Title: "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Author: Eponymous; autobiographical Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company 346 pages, includes index.
It's been an even longer while. Sorry about that. A recent yen for consolidating my creative pursuits has prompted me to pick up the reins again.
And I shall do so with this fucking terrific book by one of my personal heroes, Richard P. Feynman, who also happens to be one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. I'm not sure exactly what it is he accomplished, other than doing a lot of the more seminal work that built up a lot of our current science.
There's a lot more to the guy, though, and he does not at all fit the stereotype of the pocket protector. For one thing, he was an incredibly insatiable womanizer who picked up girls almost literally everywhere he went and thought about almost nothing other than T&A if it was jiggling in front of him.
This guy worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project with folks like Niels Bohr in the early years of World War II, and was the only one dumb enough to look directly at the fury of a nuclear blast in the testing stages. When he wrote about that particular experience, there was a passage that struck me as being quintessentially Feynman:
They gave out dark glasses that you could watch it with. Dark glasses! Twenty miles away, you couldn't see a damn thing through dark glasses. So I figured the only thing that could really hurt your eyes (bright light can never hurt your eyes) is ultraviolet light. I got behind a truck windshield, because the ultraviolet can't go through glass, so that would be safe, and so I could see the damn thing.
That's Feynman for you, I think. All through the book he gives off this sense of near-psychotic, singleminded curiosity about things that arouse his interest. He keeps at it and keeps at it and has this damnable ability to see how things work in his mind, like an exploded diagram--which is, in fact, how he describes it.
That's part of another aspect of his personality, in fact--the prankster side. While he was working at Los Alamos, he caused quite a few security scares because of some gassers he pulled by cracking damn near every safe in the place.
Then there's the inexcusable ease with which he picks up languages (like Japanese and Portuguese, for Christ's sake)--and girls--and obscure historical topics. He was so interested in Mayan astronomy that he gave several acclaimed talks on the subject, in spite of having quite literally zero formal training.
The title comes from a humorous episode in his college years, in which he makes a pretty funny social gaffe at a formal gathering. The statement certainly seems like a good fit for Feynman's life in general--he approaches things with such good humor and friendly curiosity that you think he's just a regular guy.
Then he drops in a casual mention of the energy levels of the lighter nuclei and how he worked out all the theory for it in a hotel room in Brazil, and it really socks it to you--this man is brilliant.
It's sort of a window into the mind of genius, sitting shotgun on a ride through the heavens. You get the feeling, from the way Feynman goes all over the place with his little asides, that he's literally processing everything somewhere in the background noise. The amazing thing is that he calls himself "anti-intellectual" and that's certainly true--he's just an everyday charming skirt-chasing polyglot height-challenged nuclear physicist.
Scale: Seminal figure in 20th-century physics who gets loads of trim. Like Einstein on testosterone supplements and 50 times as fun. 5, baby.
Audacity: I still can't get past the balls on this guy at Los Alamos. 5.
Engagement: Immensely relatable. A regular guy who happens to knock out revolutionary quantum spin theory between bottles of booze and willing ladies. 5.
Sexiness: A surprising amount for a a book that glosses over the really freaky parts of this guy's life. Still, he's pretty schmo-ish, albeit hilarious. 4.
Average: 4.75. Pretty high-range, damn near top-of-the-shelf, and it would have been cheapened by graphic portrayals of Feynman's encounters with the complicated sex. Would read again. And again. And again. And possibly once more after that.
Title: Darwinia Author: Robert Charles Wilson Publisher: Tor Books 372 pages.
It's been a while. Sorry. To make up for it, here's the first of two posts about the same author, Robert Charles Wilson.
First up is Darwinia. It starts in 1912, when a bunch of strange lights is visible over the Atlantic and Europe disappears. Subsequent surveys discover that the whole of the continent has been replaced by alien wilderness; essentially, the jungle Europe would have been had the Precambrian period not ceased abruptly with the advent of God's version of the heavenly eraser: a meteor/asteroid strike.
The novel centers around Guildford Law, a relatively unremarkable American who was twelve years old when the Event occurs. He becomes a photographer who goes on an expedition into the heart of the newly-changed continent, now labeled Darwinia in recognition of its relation to the then-mysterious phenomenon of evolution.
It's sort of a Heart of Darkness kind of thing. A wild continent, braved by a group of intrepid explorers, in the center of which is discovered a big secret that changes the nature of things.
The book is pretty meticulous in describing the strangeness of the new Europe. New London is no longer a bustling, thousand-year-old city on the Thames; it is now a rugged frontier town supported by hastily-erected docks and industry, serving as the gateway to Darwinia. The occupants have hacked the town out of the strange wilderness and fought bizarre forms of life in order to establish their foothold.
Guildford himself is the central character of the novel, and he winds up playing a key role near the end of the book. As far as personality and reader engagement, he's a giant fucking zero. You get the sense that the book is more about exploring what-ifs about the transformation of Europe during this key era in world history than it is about the human element, although you do certainly get a good dose of that over the course of the book, meeting people who've lost family and friends, who have bound their destinies to this freakish place.
As the explorers strike further into the heartland, strange things begin to happen, and one of the expedition's members starts a queer fucking transformation into something else.
As it turns out, the change in Europe was effected by a bug in what is essentially a computer that uses whole universes as processors. Here's where the book gets weak; everything leading up to it is pretty fucking awesome, but then it gets into the "Hive" and the war between advanced races struggling for control, and it seems to kind of trivialize the experience of 1920s-era humans in dealing with such a cataclysmic change.
Of course, there are interesting historical sidenotes: as a result of the transformation, the World Wars never occur, the world population and economy are affected by the disappearance of millions of Europeans, and...shit. It's still fucking cool. Those damn aliens, though. Jesus.
Scale: Ramps up from the disappearance of all European civilization to a war among gods. Not shabby, really. Give it a 5.
Audacity: Impressive, indeed. 5.
Engagement: The sheer scale does capture one's imagination a bit, and creates curiosity about what kind of strange shit'll happen around the next corner. But it's all kind of impersonal. 4.
Characterization: Not the best. There are some good moments, but the final impression leaves you a bit cold. 2.
Sexiness: Not much. The idea's pretty good, and so is the execution. Still, in the end, it's kind of a prosaic book that reaches far and accomplishes it, but the grip is narrow and falls short of true wonder. Physical sex, it's pretty light. 3.
Average: 3.8. About middling-to-fair. It's a terrific read, but in the end, it's more of a book than an experience. Unless you're the jungle-hacking sort, then you'll probably get more into it.
Here's a terrific example of the ability of science fiction literature to predict the future.
This example is from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, and this particular subplot involves a female actor, Miranda Redpath, who's looking for a job. It all takes place sometime in the 2100s, and nanotechnology is very commonplace, not least of all in the actor's body, which is used to map computer-generated characters to her actions. In this way, she can perform in interactive movies (called "ractives"--she is a "ractor") that consumers can also participate in.
She is auditioning for a ractive producer, who needs to test out her system. This book was published in 1995. Thus...the stage is set.
"Looks like we got ourselves an artiste here," Fred Epidermis said. "Lemme try you in one of our most challenging roles."
Suddenly, a blond, blue-eyed woman was standing in the mediatron, perfectly aping Miranda's posture, wearing big hair, a white sweater with a big letter F in the middle, and a preposterously short skirt. She was carrying big colored puffy things. Miranda recognized her, from old passives she'd seen on the mediatron, as an American teenager from the previous century. "This is Spirit. A little old-fashioned to you and me, but popular with the tube feeders," said Fred Epidermis.
Title: Eon Author: Greg Bear Publisher: Tor Books 503 pages.
A former sci-fi novel that's now become an alternate-history tale, Eon kicks ass.
It starts on Earth in the year 2000 (note: this book was written in 1985) when an asteroid suddenly appears in orbit around the Earth. This mysterious appearance doesn't go unnoticed or unstudied, and it's eventually determined that the asteroid's been hollowed out into 7 massive cylindrical chambers, which were inhabited several hundred years ago by humans.
However, there's something odd about the seventh chamber. More on that later.
Anyway, in the first six chambers, astronauts sent up by the United States and the Soviet Union (yes, in 2000--like I said, it qualifies as alternate-history these days) find all kinds of freaky shit. Each chamber is 30km long and 50km in diameter and are linked end-to-end, and the whole asteroid is spun just so to provide Earthlike gravity along the inner wall of each cylinder. Since the thing is so enormous, there are whole cities, farms, and forests inside the asteroid.
The cities are where the truly interesting things start to happen. The human explorers decide to set up stations in the asteroid and import scientists to study the rock. At this point, the plot gives way to a second story, which involves a man named Olmy, which is basically all that is comprehensible about it. The rest of the book vacillates between Olmy and the explorers.
Really, the lynchpin of the whole book is Patricia Luisa Vasquez, a Californian physicist with some truly strange ideas. As she travels up to the rock and investigations continue, she finds out the ultra-classified secret of the asteroid: it's from the future. And everyone's hoping it's not from their future because if it is, that means Earth is going boom in just a few weeks.
Whoops. However, in my head, that's fucking nothing compared to the other secret, this one involving the seventh chamber.
It's made more or less the same as the other six, with one exception: it doesn't have a cap at the "north" end. It just keeps going. And going. And going. It's basically an artificial universe generated by the greatest Engineer of all time, Konrad Korzenowski, who was (or will be? Hmm) a student of...you guessed it. Patricia Luisa Vasquez.
Apparently in future history, Earth goes boom, human society re-establishes itself based on principles developed in the aftermath of the war, and becomes super-scientific. So they decide to leave Earth and develop an asteroid, which they name "Thistledown," and live there in the cities they've built. They're so technologically advanced most of them don't really bother with bodies, and if they do, they treat it like an art form. And of course, Korzenowski builds a sixth chamber chock full of mysterious machinery and co-opts the seventh chamber to build his own private universe. Once it all works, he tells everyone and they all migrate into the seventh chamber. Because of the sheer relativistic weirdness involved in constructing your own universe, a singularity (referred to as the "flaw") runs down the middle, which they use for transportation and to hold their main beacon of civilization, named the Axis City. This consists of several huge geometrical forms strung on the flaw like beads on a necklace, in which everyone lives, several million miles into the seventh chamber.
Of course, the story gets much, much deeper. Due to the nature of this universe (dubbed "the Way" by its inhabitants), it's possible to open gates to other planets and universes, so Axis City serves as the nexus of thousands of worlds and species as well, and governs commerce between all those. And its government is called the "Hexamon Nexus," or "the Hexamon" or "the Nexus" for short.
Okay. Now that the backstory's done...we move on to the plot.
Jesus Christ, fuck it. I don't give a shit about the plot. It can go piss in a nun's mouth for all I shit on it. Moving on.
Scale: You're shitting me, right? A time-traveling asteroid containing an artificial universe that serves as the nexus of commerce between millions of alternate universes? 5.
Audacity: Again with the shitting. 5.
Engagement: Aha! Here we come to the crotch of the matter. There's a lot of talk about math, gravitational physics, and the Way, but for someone like me, it's incredibly boner-inducing. For an average person, though? The slow set-up and admittedly unimpressive climax (although the Russian invasion of Thistledown was hugely creative) might turn some people off. Call it an even 3.
Characterization: I scoff and thumb my balls at characterization in this book. The characters aren't that sympathetic--it's a mass of obsessed intellectuals living in the middle of the most incredible accomplishment of the human race, watching Earth poof. The point of this book isn't character development--it's about the human species and the amazing ideas it can dream up. Give it a 3.
Sexiness: Yeah, there's sex. Suli Ram Kikura (a sort of Hexamon lawyer) is cute, Patricia Luisa Vasquez, though spooky, is a horny slut, and Judith Hoffman is a sexily powerful lady. Then there's just the sheer grandeur of concept expressed in this book. 5, damn your eyes.
Average: 4.2. Fuck numbers, if you're hardcore like me, read it. If you're not, your eyes will eventually be plucked out and used to grow a creature with really good eyesight that'll kill you just by looking at you with your own eyes.
So for non-anthologies, I'll do a summary and then rate it based on five criteria. They're completely arbitrary.
Metaplanetary by Tony Daniel
The tagline on the cover reads "A novel of interplanetary civil war." That about sums it up. The story takes place in the 31st Century, when all of the inner planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars for the Down's Syndromers out there) are linked by a vast network of nanotechnologically constructed cables that serve as transportation, housing, and really cool decoration. The outer planets don't have any cables, and as such are sort of the rugged frontier.
Nanotech is the driving force here. They've developed and refined it so much that it can do basically anything. God, I love this book so much I have no fucking idea how to even begin to explain. To start, nanotech is called "grist," which is where the address for this blog comes from, and which I think is cool. It's fucking everywhere and provides the basis for the merci, their version of the Internet, which has mutated into this monstrous construct that basically serves as an artificial universe that people practically live in, which is enabled by the grist that their bodies are practically made of. It's so refined that it works on the quantum level, using the properties of entangled particles to communicate faster than light.
In fact, it's so ingrained in human life that basically everyone can be split up into three parts: the aspect, which is the actual human body; the pellicle, which is the grist that's interpenetrated the body and even extends out into a cloud around the person and can do basically anything; and the convert, which is the electronic version of the person that inhabits the pellicle. Because of this setup, people have an unfortunate tendency to turn into Large Arrays of Personalities, which basically means the same mind inhabits multiple bodies, which can look like anything. Some of the biggest LAPs are cloudships, which are essentially huge conglomerations of grist that have accreted asteroid material around a human body (which is strictly optional) and which are maintained by physical copies of the controlling intelligence.
Actually, that's what the entire book revolves around. This dude who got beat up by drunkard daddy in the sewer of the inner planets takes over the government and starts "consolidating"--basically taking over all the grist in the solar system and incorporating it into himself. The inner system is so moronically addicted to merci entertainment that they're actually into the idea, while the outer system, which is a bit less accessible, fights back. Hence the "civil war"--although the entire solar system is technically subject to a single government based on Mercury, the outer system decides to secede and fight compu-Hitler. And no, that's not a ridiculous comparison. Apparently this guy hates individuality so much that he rounds up all the pure AIs he can find floating around in the grist and detains them in some camp on Mars where they basically have to spend their lives counting grains of sand until they go nuts.
There are some heroes, of course, and some villains. One of the more interesting ones is this guy called Tod who's nine feet tall, triple-jointed everywhere, and who apparently was designed to see the future, but experiences so much quantum interference that he's basically shitbags. He's called a "time tower." Another guy works on the same principle, but in his case, it was so successful that he became the future in some vague way. *shrug* I don't pretend to understand it, and neither does the author, apparently.
In any case, it's a pretty complete novel, written as part of a trilogy. There's a very, very detailed and believable history of quantum physics ("spooky" instantaneous info transfer at a distance) and its applications to nanotech, which enables all of this stuff to happen. There's lots of sex, lots of fucking strange shit (this guy pukes and the chunder turns into a woman), lots of action, lots of oh-wow stuff, lots of...goddammit. I'm going to re-read it.
Scale: Pretty huge. Covers basically all the bodies in the solar systems, asteroids and cables included (and in one case, the sun itself). Really, it's an epic. Call it a 5.
Audacity: A fat man's diarrhea-load of it. This guy's 31st Century is so far-out it's believable. Another 5.
Engagement: It can be easy to get lost between all the character/storyline shifts that try to unify underneath the larger arc of civil war. Then there are the chapters that focus on establishing the history and technological advancement, which can get pretty technical. Put it at a 3.
Characterization: Pretty big ensemble cast here. Most of them are pretty relatable--12-year-old girl who gets cut off from her AI mom and becomes a guerrilla, disenchanted priest who gets mixed up with some major figures, etc. Some are kind of too fucked-up to really get into, like the time tower, who's just too closed-off, or the dictator who really wasn't too, uh, sane from the start, no matter how much Papa carved up his back with a broken bottle. Eh...4.
Sexiness: Yeah, lots of it. The sheer sci-fi is boner-inducing, and there's plenty of copulation going on as well. Check out the truly bizarre sex scene between the dwarf and ferret inside the giant pumpkin-like shuttle. 5.
Average: 4.4. Just fucking read it, okay.
The sequel, Superluminal, was released a couple of years ago, but I probably should re-read it. Because I want to.
McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories
Title: McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories Author: Edited by Michael Chabon Publisher: Vintage Books (Random House) 328 p.
When I need to get my fix of the weird, creepy, and various, I turn to this book. Ordinarily, I'd talk about the book as a whole, but since it's an anthology and I'm a dumb asshole, I'll go over each story briefly and in order as published.
Lusus Naturae by Margaret Atwood: From the author of the delectable Handmaid's Tale comes this creep-fest about a young girl who comes down with a mysterious disease that turns her eyes yellow, her teeth pink, her fingernails red, and her hair all-encompassing. With a taste for blood and her fearsome appearance, she becomes a liability for her family, and is eventually abandoned as a result. Her curiosity and need for human companionship results in a curiously clichè denouement that is nonetheless effective.
What You Do Not Know You Want by David Mitchell: An intriguing tale about a special-interest buyer with an annoying model fiance in L.A. who investigates his former lover's suicide in Hawaii. The story revolves around a Japanese knife with an evocative history, and the hero bugs a shitload of people to find it. In the end, though, the shitload bugs back, and things get interesting.
Vivian Relf by Jonathan Lethem: More puzzling than it is scary, this story tweaks the "Have I seen you before?" pickup line. The protagonist bumps into a mysterious woman three times. Really, that's all that happens. I guess it's about missed chances at true love, where the soul almost, but not quite, recognizes it's counterpoint in another; on the tip of the ectoplasmic tongue, so to speak. The last line is fun, though: "The dinner party rose up and swallowed them, as it was meant to."
Minnow by Ayelet Waldman: This is one of those far-out stories that make you go, "OK. The fuck?" A pregnant woman is bloodily liberated from her parasite (miscarriage to you kid-non-haters), but starts hearing the yowls of a ghostly hatchling via her baby monitor. A lot of really weird sexual shit happens (hubby digs ta-ta-juice fresh from the nozzle), and makes you wonder if this is why pregnant women suck. Good ending, though.
Zeroville by Steve Erickson: So a crazy film editor spends 30 years watching movies and dreaming about hidden frames with a door in them. Of course, he finds them in every movie, and tracks down a final flick that holds the secret. In the end, he walks through. That's, like, it. Yawn.
Lisey and the Madman by Stephen King: Eh. It's okay. A famous writer's wife (gee, how unusual for a famous writer to write a famous writer character) sweats in the Nashville sun while her husband conducts a groundbreaking ceremony for a new university library. Well-written, but goes on and on about omens and shit before a blond assassin shows up and tries to blow away the writer. Wifey saves his life, but bitches about how in every significant picture of her husband, only her shoes are visible. Here's a hint: don't buy Payless.
7C by Jason Roberts: Holy shit. Definitely one of the best short stories in the book, which makes sense since it won a contest to be included. An astronomer is studying quasars and wondering why our universe even has them, since they're immensely old. Eventually, as people begin developing scars that seem to run backwards, he finds out the truth about his wife's infidelity and resorts to some truly scary tactics to bounce his ideas about quasars off of his best friend.
The Miniaturist by Heidi Julavits: It's average, really--your basic story about a young woman trapped in a remote mountain cabin with a strange, dollhouse-obsessed old lady. Not my favorite, but serviceable.
The Child by Roddy Doyle: A nice fake-out story, where things as written are not the same as what's actually happening. Doyle is one of my favorite authors, and I'm pleased to report he fell far short of disappointment on this one. A random guy starts seeing a little kid everywhere, and starts making a list of women he's slept with and trying to contact them. The end's quite good, a little surprising, and certainly sensical.
Delmonico by Daniel Handler: Another puzzler. A drunkard observes as a bartender with an unusual skill at problem-solving (and I mean unusual) works on a unique problem involving an acrobat, a murder, and a chandelier. Really quite a pleasure to read, mostly because it's a locked-room mystery reconceptualized. Plus the eponymous cocktail of the title was responsible for a drunken rampage of mine a couple of years ago, so I have warm fuzzies for it.
The Scheme of Things by Charles D'Ambrosio: A couple of con artists hit a small town, using a crack-baby charity as a front to bilk agriculturally-inclined Iowans out of pennies. The hook? They're psychic. The end? They provide closure to an old couple. Not sexy, but still a decent read, if only because of the banality of the phrase "cowboy brain."
The Devil of Delery Street by Poppy Z. Brite: Okay, I admit it: I'm not a Brite-head. The name's ridiculous, and Anne Rice has made the gothic New Orleans somewhat tiresome. Still, this one isn't too bad, if unsatisfying. A ghost starts haunting a Stubbs girl with interesting consequences, but virtually nothing is elaborated. She hears scratchings, crucifixes self-affix to her back, her siblings start playing with a mysterious force, and then it goes away. That's it. Maybe the lack of explanation and seeming senselessness behind this supernatural manifestation is supposed to make it creepier, but it seems to rob the reader of any kind of payoff. It doesn't help that the damn thing acts like Casper with the younger Stubbses. Nothing "devilish" about this one.
Reports of Certain Events in London by China Mièville: My favorite out of the entire fucking book. It's done in the false documentary style, the author posing as just someone who came into possession (ostensibly due to postal error) of certain documents belonging to a group of people who investigate Via Ferae. The VF, as they are referred to by the group, are fucking cool. They're what their name says they are: untamed streets that come and go at will in the heart of London and most other major cities. The investigation of a war between the intelligent city streets turns out to have very, very interesting ramifications.
The Fabled Light-House at Viña Del Mar by Joyce Carol Oates: Ordinarily, I think of Oates as a first-period type of writer--and I mean the menstruation kind of period. Talk about an up-ending of expectations. Jesus. A nineteeth-century guy who vacillates between British gentlemanry and hooliganism is dropped off on a tiny island in the Pacific as part of an experiment on human isolation, with only his dog to keep him company. He has two tasks: document the effects of isolation on his psyche, and maintain a lighthouse. He only succeeds in one of them, and his descent into animalistic madness is amazing and disturbing. The aquatic animals in the vicinity are not fucking normal, and the end makes you both shudder and want to throw up in your mouth.
Mr. Aickman's Air Rifle by Peter Straub: Four guys who're involved in publishing wind up on the same fancy-pants floor of some fancy-pants hospital, all because of non-fatal heart failure. Two are writers, one of whom has experienced a brutal fall from grace when he's outed as a shameless plagiarist. One's a book critic who sells opinions for money and loves artificial sweetener. The last is an ancient publisher with delusions of grandeur. All four have affected each other at some point. The rest really isn't terribly fascinating, what with comings and goings and "Oops, he's actually dead" moments. A big, giant *shrug* to it.
And that's it. Keep an eye out for another one coming soon.
