GalacticMu

Welcome to Part Two!

The continuation of a page-by-page summary of a British scifi novel from 1972.

Read Part One.

Read Part Two

Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis (The Viking Press, 1972)

How many times have you wish for a novelized version of a British scifi television show from the early 70’s? A dozen? Hundreds?

It would be fantastic, I concur, and with evidence in hand: Mutant 59 is the funnest read I have had in some time now: Such shameless destruction! Such brash sexuality!

It is with sincere pleasure that I present to you Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, a page-by-page summary in three parts.

Read Part One

For a few years now I’ve been quietly hating on science fiction a little. There has been trend of scifi going “normal,” to the extent that writers of the genre are now often writing about today, with only a few stale, chewy treats of speculation, like cheap raisin-bran cereal. On this front, I’ve lost a few of my favorite writers.

I don’t believe that writers have “failed” or any nonsense just because they don’t write the same novel over and over again. Though repetition works for Stephen King, many other writers work their craft because they are interested in it, and in exploring new ideas. When William Gibson, the author I credit for giving my understanding of literature a version upgrade (”You mean, it’s not illegal to write a fragment?”), wrote a novel called Pattern Recognition, there was a fair amount of fallout. You see, “The Father of Cyberpunk” decided to have other children. The most common negative reviews can be condensed into: “Why no more Neuromancer? Boo!” And while I also wish he’d written something more speculative, I harbored no ill will. He already wrote Neuromancer. And I can read it whenever I want to. Expecting him to write another one is like having your significant other say at a party, “Why aren’t you funny right now? Be funny. C’mon and be funny. I expected you to be funny always. My disappointment over your lack of funniness is profound and I have turned against you.”

But, I have this criticism: is it science fiction? Should we be calling it that? My answer is no. I appreciate what the publishers and perhaps Gibson himself are trying to do by staying, ostensibly, in the genre (after all, why avoid your fanbase?), but I also feel a teensy manipulated. And I mean that in the least victimy way possible - I ran out and bought Pattern Recognition in hardback, without reading the jacket flap and without hardly glancing at it, and any fault of that is entirely my own (it was at a live reading and I would have purchased a treadmill from him if he had asked me to). And again my own fault after doing the same thing with Spook Country, the book that followed Pattern Recognition. These were good books; well written, engaging, fresh. But they are science fiction in only the most generous of definitions, a fact that does not keep them from sitting on Border’s scifi shelves and ranking high on Amazon’s scifi lists.

A similar event happened with Geoff Ryman. Some time ago, and despite writing one of the most brain-busting, far-future weird-outs I’d ever read (The Child Garden), he produced The Mundane SF Manifesto, also known as How To Make Subspace Rend Her Clothes. In short, the Manifesto says: there will never be interstellar travel - hence never any alien contact, terraformed worlds, etc. - so stop writing about them. Oh Geoff, why? Why it gotta be like this? To my eternal heartache, a movement thus followed, even such that some, while not directly following the Manifesto, could still be seen carrying the torch (I would unhesitatingly rank Cory Doctorow in this group). An entire movement of people who feel that science fiction is somehow best served by making sure that plausibility reigns.

Happily, there are those other than myself who disagree. Rudy Rucker, a long-time-player in scifi and a Ph.D in mathematics, gently spoke out against the so-called Mundane sub-genre, foremost by pointing out that basing a philosophy on the impossibility of interstellar travel is just bad science (his entire blog is a lesson on how to remain genuinely civil and opinionated at the same time). Pay attention to the comments at the end of his post: people seem to be agitated at the idea that “bad science” might ruin their scifi.

The upside has forced me to examine how I am limiting my own writing: do I discard ideas because they resist explanation? Or because I fear it would be to much work to suspend disbelief? But I still come around to the same lament: since when are there so many predicates in “What if?”

Apologies for a lack of content, dear readers, but I grudgingly had to write something “for real,” as the punk shits say. Somebody’s got to pay for the dilithium crystals to run this thing (which based on my pay, will not be me).

I’ve also struggled to compose something regarding the death of Arthur C. Clarke, but I got nothin’. Sorry. I just wasn’t a dedicated fan of his, and I have a certain amount of shame over my impassioned mockery of his TV show, Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World. GalacticMu commenter and old friend of mine, Shane (he’s getting really old, like with kids and everything), reminded me that as a teenager I called it Arthur C. Clarke’s World of Crazy Shit in lieu of being able to recall the real name. The program infuriated me: the somewhat smug old Clarke sitting there, introducing himself erroneously as the “inventor” of the communications satellite, after which he’d give compelling evidence for something mysterious - only to end each episode with haughty denial that any such mysterious thing could exist. Believers of strange events/phenomenon were often chided in his lulling, mealy British accent, often prompting me to shout at the TV “SHOULDN’T THIS SHOW BE CALLED ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S WORLD UTTERLY WITHOUT MYSTERY?”

It wasn’t until I was older that I appreciated him for the person he was. I appreciated that he fled to Buddhist paradise Sri Lanka (I can attest as an atheist forcibly surrounded by religion at all times: Buddhism is not a bad choice) and intently lived out the rest of his science-fiction loving years running a diving school and living with friends (which I always misread as “driving school,” a visual that makes me laugh and laugh. “Merge left here - I said merge left! There is perfectly reasonable scientific explanation for merging left!”). I appreciated that his wit never left, and that he honored and loved space travel until his last days. And I especially appreciated that he famously predicted the use of House Chimps by the year 1960. He’d apparently never actually met a monkey and did not know that you’d be far better off paying a hobo to come due chores for you.

This one’s for you, Arthur.

When I am at my most pessimistic and feel that even the grocery checkers dead faux-smile might send me into rampage over the mockery that is “hopefulness,” I find the best thing to do is indulge the feelings*. The primary way of doing this - like the primary way of waking up consists of coffee and Sudafed shooters - is to visit Peter Watt’s blog, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.

Peter Watts is the author of some of the best science fiction writing of the last decade, namely the Rifters Trilogy (just to be confusing, against Watts’ wishes the publisher split the last book in the trilogy, Behemoth, into two separate books, bringing the “trilogy” count to four) and the Hugo-nominated Blindsight.

Watts is lumped together in my mind with people like Anthony Bourdain: crusty, self-damagingly intelligent, pessimistic and the exact sort of person you want at the bar with you. I can identify with Anthony Bourdain not because I appreciate his chain-smoking while eating blood sausage, but because he recognizes his own Schadenfreude. Watts is very much the same way; to not be drawn into his visceral delight of the broken, the flawed and the messy is to not be a thoughtful human.

Much is explained by Watts’ training as a marine biologist. It also helps me to think of him at home, in some kind of tatty, aged robe, ignoring the fetid litterbox of his deranged and hostile cats by writing an exegesis on the neurological functionality of zombies. I find it a much more sane than thinking of Stephen King, each morning mechanically propped up at his immense oak desk overlooking all of Maine, drinking Diet Pepsi and smashing out an entire novel before noon. A biologist, I can imagine, is doing the same kind of things I am: burning one’s self of hot frying pans in the kitchen and then going into stuporous reveries about the biological nature of pain (and then disregarding them in favor of eating something comprised largely of whipped cream for breakfast). Not that I am in the same intellectual ballpark as Watts, but I imagine that I would be allowed to… uh… wax his balls? Grease his bats? I don’t know anything about baseball but I know a fair amount about double entendres, and I fear I’ve ventured into the wrong territory.

ANYWAY.

Halcyon and I were just the other evening discussing the possibility that Asperger Syndrome is an evolutionary specialism designed to combat the uncategorizable mass input of modern human existence. Why? Peter Watts is to blame.

* While in this state I am still capable of recognizing beauty (generally in the form of cake) I just don’t believe it to be the transcendent, hand-that-beats-all that the luckier among us do. The existence of cake in the universe does not make me believe that cake is the prevailing force. Entropy and chaos are still the prevailing forces. I’ve dealt with chaos cake before, and it is not pleasurable.

There was a time when serious books were allowed ostentatious names, and those days are long buried under the castoff knickers of the Pussycat Dolls.  Books like this one:

I have not yet read it, but I am looking forward to the dreadful looming horror of the plastic-eaters.  Kit Pedler was a science adviser for Dr. Who, and later was partially responsible for the BBC science fiction series Doomwatch.  From what I read, “The Plastic Eaters” was the pilot episode for Doomwatch, the plot of which this novel is based.  I will keep you all updated to the delights of Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters.

Sun of Suns, by Karl Schroeder (Tor, 2006)

In this first book of a proposed series, we are introduced to Hayden Griffin and his giant gas-bag world of Virga. Hayden seeks revenge, as all good pirate-raised adolescents do, and no amount of sword fighting or nefarious ne’er-do-wells can slow him. Or can they?

Spoiler-bloat after the jump.

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