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Art Bell was the host of the late-night radio show Coast-to-Coast AM. A strange show, that often dabbled in what we today would call “conspiracy theories”. I’ve written about it before. It was many things, but the key to its popularity was the personality of Bell himself: non-judgmental, willing to accept people as they were, even though many of them were either crazy or lying.

(It’s worth noting that Bell did do more typical programming as well as his X-Files-esque stuff–see for example his interview with singer Gordon Lightfoot.)

As you can tell, I’ve long been a fan of the late Mr. Bell, and many times I heard him promoting his book The Quickening. But only now, nearly 30 years after its publication, did I finally get around to reading it.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would Bell show his cards, and reveal himself to be as, shall we say, “eccentric” as many of his guests and callers? Or, perhaps even worse, would he show contempt for his own audience? Or something else?

Bell’s thesis, briefly put, is that events, information, and just general activity in the world are increasing at an alarming rate. As the world becomes better connected by technology, people become swamped with more choices, more stuff, more content, than ever before.

Moreover, natural disasters, diseases, extraterrestrial activity, terrorism, crime, social decay, and so on have all been exploding as well. As has the human population itself, with more people being born every day. And with each human being comes the potential for more chaos.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, Bell argues, and indeed his book itself seems to be intent on illustrating how overwhelming it is, as it bombards the reader with facts and figures to support his points about every political, economic, social, biological, environmental, technological and astronomical trend you can think of. It’s a bit like a literary version of “We Didn’t Start The Fire.”

All of it builds slowly to… something. Bell appears to have been so busy documenting his evidence that he forgot to include the conclusion.

And yet, for all that, you can’t help but see his point. It feels like the pace of everything is increasing. Indeed, modern life seems to have a disturbingly fast-pace that invites an analogy with heat in thermodynamics: heat is the process of particles in a system moving faster, often accelerating said system’s collapse. (This will be familiar to those of you who remember the CCRU Writings.)

This does seem to be the implicit message of Bell’s book: that everything is accelerating towards some final, momentous event. It certainly feels that way, doesn’t it? Surely some revelation is at hand!

Or… perhaps some revelation isn’t at hand. And don’t call me Shirley.

As John J. Reilly noted in his book Perennial Apocalypse, people have always felt that the world was about to end. And in a way, they’re not wrong, because the world as they knew it has ended. Many times. And afterwards everyone feels fine. They don’t even remember anything unusual happened after a generation or so.

This is where it becomes hard to judge the book, because it’s hard to know whether Bell’s identification of trends that dominate the world today is prophetic, or if things are always like this. Has he correctly observed the seeds of our destruction being sown, or is he just making eternal problems of human society out to be more pervasive and sensational than they actually are? Is there, in short, anything new under the sun?

Well, I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t know the answer. Perhaps it’s best to simply view this book in the same neutral, polite way that Bell would react to a typical caller on his show. It’s just what somebody wanted to say for some reason.

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I saw the movie The Haunting, which is based upon this novel, when I was 10 years old. At the time, I wasn’t terribly impressed. But then, I was 10 years old. And parts of the movie stuck with me… dare I say even haunted me. And on rewatching it as an adult, I found it a very effective ghost story.

So I finally got around to reading the book. I was intrigued when I read that Shirley Jackson’s own reaction to the film was more or less the same as my 10-year-old self’s. She said that she and her son “nearly went to sleep” watching it. Obviously, the book must be quite different from the movie!

Or so I thought. But frankly, the first three-quarters of the book are quite similar to the film, so that I could easily picture almost all the scenes as I read them. There was a bit more dialogue in the book (which makes it rather odd that Jackson complained the movie had “far too much talk”) but the characters were largely the same as in the film. The biggest difference is the names: the book’s Eleanor Vance became Eleanor Lance, and the paranormal investigator called Dr. John Montague in the novel became Dr. John Markway.

But the core story is identical: Eleanor is depressed after the death of her mother, for which she feels guilty. Due to a documented association with poltergeist activity in her youth, Dr. Montague invites her to stay at Hill House, the sinister old mansion with a gloomy history, where he is conducting research into the supernatural. Having nothing else to do, and no one who cares about her, Eleanor accepts.

Arriving at Hill House, she instantly begins to fall under the spell of the creepy old pile. She befriends the other guests, particularly the confident, witty, and often cruel Theodora, or “Theo”. Theo is implied to be a lesbian, although exactly what this means for the dynamic between her and Eleanor is not explained. It’s not clear if the needy Eleanor wants a friend, a lover, a big sister, a mother—or maybe it’s all of the above.

In any case, she begins to find the dominating presence she craves in her life, but not from Theo, or any of the other visitors, but rather from Hill House itself. The evil manse seems to affect all of the characters, but Eleanor by far most of all, as she grows obsessed with it, gradually losing her own identity as the ghostly influence of the place takes hold.

All this is exactly what happens in the movie, so if Jackson found it boring, she has no one but herself to blame for writing it. Personally, while I didn’t find it particularly scary, I did find it to be a compellingly tragic tale of a depressed woman gradually sinking deeper and deeper into her own hopelessly melancholy psyche. Eleanor is a truly pathetic figure, in the original sense of the term.

The major difference between book and film is when Dr. Montague/Markway’s wife shows up. In the film, she is portrayed as a skeptic, who doubts the hauntedness of Hill House until it decides to show her good and hard. In the book, she and her strange assistant, Arthur, (who is a weirdly misplaced comic relief character) spend hours using a planchette to try and determine the motives of the spirits who reside there. She’s also incredibly annoying, which made me rather disappointed that the ghosts don’t terrorize her the way they do her much less irritating cinematic analogue.

And then we come to the very end. I won’t spoil it, either book or film, for those of you who are unfamiliar with it. Let’s just say the way the film ends includes one of my all-time favorite quotes. Even as a ten-year-old, I could appreciate the way Russ Tamblyn, who up till then has played Luke Sannerson as a wise-cracking, too-cool-for-school playboy, delivers his chilling final line.

In the book, by contrast, the ending is rather abrupt, with no time for a final remark from anybody. I felt shortchanged afterwards. What did everyone have to say regarding what they just witnessed? I’m all for leaving things to the reader’s imagination, but all the same you’ve got to give us something!

The book really doesn’t work as a ghost story. But that’s not to say it’s a bad story. Actually, it feels like two rather good stories that have been awkwardly stitched together.

The first story is a depressing work of literary fiction about a fragile woman slowly losing her mind. It’s well-written, but extremely bleak and depressing.

The second story is a pretty witty comedy about the rest of the ghost hunters at Hill House. The snarky banter between Luke and Theo is quite funny, as are Dr. Montague’s often-futile attempts to be the adult in the room. And the arrival of Mrs. Montague and her incongruously goofy friend Arthur just makes it all the sillier. These characters are all very entertaining, but when their antics are combined with the unrelentingly sad mental collapse of Eleanor, it just feels… off.

I am reminded of W.S. Gilbert’s supposed quip about the actor Beerbohm Tree’s performance of Hamlet as “funny without being vulgar.” It sounds like a compliment… until you remember that Hamlet is a tragedy. And don’t get me wrong, The Haunting of Hill House is pretty emotionally powerful. But then you realize the tragedy could have all been avoided easily enough if people had just behaved sensibly. Maybe the real curse of Hill House is that it makes its denizens act stupidly.

I came away from the book very impressed… by the film. They did a good job of knowing just what to take and what to cut from the source material to turn it into a good, coherent story. Obviously, Shirley Jackson deserves a lot of credit for providing that raw material, but she also deserves blame for not making it as good as it could be.

Well, that’s my opinion, anyway. Lots of people will disagree. Lots of people say it’s the greatest haunted house book ever written. This is why I always take what such people say with a good deal of salt.

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I remember I enjoyed this book, but I can’t remember why. 🙂

Okay, no, I’m kidding. That’s actually an in-joke for people who have already read the book. It happens, you know, that sometimes someone will read a book and then look up the reviews afterward. I do this myself pretty routinely.

If you think about it, it’s odd. Why should I read a review of a book I already read? Well, sometimes I’ve forgotten some detail and it’s faster to remind myself by reading a review than by looking it up. Or sometimes I just want to know what other people think.

Which again, is odd. Why does it matter what other people think? Surely all that matters is what I think–at least, that’s all that matters to me, right?

Well, that would be true, if you consider ideas as merely static, unchanging things. But what if we consider ideas as dynamic entities, separate from the minds that create them? Ideas are after all transmissible from person to person. Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme“, analogous to the gene in the realm of biology, to describe these replicating units of information, and with it, invented the science of memetics.

Okay, so then what is antimemetics?

Trick question; there is no such thing. Hence the title and the nonexistence of an antimemetics division.

Actually, no. That’s not true. But it is very hard to describe something that is about the negation of ideas; the erasure of knowledge because it is too dangerous to know about. The first rule of the anitmemetics club is that you literally can’t talk about the antimemetics club, because to talk about it is to cause it to exist. You have to instead find a way to talk around the problem without actually stating it.

Which, as you may have noticed, is exactly what I am doing in this review by not mentioning any specifics about the book for as long as possible. Forgive me; I couldn’t help paying tribute to the book’s central theme this way. But now, since you probably are expecting a review to provide information and not antiformation, I’ll give some specifics.

This is a psychological horror book that messes with the reader’s head. Every chapter is a little vignette depicting the members of the Antimemetics Division trying to piece together a mystery—a mystery which they usually begin to forget exists the longer they study it. It’s implied there have been many iterations of the Antimemetics Division, with the history of each being periodically forgotten.

I’ve often said that what I really like in a book is a story that messes with your head so much you start questioning your whole understanding of reality. That’s basically the whole point of this book, so naturally I enjoyed it. It’s weird, unsettling, mind-bending—and also, in a few places, surprisingly funny and even at times a little romantic. You’ll see what I mean.

The only part I didn’t really like was the ending, which was so abstract and confusing it was hard to even relate to what was happening. But maybe that was inevitable given the nature of the story.

I still recommend the book to fans of weird fiction. The ending is so disconnected from the rest that it couldn’t even ruin it. If you like having your mind bent in all sorts of crazy directions, you’re bound to enjoy this strange and unsettling voyage into a world of unthinkable, unnameable things.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Adam Bertocci is the millennial Oscar Wilde. He captures what it is to be a Gen Y-er, just as Wilde captured what it was to be a member of Victorian high society.

So it’s fitting that in Bertocci’s latest short story Translating the Wildest, one of Wilde’s most famous works, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is prominently featured.

But I have a confession to make: despite my literary pretensions, I had never actually read Wilde’s famous novel of philosophical horror. So, how could I be prepared to adequately review Translating the Wildest without first familiarizing myself with the source material?

You probably know the setup already, via cultural osmosis, just as I did: Dorian Gray, a handsome youth, has his portrait painted by a painter who idolizes him. On seeing it, Dorian wishes that he would not lose the physical perfection depicted in the painting–that the image of him should age and decay instead of him. (There’s probably some solid material here for a Daniel J. Boorstin-inspired reading of Dorian Gray, if you’re into that sort of thing, or need to write a paper for an English or Philosophy class.)

Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for. You might get it. And Dorian does.

That’s the basic plot of the story, and frankly, anyone familiar with Victorian melodrama will not be shocked by much of what happens here. Honestly, for as avant-garde as Wilde liked to appear to be, the theme of Dorian Gray is not that different from the elements of the Gothic villain archetype parodied in Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1887 operetta Ruddigore, where the accursed nobleman Sir Despard sings:

When in crime one is fully employed
Your expression gets warped and destroyed.
It’s a penalty none can avoid!
I once was a nice-looking youth;

But like stone from a strong catapult
I rushed at my terriblе cult –
Observe thе unpleasant result!
Indeed, I am telling the truth.

Wilde’s conception of sin is hardly any different; he just uses the portrait as an effective plot device to convey it.

Okay, but that’s just the bare bones of the plot. As you might expect from such an eminent purveyor of witticisms, the writing is chock-full of clever quips and cleverer ripostes, especially from the mouth of the cynical Lord Henry Wotton, who continually tempts Dorian Gray into acts of increasing depravity with his non-stop banter at various fancy parties.

And banter at various fancy parties is the main activity in this book. When I think of Gothic horror, I think of old mansions, creaking floorboards, and moaning ghosts, not Chopin and cucumber sandwiches. M.R. James would no doubt approve of the way Wilde keeps the horror elements to a minimum, only occasionally intruding on the otherwise fashionable and vapid scenes from the class struggle in Mayfair. Imagine a season of Frasier except there’s one episode of Dexter in the middle of it.

Gray just keeps doing one bad thing after another, until finally, there comes at last a day when, sick of crime, he vows to sin no more, and so, in agony, calls welcome Death to free him from his cloying guiltiness.

So, I guess what I’m saying here is if you want a Victorian meditation on morality that also has plenty of wit and Gothic horror, watch Ruddigore instead. I recommend the Stanford Savoyards’ production from 2012, with production design inspired by Tim Burton. 

But how does all this inform Mr. Bertocci’s latest offering?

Well, perhaps I am as much a product of my time as Wilde was of his, and just as the Victorian tropes of Dorian Gray seem trite and predictable with the benefit of critical distance, so too will Translating the Wildest appear as a typical work of early 21st-century fiction to readers in future centuries. If there are any.

But to me, it seems far more inspired than many books, including the classic that the protagonist is translating.

First off, unusually for Bertocci, this book is science-fiction. Set in the year 2187, it’s written with an epistolatory framing device, the book is framed as a series of messages from a woman named Amicayle, who is translating Wilde’s prose into the language of the Ilvenica, the mysterious, but seemingly peaceful race of intelligent aliens who have come to Earth and a seeking to learn more about our history and culture.

What follows is a chaotic running commentary on her attempts to capture the meaning of Wilde’s novel while juggling her own personal life and, eventually, some strange happenings involving the Ilvenica themselves.

It’s one of Bertocci’s most original works. Stylistically it’s a departure from his slice-of-life millennial literary short stories, while still retaining the same wit and insight his loyal fans have come to expect. While I didn’t think Dorian Gray itself was the classic it was hyped up to be, I was still glad I read it just to be able to enjoy Translating the Wildest to the fullest. That said, it isn’t essential that you read the former to appreciate the latter.

Through the lens of Victorian literature, Bertocci explores the meaning of art, humanity, and our place in the universe. Earlier I compared Dorian Gray to Frasier with a serial killer episode; Translating the Wildest is like an episode of The X-Files with a literary criticism episode. And as Wilde himself might have said, “the only thing worse than the truth being out there…”

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It’s that time of year!

Yes, the time of pumpkins and pumpkin spice, of dark nights and the wind ripping the dying leaves from the trees, of eerie decorations popping up throughout the neighborhood and candy, of cornstalks and orange sunsets and the witching wonder of what lurks out there in the darkness.

But what to read during this magical time?

That’s always a bit of a challenge for us here at Ruined Chapel because—given our love of the season—we have to find something that really suits the mood. It has to be eerie and unsettling, without simply being an outright bloodbath. The classic ghost story; only not too classic, because after all, we know all the classics so well, they lose their element of suspense.

I’m happy to say that Walking After Midnight is exactly the type of book that fits this need. It’s a collection of short stories, each of which capture the Halloween mood. Haunted hayrides, ouija boards, dark country roads, and Shadow People all make appearances in this volume, vividly and memorably. One can almost imagine each vignette as a different caller on Ghost-to-Ghost AM, spinning their yarn as the reader, in the role of Art Bell, listens thoughtfully.

Most importantly, each story keeps that critical element of ambiguity that is vital to the best horror. Every time a story ends, we are left with questions. Different possible interpretations to mull over. This is the key to any good ghost story: there has to be some central unresolved mystery for the reader to ponder.

This is a perfect collection of stories for reading on some dark October night, when the fog is rolling in over the rooftops and the distant dogs are baying their nightly hunting song. (If that’s not happening where you live, what’s wrong with you???) This collection earns Ruined Chapel‘s Halloween-certified stamp of approval.

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“Sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your name,” as the Cheers theme song tells us. And really, who doesn’t love the idea of some pleasant gathering place, where you can go to “forget about life for a while“?

So I’m mixing up my references a bit there, but it’s fitting, because the narrator of C. Litka’s latest novel is in fact the piano man at a bar—The Bleu Moon, which calls the Sinatra song to my mind. All these cozy references should help suggest the mood of Some Small Dive, which is a supremely pleasant literary-fantasy novel set in Litka’s Lorrian universe.

You’ll note I say it’s fantasy, even though the book description itself denies this: “Only the fact that it is set on a world other than Earth makes it slightly different from a light literary fiction novel. Readers who have found my work via science fiction and fantasy, may perhaps find this story boring.”

But it is still set in a fantasy world, so I call it fantasy. And there’s another reason too, but we will get to that later…

Part of what makes it so cozy, of course, is that we get to meet some of the familiar faces from Litka’s earlier books. My personal favorite is the dramatist, Forthwith Om, or “Omi”, as he is called by his friends.

Actually, Omi’s whole subplot was my favorite part of the story, because it is about the behind-the-scenes logistics of crafting a musical. Omi has recruited an up-and-coming composer to write the songs for his first venture at musical theater, but wants our hero, an editor by day, to look over her work to make sure it won’t embarrass him before the critics. Which, naturally, wounds her, as she feels her competence is being questioned, even though Omi tries his best to smooth things over.

I’m always fascinated by these kinds of tensions in songwriting partnerships. Look at Gilbert and Sullivan’s infamous “carpet quarrel” to see what kind of drama can happen off the stage of a big production. And Wodehouse had more than one story about the turmoil that goes into crafting a show, and it’s fair to say that in this, as in other respects, Litka follows in the footsteps of the great PGW.

The main thread of the story is a romance, but it’s a quaint, mild sort of romance, with no big dramatic moments or anything like that. Like everything in Litka’s world, it is peaceful and old-fashioned.

Which brings me to the point about fantasy. The fact is, this world of people gathering nightly for drinks, or attending laid back parties to mingle with friends and colleagues, is increasingly itself a fantasy. I reference Cheers and “Piano Man” above because they, too, are artifacts of a vanished world. Now, everyone’s just on their phones.

It would be nice if we could rebuild that world. But for now, at least, we can experience it via Litka’s cozy tales.

Last week, I referenced the “Torment Nexus effect”, whereby authors attempting to write cautionary tales inadvertently set in motion the creation of the very dystopia they mean to prevent. Litka has done the opposite. He has crafted pleasant, enjoyable futures. Let us hope that his books become widely read, and that life will imitate art.

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This is a dystopian philosophical novel. It begins in the year 1915, with a debate between two scientists: the protagonist, Arnold Pennell, and his rival, Lazaroff. Both scientists are vying for the love of a woman named Esther, the daughter of their benefactor, Sir Spofforth Moore.

Moreover, since it’s a philosophical novel, they have opposing moral ideologies: Pennell, like Moore, is a Christian traditionalist. Lazaroff is a man of material science, who believes that technology and reason have rendered the old superstitions obsolete. Man, he reasons, is nothing but a biological mechanism that can be perfected through appropriate stimuli, and anybody who thinks different is a moron. “Moron” being a term which Lazaroff applies with scientific precision, as he is also a strident phrenologist.

Pennell and Lazaroff’s research is on the subject of we would today call cryogenic freezing. They are preparing an experiment to seal and freeze three live monkeys in huge cylinders, to sleep for a century. So, after the dinner debate with Sir Spofforth, Lazaroff invites Arnold and Esther down into the lab, just to show Esther around. And so the three of them wander in to look at the three cryogenic tubes.

Can you guess what Lazaroff does next? If so, you are much smarter than Arnold. Maybe Lazaroff does have a point about Arnold’s skull not housing enough brain matter…

So Arnold wakes up centuries later in a strange world, filled with flying machines, men with ray guns, and society apparently strictly regulated and regimented, with people divided into classes based on their physical structures. He meets a man named David and his daughter Elizabeth, who give him a book that explains how the new order was founded. Forgive me quoting at length:

I learned of the great war that had begun a few days after I entered the cylinder, when Russia and the democracies of Europe stamped out German autocracy and laid the foundations of democratic government. I learned how this democratic spirit burst out in 1945, when all the experiences of the social order, accumulated by mankind since the dawn of history were jettisoned, with all their lessons and all their warnings.

It was extraordinary to me that none of us had realized the changes which had been impending. Warnings there had been, as there always are. They were the decay of parliamentary government in all lands, the breaking down of tradition and authority in every phase; only there was nobody to heed them. Then, previously, whether by acknowledgment or in spite of denial, society had always been founded on servile labor. The harnessing of the tides, and, later, the control of solar power, threw millions out of employment, millions of hungry men with time to think and nothing to reverence.

The book said that the movement could have been stayed by wise measures. But it was doubtful, for a frenzy for change was spreading like wildfire over the civilized world. Now only Spain, restored Russia, and monarchical and prosperous South America resisted it, among Occidental nations.

I read that in 1945 democracy initiated the millennium by bursting all the dykes. Millions were slain. London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, Winnipeg were burned to ashes, with scores of other cities. Peace was restored fifteen years later by a few military chiefs who came into power owing to the universal exhaustion. At that time whole populations were turning cannibal. All organized industries had been destroyed. The path for reconstruction was clear.

Men called that the period of reaction, but it might have been the period of reconciliation. Both sides failed in the ensuing years; the mob, because it lacked idealism; the leaders, because they failed to recognize the unassailable truth in the old Socialist propaganda, that the era of machinery and of an inexhaustible supply of industrial power had made the systematization of production inevitable. With half the people workless, it was ridiculous that they should suffer and starve because they could not buy the goods rotting in the stuffed warehouses. The system did not fall because it was ridiculous, however, but because it had become unworkable. Production had to be for use, not profit. When profit went, rent had to go, and interest, that leech of society, so long forbidden by the Catholic Church, and no doubt the direst result of the Reformation. Failure to realize this need dragged down the old order in 1978. It fell forever, and with it died all hope of a civilization built on that of the past.

It was then that the writings of the great Wells, since called the Prophet, were discovered and proved the inspiration of the new order. In place of the illogical instinct of nations there was to be a New Republic, based on pure reason, and shining with facets of unanswerable facts. The world was to forget its past as thoroughly as it had forgotten the Stone Age. The new revolution was led by Sanson, I gathered, and swiftly conquered.

Although never explicitly explained, “the great Wells” is clearly H.G. Wells, and the entire book is a response to Wells’s own novel, When the Sleeper Wakes. Rousseau takes issue with Wells’s scientific socialism, and wrote this story as an explicit rebuttal to it.

As for that Sanson character, he is one of the leaders of the new society. It is again not stated explicitly, but he presumably takes his name from Charles-Henri Sanson.

The society in which Arnold finds himself is, in short, an amalgam of all the worst characteristics of the First French Republic, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany.  If the book were written today, this would just seem lazy. But given that it was written in 1917, when the Tsar was still alive and Adolf Hitler was just a courier in the trenches of France, we must give Rousseau some credit for anticipating the horrors the 20th century had in store.

We give him less credit for how the story develops. The cylinder trick that Lazaroff played was only the start; at times this is a downright idiot plot.

Then there’s the writing style itself, which, as the cover suggests, is Victorian melodrama through and through. The version I have includes illustrations, which are also firmly in the mid-19th century style. (I couldn’t help wondering how Frank Frazetta might have rendered some of these pulp-y sci-fi scenes. I’m sure Rousseau would faint dead away at how he would have depicted Esther in the cylinder!)

Like many philosophical novels, the book is strongest when it’s doing world-building and describing characters, and at its worst when action is happening. Although I suppose a pro-religious novel can be excused for using a deus ex machina ending.

Still, the book is interesting as a historical document, just for predicting how wrong the early 20th-century experiments in Utopianism would go. And even more for how it shows the fundamental ineffectiveness, and perhaps even downright counter-productivity, of the cautionary tale. The Torment Nexus effect is older than people suspect!

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Mark Paxson recently blogged about the book Fitzpatrick’s War, and how the footnotes (which I loved) overcomplicated the story. While I’m always one for layered stories with many different interpretations and shades of nuance, I see Mark’s point. There can be such a thing as too much detail, a world built too completely. I don’t necessarily think this is true of Fitzpatrick’s War, but there definitely are some sci-fi books of which it is true.

Wasp is a sci-fi story with no complications. There is an interplanetary war between the Terrans and the Sirians. The Terrans are humans from Earth. The Sirians are shorter, squatter, and purpler, but otherwise are pretty similar to us Earthlings. The Terrans have the advantage in tech. The Sirians have the advantage in numbers.

And that’s literally all we know, or need to know. The book is about a Terran, James Mowry, who is put to work as a “wasp”, that is, a spy/saboteur/agent provocateur sent to a Sirian planet to stir up trouble.

The reason he’s called a “wasp” as the military intelligence man who recruits him explains, is an analogy. He describes an incident where four large, strong men driving a big car were all killed because a single tiny wasp got in and made the driver lose control.

That is what they want Mowry to do to the Sirian government on a planet called Jaimec. But first, of course, he’ll have to go through several weeks of rigorous training as a field operative.

In those over-complicated books I mentioned before, we might have gotten Mowry’s adventures at spy college. Not here. It’s dispensed with over the course of a section break, and then Mowry is sent off to Jaimec.

The book is fast-paced and witty, written in a funny, pulpy style that makes Mowry’s exploits entertaining. His first act on arriving on Jaimec is to begin putting up propaganda posters for an imagined subversive organization featuring ominous anti-government slogans. Before long, the Sirian authorities are convinced they are dealing with a vast conspiracy, with multiple cells and a chain of command—when in fact, it’s all the work of the lone Mowry, printing up sheets of stickers in his cave.

It’s true that the sci-fi aspect of the book is rather incongruous, to the point of being comical. They apparently have spaceships, but Mowry still forges his documents with a typewriter. More significantly, the modern reader will notice that virtually all of Mowry’s clandestine activities would be instantly thwarted if the Sirians had surveillance cameras. The book reads like a subtle advertisement for Flock cameras. (Or against them, if you look at it from Mowry’s perspective.)

Still, there’s no question that Mowry’s schemes are clever, and rooted in a deep understanding of the behavior of a bureaucratic institution under threat. For example:

The more persistently a government maintains silence on a given subject of discussion, the more the public talks about it and thinks about it. The longer and more stubborn the silence, the guiltier the government looks to the talkers and thinkers. In time of war, the most morale-lowering question that can be asked is, “What are they hiding from us?”

As Mowry’s activities increasingly divert the attention of the security forces, and the war drags on, the government propaganda correspondingly starts to reach Orwellian levels. As one Sirian mutters to Mowry, unaware he is talking to an enemy agent:

“Last night, according to news channels, they destroyed the main [Terran] space-fleet for the tenth time.  Today they are pursuing the remnants of what is said to have been destroyed. For months we have been making triumphant retreats before a demoralized enemy who is advancing in utter disorder.”

Later, a piece of information the government releases in the newspapers is described as “a transparent piece of nonsense to any reader capable of independent thought. But ninety percent of the readership could not endure the awful strain of thinking.”

This kind of acerbic commentary might make you wonder just who this Eric Frank Russell fellow was. According to the official records, he was an RAF radio operator in World War II. However, there have been unverified claims that he was actually a military intelligence officer, whose responsibilities included running clandestine operations of exactly the sort described in Wasp. There is no official documentation of this. But then, there wouldn’t be, would there?

Another curiosity worth noting about Wasp is that the Sirian government’s ruthless secret police force is called the “Kaitempi.” The military police force of Imperial Japan in WWII was called the Kempeitai.

If we are of a mind to let our imaginations run wild with these facts, we could start to view Wasp as something more than just an entertaining sci-fi thriller. It could be read as a kind of introductory handbook to 4th generation warfare, written by someone who knew whereof he spoke. Mowry’s actions are merely small annoyances in and of themselves. What makes them powerful is the reaction they provoke in the government, which believes itself to be dealing with a far more extensive internal threat than it actually is, thus creating a phony new front to the war.

And it’s worth noting that Mowry’s actions are only really useful because he has external help coming. If he were just sabotaging the Sirians on his own initiative, he would sooner or later be caught and executed, and that would be that. But because his job is only to make sure their forces are otherwise occupied until the Terran fleet arrives, there is a clear purpose and end state in mind for all his subversive activities.

Thanks to Hollywood, most of us have come to readily believe in the plot of the Plucky Rebels Defeating The Evil Empire™. And it’s true, sometimes the plucky rebels do defeat the evil empire… but it’s usually because the plucky rebels have the help of some other external force that is approximately as strong as the evil empire.  People tend to forget that detail.

Anyway, the point is, I loved Wasp. It’s quick-moving, entertaining, and surprisingly funny, and it also gives you something to think about after you finish. That is… if you are part of that ten percent of the readership. 🙂

by on

Theodore Judson is a curious case. He wrote one of my all-time favorite novels, Fitzpatrick’s War. I consider it to be one of the greatest works of science-fiction ever penned, with its sweeping world-historic story, its understandable, profoundly human characters, and most of all, its ingenious “dueling narrators” storytelling style.

Then he wrote The Martian General’s Daughter, which is a thinly-disguised re-telling of Roman History with the flimsiest patina of sci-fi coating to make it qualify as a novel. It’s hard to think of a time when I’ve been more disappointed in a book.

This past August, after many years out-of-print, with used copies costing thousands of dollars, a new edition of Fitzpatrick’s War was published. Naturally, this news thrilled me, as now I could recommend Fitzpatrick’s War to friends, family, and random strangers without reservation.

But there was a second part to this development: not only was Judson’s classic finally available again, but a sequel, The Timerman, was also being released concurrently, thus making Fitzpatrick’s War but the first entry in the “25th-Century Yukon Confederacy” series.

This news I met with a mix of excitement and apprehension. I was eager to rediscover the world of Fitzpatrick’s War… but not if this new story was on a par with The Martian General’s Daughter.

This was all or nothing, as far as I was concerned, for Judson’s literary credentials. If he could recapture the magic, he would be one of The Greats. If he came out with another Martian General-level effort set in the same universe as Fitzpatrick’s War, he would ruin his earlier masterpiece, and I would view the whole enterprise as a tragic literary collapse to rank with Harry Potter after the fiasco that was Book 7.

So, with a heavy feeling of anxiety and anticipation, I picked up The Timerman. And…

Well, I have to say this, review is a bit hard to write, because to understand anything about The Timerman, you have to also understand Fitzpatrick’s War, including how it ends. And since Fitzpatrick’s War has only become available again in the last month, probably not many of you have read it, and I don’t want to spoil it.

In my review, I said that Fitzpatrick’s War was a love letter to Clio, the muse of history. The Timerman is much the same thing: the theme is how cycles of history repeat endlessly, and individuals are in some sense destined to perform the function in the great drama that the circumstances of their birth assign them. Like the Notary sings in The Grand Duke: “Then take a card with heart of Grace / Whatever our fate, let’s play our parts.”

The Timermen are a secret organization with access to powerful technology that allows them to eternally control the cycle of history, choosing, as Leonard Cohen might say, “who will serve and who will eat.” The implicit question of quis custodiet ipsos custodes looms large in the story, but is never asked as much as it should be, much as it isn’t in real life.

The main character, John Randel, is a junior member of the organization, apprenticed to the veteran Timerman Dr. Murrey, who readers of Fitzpatrick’s War will readily recall.

Murrey is, essentially, the voice of History, as when he tells the protagonist:

“There are—I don’t put this in any of my books because it is a rather mystical idea—there are certain personality types that keep popping up over and over again throughout the recorded story of mankind.”

Even more pointed is his reply when our hero suggests to Dr. Murrey the idea that electrical power could be harnessed to benefit humanity, instead of relying on steam-power as society currently does:

“We cannot lose our focus by fussing over the possibility of helping the sick. Trust me, if you knew as much of History as I do, you would appreciate that the world is much better without the use of the electronic equipment we have on the islands. The mass media and thinking machines of olden times were, without exception, the enemies of all humanity.”

(Readers of Fitzpatrick’s War may recall that the late 20th and early 21st century are classified colloquially in this universe as “the Age of Shit.”)

The central plot of the book concerns the present ruler of the Yukon Confederacy, Lady Chelsea or “The Chrysanthemum Woman”. Again, if you have read the Fitzpatrick’s War footnotes, you will already know, in broad outlines, what will happen to her and her decadent court.

But as always with Judson (yes, even in Martian General) the point of the story is about those little individual lives that get lost when historians write on a scale of the rise and fall of empires. The book captures all the little details of life that are swept away in the great tides of time. (Ironically, this is exactly the sort of history that two characters explicitly endorse in the story itself… and are denounced by Dr. Murrey for believing in.)

In the end, like real history, the book doesn’t provide us with easy answers, and every reader must work out for themselves their own interpretations of events. In that regard, Judson held true to the spirit of Fitzpatrick’s War.

So, in the final analysis, is The Timerman as good as Fitzpatrick’s War?

Not quite, I think. The way the footnotes contradict the main narrative in FW was a masterful bit of writing, and this book lacks that. And the funny part is, I don’t even really blame Judson for not doing that again, because it would have felt cheap. It would have been awesome if he had come up with a different, but equally clever framing device—but that’s essentially asking him to catch lightning in a bottle again.

The Timerman is nevertheless a worthy follow-up to Fitzpatrick’s War, and like its predecessor deserves to be read by lovers of science-fiction and history alike.