental weakness in their character. Some are afraid of being poor in a new place. Others are reluctant to give up the homesteads they have labored to improve over the years. Some are just too tired.
Others, like Pete himself, have some secret sin to atone for, and a guilt that keeps them from leaving.
When I was teenager (ahem, some years ago) I had the good fortune to see Robin Williams perform. He was the lead entertainment for that year’s Gator Growl, the annual pep rally thrown by the University of Florida. At the time, Williams was mainly known as the odd but extremely funny star of TV’s Mork & Mindy. Few were aware that he was first and foremost a stand-up comedian, and even fewer knew just how brilliant—not to mention obscene—his style of comedy could be. So, you can imagine the surprise (and shock) that ensued when he walked out on stage and did his first joke, miming the cocking action of a shotgun as well as the sound: KA-CHICK. “Down here in the South,” he said, “if you hear that sound, you’d better be one fast motherfucker!”
The ensuing performance became a local legend. I remember it as being as incredibly manic and astoundingly creative. William’s comedy was like nothing else around at that time. It wasn’t long before he emerged as the premier comedian of his generation. And, since his suicide in 2014, he has become firmly embedded in our national consciousness as the Greatest Comedian of All Time.
This is a justifiable opinion. For my money, though, there was one comic who surpassed even Williams in his intellect, inventiveness, and sheer genius. This was Richard Pryor.
Ash Clifton, Writer 