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Remember that book, CCRU Writings: 1997 – 2003 that I reviewed last Fall? The one full of weird occult philosophical ramblings about AI, techno-demons, and inhuman pseudo-mythology?

If you read that review, or the book itself, and thought, “that was good, but it’s just not bizarre enough”, well, my friend, have I got good news for you!

Cyclonopedia is written in an academic style. Or rather, it’s what would happen if H.P. Lovecraft wrote in an academic style while on acid.

The book is framed as a found manuscript discovered by an American tourist on a trip to the Middle East. What she finds is a disordered collection of notes loosely centered on the works of a Dr. Hamid Parsani, who has developed an esoteric theory of the world, particularly the Muslim world, and the Global War on Terror.

Dr. Parsani’s thesis, insofar as it can be discerned from the many cryptic documents and references, is that the Middle East is actually a conscious organism, powered by a dark god that lives beneath its surface. This viscous Lovecraftian xeno-intelligence is the substance we know as “oil”, and it subtly shapes humanity to suit its purposes. It runs our machines, drives our economies, and provides the impetus for massive wars, all in an effort to increase its control over the Earth as it seeks to burn as bright as its nemesis, the Sun.

Scattered throughout the writing by and about Parsani are references to other characters, including an American soldier called “Colonel West”, a Kurtz-like figure who has begun to understand the bizarre and occult nature of the battlefield and gone rogue, leading a renegade Delta Force unit on brutal sorties informed by his and Dr. Parsani’s research into the esoteric nature of the desert and the demonic forces that rule it.

This West character is especially interesting to me because in certain respects he parallels the real-life Lt. Col. Allen West, who was tried for the use of unnecessary force during the Iraq War, even down to such minor details as the fictional West’s fascination with oil and the real-life West’s line that “if it’s about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I’d go through hell with a gasoline can,” which he said by way of defending his actions. Is this literary license, satire, hyperstition, or mere coincidence?

I’m probably making this sound more compelling than it is. Parts of it read like a really dry and incredibly confusing dissertation, punctuated by moments of bizarre horror that aren’t as shocking as they might be simply because they feel so out-of-left-field. Still, like CCRU, the book does manage to gradually instill a sense of gnawing unease in the reader.

And also like CCRU, most of this unease comes from the fact that its central insane thesis seems to align with observable facts. If the Middle East really is a sentient force that compels humanity to wage eternal war over the black gold beneath it, we would expect to see exactly what we do see in the real world.

More curious still are some of the things that the philosophy of Cyclonopedia implies rather than stating outright. For instance, the curious fact that the monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all originated in the Middle East, and slowly but surely defeated and subjugated the sun-worshipping religions—a fact which dovetails with the supposed envy the dark god oil harbors against the sun. (“Since the beginning of time, Man has yearned to destroy the sun!“)

It’s worth noting that the basic concept here isn’t all that different from Dune: a mysterious desert populated by a adherents of an esoteric religion, and a vital resource that is key to control of the universe. Frank Herbert based his story on the Muslim world to begin with; Cyclonopedia is like what would happen if you removed the sci-fi setting, and restored Dune‘s weird, psychedelic vibe to Mesopotamia proper. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Cyclonopedia is stranger than both.

Now, this is where I need to step back and acknowledge that most people are not like me. Most people like a story with a coherent beginning, middle, and end, and do not like to feel like their understanding of reality is slowly unraveling when they read a book. So I probably have a higher tolerance for this sort of mind-bending madness than most. And even I was getting impatient after a while. In a lot of ways, the book felt like it was building up to a payoff that it never delivered.

So, should you read it? If you love bizarre esoteric theory-fiction that requires a huge amount of close reading to even begin to understand. Since I think that only describes about nine people in the entire world, it’s likely not for you. But if you’re one of the nine, you’ll probably love it.

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There’s an old line which I’ve seen attributed to Pericles: “just because you don’t take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.” I am very skeptical as to whether Pericles said this, but the sentiment is fundamentally sound. Politics exists in all nations at all times, and can be defined simply as the endless competition for the power of governing. In democracies, people compete for votes. In oligarchies, for the support of the strongest factions. In monarchies, for the favor of the crown.

Thus, there will always be politics. In the latest Brad and Karen thriller, the pair are both caught up in developments stemming directly from government policy changes. Brad in that much of his research funding has been terminated and Karen in that she is having to work with a much more aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Both are affected when one of Brad’s colleagues is taken into ICE custody and then mysteriously murdered. As usual, the duo works to solve the murder, though this time getting information through Karen’s usual channels is more difficult, as the federal authorities are very secretive about their operations.

If you’re a fan of Brad and Karen thrillers, I probably don’t have to tell you to read this. Unless, perhaps, you are also so horrified by current events that you don’t want anything that reminds you of them. There were a few, I think, who declined to read Mark Paxson’s wonderful novella The Jump for that very reason. And that’s a pity, because it really was a phenomenal book that explains current events far better than most mainstream news outlets.

So, my advice to prospective readers of this book is to be undeterred by the political themes. Even if you don’t agree with them! As you might guess, the distribution of ratings for this book is bimodal, with some long-time readers of the series being alienated due to the beliefs held by the main characters.

This may be a controversial opinion in itself, but this review just makes me sad. When did people lose the ability to read a story even if they disagree with some of its ideas? Are some people unable to read Kidnapped just because they are not Jacobites? Political disputes, up to and including wars, get forgotten with time. (“Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor…”) What doesn’t get forgotten are good stories.

Well, anyway, back to the book itself: in the end it practically turns into a spy-thriller tale, complete with secret agents leading double lives and a dramatic cycle of betrayal and revenge. And I love a good spy story.

Pick up The ICE Murders. Yes, it might force you to think about things outside of your normal perspective. But isn’t that what books are for?

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“The past is a foreign country,” according to L.P. Hartley. In his latest volume, Zachary Shatzer sets out to explore this foreign country, armed with nothing but his own whimsical sense of humor.

The first, and perhaps most educational section of the book focus on Emily Post’s Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, published in 1922. Specifically, the section the proper usage and modes of address on visiting cards. Personally, I’ve wondered what visiting cards were since I listened to “The Grandson of Abdul Abulbul Amir,”  which includes the line: “and his visiting card / bore the name of this bard: / Count Ivan Skavinsky Skivar.”

Well, they were like business cards (which I’ve also never used) except in the early 1900s, everyone used them for social calls and occasions, and an incredibly complex system of etiquette evolved regarding their use. Ms. Post—excuse me, Mrs. Price Post, which is apparently the correct form of address for a divorcée—describes the rules for what a card should and should not say in different situations.

A few years ago, I reviewed a book that made reference to the debutante season, and I said it felt like reading about an alien civilization. I get that same vibe here. Frankly, the scariest part is that it feels like an alien civilization that is superior to our current one. Like we’re just apes throwing bones at monoliths.

But I digress. Shatzer then turns his humorous touch to more of the jests of Joe Miller, whose work he had previously collected in another volume. If you read that one, this feels like more of the same, although personally, I thought some the jests were too dark. As Shatzer notes, hating one’s spouse seems to be a source of much of Miller’s comedic material this time around.

From there we get an excerpt from a book (which sounded promising, I might actually read it), a selection of fables from the notoriously jaundiced eye of Ambrose Bierce, and a complete short story about baseball. Now, here I must confess that I find baseball to be extremely boring, and unless a work of fiction about it is written by, say, Mark Paxson or Kevin Brennan, it’s not a must-read for me. Shatzer’s humorous asides make it tolerable.

We then get another set of acerbic observations on relations between the sexes from a writer named Helen Rowland. I’d never heard of her before. Sadly, she seems to have had bad experiences in relationships. One of the running themes in this section is that men are constantly being unfaithful with chorus girls, which, oddly enough, was apparently the reason Emily Post divorced her husband.

Speaking of Emily Post, the book ends with another set of tips from her, this time on the art of camping, or roughing it without anything rough. This idea of simulating hardship while not actually having anything difficult or upsetting happen is, if anything, the most recognizably modern sentiment in the book. Perhaps that’s the reason Shatzer chose to end on that note, to remind us that we are not so different from our ancestors after all.

As a whole, the book is a charming look into the past, and an invitation to reflect on what future eras may think of our own. The public domain is a treasure trove of interesting works, and I hope Shatzer continues this practice of adding his commentary to older works. They can enliven even rather dull stories.

And I would also note that The Great Gatsby recently entered the public domain, so if Mr. Shatzer ever feels “borne back ceaselessly into the past…”

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The first thing to clarify here is that the title is intentionally provocative, to the point of being misleading. I think a lot of people read it and assume the idea is that the whole thing was faked, and that Baudrillard was some kind of conspiracy theorist. But really he was something much crazier and more dangerous: a French philosopher.

And in this series of essays, he does not deny that something happened in the Persian Gulf in 1991. But he disputes that what it was was really a war. Or at least, contrary to Fallout, that “war has changed.” Would King Leonidas or even Ernst Jünger recognize modern warfare? Airstrikes and cyberattacks have taken the place of direct combat between infantry in many conflicts, and Baudrillard argues the first Gulf War was an example of war being fought for the purpose of spectacle. Whoever convinces the TV audience they are winning is winning, regardless of what the actual situation in reality may be.

This ties in to Baudrillard’s signature idea of “hyperreality”, a condition of the modern world in which what we call reality is actually largely fake, with symbols having taken the place of the things themselves. For the vast majority of people, their experience of the war was solely in the images presented to them via mass media.

If this sounds like Daniel J. Boorstin to you, then congratulations! You have been a careful and attentive reader. Boorstin was a forerunner of Baudrillard, and nothing about this replacement of the territory with the map would surprise him. Honestly, if you read The Image, you’ll find yourself chuckling sardonically as DJB’s prophecy of 30 years earlier is fulfilled.

These are interesting ideas, and they seem to have become only more relevant since Baudrillard wrote them. Unfortunately, the essays themselves are rather hard to read since they are (a) dense abstract philosophy and (b) translated from French. I think it’s a very good translation, but still, there is just some inevitable weirdness that creeps in as a result. That’s on top of all the other weirdness in play here.

The fundamental problem isn’t really this new type of war at all; rather, it’s a symptom of our global communications networks. Back in the old days, if the Greeks fought the Persians, most people not in Persia or Greece had no reason to know or care about it. But in the modern world, when there’s an armed conflict anywhere, especially between nuclear powers, everyone hears about it. And has an opinion on it.

As is often the way with books like this, the author does a magnificent job describing the problem, and a very poor job describing how to solve it. Baudrillard leaves us only with a note of warning for what these virtual wars imply for the future of the world:

“The more the hegemony of the global consensus is reinforced. the greater the risk, or the chances, of its collapse.”

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Only Adam Bertocci could take one of the oldest and tritest riddles in the book (it dates to 1847, I discovered in writing this post) and transform it into a compelling work of literary fiction.  I mean, really, in this very short story he manages to weave together feelings of romance, fate, heartbreak, and dark comedy. I’ve read novels that didn’t have as much going on in them as this book does.

It’s the story of a chicken named Bertram, and the reasons that he decides to flee the farm life and go to… the other side. But, like many another literary crossing, this is more than just a literal crossing. It is a spiritual transformation.

This is somehow both very moving and deeply funny. I’m reminded of Paul Graham’s essay “Taste for Makers”:

The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings– or Shakespeare, for that matter.

That’s Bertocci to a “T”. He crafts something that is simultaneously a parody of the literary short form and a magnificent example of it. And he does it while staying true to the source material. The same cannot be said of many another modern adaptation.

And while I’ve never been as good at writing to prompts as, say, my friend Mark Paxson is… this made me wonder: what other hackneyed jokes or riddles could be repurposed as fodder for literary works? Knock, knock… who is there?

Well, I’ll leave that up to the rest of you. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for a quick and clever literary experiment, pick this up.

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New Dawn is a military sci-fi thriller. The premise is that a dystopian Earth sent the titular colony ship to Mars, crewed by dissident and free-thinking scientists and explorers, who rebelled against the authoritarian Earth governments. The ship disappeared, and it was assumed that all the crew had been lost.

Many years later, New Dawn reappears in the sky above Earth, with a mysterious crew and sending ominous messages demanding Earth submit to their demands or face an invasion.

The Earth nations quickly scramble to fight back against this foe, including rounding up a team of their best engineers and scientists to go aboard. They are some of Earth’s most brilliant minds—and, as it happens, some of them have crossed paths before, and not in pleasant ways. This leads to tension between people like the brilliant engineer and his bitter ex-lover, as well as the young graduate student who would very much like to become his current lover.

There’s plenty of emotional turmoil among Earth’s military personnel as well. We have the daring Italian pilot who flies for NATO and the young Russian who fights alongside him. These two were probably my favorite characters in the book.

And then there’s the sinister NATO intelligence officer who oversees the whole operation. A classic manipulative bureaucrat, using blackmail and coercion to get others to play into his hands.

It’s an interesting concept, and the characters have potential. Unfortunately, a number of things didn’t work for me. The dialogue is quite stilted, and much of the prose seemed choppy and repetitive. Also, a number of key plot points were telegraphed early on.

Also, early on in the book, a traumatic event happens to one of the characters. It’s mentioned briefly, and then people carry on as if nothing happened. Then it comes up again much later in the story, as part of a plot twist (although this is one of those things that I could see coming), but then it’s dropped again, and it really shouldn’t be. Because it calls into question the whole modus operandi of what is being presented as a largely sympathetic faction, but it’s just hand-waved away in a couple pages. I wish could be more specific, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The book feels very much like the later Tom Clancy books: many of the plot beats are predictable because it’s quite clear who is supposed to win. Also, like Clancy, the book does get politically heavy-handed towards the end. I’m not against political messaging in books, and I try not to let whether or not I agree with an author’s views color my opinion of a book.

But what does color my opinion of a book is whether the political commentary is handled deftly or not. I mean, what is the point of putting your story in a futuristic sci-fi setting if you are just going to have exactly the same political dynamics as present-day Earth? To me, the advantage of a different setting is to be able to create allegories and analogues to political issues, to allow discussion of topics that otherwise would be too charged to raise.

In summary, I think New Dawn is an interesting concept, but the execution was so-so. But I will say this much: I kept reading it, because I wanted to know what would happen next. And to me, that’s the ultimate test of a story.

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Do you like cozy mysteries? You’ll be hard-pressed to find a cozier mystery than this one. Indeed, I believe it is an example of what the young people call cozy-maxxing.

Of course, this is no surprise for fans of Litka’s work. All his stories take place in a warm, gentle world where even the crimes have a certain pleasant kind of charm. It’s like the world of Wodehouse, albeit with sci-fi technology. But this story is even closer to a Wodehousian never-never land than Litka usually gets. It has a quaint country fair, complete with games and sports. Shades of “The Purity of the Turf.” As if that weren’t enough, there’s a scene where a lady is painting in a field when she is surprised by a sudden rainstorm. Reading this, I instantly was reminded of this intro to a Beatrix Potter video I watched as a child, which is possibly the coziest thing ever.

You’ll notice I haven’t said much about the plot yet. Well, once more, the lawyer-turned-detective Redinal Hu, AKA “Red Wine”, is hired to investigate an intrigue among the Great Houses. A mysterious character called “Agent Nine” has been leaving ominous notes in the dead of night at a wealthy businessman’s estate. No one knows how this Agent Nine gets in or out. Some believe that he or she is no living creature at all, but a ghost haunting the old manse.

A good plot, but if we’re being honest, the plot is not really why we’re here. It’s just an excuse; much as Red’s frequent walks with his dog Ellington are an excuse to see the attractive lady painter holidaying in the nearby village. So if you want an escape into a far more pleasant world than our own, I encourage you to pick up this short story. My only complaint is that it goes by so fast—but then, Litka has given us no shortage of other delightful tales of near equal-coziness to enjoy as well.

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The great philosopher-humorist Zachary Shatzer recently told me I might read “too many books about gritty, unshaven antiheroes who say things like ‘Sometimes a man has to do what must be done.'” And he may well be right. I’m descended from Irish policemen, many of whom probably played by their own rules and refused to do things by the book. So I’m a sucker for stories about tough cops who can’t stand being hamstrung by red tape. My epithet might well be the line Gallus says to Sejanus in an episode of I, Claudius:

A song sung by every small-town corrupt policeman, which is what you are and what you should have stayed!

Well, come to that, I think Sejanus got a bad rap.  He was just trying to get stuff done in the notoriously corrupt Roman Empire. But I digress.

This book is about just one such gritty cop: David Forbes Carter, a brilliant, daring and extremely anti-bureaucracy Interplanetary Police Force agent. Since the mysterious death of his sister, Carter has become an increasingly loose cannon, and so the IPF assigns profiler Veronique de Tournay to try and get a sense of his unstable psychology and determine if he is still fit to serve.

It’s the classic set-up: two cops forced to work together, neither of whom likes the other. It’s been done a thousand times. But, as George Lucas once said, “they’re clichés because they work!” He ought to know. Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark are nothing but clichés, and they became some of the most beloved films in history.

So it is with Phoenix. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and that’s exactly what made it so much fun; like seeing an old friend again after a few years. It doesn’t hurt that Janeski and I seem to have more or less the same vision for what a future solar system-spanning civilization would look like. Space stations, corrupt mega-corporations, cultists, conspiracies, etc. I had a very easy time picturing this world.

And of course, those cultists and conspiracies and mega-corporations soon get in the way of Agent de Tournay’s efforts at profiling Agent Carter, and the pair is caught up in trying to solve a massive plot to destroy the entire interplanetary government. As often as not, they resort to Carter’s decidedly non-standard methods of operating, though with time, Agent de Tournay helps him understand that waving a gun in people’s faces isn’t always the best answer to a problem.

Like I said, if you’re expecting something groundbreaking, you won’t find it here. But if you’re expecting a fun adventure story in a great sci-fi setting, this is just the ticket. And it would make a great movie!

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When the history of our era is written, what will they say about our literature?

I can’t help asking this sort of question. I read about Weimar literature and fin de siècle literature and Victorian literature and all other sorts of literature categorized by historical period. Each one has some pithy one-line summary associated with it: Weimar was “experimental”, fin de siècle was “decadent”, Victorian was “sentimental”, and on and on. These words can hardly be expected to do justice to vast numbers of books written by countless people over periods of years, and each one represents only a general consensus of literary critics and historians. But, you know, you’ve got to start somewhere.

So, again: what are they going to say about our era? You know they’ll say something; they have to. What they say is going to depend on which books they read.

Well, for those future historians writing about “Early 21st century literature”, the works of Adam Bertocci are not a bad place to start. I’ve reviewed many of them already, but since he is not incredibly famous and wealthy thanks to the massive success of his books, clearly I have not reviewed enough of them yet.

Confessions of an Off-Brand Princess starts with a Bertoccian staple: a young woman named Sydney who is working her way through grad school as an employee of her step-mother’s company, which provides rent-a-princess services for children’s birthday parties. Sydney has played versions of all the recognizable fairy tale princesses, albeit with enough plausible deniability so as not to be sued by a certain mega corporation that owns the rights to many of their likenesses.

Sydney likes her job well enough, and her step-sisters are anything but wicked. Still, even though she enjoys her work, she can’t help feeling a sense of malaise as well as loss: her memories of her mother’s early death haunt her, perhaps more than she cares to admit.

The book blends deeply-felt human emotions with the superficial and banal tropes of commercialized princess culture. This, I finally realized, is why I love Bertocci’s work so much. I’ve occasionally heard critics complain that he undercuts the raw human emotion of his stories with superficial jokes and pop culture references, but this misses the point: the life experience of anyone born in the 1980s or later has involved searching for genuine expressions of real humanity, now obscured in a techno-decadent jungle. Like Diogenes of Sinope, we are all searching through this mass of ephemera for something true.

What becomes apparent only rather late in the story, is that it is a retelling of a classic fairy tale. Fairy tales are a tradition which reflects the changing state of culture. Most of the famous ones emerged from the dark forest of German Romanticism only to be sanitized by aforementioned mega corporation into mere trite caricatures.

And yet, as Sydney learns over the course of the story, it all springs from the same well of human desire. And so, Bertocci crafts a retelling for the 21st-century, where concerns like social media and paying for college and not being taken to court by a company known for a cartoon mouse occupy our time and mental energy.

Beneath it all lies something more important, but it takes a while to emerge. But when it does, it’s like the beam of a headlight piercing the dark of night.

When they go to write the history of 21st-century literature, they will have to include Bertocci. Few authors currently going understand our era as well, and even fewer have the gift of translating it to the page as he does.

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On the one hand, you might be tempted to say, this book is just a zany comedy. It certainly has its share of zaniness. It’s about a woman who travels to a small river village, populated by colorful characters. A wizard named Zuzzingbar, a group of gossipy ladies, and a species of aquatic creature known as a “leaping chomper”, which is pretty much exactly what you’d expect it to be, are just some of the odd denizens of the place.

And then there’s Coren, a man cursed to never be allowed to set foot on dry land. So, he spends his days rowing up the aforementioned river. He has to, because if he doesn’t, he’ll go over the waterfall at the end of it.

Is this setting fertile ground for hilarity? It is! And there is plenty of that. Humorous hijinks abound. You might as well know that, despite the name on the cover, this is a Zachary Shatzer book. I’ve reviewed every one of his published books, and if you don’t know by now that I enjoy his work, well, you just haven’t been paying attention.

And yet… you might stop and wonder, why did he publish this under another name? Isn’t it just another one of his wizard stories?

Well, yes and no. It is another one of his wizard stories. But it is also something else.

You see in the description where it says it’s a “philosophical comedy”? Don’t ignore that first word. The book poses a philosophical and moral dilemma for the reader to puzzle over. And argue about ad nauseam. (Well, maybe that’s just me.) But it really is an interesting question of ethics that lies at the center of this seemingly light little comedy.

What is the interesting question, you ask? I’m not telling. That would be to spoil it! The whole story has been constructed specifically to invite the reader to think about this moral quandary. For me to just vomit forth my own interpretation would be leading the witness.

And how refreshing it is, I might add, to read a story that invites us to think, rather than lecturing us on what to believe. There is more than one way the story can be viewed, and that’s what makes it magical. Well, that and the wizards.

Is this Shatzer’s best book? I’m not sure—I really am fond of The Beach Wizard. But it’s in the top three, certainly, and it probably is the one that lends itself most readily to discussion and analysis. And it does it with the lightest of touches, without ever seeming heavy-handed or preachy. It’s just a story about some people and how they play the cards life deals them.