However-

I have to break precedent to tell you this: Dedicat Ed is now available on Kindle.

It is, as it says on the back cover*:

A heartwarming story about a foulmouthed midget who wants to play in the NBA, and his sister, a pragmatic prostitute. You know, the American dream.

If you own a Kindle or an i-phone, or an i-pod touch, and you like midgets and/or hookers and/or laughter, and/or feelings you should definitely buy Dedicat Ed. It’s only $4.80, the same price as a ham sammich. And it won’t make you fat, infest you parasites, or give you hammy breath. Guaranteed.

I co-wrote it a few years back with a good friend of mine, Eric Fleming. It’s very funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. I have no problem saying that because many of the funnier parts were not even written by me. It’s also pretty insightful about humans and the things they do, and I can definitely say that because none of the insightful parts were written by me.

I did, however, write a chapter which involves rough midget sex and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. If you ever want to make friends quickly, pull up that chapter, and put your gizmo on text-to-speech mode. Instant robot midget porn. And, like the man says, if your friends don’t like instant robot midget porn, then they’re no friends of mine.

Dedicat Ed is written in the style of an oral history. In other words, people take turns telling the story. It’s kind of like a mockumentary, if that helps. Here’s an excerpt from auto mechanic Willy Jopstone, one of Mary’s many satisfied customers:

…she told me she was eighteen but if I wanted would pretend she was fifteen or whatever. The thing about that girl was, and I remember this part too; was that she was a pro. Not that she fucked like a pro, which she did, but she was all business. No pimp either; I like that on account of the pimp always dickin’ me over money. Hey! I like to tell the boys, listen to this now, I like to tell the boys that when I get a hooker with a pimp I get fucked by the broad and then get fucked by the pimp, too! Two for the price of one! Get it? Not that I get a dick up my ass really, but that he screws me outta money. I ain’t queer.

What else about Cherry? Well, she charged more than most girls did. She asked alotta questions about stuff; things about cars and things about being a guy getting a hooker and shit like that. I told her, listen to this one, I told her: ‘What, you writin’ a book or somethin’?’ Hey Frank! You writin’ a book or somethin’?

What, more stuff? It was fifteen years ago man! All I know is this hot little chick is standin’ on the corner looking all fresh and fine and I says to myself: ‘Willy, this here is your lucky day!’ You can cut that out, the part with my name right? Anyways, so I stop and she gets in the car and names her price and tells me her brother will kill me if I don’t treat her right and puts her hand in my lap and off we went.

Oh, there’s one more thing that made me laugh my ass off. Listen to this one. Hey, listen to this one guys, I ask this hooker who’s this brother who’s gonna kill me if I don’t treat her right and she says it’s her little brother. I ask her how old her little brother is and she says; you hearin’ this? She says: ‘He’s seven!’

Always here to help,

Halcyon
Psych Officer
GalacticMu

 * There is no back cover.

This is why I automatically cringe whenever a list of THE MOST IMPORTANT BOOKS YOU’LL EVER READ is printed; maybe for you, who ever you are, but so far every one of these “master lists” has left of Voltaire’s Candide, which immediately negates their credibility.  For me.  But maybe not you.  It depends.  See?  It’s a sticky toffee of a problem, except not as desirable.

The Guardian recently published a list of “1000 novels everyone must read” broken into categories, one of which is scifi and fantasy.   Must you read them?  Well, no.  Should you read them?  Some of them, others not so much.  It’s British, so there is an interesting skew to what I imagine are British scifi favorites (many authors of whom I’d never even heard of), but sadly a strange preponderance of novels I’d barely categorize as even magical realism, let alone science fiction.  Lord of the Flies?  They listed Margaret Atwoods The Blind Assassin, but not The Handmaid’s Tale?  The Magus?  I mean, to be honest the Guardian list reads like a particularly uninspired college syllabus for a class called Naptime: Obscure Fiction You’ll Immediately Resell Back to the School’s Bookstore.

And then somehow, in what I desperately hope was some kind of covert racist commentary, Tony Morrison’s Beloved winds up in this list.  They might as well have included Anne Frank’s Diary.

For the sake of balance, here are a few books I’d put on a damn list.

1. Neuromancer, by William Gibson.  There are a lot of reasons to obsessively love this book, and as many reasons to discredit it as luckily popular among many similar books emerging at the time.  Both positions are valid.  For me it was the first time I’d read something that really, really went out of my comfort zone.  I’d happily been reading fantasy and light science fiction until that point (think: Piers Anthony), and then suddenly things weren’t so flip any more.  It was like everything else I’d read had been making out on a couch with my clothes on, and suddenly Neuromancer had my pants off, a condom on and wasn’t giving me time to protest my virtue.
2. Winterlong, by Elizabeth Hand.  I was lucky to read Winterlong during a strange time in my life, something I highly recommend you save Winterlong for.  I was 19, on prednisone (a steroid that makes your moods all topsy-turvy), I was breaking up with a boyfriend and working long hours at my first real job.  Life was surreal already, and along came this book about cannibal children, corporeal Death, bioterrorism post-apocalypse, adolescent concubines and heavily gene-modified animals.  Highly recommended.
3. Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson.  The pacing and flow of this novel still gives me chills.  The first chapter is perhaps one of the best chapters of science fiction ever written.  I live in a kind of terror/hope that someday, some impossibly brilliant director will be able to make a film of it (it’d have to be more like two or three films) and reveal it for the visual super-masterpiece that it truly is.  On the other hand, no.   Hollywood better stay the fuck away from it.
4. The Child Garden, by Geoff Ryman.  This one went under everyone’s radar and still managed to snag two big awards.  I literally and truly called in to work sick the second day of reading this novel because I simply had to stay home and continue reading.  It’s the closest thing I can compare to a kind of science fiction mythology: dark and sad while hopeful and lyrical, saturated with curiosities while never failing to be somehow familiar… It’s not a perfectly easy read, but is often the book I recommend to intellectual friends who claim they don’t like scifi.
5. Dune, by Frank Herbert.  What, it’s a classic among classics.  Read it again.
6. The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker.  This is unabashed smut, so don’t leave it lying around at work or anything.  Anyway, what would you do if you could stop time?  Chances are, if you’re a man² you’re going to be looking up ladies’ skirts at any opportunity.  I love books that obsessively describe the detail of fantastic things (I mean the time-stopping, in this case, not the panty-grabbing) without feeling the need for excessive plotline – I mean, isn’t the ability to stop time enough?  Don’t get me wrong, there’s an underlying drama, but for the most part The Fermata is a kind of dirty, elaborate daydream and a real lesson in savoring a single idea.
7. Blindsight, by Peter Watts.  I am too tired to try and describe Blindsight, so instead: reading Watts is like playing a literary game of Dig Dug, an exercise in a kind of infuriating, thrilling futility.  You know he’s going to sting you with some kind of suckerpunch regarding the nature of consciousness and will, but you keep reading anyway.  The writing is just too good.  I keep coming back to him with more quarters, inevitable kill screen or no.
8. Candide, by Voltaire.  If you’ve been to college you’ve probably read this, maybe even if you went to a decent high school, but you should read it again: the dystopia and snark of this thin little read is the basis for the Great Triple Threat, aka, We, 1984 and A Brave New World.  Anytime anyone has ever said to you in a kind of glazed, moronic lowing “Everything happens for a reason!” and you’ve felt your skill crawl – that’s Candide.  Basically, it makes fun of Oprah.
9. Momo, by Michael Ende.  If you ever find a copy of this book, buy it.  Better known for having written The Never Ending Story, in my opinion Michael Ende’s Momo is a better book.  Ostensibly a book for children, it’s about a mysterious little homeless girl who is instantly beloved by everyone she meets.  When the Men in Grey suddenly appear in town, everything starts to go downhill.  A cautionary parable about the dangers of overwork, materialism and adulthood.
10. I know you want ten, but I only have nine.

¹A line from an GalacticMu favorite film, The Specials.

²Or a woman, jeez.

Yes, that Stephanie Meyer.

The only statement in my own defense is that I was sitting in the airport when I finished my only book on hand (Man Plus by Frederik Pohl – fun, but awkwardly retro writing) and went to go purchase a magazine.  Paper magazines, which you may or may not be aware, are now the same price as a fucking novel.  Which are expensive.  With this knowledge, I, with great embarrassment and guilt, purchased Twilight.

The backstory here is that I have been superficially following this Twilight obsession almost exclusively because many of the blogs I read.  Yes, once again, I blame blogs.  Anyway, as an adult who reads YA fiction (for the record: I think the Harry Potter books are just okay, Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series is pretty good and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy is canon) I paid some attention.  Matthew Baldwin’s review in particular caused me to chuckle with delighted dismissal.  In  summary: romance novel – minus sex + nearly pointless vampirism = Twilight.

And then I read another blog, one I won’t link to.   In it the writer seethed about the negative impact the books will have on fragile-minded teen girls.  It teaches girls that stalking is acceptable behavior from a man!  And that it is thrilling to have your boyfriend want to kill you!  In a good way! Blah blah blah, I didn’t really pay attention because I’m a misogynist.

Anyway, there I am, standing in an airport where I am surely to escape the eyes of anyone I know, purchasing the book.  Because I had to know!  Which was it: was it a comically embarrassing attempt at ‘literature’ or a manual for abusing women?

The answer if of course both!  Delightful!

I can’t add much to the masses of criticism for the books, other than to make a few personal points.

•  Based on Baldwin’s report, I expected no less than 642 uses of the word “exquisite”.  Sadly, I noted only in the realm of two uses.  However, the point he may have been trying to make is: but damn, this woman is repetative.  Once she latches on to an adjective or an adverb she gets lockjaw. So instead of 642 instances of “exquisite” we get probably literally 50 instances of remarking that Edward – the vampire heartthrob – having marble skin, or skin like marble, or marble-cold skin, or a cold, marble chest, or cold marble coldness marbleness.  Likewise how many times he is simply described as “perfect.”  Sigh!  Perfect!  I ran out of adjectives for cold and marble.  I need a rest.

• As many have noted, I can see how the teens are wack-a-doodle over these books.  They’re broody, moody, vaguely sensual and chock full of forbidden things like lying to your parents and dating the undead.  For the rest of us that have actually experienced sex, they’re pretty boring.

• The vampires are, for all intents and purposes, not vampires at all.  They’re Supermen.  Do they have to drink human blood?  No, they just prefer it.  Does sunlight/crosses/garlic/stakes repulse them?  Nope.  In fact: sunlight makes them “LITERALLY SPARKLE”. Meyer made sure to include the word “literally” in the actual novel in case we mistook her thin narrative as metaphorical.  So, they avoid sunlight to avoid dazzling humans with their glittery beauty.  Like unicorns.  They are impossibly fast, impossibly strong and to make it the most delightfully hyperbole-saturated book ever, many of them have special superpowers like mind-reading or precognition.  Oh, and also: they’re rich.  Alright, alright, I’ll fuck them already, jeesus.

• The main character, Bella, is intolerable.  In what I think was Meyer’s clumsy attempt to make Bella someone the average teen girl could relate to, she instead made Bella improbably klutzy (really: every time Bella leaves the house she either falls on a heap of razorblades or rams her head into a crowbar – you think I’m joking, I know) and argumentative.  Everything she does is counterproductive.  In fact, the entire final showdown that results in Bella’s near-death is the direct result of Bella just not telling someone what was going on.  Listen, teen girls of the world, if a mean vampire threatens to kill your family unless you submit yourself to him, a tip is to TELL THE WHOLE POSSE OF SUPERHEROES YOU’RE HANGING OUT WITH.  Dude, delegate the problems, and in particular, delegate them to friends of yours that are immortal supermen.

In penance for giving the Stephanie Meyer machine $8 of my money, I will make sure my next few book purchases are for authors I actually care about.  In fact, I’ll buy extra for friends.  Because I don’t know how else to make things right.  When the second book gets made into a movie the madness will start all over again, and then repeat with the last two books.  My only hope is that the actors will look haggard and dumpy by the last two, like Ralph Macchio suddenly got in the Karate Kid movies even though supposedly no time had passed between them.

So, I have this story, right.  I never sold it.  There is a character in it who gets the nickname Thirteen.  As of today, I discover that the television show House has a character named Thirteen, and guess who has to replace every instance of the name “Thirteen” in their document now?  And the jokes and references and stories related to it?  That’s right, me.

There is a classic old piece of writing advice to “kill your darlings,”¹ an aptly poetic way of saying that nothing you can write will ever be sacred.  In fact, if there is something sacred, you’re probably way too emotionally involved to determine its quality.  To be safe, you should kill it.  So they say.  Like most writing advice I find it to be quackery and metaphorically shit on it as often as I am able.  I’d also like to point out that I’ve never successfully sold a novel, so here’s some salt.

Point being: I’m pretty used to this.  It fits in with my atheistic worldview.  It happens, just like I am named Sunday and YES, LIKE NICOLE KIDMAN’S DAMN BABY, BUT MY MOM ALREADY THOUGHT OF IT 30 YEARS AGO.  Whatever, I’ll deal with it the same way I deal with everything: by starting a gang.

¹Also deliciously pertinent to this subject: the phrase originally used (maybe) was “Murder your darlings,” as attributed to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, but also sort of simultaneously attributed to Faulkner who said “Kill your darlings” in a variety of phrases.  It is possible that one stole from the other, but more likely they both had the same idea and then whichever one thought of it first got credit last and felt like a loser.

What occurred to me is that I am unsure if Delaney wanted the Gypsies to be sympathetic or not.

A few years ago I reread Brave New World for maybe the third or fourth time, and the first time since I had been a teenager.  It was a revelation totally unlike my first reading, because I found myself questioning what was so wrong with being genetically matched to a labor caste.  Everyone is chemically altered to be happy doing whatever it is they were meant to do, be it chef or coal miner or movie star.   As a teen I was focused on the the dissolution of free will, of eugenics and mass indoctrination.  As an adult I wished desperately there were some pill that made me happy to go to work every day, to make scads of money for someone else while I remained trapped in an economic morass, unable to labor on subjects that actually pleased me.

And then yesterday, rereading parts of Nova, a similar realization: the Gypsies are people I would despise.  This increasingly congested world is creating the opposite of a social environment: rather than being surrounded by potential friends, I find I am surrounded by people I have nothing in common with.  It’s a mathematical eventuality.  I turn to my computer, for example, so that I may easily identify and contact the kind of person I would like to be social with.  I’ve transferred a good deal of my creativity over to the ethereal “net,” where I share photographs with friends and strangers, where I can find artistic mentors I’d never be able to find in meatspace.  I imagine, then, a Gypsie who disapproves of what I do.    And I think, “What an ignorant douchebag.”

It always comes back to me calling someone a douchebag, doesn’t it?

Every once and a great while I go through periods of not wanting to read, and almost always this is set off by reading a particularly terrible book — the great Not Reading Anything of 2001 in the wake of China Mieville’s aneurysm-inducing Perdido Street Station, for example. However, just before I moved across the country (the second time) I had a sudden and unpleasant realization: It had been a while since I read a book I’d actually enjoyed.

I looked over my shelves. 2006 Hugo Award-winning Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? In the dictionary? Next to ‘Trying Too Hard?’ That’s right, there’s Rainbows End. And don’t even get me started on Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon: I’ll take the high road and just say that nothing spells unintentionally funny like preposterous, confusing sex scenes.

In fact, after picking through my shelves with increasing frustration, I found that Peter Watt’s Blindsight was the extent of the good reads in the last year. Good old Watts. Meanwhile, Altered Carbon was purchased for a reported million fucking dollars to be made into a movie. O, the infinite horror of this dimension that I keep trying to insist is merely chaos but is more obviously the result of a cruel and mentally retarded god.

Unrelated: my doctor seems delighted that I am only 29 and need to be on blood pressure medication. Early and often, as they say.

What is going on here? Have I become hard to please, or is science fiction getting shittier?

I’m inclined to say a little from column A and a little from column B, and not just because I’m a noncommittal poser. I had a half-strength epiphany while camping last week with my family and reading John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. This being my first Updike (yes, I went to college, shut up – and anyway, I never graduated), I was officially thrown for a loop. Firstly, I remember trying to read Updike years back and curling my lip. Back on the shelf it goes. Secondly Nicholson Baker once wrote a touching ode to Updike, which gave me pause. If Baker likes him, surely…? But no, I still couldn’t be bothered with it. And then, in a fit of pique (“I’ll show those smart people and prove that I don’t like Updike once and for all.”) I picked up a battered copy of Eastwick. And there I was, several pages into it and thinking, “This is fucking brilliant.” It was like reading Baker’s liquid, fizzy train-of-thought, the same bumbling honeybee of prose – but with a story! It’s humane and active, meaningful and profoundly mundane. It is somehow familiar and totally surprising. Stephen King famously complained that Baker’s writing was a “meaningless little fingernail paring,” which is a lot like saying that pie is a pointless trimming of beard hair; also, someday soon Naglfar will be coming for you and it won’t seem so meaningless after all, will it?

Blah blah blah, anyway, I had a mini-epiphany: people don’t know how to write anymore. Or rather, there is no reward for knowing how to write anymore. That has to be it. So that you have these masses of writers who might be technically good but cannot string an arc along to save their lives (any contemporary scifi writer who is obsessed with the singularity, I’m looking at you), and you have these terrible writers who have a whole laundry basket of good ideas but need to be told that no one “stares broodingly”. And they both get five-novel deals with movie options. Huh?

Before I started writing this I thought: I can’t complain if I can’t fix it. But I spent some time with myself, listening to myself’s side of the story, and I came to see a different point of view. I am the consumer. If my TV doesn’t work well, no one expects me to head down to the basement and hack a TV out of a block of butter and some twist ties. Other than MacGyver, who remains disappointed with humanity on a daily basis (like me!). But me, I argued, books aren’t a machine. They are art. Au contraire, me! I said. They are a recipe, like a cake. There are a near-infinite range of variations, but they are still cake, and they are still made according to a finite series of rules (don’t check my math, just trust me). And we’re talking about taste here, anyway. If publishers claim that Americans aren’t reading anymore, I can’t help but ask, is it maybe because the product is shitty? Have you gone off the recipe?

The answer is yes, if you aren’t capable of following my faux-rhetorical questioning.

That just leaves us with my being hard to please, which is straight-forward. In my old age, I find that I want an increasingly rare and perfect balance of real story with quality writing. Poor me. It wasn’t all that long ago that I liked passing time with a book as much as I liked scoring a really excellent read. Currently I’m alienating friends by calling them at work just to read them an especially atrocious sentence of Altered Carbon. DID HE EVEN HAVE AN EDITOR? I guess I’m still upset about it. The point being: popular scifi lit is morphing into a lethal combination of Idiocracy and Fahrenheit 451, and I’m certain it’s not just that I’m getting smarter (I call it “The Dumbening”). But clearly instead of censoring thoughts they are quietly replacing them with lamer ones. And by “they” I don’t know who I mean. I vote Russians. Or possibly Boing Boing.

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

Read Part One.

Events are color coded. Red is for acts of violence and destruction. Violet is for sexiness. Green is for amazing science.

pg. 102: Man sees woman’s panties as she descends ladder. They are white.

pg. 105: Woman lays head on Man’s lap for a quick, professional nap.

pg. 106: Cameo visit from Lovecraft!

“In the shaft leading to the grille a mindless, groping mass of malodorous corruption was thrusting its way silently towards the surface. Buoyed up by bubbling foam it steadily rose. Single units in obscene abrogation of normal order divided and made two. Two became four and four, eight. Endlessly supplied with food, each unit absorbed nutrient and in a soft, ancient certainty fulfilled its only purpose – to multiply, to extend, and to multiply.”

pg. 107: More violence against commuters!

“There was a brief flash, a deep, thumping detonation, and the concrete shaft split open like a hatbox, totally dismembering the commuter.”

pg. 108: Death to secretaries!

“Young secretaries ran screaming as the acid drenched down over them, bubbling their skin into great yellow blisters.”

pg. 114: Death by electrocution! CPR described as “the kiss of life.”

pg. 118-119: Woman gets angry at man for withholding information from her, then apologizes: “I’m a cow.”

pg. 119: Scientist determines the direction of a draft by licking finger and holding it up.

pg.120: Man instructs woman to “stand back and admire my muscles.” Woman answers, “Oh, balls!”

pg.124: To get warm before a fire, Woman removes everything but her panties and her bra, which Man notices as being “almost transparent.” They make out.

pg.133: Flashback to scientist drinking a large glass of sherry and then inventing plastic-eating bacteria.

pg. 135: Scientist death by aneurysm!

pg. 152: Press conference takes news of total plastic failure well – news that sewage will be diverted to the Thames is met with near-rioting.

pg. 168: This sentence:

“A polythene jug sagged, buckled and tipped over, releasing a spreading pool of custard.”

A jug of custard?

Stay tuned for Part Three! 

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.

To help assimilate information, I have color coded certain events. Red is for acts of violence and destruction. Violet is for sexiness. Green is for amazing science.

pg. 5: Multiple astronaut death by re-entry failure!

pg. 8-9: Jetliner death with elderly woman peril!

“The lives of the forty-eight passengers and crew ceased almost simultaneously as collapsing bulkheads and jagged paneling slashed their bodies into a terrible carrion which rained down onto the street below.”

pg. 10: Use of the word “maidenhead” as a part of a hymen joke.

pg. 16: Catastrophic series of fatal automobile accidents!

pg. 18: Scientists take a tea and biscuit break.

pg. 23: One character describes this scene:

“Some of the plastic in, I don’t know, some kind of Christmas toy grotto or bazaar has melted and the guy on the job can’t account for it.”

The other characters respond with merely lukewarm concern.

pg. 24: Primary male character (Man) grumpy about women not wanting to commit.

pg. 29-3o: Malfunctioning Christmas astronaut robot attack! Primary female character (Woman) injured!

pg. 31-32: Man must take Woman back to her apartment and examine her shoulder, accidentally sees breast which is surprisingly “full for her slender figure, and firm.”

pg. 45: Reveal of plot-important material called “Degron,” a plastic that turns to dust two hours after exposure to oxygen and sunlight. Used to make soft drink bottles with complicated, removable shells of non-disintegrating plastic that can be discarded to expose the interior layer of carbon-coated (to keep sunlight off) Degron. Result: half the plastic is used, eighteen times as much manufacturing technology is needed. Questions unanswered: if the Degron is the interior of the bottle, won’t there be oxygen and light exposure as you drink your beverage? Where do you discard the bottle if you are indoors (aka, would the interior of a waste bin provide enough sunlight?)? Doesn’t plastic always just “degrade” into smaller pieces of plastic?

pg. 47: Ad copy written for soft drink in Degron bottles:

“Help your environment, drink Tropic Delight. Pull the strip – watch it crumble. Put it on your window box – sprinkle it on your garden. Watch your flowers flourish. If you haven’t got a garden, flush it down the sink.”

It would seem that Degron degrades into a nutrient, unlike all other plastics ever invented.

pg. 49: Secretary hesitant to make a whole pot of coffee just so Man can have a cup. Man silently throws fit then resolves to force her to make the coffee anyway and “get her up off her fat can.”

pg. 63: Man afraid secretary heard him burp.

pg. 65: Grisly submarine death!

pg. 66: Mention of a different secretary, this one “rather asexually pretty.”

pg. 73: Adultery!

pg. 81: Disastrous subway peril! Children and elderly trampled! Elderly man described as “carrying a polythene container of paraffin” then “explodes in a ball of flame”!

pg. 82: Individual descriptions of people burning to death!

pg. 89: Detailed recap of subway peril from page 81!

pg. 90: Commuters “mowed down” by explosion debris! Crowds “crushed and flattened” by pipes like “monstrous pastry rollers”!

pg. 92 & 95: Brandy used to successfully revive two people near death.

pg. 98: Evidence of workmen having recently been in an unused subway tunnel: a still-warm kettle and scattered packets of tea.

Stay tuned for parts Two and Three!

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?”

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.