by on

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!

by on

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.

by on

This is a good outline of a story. It’s a techno-thriller about a police detective investigating a murder. The murder victim is one of the “chipped”–that is, someone implanted with nano-chip technology.

The supposed perpetrator is one of the “unchipped”, the downtrodden underclass who have few rights. Due to the word “supposed” there, you probably suspect, as the detective does, that there is more to this story.

And indeed, there is. It’s a cyberpunk story, so of course it’s a dark tale of corrupt government officials and greedy corporations. It’s a good plot, but since it’s serving as an intro to a six book series, it has to be short.

And is it ever short. That’s why I say it feels like a good outline of a story, rather than a good story. There’s plenty of interesting material here, but it’s all just handed to us in info-dump style, rather than truly conveyed as part of a narrative.

It’s interesting to compare and contrast this book with Nightside City. Both are books about a cybernetically-enhanced detective trying to untangle a web of corruption, with only their own gut instincts and their lovingly-described sidearm to aid them.

The difference is that Nightside City is a fully-realized, vividly-painted world unto itself. This book was more like an elevator pitch for what could be a good story. Of course, it’s only meant as a teaser for the series as a whole, so what can you expect? But I guess the really unsatisfying thing about it is that it wasted some plot elements that could have been really effective had they been properly set up and fleshed out, rather than dispensed with in summary fashion.

by on

“Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” as the old saying goes. Well, actually, some people do try to do something about it, but the weather is an immensely complex system, and doing something about it is dangerous, especially if you don’t understand it.

This field guide was recommended to me by a woman who works at my local gym, and when I saw the author was a Purdue alum, I was especially interested. I have long believed, as hinted in the book Fitzpatrick’s War, that a secret society of Purdue grads controls the world. I’ve met quite a few Boilermakers, and I can easily imagine them all gathering to boast, like the Stonecutters.

The book begins with an overview of the science behind weather, including a few basic physics principles. Then we have some definitions. (Freezing rain is rain that is frozen, for example.) But after that, we get to the really juicy stuff: namely, what you can determine about the weather from looking at the clouds. I had no idea there were so many different types of clouds; and this book presents detailed explanations of what they all mean, complete with pictures.

Unfortunately, I still can’t claim to be an expert on recognizing the different clouds. But then, I’ve only had a few days. With practice, and with repeated reference to the book, I may be able to become a more competent amateur weather spotter.

Because frankly, the weather is a bit of an obsession of mine. Not least because I’ve noticed the forecasts are almost always wrong. This annoys me. I like to be prepared, and how can I be prepared if I have inaccurate information?

For my money, the best weather forecast site is Tornado HQ. Because it isn’t a forecast site; it’s just a live radar of severe weather. (Sadly for my international readers, it only works for the U.S.) You can look at it and, once you have a feel for how the wind blows, probably guess when the next round of rain or snow will hit. I’ve found I get a far better estimate by doing this than by looking at Wunderground or Accuweather. And just forget about the Apple Weather app; it’s completely bonkers.

Anyway, back to the book. Besides the clouds, the most vital piece of info I got from it was that when you want to know how humid it is, don’t look at the humidity. Look instead at the dew point; that’s the real indicator. Another good metric, which I already knew, is barometric pressure. (The executive summary is: high pressure good, low pressure bad.)

All told, this is a handy guide to refer to if you want to learn how to tell if it’s going to rain for your evening commute just by eyeballing it. And you might as well, because you are not going to get reliable info from the local TV news or the internet.

by on

Do you remember a few weeks ago, when I rhapsodized about my love of powered armor? Well, related to that, I also have a fondness for giant battle tanks, mechs, and other giant armored weapons platforms. Maybe, like other aspects of my personality, it’s thanks to Metal Gear Solid.

The titular “trolls” in this story are massive battle tanks called “Bolos”. Our protagonist is a man named Jackson who has awakened from suspended animation in some sort of military base. He stumbles outside to find the door guarded by one of these huge units. He manages to evade it and sets out to find his way home.

Unfortunately, as often happens in science-fiction stories, he realizes he’s been asleep far longer than he realized, and that the world has turned into a war-torn dystopia. He returns to his old home, and finds it a ruin, inhabited only by an eccentric old man.

Gradually, Jackson learns that this ravaged hell-scape is ruled by a mysterious figure called “the Baron,” who is believed to possess powerful and terrible mana which enables him to control the “troll” guarding his estate—that is, another Bolo. With help from the old man, Jackson makes his way there, and infiltrates one of the Baron’s social gatherings by disguising himself as a haughty officer.

So far, this sounds like a typical post-apocalyptic affair. And it is, but what sets it apart is the style of writing. It’s written like a hardboiled Chandler-esque detective story, with memorable lines and plenty of gallows humor. Darkly comic metaphors and similes abound: “The joy ran out of his face like booze from a dropped jug.” “The grin fell like a stripper’s bra.” etc.

At one point, the old man tells Jackson many of his shotgun shells are spent:

“There are shells–but the magic is gone from many.”

“That’s the way magic is, Pop. It goes out of things before you notice.” 

And then there is this magnificent passage from Jackson’s infiltration of the Baron’s estate, which I cannot resist quoting at length:

This was Baronial country, all right. A pair of guards stood at the far end of the corridor.

I’d passed half a dozen with no more than a click of heels to indicate they saw me. These two shouldn’t be any different—and it wouldn’t look good if I turned and started back at the sight of them. The first rule of the gate-crasher is to look as if you belong where you are.

I headed in their direction.

When I was fifty feet from them, they both shifted rifles—not to present-arms position, but at the ready. The nickle-plated bayonets were aimed right at me. It was no time for me to look doubtful; I kept on coming. At twenty feet, I heard their rifle bolts snick home. I could see the expressions on their faces now; they looked as nervous as a couple of teen-age sailors on their first visit to a joy-house.

“Point those butter-knives into the corner, you banana-fingered cotton choppers!” I said, looking bored and didn’t waver. I unlimbered my swagger-stick and slapped my gloved hand with it, letting them think it over. The gun muzzles dropped—just slightly.

“Heard the rifle bolts snick home!” “Banana-fingered cotton choppers!” It’s all so vivid, and, despite being a tense moment in our hero’s journey, rather funny.

If I have a complaint about the book, it’s that it all moves a little too fast. There a surprising number of plot twists packed into this for a short story, and sometimes it feels like we receive a really head-turning bit of information, but have to move on to the next thing before it’s even been processed. It’s a little like a Twilight Zone episode, if the Twilight Zone had had the budget to build futuristic battle tank sets. Can you imagine?

I highly recommend this story to anybody who enjoys sci-fi adventure or Golden Age pulp stories told with flair and wit. And, of course, to my fellow giant tank enthusiasts. I haven’t talked about it much so as not to spoil anything, but rest assured that the Bolos see plenty of action in the last act of the story.

by on

Ah, submarine warfare! Sure, kids these days have their grand notions about space battles, and romantics may long for the days when Hearts of Oak Really Ruled The Waves, but me? Give me being locked in a cramped metal tube deep under the ocean for months at a time, breathing stale air and never seeing trees, grass, or sunshine.

No, actually, I’m kidding. Being a submariner sounds horrible, and I have nothing but respect for people who serve their country by doing it.

Search and Destroy tells the story of such people, an American submarine crew engaged in a massive war against China, as seen largely through the eyes of Commander Christopher Coe.

Captain Coe is a harsh disciplinarian, and as the book goes on, he sometimes veers close to being a Captain Bligh. His harsh, no-nonsense attitude leads him to clash repeatedly with his executive officer, Richard Wickham.

And that’s about it on the human drama level. Most of the book’s conflict comes from listing the various pieces of awesome high-tech naval weaponry the dueling vessels (it’s more fun if you pronounce it “wessels“) hurl at one another. I admit, these scenes were a bit hard to follow–as I would imagine real-life submarine warfare is.

The book says it’s a techno-thriller on the cover, so I can hardly complain about the many references to technology. I don’t have a problem with that.

I do have a problem with the some of the prose style. For example, people say “very well” astonishingly often aboard this sub. Now, again, I’ve never been in the military, so I don’t know, but I would think the terser “okay” or “yes” would be the preferred form in intense, often radio-transmitted communications.

And then there are other oddities of style, perhaps the most interesting of which is:

“Aye, sir,” Wickham nodded through gritted teeth.

Obviously, what this means to say is “Wickham nodded and said ‘aye, sir’ through gritted teeth.” I’m not sure how you nod “through” gritted teeth. It sounds painful. But even apart from that, just try saying “aye, sir” while gritting your teeth.

But, we’re not here for lyrical prose. It’s true that some of the most interesting books about submarine warfare feature clever writing and complex psychological drama, but this one is more in the vein of Tom Clancy, where the point of the story is to watch our heroes defy the odds over and over and defeat the bad guys with their awesome technology.

And you can’t say it isn’t popular! The book has almost 4,000 reviews on Amazon, most of them positive. And for all I know, it may be a perfectly realistic depiction of how a submarine operates. Which just affirms my desire to never be on one.

by on

Sentient Secrets is a short story that packs a lot into a few pages. It’s a teaser for the novel Sisters Arcana. The protagonist is Lulu Wren, whose company mandates her to do a journaling project with an AI assistant.

At first, Lulu finds the exercise tedious, stupid, and cringeworthy. But soon, after gathering enough input from her, the AI starts producing new entries in her voice. More than that, it soon seems that entries in the journal have predictive power.

It was a compelling concept, and made me interested in reading Sisters Arcana. I’ll probably pick that one up at some point.

I am, as you may have noticed, extremely interested in non-linear conceptions of time. Try reading about the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment sometime. It doesn’t actually demonstrate that information can be sent backward in time. However, it takes advanced knowledge of quantum mechanics to explain why it doesn’t demonstrate that, which means that it’s close enough to time-travel for government work.

Time-travel is a bit mind-bending to think about, and that is probably why it’s one of those concepts best suited to machine minds, which are entirely comfortable with hallucinations and things that sound cool but make no logical sense to those of us made out of meat.

This kind of techno-sorcery is what is going on in Sentient Secrets, and if this blend of esoteric mysticism and modern computer technology doesn’t put you in mind of the CCRU, well… congratulations, that means you’re a normal, well-adjusted person. How did you even find this blog? Were you perchance led to it by The Almighty Algorithm?

Well, like Hunter S. Thompson said, “when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” The computer age is proving to be a weird one indeed, and Sentient Secrets is a concise distillation of that weirdness.

by on

Literary theorist Georg Lukács said that novels were “the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given.”

Well, who am I to argue? But let me just say that I think it is hard to capture all that in a single novel, unless maybe you’re doing it the Russian way. But the short story collection, now there’s a way to capture “the totality of life.”

Pacotti is like Mark Paxson and a few other gifted writers of literary fiction who have this extraordinary ability to inhabit the heads of different people and show the world from their perspective. This collection is a beautiful mosaic of unique characters in varied circumstances, all written with care and empathy. Whether it’s the wife of an alcohol smuggler in Tehran, a pair of rebels in a dystopian Hong Kong, or a young boy growing up believing he will never be as brilliant as the rich kids in his class due to their chemically-induced mental advantage, Pacotti invites us to walk around in many different shoes.

Of course, I knew of Pacotti first from his work on the dystopian video game Deus Ex, and later from his prophetic neo-noir cyberpunk horror thriller Demiurge. Both of these are absolute classics of 21st-century sci-fi, and each share many things in common with the stories found in this volume.

The most obvious common element among these stories is… drugs. Not just the typical illegal kind (though those certainly show up) but all manner of mind-altering substances, both real and, at least so far, imagined. Pacotti returns again and again to the subject of chemically changing the patterns of the brain.

And yet, at the same time, he clearly isn’t just a materialist who sees consciousness as just an accidental product of a bubbling stew of chemicals. There is an implicit human core that is somewhere beyond the reach of the drugs, and that’s the part that makes Pacotti’s work so haunting. Over and over, we meet characters exposed to the most fundamentally anti-human and unnatural circumstances, but what makes the story work is the undeniable basic humanity struggling to break through.

I haven’t done a very good job describing these stories, and I am sorry for that. The power of them is a hard thing to concisely summarize; it’s more like a feeling that gradually steals over you as you read, and find yourself rooting for (or against) his vividly-drawn characters.

I liked all the stories, but probably my top three are “Evil Spirits Travel in Straight Lines”, the eerily prescient “Conversations with the Noösphere” and “Incantation.” All the stories are available on the author’s website, so I encourage you to check these out, and read the rest if you enjoy them as much as I did. Pacotti is one of the great sci-fi authors of our era, and when the history of fin de millénaire literature is written—if it is written—it will be impossible not to include his name in it.

by on

The great Noah Goats once told me something I’ve never forgotten. “Berthold,” he said to me, “books lead on to books, sometimes in strange ways.” Then he closed up his butterfly knife and walked away into the darkness.

Okay, I’m embellishing. But he really did tell me that. And he was right. Today’s book is a case in point: it’s written by one of the authors of Best, which I reviewed last week. Reading another book by an author of a book you’ve enjoyed may not seem that strange, but what piqued my interest is that while Best, is a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia, Kenai is military science-fiction.

This got my attention. There aren’t many authors who dabble in genres as diverse as that. (Full disclosure: I have also written a light-hearted rom-com satire of academia and military science-fiction. Now are you starting to get an idea of what kind of eccentricity it takes? 🙂 )

Kenai tells the story of Jess Amiko, an ex-space marine trying to forget her past. During her time in the service, she was railroaded into serving a prison sentence for war crimes. They really gave her the Breaker Morant treatment, minus the firing squad, obviously. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t have plenty to feel justifiably guilty about! She does, and… she does.

Once she is finally released from prison, Amiko works as a private security guard on the world of Kenai, assisting with an archeological dig to uncover the ruins of a lost civilization.

Naturally, things don’t go smoothly. Amiko soon finds herself under attack by mercenary thugs, meeting sentient trees, and generally having a whole bunch of experiences that make her question her own sanity.

Interwoven with all this are flashbacks to her time in the service and in prison, including the lengthy counseling sessions she underwent as part of her rehabilitation. These scenes serve to flesh out her character, and also serve another purpose…

…a purpose which I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to divulge. You see, about halfway through the book, there’s a very clever plot twist that forces you to reevaluate a good deal of what came before. And after. But I can’t explain what that is without spoiling it, and that would be very wrong. Now, I could it put it behind a spoiler tag, ’tis true. But in these days of AI combing through everything to slap together answers for inquiring minds, I can’t guarantee my spoiler might not find its way into some LLM-generated reply to a query, and I wouldn’t want that. Therefore, it’s very important I not talk about some of the things that happen in this book.

(Curiously, it occurs to me that not talking about some of the things that happen is also a key plot element in the book itself. There appears to be some sort of recursive hyperstition effect at work in this text which affects not only the book itself, but also writings about the book. But probably best not to think about it too hard. “How quaint the ways of Paradox! / At common sense she gaily mocks!”)

But anyway, what I can say is that this is a fine MilSciFi adventure. Who doesn’t love the trope of a flawed protagonist on a quest for redemption? Especially if that quest for redemption involves the liberal use of POWERED ARMOR!

Gad, I love powered armor. Any story is automatically rendered better by the inclusion of powered armor. Remember how like 15 years ago there was a fad for rewriting classic works of literature but with zombies? That really never moved me, but if they did it with powered armor? Pride and Prejudice and Powered Armor even sounds better!

In short, I unhesitatingly recommend Kenai to anyone who enjoys science-fiction and clever, mind-bending plot twists. Be sure not to skip over the author’s note at the end if you’re a writer, it reveals interesting details about the process.