A Look at the Future from the Past, Part II, or The Giant Sheep of your Nightmares

"Will I die tomorrow?"
"Question irrelevant. No answer available."

But for Rod McBan, a frightened yet idealistic teenage boy, the question has strong relevance. He faces a hearing in which his "fitness" will be determined. If he can demonstrate that he is fit, he will be accepted as an adult, and a wealthy land owner at that. But if he cannot, he will be executed via "The Giggle Room." A pleasurable way to die, for sure, but still.

Such are the ways of Norstrilia.

Norstrilia” is an idiom for “Old North Australia” but it isn’t a place on Earth at all. It’s a distant planet in a distant future, settled long after humans have dispersed across the galaxy. Norstilians, and everyone else in the galaxy who can afford it, have achieved near immortality by taking a drug called stroon which is refined from a virus carried by giant sheep which Norstrilians raise. That is, most Norstrilians are nearly immortal. A few don’t respond to stroon and thus are condemned to a “normal” life span of 150 years or so. And, in order to prevent overpopulation, many others are deemed “unfit” and executed.

The most important measure of a Norstrilian's fitness is telepathic ability. Rod's is sketchy at best. When it reveals itself at all it explodes out of Rod's control and he can "hier" hundreds of minds at once scattered over hundreds of miles and "scream" pain into every one of them. Only rarely can he "spiek" with his mind as is common among his people. Usually, he has to simply talk with his voice and listen with his ears, a handicap beyond tolerance on Norstilia.

But thanks to some clever thinking on his part and the mild intervention of an offworld official of the Instrumentality (a loose but vastly powerful government to which all humans in the galaxy answer), Rod is granted his life. By surviving, he instantly becomes something of a celebrity on his home world. There are a jealous few who, because of his fame, want to see him either arrested or dead. To escape the constant threats upon his life, Rod (aided by his family's antique mechanical computer) executes a plan to multiply his already significant fortune until he is literally rich enough to purchase Old Earth--that's the planet you are presumably reading this from--and escape Norstrilia.

That's merely the opening. Once on Earth, Rod will contend with criminals, a woman of literally devastating beauty, more elements of the Instrumentality and animals with enhanced brains who have been enslaved by humanity. Oh, and postage stamps.

If the plot sounds like a mess, that's because it is. But it's a happy mess, a tangle that veers from nightmare to folk tale so often, you just give into it and let it take you where ever it will. Everything is a surprise on multiple levels. Like the 100 ton sheep which produce stroon; you would expect them to be comic material, something from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but here they are twisted and strange and more than a little sad. Elsewhere a character's sudden demise might leave the reader smiling, perhaps guiltily, both at its poetic justice and at the sheer silliness of death.

Despite Smith's bizarre imagery, the most remarkable aspect of his storytelling is his language. Always somewhat distant and eerie, Smith's narrative draws from an array of cultural sources. The telling of a story is both academic and sacred, part science, part fairy tale. The prologue, entitled "Theme and Prologue," bluntly introduces readers to the story:

Story, place and time--these are the essentials.

The story is simple. There was a boy who bought the planet earth. We know that, to our cost. It only happened once and we have taken pains that it will never happen again. He came to Earth, got what he wanted , and got away alive, in a series of very remarkable adventures. That's the story.

On the one hand, Smith is simply a reporter. On the other hand, he's a shaman, drum-beating a story into existence.

Norstrilia is Cordwainer Smith's only novel, but hardly his only work. He published dozens of short stories, almost all of them set in the same universe, a universe with a long, complex history, and a wide array of characters and lineages. You can read Norstrilia without knowledge of Smith's larger vision--he provides all you need to know and the parts that don't make complete sense just add to the odd and alienating atmosphere of the work--or you can go explore more of the Smith's rich vision. The Rediscovery of Man collects all of Smith's related shorter works. A number are also available online here:


http://www.webscription.net/chapters/1416521461/1416521461_toc.htm

Revel in the oddity.

Crossposted at Critique de Mr. Chompchomp

A Look Into the Future from the Past, Part I. Or The Mostly Philip K. Dick Hour

The Reel Stuff
Edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg

The book is always better than the movie, isn’t it? That’s what we’re supposed to say, anyway, when our English teachers are listening, but secretly, just sometimes, we like watching the movie more; secretly, we might even believe the movie is better than the fiction it’s based on. That’s OK, say Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, co-editors of The Reel Stuff. In fact, you’re allowed to like both the film and the literature; you’re even allowed to like them for completely different reasons.

To encourage such discussions and musings Greenberg and Thomsen have compiled a collection of thirteen stories and novellas upon which contemporary science fiction movies have been "based.: Here are collected the texts which inspired Mimic, Screamers, Amanda and the Alien, The Outer Limits: Sandkings, Total Recall, Millenium, Candyman, Johnny Mnemonic, Enemy Mine, Nightflyers, Reanimator, The Thing, and The Minority Report.

Not all of these were great movies, and not all of them are great stories either. In fact, some of the fun of reading The Reel Stuff is discovering mismatches between the film and the literature, how a marginally good story (like Minority Report) can become a great movie or how a killer story like Johnny Mnemonic can get translated into a pretty sorry film.

In many ways the comparison isn’t fair at all. Movies cost millions of dollars to make and involve dozens if not hundreds of people all with schedules and careers on the line. Nearly every commercial movie has to fall within a prescribed length. To make back the money put into it, a movie has to have broad appeal, or what the directors and producers think is broad appeal, anyway. A sci-fi movie, thus, will tend to have fight scenes, chase scenes, a love interest, some snappy one-liners and an unambiguous (usually happy) ending.

A story, on the other hand, largely composed by a single person, requiring only time and some way of recording words (many of the stories in this volume predate personal computers and were probably drafted with pen and paper or clunky typewriters), can be more flexible. In fact, it almost has to be. A story can be short and taut, or expansive and rambling. It can enter a characters’ head in a way a film cannot. It can create dazzling visual images, but it doesn’t have to. It can end surprisingly. It needs, in short, to compromise a lot less. To Thomsen and Greenberg’s credit, none of the stories in The Reel Stuff are laden with Hollywood clichés. None of the writers of these works seems to have been worried at all about their stories becoming movies.

There science fiction here is both classic and edgy, from contemporary masters William Gibson (Johnny Mnemonic) and Clive Barker ("Forbidden" which was made into the film Candyman) back to the profoundly influential H.P. Lovecraft ("Herbert West—Reanimator" which inspired Reanimator ). Anchoring the collection are no less than three short stories ("Second Variety" – Screamers, "We Will Remember it for You Wholesale" – Total Recall, and Minority Report) by the prolific and enigmatic Philip K. Dick whose novels also inspired the films Bladerunner and A Scanner Darkly. Although in the introduction Thomsen makes mention of Asimov and Clarke, you won’t find their stories here. The Reel Stuff leans toward a darker, more subversive kind of fiction. Most of the writing here, in fact, is so surprising, even startling, that you just might find yourself agreeing with your English teacher.

Still, movies can do all kinds of things stories can’t. Movies are communal experiences, shared like buckets of popcorn, often the center of evenings out, dates, parties, and family nights. You can talk with your friends about a book, but you can’t share the experience since so much of it occurs in your own head (at least not until we can open up our minds with the technologies imagined in Total Recall or Johnny Mnemonic). To be wowed by a film is to grow closer to the people you’ve seen it with.

Because of this, film and literature are linked. Many, maybe most, movies take works of fiction as their inspiration. Screenwriters and directors are driven to share their individual experience of a great work of fiction. So it’s probably best, in the end, to take in both. See the movie, read the story. Or read the story and then see the movie. It doesn’t really matter. Let them be distinct and separate indulgences that nonetheless inform and enrich each other. The Reel Stuff is a good place to start.

Nick and the Glimmung
by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick began publishing fiction in the 50s and continued until he died in 1982. But his first and only YA novel is being published this year for the first time in the US by Subterranean Press.

Dick is a favorite of movie directors these days, but Nick and the Glimmung is unlikely to ever become a blockbuster sci-fi flick. This isn’t because it lacks spectacle or adventure, but because its vision is far too bleak for Hollywood sci-fi, especially Hollywood sci-fi that features a young protagonist, and his cat.

The future earth which Nick Graham inhabits is dystopic, to say the least. The planet is so overpopulated by humans that they all must live in massive apartment buildings that also extend high into the sky and deep into the earth. Employment is scarce. Many of the "jobs" that people are expected to be grateful for are mere busy work. Nick’s father, Peter Graham, for instance, must check forms to insure that the man sitting next to him has signed the form. Not once has a form gone unsigned. Feeling that he contributes little to society, Nick’s father has grown deeply restless and depressed.

On this future Earth, pets of any kind are illegal on the grounds that they use resources much needed by humans. Nick has an illegal cat named Horace. When Horace is discovered and reported to the authorities, the Graham family chooses to emigrate from Earth and settle with Horace on a new and distant world, Plowman’s Planet. The family is full of hope as they set off, but their new planet is at least as bleak as the old, though far more strange and dangerous. Besides humans, Plowman’s Planet is populated by a range of beings, including "wubs" who speak only through pre-printed cards, "father-things" which produce a kind of clone of those they grow near, chatty "spiddles," wise and productive "printers," devious "werjes," and an evil entity known as the Glimmung.

Nearly all the humans on both Earth and Plowman’s Planet seem fully resigned to a desperate fate--on Earth to their crammed and bureaucratic society, and on Plowman’s Planet to a futile attempt at settlement that has degraded to base survival. When the Grahams arrive on Plowman’s Planet they get immediately lost. After they find their home they are faced with an almost total shortage of water and the self-protective behavior of those around them. They cannot go out at night because of nightmares lurking in the darkness. Their neighbors reveal that no one has been successful farming anything at all.

Finally, even Nick’s hopeful father is affected. When Horace runs away, and when the family first obtains and then loses a book that could help defeat the Glimmung, Nick’s father can do little more than shrug. But there is hope in youth. Nick alone draws on stores of courage and perseverance, setting off to recover Horace and to aid in the planet’s struggle against darkness. Whether Nick succeeds is ambiguous (another reason Hollywood would flee from this story), but out of all this bleakness, Nick’s adventure ultimately invites a belief that the future might be brighter.

Much of Dick’s work might be described as experimental, relying on alienating shifts in point-of-view. Reality blurs for his characters through a haze of drug use, or the confusion of precognition and time travel. Still Nick and the Glimmung may be his most experimental book. Its style recalls absurdist and expressionist writers like Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. Here Dick adopts a formal language that is often both distancing and comic as in the anti-pet man’s dialogue when Horace tries to escape:

From his belt the anti-pet man brought out a metal tube which he pointed towards the kitchen. "I will put him to sleep," he said, "and that will end his illegal activity, his illegal walking backwards into the kitchen."

There is also a deep meta-fictional element that tempts comparisons to Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. Central to Nick’s adventure is a book which comes into his possession. The book both records and predicts everything that occurs on the planet. When the Graham family look themselves up the book, they discover a synopsis of the story in which they are involved:

"They cannot find their farm. The map has been eaten. The creature which smells of fish misleads them until it is too late. They are undone by their love."

More than any of his other novels, Dick’s subject here is not really the future or technology or alien worlds but the human soul in all its facets from its hungry greed to its fearful resignation to its hopeful perseverance to its restorative love. Nick and the Glimmung is a fable that will leave readers puzzled and disturbed but also with a renewed belief in the power and resilience of humanity and especially of humanity’s youth.

You can preorder Nick and the Glimmung from Subterranean Press.

Airman Takes Off

Reviewed by Steven Wolk

So, imagine that you are 14 years old and have been unjustly imprisoned. It is the 1890’s and you live on the Saltee Islands off the coast of Ireland. You are in a hellhole of a prison, and the guards are under orders to break you, to make you obedient; so they hire a human grizzly bear by the name of Otto Malarkey. Each day he comes to beat you. Your cellmate gives you one bit of advice: You must kill him. And this cannot wait. Tomorrow, when Otto pays his visit, it must be his last. So, what do you do?

This dreadful quandary befalls Conor Broekhart in Eoin Colfer’s magnificent Airman. Fourteen years old, his heart beating wildly for his lifelong best friend, Princess Isabella, Conor falls victim to the leader of the Saltee military, Marshall Bonvilain, who has been plotting for years to take over the islands. I give Colfer tremendous credit because of all the challenges Conor confronts, including his impending date with Otto, this boy uses his head more than he uses his fists. Don’t get me wrong; Broekhart does not shy away from a fight. But he’s also got a heart and he’s got a brain, and he uses them both.

Conor was born to fly. In fact, he was born in a hot air balloon. As the story begins his scientific brilliance saves the princess and he is rewarded by King Nicholas – a kind and cool king if there ever was one – to have the same private tutor as the princess. After years of education from tai chi to fencing to physics, he is set-up by Bonvilian as a traitor and tossed into the dark and dank diamond mine prison on the Little Saltee Island to slave his life away. Well, needless to say, this boy does not accept his fate. Secretly, he spends his time in prison designing a flying machine – an aeroplane. Can stonewalls imprison a boy who is meant to fly?

I’m a sucker for history, and while Colfer creates an entirely fictional history of a fictional country (the Saltees actually exist, but they’re uninhabited), he peppers it with real history, like the Civil War and real people, like Leonardo da Vinci and Queen Victoria and Darwin, and he makes that place come alive. This book is in the rare genre of historical science fiction. While most of the book reads like adventurous historical fiction, many (but not all) of the flying machines are imaginary. This all makes for a fabulous ride. It is a book that good social studies and science teachers should get excited about and have in their hands on the first day of school. It takes fighting, flying, fencing, and a love for science and wraps it in a story that makes the reader appreciate history. This book – a work of adventure fiction – puts social studies textbooks to shame, because Colfer knows that history really is adventures into the unknown. Just maybe, if I had read this book as a kid I would have had my eyes opened to the thrill of the past and the joy of science and the delight of thinking. And I would have seen that a book could be both exciting and intelligent.

While many books that pass their 400th page could have used an editing trim (The True Meaning of Smekday, hysterical but too long, comes to mind), Airman does not waste a word, and what wonderful words they are. Walk into a bookstore and peruse the kids’ and young adult shelves and you will be practically assaulted by the number of adventure books. And while some of them certainly have plots full of gusto, not many have the words. So I’ll be blunt: Airman is chock-full of gorgeous writing. It flows, man, like a kid with wings, sailing above the clouds. Read it. Devour it. Fly with it. Airman soars.

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

To inaugurate these reviews of books for young guys, I thought I’d start with my favorite book from when I was a young guy, re-released in a new edition last year.

I admit it, though: I saw the movie first.

It was 1975, and I was twelve, living in a tiny burg in Tennessee. The Land That Time Forgot was playing in nearby Humboldt and I desperately wanted to see it. The TV commercials convinced me it had everything I could ever want from a movie: action, a hint of romance, submarines, evil Germans, and most importantly, dinosaurs. I begged my dad to take me, and he did, falling back on the old "I'm resting my eyes" ploy when I caught him sleeping through it.

The movie was...okay. But it led me to the book, written by Tarzan's creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, and I discovered that the book really did have everything. In addition to the movie’s assets, it had an audacious science-fiction imagination, and prose that only a twelve-year-old boy could take seriously (this was also probably true when Burroughs originally wrote it in 1918). The movie, it turns out, told only one-third of the story: The Land That Time Forgot is actually a trilogy, and by the end reaches such a crescendo of absurd completeness that only Shakespeare, in his plays where either everyone dies or gets married, stands as a rival.

The first book, The Land That Time Forgot, begins in 1914 with a manuscript in a bottle, as thrilling an idea as a boy can encounter. This message is from Bowen Tyler, one of two survivors of a passenger ship sunk by the evil Germans. The other, as luck would have it, is a beautiful girl:

I had never looked upon such perfect features, such a divine molding, which was at the same time human—intensely human. It was a face filled with character and strength and femininity—the face of one who was created to love and be loved.

Tyler, however, is far from being a ladies man. When she saves his life after he mistakenly believes her a traitor, he says:

I could have gone on my knees to her and begged her forgiveness—or at least I could have, had I not been Anglo-Saxon.

When the submarine is finally captured by Tyler and the crew of a British tugboat, more luck (or absurd, magnificent coincidence) comes into play: not only was the submarine originally built in (gasp!) Bowen Tyler's family shipyard, but the girl (double gasp!) is actually the fiancé of the German captain!

Stuck aboard an enemy vessel with a saboteur, Tyler tries to take the submarine to a neutral port, but ends up instead running up on the coast of Caprona, a mysterious unknown continent. They find a way inside, and discover a primeval landscape teeming with dinosaurs and cavemen. And this is where Burroughs really pulls out all the stops: Caprona, or "Caspak" as the natives call it, is more than just a lost world: by following the central river upstream, the submarine travels through evolutionary time. It's like Heart of Darkness, in a sense, only instead of Mr. Kurtz waiting at the head of the river, they find the ultimate source of life in Caspak.

Whew. And that's only the first book.

The People That Time Forgot sees the Tyler manuscript spawning a rescue mission, led by Tyler's old college roommate Tom Billings. With the situation and locale already established, Burroughs jumps right into the action (in every sense: Billings almost immediately meets Ajor, a native girl he describes this way:

…she combined all of the finest lines that one sees in the typical American girl’s face rather than the pronounced sheeplike physiognomy of the Greek goddess. No, even dirt couldn’t hide that fact: she was beautiful beyond compare.).

The third part, Out of Time's Abyss, is a sort of alternate storyline that follows the adventures of tugboat first mate Bradley as, separated from the rest and believed dead, he stumbles into his own troubles, including, inevitably, a girl:

Her figure, but partially concealed by the soft deerskin, was all curves of symmetry and youthful grace, while her features might easily have been the envy of the most feted of Continental beauties.

Unlike the first two sections it is written in third person, and as such shows its age more than the others. It’s also the most totally out-there, with winged humanoids called Weiroos as the villains. But as part of the overall piece, it conveys a (admittedly whacked) sense of depth and substance, not to mention rewarding the plucky mate for his courage by giving him the native princess as a lovely parting gift.

Make no mistake, this is old-fashioned stuff. Heck, it was old-fashioned when I first read it in '75, too. But its utter guilelessness is its greatest strength. In these days of ironic detachment, when heroes don't count unless they follow blood-drenched mayhem with a witty bon mot, Burroughs' Tyler, Billings and Bradley seem positively revolutionary. For boys with an interest in a) alternate-world concepts, b) submarines, c) dinosaurs, d) reasonably non-icky romance and e) loopy action, this book will transcend its century, I suspect, and connect with that primal part of all guys eternally fascinated by these things. It was my favorite book as a boy, and I intend to share it with my boys as soon as they’re old enough.

Although, in deference to their media-saturated era, I may start with the movie. It worked for me.

--Alex Bledsoe

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Leonaur Ltd (April 13, 2007)
ISBN-10: 1846772206