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Book cover for 'The Jump' by Mark Paxson featuring a silhouette of a construction crane against a sunset backdrop with the tagline: 'Nothing is as it seems, everything is as it should be.'

Every now and again, you get an opportunity as a reviewer to tell the world about a book before the world has had a chance to form an opinion on it. It’s rarer than you might think. When you review a classic book, most people have already at least heard of it. When it’s a book by a famous author, preconceived ideas based on that author’s other works are bound to color how it is perceived.

But this is a new book, by an indie author who I am honored to call a friend and who has yet to become widely known to the world at large. And more’s the pity for the world, because once you read Mark Paxson, you don’t stop reading him. You eagerly anticipate his next work.

Let’s say you are among the select group of people of taste and discernment who already do read Paxson. I am in this group. I’ve read his collections of short stories, and his literary novella, and his legal drama. I’ve read his coming-of-age novel and his psychological thriller.

Are you seeing the pattern here? Or, more accurately, the lack of a pattern here? Mark Paxson doesn’t write the same book twice. He experiments. He takes risks. He dares. He wins.

Which brings us, finally, to The Jump. What kind of a book is it?

Well, it’s about a dystopian United States where the President has declared martial law and sent squads of thugs, known as “the President’s Men”, to terrorize the population.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. That this is a commentary on current events. Maybe you don’t like commentary on current events in your fiction. But I promise you, it’s not what you think. Stick with it. Don’t assume that it’s some lazy attempt at relevance-by-real-world-reference like we get from so much of the commoditized entertainment industrial complex these days. It’s not that at all.

Which is not to say it is not relevant! Oh, it’s plenty relevant, to be sure. We’ll get to that, fear not.

By the way, I won’t explain what the title means. It’s not a spoiler, because it’s explained in chapter one, but the way Paxson describes it is unforgettable. I should know, because I read the opening of this story nearly a decade ago, and it stuck with me all these years.

The Jump tells the story of a man named Richard Bell, on a quest to avenge his wife’s death, which he feels he can only do by punishing the man responsible: the President.

Following after him are his children, who soon realize their father is out for revenge. Separately, father and children journey across the shattered remnant of the USA, witnessing haunting visions of Americana fallen into decrepitude, and patrolled ceaselessly by the President’s Men.

Along the way, they meet an odd collection of characters, such as Tobin J Oxblood, another man haunted by the loss of the country he once knew. And then there’s Tum Tum Run, my personal favorite character. I won’t say anything about him other than he’s like if Tom Bombadil found his way into a Tom Clancy novel. If that doesn’t make you want to read this, nothing will.

Needless to say, it’s a long, strange trip. As the cross-country journey leads inexorably towards Washington D.C., the central theme, taken from the President’s book of maxims, is hammered home again and again:

Nothing is as it seems. Everything is as it should be.

To quote another American President: “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.” It is repeated in the book like a leitmotif, as well it should be. It’s really the key to the whole story.

I won’t say more about the plot here. Just know that it begins as a dark story of despair and revenge, and ends up in a place you would never expect given where it started. It’s a brilliant, mind-bending, plot-twisting odyssey through dystopia, told at every step with the emotional, almost poetic writing we expect from a Paxson novel. 

But now we come to the really important question: what was the author trying to symbolize in this book?

Okay, okay; this started as an in-joke for the Writers Supporting Writers group and our viewers. None of us are huge fans of analyzing the symbolism in fiction, and when I said I would discuss that in my review of this book, it was really a lighthearted comment.

And yet… the question nagged at me. There can be no doubt, after all, that every author is influenced by his or her time and place, the milieu in which they live. The Count of Monte Cristo is a classic that transcends its setting, but would Dumas have written quite the same book if the conflict of Bonapartism vs. Royalism had not been on his mind? So it is with all of us.

And moreover, each reader interprets any given book in a different way, based on his or her own particular experiences and beliefs. If I did not play video games like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Fallout: New Vegas, if I had not recently read books like The Image by Daniel J. Boorstin and The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore, I would not have come up with the interpretation I am about to lay before you. But I did and I have, so I will.

The first thing to know, per Boorstin, is that, dating back to the 19th-century, America (along with the rest of the world) has been transformed by what he called “the graphic revolution”. Thanks to printed matter, photography, film, television and finally the internet, people receive news in the form of transmitted images, so much so that thinking of the image of a thing is more common than thinking of the thing itself. 

The second thing to know is that the human mind is primarily built on its facility for imitation. The smallest unit of a thing to be imitated is a called a meme, an analogue to the gene in the biological world. Thanks to Boorstin’s Graphic Revolution, these memes can now be transmitted instantly around the world, leading to people imitating “viral” (the word is more apt than many realize) fashions, fads, ways of speaking, etc.

This is the world of the internet, the super-connected noösphere of de Chardin; the world you are in right now as you read these words, and the one I am in while I am writing them. We are able to bridge the temporal displacement between my writing them and your reading them effortlessly, thanks to DARPA’s miraculous invention.

And note that that this is not quite the same thing as the real world. You know, IRL. Meatspace. There is a certain overlap, but the world of physical reality is still separate from the interwebs.

How does all of this relate to The Jump? Well, here it is, ladies and gents: Berthold’s Unified Theory of What The Jump is Symbolizing. Are you ready?

What happens in The Jump is what would happen if the world of the internet could be transmuted into physical reality.

That’s why so much weirdness abounds. The President in The Jump is effectively the influencer-in-chief, requiring the population to mimic whatever fad his algorithm chooses to promote. (Remember, an algorithm need not necessarily be electronic or computer-based, but is an ancient mathematical concept. The word is an Anglicization of a Latinization of the name of a 9th-century Persian mathematician.)

Similarly, especially towards the end, the story is increasingly full of metafictional references to other things. I’ll give you a hint: there’s a nod to The Princess Bride at one point. These fourth-wall-breaking Easter Eggs are more than just in-jokes; they are symptomatic of a ubiquitous feature of internet culture, i.e. pop culture references. Only here, they are shown in the physical reality of the world itself, rather than in the form of reaction GIFs.

In some sense, the act of “the jump” for which the story is titled is the concept of “rage-quitting” as manifested in real life. Which of course has a very different effect than when it is purely a metaphor for logging off. And yet, as biosphere and noösphere continue to converge… well, it does give one pause, that’s all.

Anyway, that’s my take on it. Of course you might ask, did Mark mean to do any of this? Well, I haven’t asked him, but probably not. But what do we mean when we say we mean something? Do I mean to write every word in one of these rambling reviews of mine before I sit down and type it out? Not really. At the end of the day, I’m just a monkey with an unusually high capacity for imitation and a really powerful typewriter. So I just start hammering them keys and see where it takes me.

The important thing, though, is that you really need to read The Jump. You might think my interpretation is complete BS, and that’s fine. One of the signs of a great work of literature is critics preparing bogus interpretations of it. The work is strong enough it can withstand any cockamamie reading anybody wants to give it. 

But people do have to read it! This step cannot be skipped. Set aside whatever political biases you may have, be you Republican or Democratic, Whig or Tory, Bonapartist or Royalist, and approach the book with an open mind. I can almost guarantee that by the end it will not be what you expected at the beginning. And above all, it will make you think.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

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“A Steampunk Conspiracy Christmas story!” What magical words! How could anyone not read something with such a subtitle? What does this world need, if not more Steampunk Conspiracy Christmas stories?

This one is a quick read, telling the story of a girl who has purchased lights for her orphanage’s Christmas tree. A series of chance encounters lead her to more than she bargained for, including an encounter with some rather shady characters who are mixed up in the holiday business.

The story is very short, and as a result, there isn’t as much world-building as one typically expects from a steampunk story. Aside from a few touches here and there, it was most a standard Victorian-esque setting.

I did like the hints of a totalitarian government assigning people to jobs, as this carried just enough hints of dystopia to make it interesting, without overwhelming the rest of the story.

All told, this is more of a quick sketch than a fully-fleshed out tale. But still, it’s a tantalizing glimpse of what could be. Perhaps, we may dare to hope, it presages the dawn of a whole genre of Christmas steampunk conspiracy stories. Imagine bookshelves stocked with seasonal tales of this type. Imagine a whole channel, like the Hallmark channel, but dedicated to films in this genre. I could go on, but you get the idea.

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Who doesn’t love a good dystopia? To read about, I mean.

The country (maybe more of a city-state) of Deres-Thorm is a bizarre, surreal nightmare, evocative of North Korea, East Berlin, and every other totalitarian dystopia. The unsuspecting narrator, Horus Blassingame, is thrown from one bizarre obstacle to another, whether it’s from the constantly changing street and building names, the two distinct dialects, or the constant paranoia of the security forces.

The book is darkly comic, with an emphasis on the dark. There are some scenes that are not too far off of Room 101 from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Still, the narrator remains relatively upbeat, despite the torturous conditions he often finds himself in.

It’s a very funny satire on the kinds of horrors that can occur in a Stalinist bureaucracy. I’d call it Kafkaesque, although I’ve never read Kafka, so I may be wrong. But it certainly sounds like the sort of thing I’ve heard people call “Kafkaesque.” (And, well, it says so on the cover.) It also called to mind G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, with its surreal and simultaneously funny and disturbing takes on political theory.

I like the book a lot, so I don’t want the following complaints to be misconstrued as reasons not to read it. But I have to put them out there all the same.

First, the only named female character (not counting the genderless Th’pugga) is a prostitute. This is a pet peeve of mine, but I swear, so much modern fiction gives you the idea that prostitution is always and everywhere running rampant. Yes, yes, I know; “world’s oldest profession” and all that; but really.

The second point isn’t even really a criticism, but more of an observation. The most significant exchange in the book, which sums up the entire philosophy governing Deres-Thorm, is when the main antagonist, Pokska, explains that citizens are bound by the laws of their own countries while in Deres-Thorm, just as all citizens of Deres-Thorm are bound by their laws no matter where they are in the world. The logic behind this, he elaborates, is that “the citizen is the property of the State.”

This is pretty horrifying, right? It’s close to a re-formulation of Mussolini’s “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.” It’s basically the central concept of totalitarianism, and the reader is not slow in seeing how it can lead to exactly the kinds of horrors depicted in this book–not to mention in real life.

But, wait. What is the state? The state is legalized violence, because the state has a monopoly on the legal use of force. (Don’t take my word for it, take Max Weber’s, one of the founders of modern sociology.) In governments structured as liberal democracies and constitutional republics, the people consent to authorize the state to use violence. We issue them a badge, as it were. In other, more brutal forms of government, the state doesn’t need to show the people any stinkin’ badges.

This is an important difference, and I don’t want to minimize it. But… even in liberal democracies… the state still has the authority to deprive us of our freedoms, if it has some reason to do so. Theoretically, at least, the people can hold the state accountable so that it will use its terrible powers only for good. Theoretically. But it has terrible powers, all the same…

My point is, the state kind of does own the citizen, by definition.  It can pretend it doesn’t; it can put all sorts of accountability measures and checks and balances in place–and it should, and it does. But still.

And yet, not every state is a hellish Orwellian nightmare. So the state owns the people. So what? Just because you own something doesn’t mean you’ll destroy or mistreat it. Generally the opposite, actually. The problem is when the machinery of the state is controlled by psychopaths. Which, admittedly, happens alarmingly often. And even once is too often. Obviously, the power of the state is alluring to psychopaths, with results like those seen in A True Map of the City.

What I’m driving at here, in my usual roundabout way, is that the book seems to be trying to determine what it is that makes a government go insane and stop serving its people, and instead become a simple exercise in power for power’s sake; to preserve by any means necessary the status of the ruling class.

What we’re really trying to figure out is, “what is the root of tyrannical government?” To determine exactly how creeps like Pokska and Th’pugga came to be running the show in Deres-Thorm.

In an early draft of this review, I had a much longer section on this question, referencing Lord Acton and Plato’s Republic and lots of other stuff like that on the origins of tyranny. But I cut that, because it was wandering too far from the topic at hand. I didn’t want to do that to you. (Again.) But I hope I’ve at least convinced you that there are lots of big ideas in this little book. Maybe some powerful mind will do a truly cogent interpretation of it, like Christopher Hitchens on Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But as of right now it only has one review on Amazon, (5 stars, of course) so I think I can safely say it needs more readers.