Category Archives: Books

Doctor Who Reviews: Palace of the Red Sun

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction,

This is another old Doctor Who tie-in review, written years ago and revised only slightly.

Why do we always come here?
I guess we’ll never know.
It’s like some kind of torture
To have to watch the show.

–The Muppet Show

Reading Palace of the Red Sun, I had occasion to think of Statler and Waldorf. They were the two old guys who sat in the balcony in “The Muppet Show.” Whenever anyone did anything, their response was a derisive comment and a forced laugh. This took a serious toll on everyone’s self esteem. Eventually Kermit had to keep a therapist on call backstage to prevent some of the less stable Muppets from slitting their wrists.

Obviously Messrs. S. and W. thought the show was crap. Yet for some reason, week after week, they kept coming back. You see, Statler and Waldorf led empty, hollow lives. The dreams of their youth had withered, leaving them unfulfilled. Their families had long since died or moved away. If not for the Muppets, they would have spent the evenings in their tiny, dingy rooms at the nursing home, drinking themselves into a stupor and reminiscing about their glory days before the war. I think on some level Kermit understood this, because he never had Animal drag them out behind the theater and beat them to a bloody pulp.

Palace of the Red Sun brought this to mind because it parallels my own relation to the literary works of Christopher Bulis. Not the drinking and the empty life–just the fact that, no matter how bad his books get, something keeps me coming back.

Maybe it’s the ideas. Bulis does almost nothing right, but there’s one thing he’s good at: coming up with interesting ideas to build his novels around. Palace of the Red Sun has a planet of fairy tale holograms and gardening robots, surrounded by a temporal anomaly and placed under siege by a megalomaniac who’s granted an extended interview to a mediocre journalist. In an alternate universe, a place of sunshine and lollipops, somebody like R. A. Lafferty or Philip K. Dick might have taken this stuff and turned out a quirky, interesting, exciting novel.

Unfortunately, this is the real world. It is frequently cloudy. The lollipops fell on the floor and are now covered with lint and crud from the avocado shag carpet, which hasn’t been shampooed since the late seventies. In the real world, this novel was written by Christopher Bulis, and Christopher Bulis could not write his way out of a wet paper sack with a sharp pencil. His characters are cardboard. His prose is flat. His dialogue is inane. He can’t even make a decent plot from the great ideas he managed to pull together. The Doctor and Peri spend 280 pages wandering through a morass of stupid cliches. They run around, get captured, escape, and meet rebels. The Doctor patronizes the secondary characters with shallow “wisdom,” and Peri is sexually harassed. There’s even a subplot about an intelligent robot learning what it means to be human. I looked in vain for some sign that Bulis was trying for irony–apparently he just doesn’t realize how stale this plot is. (You know an idea is past its sell-by date when it turns up on Star Trek. Multiple times, even.)

Palace of the Red Sun sucked. Yet I could not turn away. Perhaps someday Christopher Bulis will write another Doctor Who book. If so, I will buy that one as well, and read it. Because it feels so good when I stop.

The Incredibly Strange People Who Stopped Speaking Occitan and Became Mixed-Up Frenchmen

Books, History, ,

History is fractal. At the top is the history of nations as singular entities. England declared war on France, Japan closed its borders… on the high-school-textbook-summary level we talk as though nations are monolithic blocks animated by ants marching in lockstep. But nations aren’t made of ants; they have factions and movements and territories, and this internal history is the next level. Then you have the history of individual factions, and particular territories, and cities and boroughs and streets, all the way down to the histories of individuals. There the fractal analogy breaks down. You can’t really write histories of an individual’s internal organs, with the possible exception of Winston Churchill’s liver which declared independence in 1951.

The Discovery of France
I always sort of thought about France as an ant monolith. Even reading Dumas didn’t change this much. My old United States-style high school education treated foreign countries as sort of hazy unimportant little islands off in the far distance. It still lurks in my subconscious. Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France was a great corrective. It turns out most of what we think of as “French culture” has, historically, been the culture of Paris. Away from the city, Parisians would find themselves in a wildly varied mosaic of provinces united only by the encircling national border. For a long time the north of France and the south didn’t even speak the same language. There were towns so isolated that everyone considered it their civic duty to hack a wandering cartographer to death in a fit of superstitious paranoia.

That’s the thing about fractal history: the farther down you go, the weirder it gets. Remember how bored you were in high school Western Civ? You were dealing with the lumbering impersonal history of monolithic nations. Sentences like “England declared war on France” are the stock in trade of textbooks. The declarations of war and treaty negotiations happening up at the nation level are important, but dry. When you drill down to the lower levels, that’s when things get interesting. That’s where you can see humanity in its particularity, and peculiarity. The best history is about people doing what they do best: behaving very, very strangely.

And, man, French people are strange. Of course, so is everyone else—although most of us don’t notice the strangeness of our surroundings, having grown up in them—but anyone who’s just read The Discovery of France could be forgiven for feeling as though France was a weirder place than most—a surrealist country that might have arisin from a conclave of New Weird writers. There are whistling languages and spiderlike shepherds on ten-foot stilts who covered ground at eight miles an hour. Villagers live in caves carved into the sides of quarries. Marshes host a community of fishermen “whose long-legged beds were lapped by the water at high tide and who learned to sail almost before they could talk.” The author of a French-German phrasebook advises her postilion (coach driver) that “I believe that the wheels are on fire. Look and see”—amazing not only for the implication that this was a common enough occurrence to need a standard translation, but also for the idea that this was not something a postilion would notice without help. Survivors pour out basins of water from a house where someone has died, in case the victim’s soul washed itself on the way out—or “tried to extinguish itself,” if on its way to hell.

It’s like an encyclopedia of strange. And yet none of these people would have thought themselves unusual. Neither do we. But two hundred years from now a thousand readers of 21st century history will come up for air, closing their books or switching off their Kindles or whatever, with dazed expressions and universal cries of “Huh?”

Doctor Who Reviews: The Slow Empire

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, ,

It’s been a while since I’ve posted much on this blog. I should do something about that. To get things going, here’s a review of a Doctor Who novel which originally appeared in the second issue of Shooty Dog Thing, a fanzine edited by Paul Castle.

Of course, if you’re not a fan this won’t be of any interest. Feel free to skip it.

If you are a fan, let me recommend The Slow Empire by Dave Stone.

You may have come across The Slow Empire. If so, its profound ugliness probably discouraged you from picking it up. When I say The Slow Empire is ugly I don’t mean it’s unpleasant or somehow immoral. I’m saying it’s physically ugly, as an object. BBC Books’ chronically maladroit designers managed to top themselves with this one. On the cover, a dull arrangement of planets and electrical arcs in the colors of unpleasant bodily fluids haloes the head of a half-blurry, bile-filtered stock photo of Paul McGann. Inside, whole sections of text are laid out in Comic Sans MS, the font that turns everything it touches into an amateur garage-sale flyer. This thing looks like it was vanity-published by a high school dropout.

In short, The Slow Empire needs a little love… the more so because Dave Stone is an acquired taste. Honestly, he’s kind of weird. But it’s a grounded weirdness. Stone has a deep grasp of human nature; characters react to freakish and strange plot twists in ways that seem just somehow right. There’s an aura of conviction here that many Who writers can’t manage. He’s also digressive, tossing ideas around like cheap salad, following wherever they lead. His books are as much about his digressions as about plot, and The Slow Empire has less plot than most. It’s there, but it’s not the point so much as an excuse to have a novel.

Continue reading Doctor Who Reviews: The Slow Empire →

Truth in Editorial Interjections

Books, News and Politics

Yesterday Tim Goeglein, a [special assistant to President Bush] [wp] who has essentially functioned as a political operative keeping right-wing activists in touch with the president, was caught [plagiarizing columns for his home-town newspaper] [nn].

This embarrassed everybody, and it wasn’t long before the President [“accepted his resignation”][wh].

Not long before his exposure Goeglein contributed a piece to [the National Review Online’s tribute to William F. Buckley, Jr] [nro]. What’s great about this is the byline:

>— Tim Goeglein is deputy director of the White House office of public liaison. [This has been corrected since posting. —Ed.]

It sure has, National Review Online!

[nn]:
[wp]:
[wh]:
[nro]:

Now even writers can feel the thrill of obsolescence!

Books

I’ve always been interested in computer-generated text–programs that create surreal yet more or less grammatically correct random texts. My favorite example is [JanusNode][jn], which hasn’t been updated in a couple of years but still runs well under MacOS 10.5; it was output from this program that inspired [this comic strip] [br].

Now a business professor named Philip M. Parker has come up with [a program that writes entire books] [guard], and is happily turning out volumes with titles like [_The 2007-2012 Outlook for Frozen Asparagus in India_] [auk], which can be yours for only £248.95. This apparently represents quite a markup:

>Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce.

>Nothing but the title need actually exist until somebody orders a copy. At that point, a computer assembles the book’s content and prints up a single copy.

I probably found this via another blog. I’d credit it, if I could remember what it was.

*Update 3/2/08:* I realized this morning that it must have been [Grand Text Auto] [gta].

[jn]:
[br]:
[guard]:
[auk]:
[gta]:

A Couple of Links

Books, Speculative Fiction

I’ve been fighting exhaustion all winter. You might get some idea of how tired I’ve been, and why, when I say that where I live we’ve had forty inches of snow since December.

While I’m trying to come up with a real post, here are a couple more links:

1. How would you feel if you were a new SF writer, and on the back of your brand-spanking-new first novel you found this?

(Via.)

2. Jeff VanderMeer is soliciting his readers’ weird stories on his blog.

Dombey and Son: Caricatures

Books,

There are three kinds of characters in a Dickens novel: Caricatures, Dull Paragons, and Other.

We might as well get the Caricatures out of the way first, because the things I have to say about them are the things least likely to be original observations. The Caricatures are what Dickens is remembered for. Dickens came up with the damnedest names for his people. Mention a “Dickensian name” and anybody will know what you mean, whether they’ve read him or not. The Caricatures’ names are the most Dickensian of all: Blimber, Pipchin, Bagstock, MacStinger, Cuttle.

Caricatures have handles: single traits that define their entire being. Usually the handle is a verbal tic, like Captain Cuttle’s “overhaul the book it’s in, and thereof make a note,” but it might also be a visual aid, like Mr. Carker’s artificially white teeth. Either way, the thing will come up pretty much every time these guys come on stage. Sometimes you get a bit sick of their handles, to the point where you almost sympathize with Carker when he tells Captain Cuttle “To have the goodness to walk off, if you please… and to carry your jargon somewhere else.” But they’re there for a reason.

The Caricatures aren’t the central characters. Almost all of them spend chapters at a time offstage. Which is not a problem if you’ve got a whole thousand-page brick of Dombey and Son sitting in your lap. It’s a problem when you’re getting three or four chapters a month, and trying to keep track of three dozen minor characters, and, owing to the fact that you’re a nineteenth century fishmonger or something, you haven’t got a Dombeypedia website on which to look up the references, the way you do with Battlestar Galactica. Actually, as a nineteenth-century fishmonger you probably haven’t got Battlestar Galactica either. But you see the point. Dickens’s grotesques aren’t just an authorial tic. They’re mnemonics; a solution to the problem of tracking a big cast over the course of a year. When a guy you haven’t seen in months shows up, you’re more likely to remember “the amateur cello player” than “Mr. Morfin, who has the office next to Carker’s.”

The Dull Paragons are the Caricatures’ exact opposite. I’ll cover them in another post. (As I said, I’m hoping it will be easier to dash off a lot of little mediocre posts than one big one.)

Dombey and Son: Some Initial Mumbling

Books,

I’ve been reading an annual Dickens book for the last few years. In 2007 it was Dombey and Son, which among other things reminded me why I need to keep this blog:

Unless young Toots had some idea on the subject, to the expression of which he was wholly unequal. Ideas, like ghosts (according to the common notion of ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will explain themselves; and Toots had long left off asking any questions of his own mind. Some mist there may have been, issuing from that leaden casket, his cranium, which, if it could have taken shape and form, would have become a genie; but it could not; and it only so far followed the example of the smoke in the Arabian story, as to roll out in a thick cloud, and there hang and hover.

(“Genie” is a brilliant word choice: an implicit pun on “genius.” No other fabulous mythological creature would do.)

One reason I haven’t written much–apart from general intellectual fogginess–is that constructing a decent essay from scattered ideas, arranging them into a coherent argument, daunts the hell out of me. Then I remembered: it’s a blog. There’s no reason I can’t post a series of short, disparate ramblings; if I find I’ve come up with something interesting, I can jury-rig them into an essay later. So expect several short, disparate ramblings.

Also, expect spoilers. Some people hate spoiler warnings. “Plot isn’t important,” they cry. Caring about spoilers is infantile. These people are, of course, pricks. It’s true that a good book is worth reading many times, even after you know the plot by heart. But reading a book for the first time is a different experience, and surprise and suspense are among its chief pleasures. Anyone who doesn’t understand this on a gut level doesn’t understand reading.

To Do List

Books

One of the unfulfilled intentions behind this blog was to write about the books I’ve been reading–to ensure that I actually *think* about what I read, not just set each book aside and move on to the next. Obviously I haven’t been doing that.

So here’s a list of books that impressed me (or in a few cases both annoyed *and* impressed me) in 2007–books I read in 2007, not necessarily books published in 2007–about which I feel I ought to write something, to better understand *why* I liked them. If I post this list, I might shame myself into actually, y’know, *doing* it. Continue reading To Do List →

New Adventures Reviews: Deceit (Part One)

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction

(This is the first half of a half-finished review. I’m hoping going ahead and posting it will prod me into writing the rest.)

The word for Deceit is “functional.” It does not tell an exciting story. It does not explore characters in great detail. It doesn’t say much about the human condition. Deceit was conceived and written solely to advance the editorial goals of Peter Darvill-Evans, New Adventures mastermind.

He’s testing his own editorial guidelines. He’s reintroducing Ace. He’s filling in the New Adventures’ future history. He’s cleaning up and retconning the last few books’ worth of characterization oddities. And he’s explaining his theory of time travel. As Darvill-Evans says in his afterward/apologia, “That’s a lot of functions for one medium-length novel to perform. I hope you didn’t notice it creaking under the weight of so many burdens.”

Deceit creaks. Understandably. Any writer juggling five such unwieldy objects hasn’t got a lot of spare attention for the things that make a book, y’know, good. The surprise is that Deceit is adequate. Continue reading New Adventures Reviews: Deceit (Part One) →