Is Detectives Beyond Borders turning into a Dickhead? plus another question for readers

I've never had much patience for science fiction, fantasy, or alternative history, and the few books in those fields that I've tried include some highly regarded titles. I generally find that once I get the (exceedingly) high concept early on, I keep waiting for the concept to turn into a story, and it never does.

But I have a feeling I may like Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle better. Its concept is high, and therefore simple: The Axis powers have won the Second World War, and Japan and Germany have divided up the former United States, ruling them as puppet territories. But already in the first chapter, Dick begins to have sly, subversive fun with the concept: An American named Robert Childan sells American antiques, offered as ethnic exotica much as Asian art is peddled to non-Asians in the real world.

Childan speaks in clipped cadences, something like the way Asian characters stereotypically do in mid-century American popular fiction. (The Man in the High Castle appeared in 1962.) He even bows obsequiously a time or two. And, most daring of all, Dick reverses in one paragraph every social, racial, and power stereotype you can think of about about sexual dynamics between men and women in which one partner is of Western descent and the other from the East:

“But it was known,” thinks Childan, “relations between Japanese and yanks, although generally it was between a Japanese man and yank woman. This . . . he quailed at the idea. And she was married. He whipped his mind away from the pageant of his involuntary thoughts and began busily opening the morning’s mail.”

I’ve read just chapter, but Dick has already demonstrated that he can go beyond the concept and explore what that concept means for his characters. It’s a hell of a start.

Now, your turn: What are your favorite fantasy, science fiction, or alternate-history novels and stories, especially if that is not your usual reading? Why do you like those novels for stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

My second go-round with China Miéville

I tried and quickly abandoned China Miéville's The City and the City some time ago, but the only thing I don't like so far about the same author's Perdido Street Station is the back-cover blurb from a reviewer who says the novel "rocked my world."

"Rock my world" is just this generation's version of "blow my mind," no stupider than its predecessor. But slang in formal writing often seems forced, as if the writer is trying to prove him or herself (or the stodgy publication for which he or she writes) hip.  I gnash my teeth when middle-aged newspaper movie and music writers refer to "reboots" rather than remakes or cover versions. And  I wrote off the New Yorker years ago when a think piece about a movie star (Julia Roberts, I think), told me: "It pisses [Roberts] off that..."

So much for the blurb; back to the novel. While The City and the City seemed to be trying too hard to prove its point in its opening chapters, Perdido Street Station combines deliberately over-the-top post-apocalyptic imagery and language (Dig the cheesy similes!) with homely good humor in a mix I find highly attractive. Or maybe it's just the book's old-fashioned virtue of creating deeply sympathetic protagonists, even though some of them are not exactly people.

*

P.S. After reading a few more chapters, I realize that, as entertaining as Perdido Street Station is, Miéville also offers thought-provoking views of what makes up a city. Think of Miéville's city, New Crobuzon, as an organic being whose dead parts don't necessarily get sloughed off.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Yes, Jasper Fforde does write crime fiction

The cover blurb for The Eyre Affair, first of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next novels, invokes Monty Python, Harry Potter, Stephen Hawking and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the Wall Street Journal's reviewer was obviously doing some dedicated zeitgeist mining.

Neither that blurb nor any of the ones on the back cover mentions one of the richly imaginative Fforde's many inspirations: crime fiction — strange, since Thursday Next is a Literary Detective.

But that's all right. Several reviews quoted inside, safely away from the prying eyes of impulse buyers, number crime, suspense, hard-boiled mystery and, in a wince-inducing allusion, James Bond among the ingredients in Fforde's fantastic stew.

Having read Fforde's Nursery Crime novels, The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear, I am willing to bet this book, first in a series that comprises five novels so far, will be just as much fun and just as inventive in its integration of fantasy and science fiction with its obvious crime elements.

***

Visit Jasper Fforde's Web site. Read what I had to say about The Big Over Easy and The Fourth Bear.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Active dislike

Have you ever noticed how many annoying, meaningless buzz words have active as a component: Proactive. Interactive. I regularly excise from news stories references to someone's being actively involved in a dispute, and if a reporter ever explains to me how active involvement in a fight differs from the passive kind, I shall be happy to restore his or her pleonasm.

I recently read some well-deserved scorn for proactive. Terry Pratchett pokes gentler but equally well-deserved fun at interactive in Thud!:

"`I'm sorry, sir. (The painting is) probably long gone out of the city.'

"`But hwhy?' said the curator. `They could have studied it in the museum! hWe're very interactive these days!'

"`Interactive?' said Vimes. `What do you mean?'

"`hWell, people can ... look at the pictures as much as they hwant,' said Sir Reynold. He sounded a little annoyed. People shouldn't ask that kind of question."

Right on, Brother Pratchett!

Now, what's your favorite redundancy, circumlocution, periphrasis, pleonasm or just plain useless use of words?
=============
News flash:

"You want tellers to be proactive, but you want them to do it safely," said FBI Special Agent Fred Gutt.

From a news story about a bank teller who chased and caught a robber and was fired for his trouble. "It's something I almost look forward to. It's a thrill and I'm an adrenaline-junkie person. It's the pursuit," he said.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thud! jokes

I could cite any number of jokes and amusing lines from Terry Pratchett's Thud!, some of them pertinent to recent posts here. But I'll highlight one sequence because it's funny, because it packs a philosophical punch, and because it reminds me of something that once happened on a beach:

"`War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?' he said.

"`Dunno, Sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?'

"`Absol— well, okay.'

"`Defending yourself against a totalitarian aggressor?'

"`All right, I'll grant you that, but—'

"`Saving civilization from a horde of—'

"`It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,' said Fred Colon sharply.

"`Yeah, but in the long run, what does, Sarge?'"

What do you think of the sudden turn toward fatalism in the last line? In any case, that's not what I meant by packing a punch. The philosophical oomph lies in Nobby's undermining of his sergeant's strict pacifist position.

Look what else the passage does. It makes a pop-culture reference, and it undercuts the solemnity of the reference with comic pacing. Adding to the humor is that the two participants in the little dialogue are comic foils, the last humans, dwarfs, trolls or vampires one would expect to have such a debate. So I'd say Terry Pratchett made a few words do lots of work here.

==========

What about the beach? One day my two nephews were building sand castles and, as boys will do when staking out territory, they began to fight. "War!" the older screamed in anguish, to which I replied, "What is it good for?" and a man on a neighboring beach towel called out "Absolutely nothing!" No prize to anyone who figures out that I cried: "Say it again!"

Something worked because, possibly amazed by their elders' invocation of Edwin Starr, the boys shut up and gave over their noisy quarreling in favor of a quiet sulk.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Thud!

I begin my crime fiction/sci-fi fantasy explorations with Terry Pratchett's Thud! (Thanks to all participants in the recent discussions here on crime and sci-fi for opening my eyes, exercising my mind, and expanding my reading list.)

Pratchett's Discworld books are generally thought of as comic fantasy, but the opening pages of this novel offer enough crime-fiction tropes to keep any mystery reader or watcher smiling. From American crime, there is the besieged urban police precinct beset by racial tension in the station house and out. From British crime, there are the aristocratic police chief, his plucky, intelligent wife, and the plodding but capable sergeant.

From the world of graphic novels comes a nod to Alan Moore's Watchmen. From noir comes the cop involved with a stripper. From the art-world thriller comes the hint that a stolen painting could contain a secret code. For good measure, real life gets a supporting role, with seeming invocations of Northern Ireland's troubles.

That's a lot of allusion for forty-two pages, and if the victims, suspects and antagonists did not include trolls, dwarfs and vampires, it might seem a bit much. But it's good fun so far, and as I read, I'm sure I'll think about why and how fantasy is a good vehicle for exploring issues that might otherwise make for heavier going. For now, though, I'll throw it over to you. What freedoms does fantasy grant a writer?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Another kind of joke from Jasper Fforde

I posted a comment last week about the entertaining jibes at crime-fiction plot devices in Jasper Fforde's novel The Fourth Bear. But there's more to Fforde's jokes than good-natured, self-referential literary japery.

There are also jabs at political correctness and conspiracy theorists, among other things, and, lest you think these are easy prey, Fforde's humor is always a bit more probing than you might expect from jokes directed at such targets.

And then there is the following, which is just plain funny, no explanation needed:

"`Lovers,' repeated Bartholomew. `Goldilocks and I. For more than a year now.'

"`Wait, wait,' said Jack in a state of some confusion. `You were, to great fanfare, Westminster's first openly gay MP and have remained a vociferous mouthpiece for all kinds of minority-rights issues for the past twenty-five years, and now you're telling me ... you're straight?'

"Bartholomew covered his face with his hands, and his shoulders shook with a silent sob.

"`You don't know what it's like,' he said miserably, `living a lie.'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Plot devices by number and two questions for readers

Here are two short passages from The Fourth Bear, the second novel in Jasper Fforde's Nursey Crimes series:

"He explained the news to Mary, who said, `How about if we do a plot device number twenty-six and pretend not to look for him?'

"`So you're suggesting we look for him against orders, catch him, cover ourselves with glory, and the by-the-book officers look like idiots?'

"Mary nodded enthusiastically. `Pretty much.'

"`No, we're going to follow plot device number thirty-eight.'

"Mary narrowed her eyes. `Which one is that again?'

"`We wait until they beg for our assistance, then save the day. For now we follow orders."

and

"`The Gingerbreadman is not an NCD investigation, Sergeant. You know that.'

"`It was a coincidence, sir,' she responded confidently. `Do you think I would be crazy enough to talked him on my own?'

"`Perhaps not you,' said Briggs, glancing at Jack. Briggs thought for a moment and narrowed his eyes. `This isn't plot device number twenty-seven, is it?' he asked suspiciously.

"`The one where my partner gets killed in a drug bust gone wrong and I throw in my badge and go rogue?' replied Jack innocently. `I don't think so, sir.'

"`No, not that one,' countered Briggs in a state of some confusion. `The one where you try and find the Gingerbreadman on the sly and make Copperfield and me look like idiots.'

"`That would be a twenty-nine, wouldn't it?' put in Mary, who wasn't going to miss out on the fun.

"` No, no,' said Jack, `Briggs means a twenty-six. A twenty-nine is where the bad guy turns out quite inexplicably to be the immediate superior.'"

Jasper Fforde knows his crime-fiction plot devices. How well do you? What crime novels, stories, movies and television shows uses the devices he has his characters discuss? And what are the implications of having fictional characters discuss plot devices, particularly Jack's tentative "I don't think so, sir"?

(The Fourth Bear follows Fforde's first Nursery Crimes book, The Big Over Easy. It's highly entertaining reading, despite a stupid blurb from the Washington Times that Fforde is "our best thinking person's genre writer." (See critical clichés.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

The crazy world of Jasper Fforde

"Easter was always bad for him."

– Humpty Dumpty's ex-wife

Blurbs I've seen for Jasper Fforde's novels tend toward stunned, amazed cheering, and it's easy to see why. There is nothing else like his Nursery Crimes books. I've just read the first of them, The Big Over Easy, and I'm happy to join the chorus. But I'll also try to suggest a few reasons why the book is far more than yuk-it-up parody of hard-boiled tropes.

1) I wrote tropes rather clichés deliberately. Fforde pokes fun at the hard-working, browbeaten cop, the trusty sidekick, the evil genius, the femme fatale, the hero in peril and more. Nothing is easier than making fun of a cliché; it's like kicking a man when he's down. But Fforde manages the far more difficult feat of making his fun affectionate. He obviously loves the genre conventions at which he pokes such delightful fun. And what a range of genres!

2) His imagination runs riot. The victim in The Big Over Easy is Humpty Dumpty. The investigating officers are Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Reading Police Department, Nursery Crime Division, and his sidekick, Mary Mary. Need I say more? I will anyway:

3) The nursery-rhyme motif is ingenious. One can imagine the early Woody Allen building a humorous essay around it, in the manner of his gangster parodies. But Fforde spins it out into a 380-page novel that never flags. How does he manage this? By ringing constant changes. Jack Spratt is not merely a hardworking detective who likes his meat lean. At unexpected moments, Fforde has him evoke other nursery-rhyme Jacks as well, one of them in a highly amusing running joke.

4) So far, Fforde has played with nursery-rhyme characters and crime-fiction conventions. But there's more. He has equally affectionate fun with a science-fiction trope or two and with a thriller-style plague that threatens if not to destroy the world, then at least to make it uncomfortable.

5) Fforde enhances the illusion of a weird but real parallel universe by heading each chapter with a mock newspaper article, usually very funny.

6) Both in the mock articles and in the body of the novel, Fforde shows a sharp ear for vacuously breathless journalistic prose.

7) The novel has at least one serious message about the contemporary world. Here's a well-meaning superior officer urging Jack to gently fudge details of an investigation:

"Times change, Jack, and we have to change with them. Public approval is a currency we cannot afford to fritter away."

If that's not a sobering comment on market-driven pandering in just about every aspect of contemporary life including the mainstream media, well, then, I don't work in the mainstream media.

8) In addition to the ingenuity of its conception, the book is just plain fun to read. Here's one of many examples:

"`Interfering fool!' she spat. `The bastard Jellyman has escaped. Ten long years of planning for nothing. Do you know how long it took me to engineer my little friend up there?'

"`You just said. Ten years – '

"`Don't patronize me!' she screeched."

Maybe this post is just so much more stunned, amazed cheering afteer all. So go see what the fuss is about, and read some Jasper Fforde.

P.S. Does anyone else see a bit of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's Arthur Dent in Fforde's Jack Spratt – and of that book's chapter headings in Fforde's mock newspaper articles?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008