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.

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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

The Children of Men

Baroness James of Holland Park is probably best known for her novels about Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray and for the television series based on the former, but I chose her dystopian novel The Children of Men to begin my acquaintance with James.

I'd seen the 2006 movie based on the novel, and I begin the book curious about why the movie changed the cause of the impending end of human reproduction. (It's mass male infertility in the book, female infertility in the movie -- a commercially wise decision, perhaps, given that men are said not to read books anymore. Who wants to pick up a book and get blamed for the impending extinction of humanity?)

The novel's strength in its opening chapters is the matter-of-fact first-person narration by a historian named Theodore Faron, who begins a diary of his middle age with the news that the last known human being to have been born on Earth has died. Oddly enough, the world has managed to continue on its way for two decades after the end of human fertility, and Faron's diary is as personal and idiosyncratic as diaries are supposed to be, yet full of chilling details. I'll leave you with my two favorite, then go back to my reading:

"History, which interprets the past to understand the present and confront the future, is the least rewarding discipline for a dying species." 

and

"It was in that year, 2008, that the suicides increased. Not mainly among the old, but among my generation, the middle-aged, the generation who would have to bear the brunt of an ageing and decaying society’s humiliating but insistent needs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Detectives beyond the stars

Happy New Year to all. For the year’s first post, I’ll cross borders I’ve rarely crossed here at DBB: those to science fiction.

For all the usual sci-fi hater's reasons, I’ve never been attracted to the genre: It’s silly. It’s far-fetched. It takes itself way too seriously. But I’d read good things about Alfred Bester, who wrote some classics in the field in the 1950s. I figured that if William Gibson thought he was cool, the man might be worth a look.

Neil Gaiman’s introduction to Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination (also published as Tiger! Tiger!) says Bester “was one of the only—perhaps the only—SF writers to be revered by the old timers (`First SF’), by the radical `New Wave’ of the 1960s and early 1970s, and, in the 1980s, by the `cyberpunks.’”

That’s good. So is this:

“When he died in 1987, three years into the flowering of cyberpunk, it was apparent that the 1980s genre owed an enormous debt to Bester—and to this book in particular. ... But what makes The Stars My Destination more interesting—and ten years on, less dated—than most cyberpunk, is watching Gully Foyle become a moral creature.”

So, how does the novel look so far? It's got a hell of a lot more humor than I expected, and that counts for much:

 "A researcher named Jaunte set fire to his bench and himself (accidentally) and let out a yell for help with particular reference to a fire extinguisher. Who so surprised as Jaunte and his colleagues when he found himself standing alongside said extinguisher, seventy feet removed from his lab bench."

He exercises that humor in paragraphs full of absurd situations, comically open-ended tales, and words that tumble over themselves in the verbal equivalent of a long, cackling tenor saxophone solo:

"Despite all efforts, no man had ever jaunted across the voids of space, although many experts and fools had tried. Helmut Grant, for one, who spent a month memorizing the co-ordinates of a jaunte stage on the moon and visualized every mile of the two hundred and forty thousand-mile trajectory from Times Square to Kepler City. Grant jaunted and disappeared. They never found him. They never found Enzio Dandridge, a Los Angeles revivalist looking for Heaven; Jacob Maria Freundlich, a paraphysicist who should have known better than to jaunte into deep space searching for metadimensions; Shipwreck Cogan, a professional seeker after notoriety; and hundreds of others, lunatic-fringers, neurotics, escapists, and suicides."

I don't know if I'll finish the novel; the above is just from the prologue, after all. But I love that paragraph.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

More Westlake

Last week I started rereading a Donald Westlake novel looking for the answer to a contest question. I found the answer and entered the contest. Then I finished that book (The Handle), and I've read four more by Westlake since, each at least for the second time. Here are some of the highlights:

• The guards in the bank that gets stolen in Bank Shot (that right: stolen, not robbed) work for the Continental Detective Agency, a tribute to the crime writer Westlake acknowledged as his first and virtually only early influence. One of the guards in particular is content to be a guard with the company. He has no aspirations to be a Continental Op.

• A belligerent driver who threatens to make trouble for Dortmunder and Kelp in the same book backs off when our heroes persuade him that police would be very interested in the piles of soft-core porn books in the back of his car. The books are titles Westlake wrote himself under his Alan/Allan Marshall aliases.

• Another Westlake book is on the way, even though Westlake died in 2008. It's a "weird little SF mystery" called The Risk Profession that first appeared in a science-fiction magazine in the early '60s, and it stars "an investigator for an interplanetary insurance company, ferreting out the truth behind suspicious ... insurance claims."

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

William Gibson's crime-inflected science fiction

Science-fiction has never been my genre, and it may not be after I'm done with Burning Chrome, either. But the gritty urban settings and fatalistic attitudes in this collection of early short stories by William Gibson ought to make interesting reading for crime fiction fans.

The opening pages of "Johnny Mnemonic" especially read like a good-natured nod to hard-boiled detectives, with the protagonist preparing for a meeting in sleazy bar with a man who owes him money. ("The meet was set ... " Where else would you see meet for meeting but in a hard-boiled crime story?)

The preface by Bruce Sterling, while acknowledging the importance of pop culture in Gibson's work, does not acknowledge crime fiction. But it does include this description of Gibson's world:

"Rather than the usual passionless techies and rock-ribbed Competent Men of hard SF, his characters are a pirate's crew of losers, hustlers, spin-offs, cast-offs and lunatics."

That could describe David Goodis' world or Jim Thompson's or Ken Bruen's. The stories intersect with noir writing in one other interesting way: their general refusal to offer death (or, in its sci-fi version, apocalypse) as an easy way out.

So, Gibson's cyberpunk shares elements with the harder, darker, grittier end of crime writing. What are your favorite examples of genre mixing, jumping, and crossbreeding?

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The book's introduction by Gibson himself has already debunked one popular misconception for me. Gibson did, indeed, coin the word cyberspace, but not in his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Rather, the word first appears in "Burning Chrome," written in 1981 and published in 1982.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Sci-fi and crime: What's the connection?

A post about mystery and the moon earlier this week elicited some interesting examples of crime fiction with a space theme or setting as well as the information, new to me, that Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, two science-fiction giants, had written mysteries as well. I also had never known that John D. MacDonald wrote science fiction.

So here's a question: What, other than money, might dispose a crime writer to turn to science fiction or vice versa? What features do the genres share, or is it just a matter of certain writers' simply liking to work in both forms?

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Late addition: B.V. Lawson's In Reference to Murder blog adds Stanislaw Lem to the roster of science-fiction/crime-fiction boundary jumpers with his novel The Chain of Chance.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

One Small Step ...

Forty years ago today, man set foot on the moon for the first time. Nineteen years ago, Reginald Hill published the novella One Small Step, in which Dalziel and Pascoe blast off into space to solve a murder on the moon. (It's a terrific story.)

What other crime stories involve the moon or other celestial bodies?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009