Category Archives: Books

New Adventures Reviews: White Darkness

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , , ,

Zombies are hip. They’re in our movies and comics and major investment firms. You can’t walk more than a few blocks without stumbling across some shambling horde of loosely anatomical types desperate for brains. Zombies, it seems, are the new ninjas. So the cover of White Darkness—on which a smiling Doctor, intrigued Ace, and off-model Benny greet their happy zombie friend—might look ahead of the curve. Not exactly. White Darkness gets into the kind of stuff that started the pre-pop-culture zombie legends. David McIntee “set out with the intention of giving Haiti and voudon society a fairer representation than is usual in fiction.” White Darkness is a straight-up historical adventure novel, with no pretentions to anything more, but it’s coming from a slightly smarter place than the books, films, and flash mobs covered in fake latex sores.

White Darkness innovated in setting the story somewhere other than goddamn London again. A lot of Doctor Who stories take place in and around London. I mean, a lot. There was a reason for this, once. The TV series had tight budget constraints and, hey, the Home Counties were right there. It’s slightly less understandable in the new series, which by the same logic should spend more time in Cardiff. When the novels and Short Trips collections head back to London again it’s plain baffling. It costs no more to set a novel in Africa, or India, or even on some entirely imaginary alien planet, than in Croyden. Apparently these stories suffer from imaginitive constraints… which may also explain those alien-world EDAs that could have been set in London. Conversely, many London-based stories could have taken place in any city and even at any time… but the TARDIS automatically, unthinkingly seeks out contemporary London again. (Preferably a neighborhood with some nice middle-class white people.) It’s like the default state of Doctor Who.

David McIntee did more than any other nineties author to claw the TARDIS from the death grip of southern England. Of his dozen Doctor Who novels only one is set in the London area, and that was a Pertwee-era UNIT story. Ironically, the author who in one book dropped in a lame joke about “political correctness”—which sounded completely bonkers coming out of the Doctor’s mouth, being normally used only by old-fashioned types who resent being asked to show some manners—did so much to diversify the series. When he wasn’t taking the TARDIS to strange new worlds, he set it down in 19th-century China. Or medieval France. Or imperial Russia. Or contemporary Hong Kong. Or, in this case, Haiti.

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Bailing Out Dombey

Books, News and Politics, , ,

I’ve been thinking lately about the last Dickens book I read—Dombey and Son. The news brought it to mind.

Dombey is the head honcho of Dombey and Son. He thinks this makes him a Great Man, and just to make damn sure he’s out to suppress all threats to his Greatness. This can get time consuming. See, all you actually have to do to threaten Dombey’s Greatness is contradict him. So Dombey spends half the 900 page epic picking up sycophants so oily you could run a Hummer off their bodily secretions, and the other half methodically alienating anybody who cares enough about him to tell him the truth.

The truth is: Dombey is a moron.

That name, “Dombey and Son?” Our Dombey’s the son. He’s like the third or fourth generation of son. He didn’t build the business. His dad didn’t build the business. Everything he has, he inherited from somebody else who also inherited it. Dombey and Son started without him and continues through inertia while he warms the chair in the big office. And he has no idea how to run it. He has no idea, for example, that sycophant numero uno Carker has for years been using shady accounting to siphon off gobs of funds. And when Carker runs off with the cash, Dombey has no idea it might be time to do something differently. He has no idea he could do anything differently. He’s Dombey, dude! The top of the heap is Dombey’s natural place. That’s how the world rolls. So he coasts placidly along as he always has, and bankrupts the firm.

This is where the news comes in. And as our fearless leaders discuss handing a $700 billion blank check of taxpayer money over to the guys who created this interesting situation, I can’t help but remember what happened to Dombey.

He, himself, personally, went bankrupt.

This was not an oddity in Dickens’s time. It was standard operating procedure. Business owners in 19th century England were personally liable for business debts. (It was a better deal than ordinary debtors got. They ended up in prison. See Little Dorrit.) But Dombey’s attitude is striking:

‘The extent of Mr Dombey’s resources [says Mr. Morfin, one of his middle managers] is not accurately within my knowledge; but though they are doubtless very large, his obligations are enormous. He is a gentleman of high honour and integrity. Any man in his position could, and many a man in his position would, have saved himself, by making terms which would have very slightly, almost insensibly, increased the losses of those who had had dealings with him, and left him a remnant to live upon. But he is resolved on payment to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that they will clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose much. Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess! His pride shows well in this.’

The vices of our current class of economic honchos are probably not virtues carried to excess.

I don’t mind bailing out the little guys. If this $700 billion were going to rescue struggling people who got suckered into crazy mortgages, I’d consider it money well spent. But before we hand our tax money over to these companies? I’d like to see their CEOs and boards of directors sell off a few private planes and summer homes. Then we’ll talk.

New Adventures Reviews: Lucifer Rising

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , , , ,

In their first couple of years the New Adventures covered surrealism, cyberpunk, high fantasy, space opera, a Quatermass pastiche, and even a right-wing religious authoritarian mystical horror novel (The Pit, which arguably took Doctor Who into places it should never have gone). Lucifer Rising was the NAs’ first Big Dumb Object novel.

Big Dumb Objects are one of your standard SF tropes—what Rudy Rucker calls “power chords,” the ideas that are to SF what the hooks are to a pop song. BDOs are the coolest gadgets in science fiction—both artifacts and environments. Rendezvous With Rama’s vast wandering starship is the canonical example. (And one of the blander ones, to my mind”¦ although it’s been years since I read it and if I went back I might have a different experience.) My favorite is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (from Solaris, natch). It might be stretching a point to class a living planet as a BDO, but Solaris does the same thing: injects Sense of Wonder straight into the novel’s jugular and gives the characters something mind-blowing to explore and react against.

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Possibly the Strangest Doctor Who Novel Ever

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, , , ,

A recent post at Tor.com on weird SF novels reminded me of Atom Bomb Blues by Andrew Cartmel. It may well be the weirdest Doctor Who novel ever. Also a very bad novel, although I can’t accuse it of a lack of imagination. Atom Bomb Blues is packed with ideas, practically all bad. It read like Cartmel just threw in anything that came into his head, and every other page there was something that made me blink and go “Huh?”

So… the Doctor is hanging around the Manhattan Project. In an alternate universe. And this alternate universe has been infiltrated by people from our own universe in the 21st century, who just happen to look exactly like people from this other universe’s 1940s. And the infiltrators plan to destroy the world because they think it will change history in other universes, causing Japan to win World War 2. Already we have reason to suspect that Andrew Cartmel has been snorting raw sugar. But wait! There’s more! Ace is taking fish oil pills that give her superhuman mathematical abilities! And she’s wearing a cowgirl outfit because she thought the Doctor was going to the Alamo! And she’s really, really dense! And one of the infiltrators is some kind of beatnik who talks like Maynard G. Krebs! Crazy, man!

And then there’s the alien. Named Zorg. Who keeps adding a “z” to the start of people’s names. And writes poetry. He’s not there for a reason. Cartmel just threw him in. Why not? And the Japanese agents in bright, color-coded Zoot suits. And the random encounter with Duke Ellington. And the stereotypical Indians. And Major Butcher, the Los Alamos security officer, who is heavily and obviously based on Dashiell Hammett for absolutely no reason I can determine at all. What’s up with that, Andrew?

And then the story stops dead for a bizarre chapter in which the Doctor, for no reason in the world, convinces Major Butcher he (Major Butcher) has been drugged with peyote. This is the chapter with Zorg, and the Indians. It has dialogue like “That was very dapperly done, Doctor,” and “Don’t be so literal-minded, Bulldog Bozo.” The whole chapter has absolutely nothing at all to do with anything else in the novel. Put it all together, and you’ve got something that left me staring at the book in my hands, muttering “what the hell was that?“

Finally, I’d like to note that I can’t read the phrase Atom Bomb Blues without thinking of “The Wedding Bell Blues” by the Fifth Dimension. It makes reading this thing even more surreal when, every time you look at the cover, you hear a choir of carousels.

A Voyage Long and Tedious

Books, History, ,

As I’ve mentioned before, history is big and the layers go down forever. The more you read themore you realize how much you don’t know. The narrative you built out of the things you remember from school is full of holes.

Tony Horowitz had a hole moment on a visit to Plymouth Rock. A guide told him that among the top tourist misconceptions (along with the idea that the ten-foot Indian statue is life-sized. What is wrong with these people?) is the conviction that Columbus and the Pilgrims came over on the same boat. And he wondered: what did happen over that century and a half, anyway? So he wrote A Voyage Long and Strange. And I read the jacket copy and thought, hey, good question.

I didn’t get very far. Horowitz came to the project as a journalist rather than a historian. He seems to have assumed, without really thinking about it, that a history writer should travel to places where things happened. So to prepare for his chapters on the Norse he wandered around Newfoundland, and before writing about Columbus he visited the Dominican Republic.

Not that historians don’t travel. But Horowitz isn’t doing original research; he’s digesting already well researched information into a manageable lump for a general audience. So it’s not clear why he’s taking these trips. Occasionally he hits on some insight into how the history influenced the character of these places today, but these insights are rarely deep and his travels are mostly standard magazine-article tourist ramblings.

And he won’t shut up about them. He doesn’t introduce Columbus by describing the present Dominican Republic, or use his trip as a follow up to the history. He jumps back and forth within the same chapter, and can’t seem to get through more than a couple of pages of history at a time. Constantly, just as the book was getting into, say, the history of the Taino, it would stop dead so Horowitz could gripe about the difficulty of renting a car in Santo Domingo. I gave up somewhere during Horowitz’s quest to trace Coronado’s route through empty desert interspersed with a series of modern-day tourist sites. Somewhere in the world may be the perfect book to rectify my ignorance about that century and a half. This isn’t it.

George Orwell’s Embarrassing Secret

Books

I have a big one-volume Everyman’s Library edition of George Orwell’s essays that I dip into every so often. A lot of it is taken up with installments of “As I Please,” a newspaper column for which he pretty much wrote whatever popped into his head. Usually there were two or three topics per column, each a few paragraphs long.

Something about “As I Please” seemed familiar to me from a different context. I couldn’t quite make out what it was. Then one day it hit me: Regularly updated prose chunks… short, briefly developed, and sometimes half-assed observations… idiosyncratic topics, often politics, sometimes returned to in back-and-forth exchanges with his readers…

George Orwell had a blog.

Harpies and Peanuts

Art, Books, Comics, History, , , , , ,

Wilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a biography of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo. So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “On William Beckford’s Vathek”

In the early 16th century, aspiring artist Bartolomeo Torri was thrown out of his teacher’s home after he got a little too absorbed in his anatomy lessons: “for he kept so many limbs and pieces of corpses under his bed and all over his rooms, that they poisoned the whole house,” wrote Giorgio Vasari. Cherubino Alberti fixated on medieval siege engines and filled his home with model catapults. Later, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt believed he was pinched and abused by a “Spirit of Proportion” who could be warded off by pulling grotesque contorted expressions, which Messerschmidt recorded in sculpture.

The cover of Born Under Saturn

Margot & Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn is a history of “the Character and Conduct of Artists,” as the subtitle puts it. And, yeah, a lot of these guys are characters. Others were normal, well-behaved types, but, honestly, you’re not going to read this book for Rubens or Bernini. But Born Under Saturn isn’t a freak show. The Wittkowers are analyzing popular ideas about artists, and although stories of eccentricities, feuds, and crimes make this book more readable than a straight academic treatise they also serve a purpose: the varied mass of biography breaks down cultural stereotypes about artists.

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In Which I Worry About My Attention Span

Books, Internet,

I started this blog—ages ago, in internet time—to get my brain working, force myself to react to what I read, and put my thoughts in order. But I’ve never kept it up for very long at a stretch, and longer essays—“longer” in blog terms, anyway—are rare.

I feel like my attention span has atrophied. I’ve noticed I’m not as good a reader as I used to be. Not that I don’t still read quite a lot compared to most people—I finished 83 books last year, more than one a week. And have no problem with reading comprehension. But I read in bits. I’ve always had more than one book going at any given time, but these days I have several, and I rarely sit down with them for sustained periods: I sit through ten or twenty pages and my brain is off on something else.

Mind you, that’s still healthier than the voracious-but-stupid way I read when I was 12 or 13. Often I’d get through a book in a day, but I didn’t retain much. There are books I know I read around that time that left no trace in my memory. I suspect there are others I no longer recall having read at all. These days I remember what I read. But I suspect I’d absorb it even better if I could get back to the middle path I took in my late teens and early twenties: more than a couple of days, less than a couple of weeks.

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Doctor Who Reviews: Sometime Never

Books, Doctor Who, Speculative Fiction, ,

This is another old _Doctor Who_ tie-in review. If it seems oddly snarky, consider that I wrote it years ago, not long after the book came out, while I was still actively following a series that was determinedly running itself into the ground.

Sometime Never… is the culmination of over three years of eighth Doctor books. This is the ultimate fruition of the ongoing storylines introduced during Justin Richards’s tenure as editor. This is the climax that every EDA since The Burning has built towards.

Book cover

And it stinks.

It’s too damn long, for one thing. Sometime Never… only exists to tie up a number of dangling plot threads. That’s it. There is nothing else to it: no theme, no plot, no character development. The little that Sometime Never… accomplishes could be done in the space of a novella. But Richards has 280 pages to fill, and he fills them with padding. Lots of padding. The most superfluous padding since Robert Jordan published volume three hundred of The Wheel of Time. Over seventy per cent of the American sales of Sometime Never… have been traced to a single bulk purchase by the Wisconsin Federation of Mall Santas. They’re going to scotch tape copies to their beer guts this December.

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Some Interesting Links

Books, Science, Weirdness

I won’t try to write full posts about any of these; my brain is so listless this weekend they would likely turn out as empty bloviation.

**1.** Strange Horizons has posted [an article about how fiction becomes urban legend] [tfv]. In 1888 Ambrose Bierce published a hoax article about three abrupt vanishings. Like the [Angels of Mons] [aom], the storied passed into folklore (or maybe into [fakelore] [fake]), being reproduced in book after book of weird mysteries.

My favorite detail–indicating the level of “scholarship” that goes into these volumes–is the author who salted his reference books with misinformation to detect plagiarists.

**2.** [There’s a strain of symbiotic bacteria in your elbow] [elbow]:

>The crook of your elbow is not just a plain patch of skin. It is a piece of highly coveted real estate, a special ecosystem, a bountiful home to no fewer than six tribes of bacteria. […] They are helping to moisturize the skin by processing the raw fats it produces, says Julia A. Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute.

These are not generic bacteria, and the article isn’t using elbows as a random example body part. These bacteria *specifically evolved to live in elbows*.

>Dr. Segre reckons that there are at least 20 different niches for bacteria, and maybe many more, on the human skin, each with a characteristic set of favored commensals. The types of bacteria she found in the inner elbow are quite different from those that another researcher identified a few inches away, on the inner forearm. But each of the five people Dr. Segre sampled harbored much the same set of bacteria, suggesting that this set is specialized for the precise conditions of nutrients and moisture that prevail in the human elbow.

**3.** Kit Whitfield examines one of the rarely-identified [stock characters] [stock] of modern fiction: the [Macho Sue] [whit]. (Via [Slacktivist] [slack].)

[tfv]:
[fake]:
[aom]:
[elbow]:
[slack]:
[whit]:
[stock]: