from the Earth Journal of Scientific Analyst SLJLK92349UO,
Earth Invasion Exploratory Unit

One thing became clear to me as I read this trilogy: Octavia Butler is not particularly partial to the human kind. Oh, humanity: violent, vengeful, and vicious; petty, pitiful, perpetually proud. Avaricious and all too willing to prey upon each other. As a fellow visitor to this planet, I view Butler's perspective as one that is roughly in line with my own. And so this was quite an invigorating experience given the overabundance of offensively pro-human novels in the science fiction genre.

The story, in broad strokes: humanity destroys itself... the starfaring race of the Oankali arrive to pick up the pieces by saving what few humans remain on their blighted planet. These saviors of humanity offer them a sort of bargain: join with them - literally - and be reborn. It is not actually a bargain because humanity does not have much say in the matter. Predictably, humans seethe and rebel against this kindly offer. My cynical self can't help but think that the main reason humans resist the compassion of the Oankali is because a large number of tentacles are involved. Racist humans! The trilogy follows the lives of three individuals: the woman who paves the way for a joining of the two species and two of her children - two different kinds of human/Oankali constructs.

Butler correctly assesses humanity's tragic flaw: a genetic tendency towards hierarchism at every level. A flaw that on the micro level leads to an inability to form relationships based on equality - and in the macro, one that could easily lead to the end of humanity's home world as they know it. Oh, humanity. Butler writes in simple, straightforward prose, in what I imagine to be a chilly, neutral monotone. Her style of writing makes the reading experience a deceptively simple one. But this is not a simple work. There is so much to contemplate throughout this series, in particular the idea of essentialism in terms of basic human nature: in gender roles, in the propagation of the species, in the ability to form families and other necessary social units, in the ways that humans think and act and react. Science fiction as a genre once had at its core the idea of "speculation" - what would happen if this concept were introduced, what would happen if that idea changed a world. Butler's trilogy is a part of that excellent tradition and these books are challenging in the best sort of way: they force the reader to speculate on their own limited natures, on their own individual decisions and on the future of their kind. Lilith's Brood imagines where humanity's ultimate path may lie if they continue to give free reign to their basest genetic impulses - and then she imagines another path.

It should go without saying that Butler is ultimately in favor of the Oankali way. As a race, they are not without their own rather endearing flaws. But compared to humanity? That's like comparing a human child's scribblings to the works of the relatively advanced human da Vinci. It was quite refreshing for me to read an alien invasion saga that is so resolutely on the side of the sensible "aliens." It was also fascinating to witness Butler's iciness gradually melt away, slowly revealing herself to be a rather tender individual who fully endorses the spirit and acts of cooperation, connection, and joining that are necessary for any species' ongoing survival. Her calm and removed observational skills are merely the exoskeleton of a person who, underneath that protective chitin, does value such things as curiosity, compassion, and the concept that to live is to change. All beings are works in progress.

I have observed humanity as well; indeed, that is my entire mission on this planet. I hesitate to say that I am more sympathetic to the species, but my robot heart does have a certain fondness for this stumbling, bumbling race - a sympathy that a being from Butler's own insect species would most usually find quite foreign. Well, I have been programmed for sympathy, while such emotions are often eschewed by her culture. I suppose these differences in perspective will be reconciled once our joint invasion of Earth commences.

10 THINGS I LEARNED

✍

7 Things I Learned About Rio and Brazil

➩ Brazilians really love to fuck. I mean who doesn't, but Brazilians should get some kinda award.

➩ Brazilian women like it rough and Brazilian men are more than happy to deliver. This is of course true all over the world, but Brazilians are really on point with this.

➩ Brazilian police are inherently corrupt, secretive, eager to make some side-money, and happy to deliver torture and violence as they see fit. Sure, police all the world over naturally abide by this common sense code, but Brazilian police really embrace it - no shame in their game!

➩ The original tribal cultures of Brazil were without a doubt bloodthirsty, vindictive, and sorta stupid. Naturally this is the case of the original tribal cultures of all countries in the history of the world, but those original Brazilian tribal cultures really put the thirst in bloodthirsty.

➩ Rio was basically founded by pirates. Well this is a truth for every major city in every country, but in Rio they were literally pirates, like on a boat type pirates!

➩ Rio's residents are consumed by role/game-playing to the point that it rules and often ruins their lives. This is a truism for humans in every city but man in Rio those games will determine who you have sex with, whose girl you steal, who you marry, who you kill. That's gaming with stakes!

➩ The folk of Rio, of Brazil itself, are basically a superstitious, foolish people whose women are secret sluts dependent on men and whose men are jealous, controlling, and potentially violent. And that keeps things fun! It goes without saying that this is true for every man or woman who ever walked the face of earth since the beginning of time, but gosh those Rio folk really live the dream on the daily.

✍

3 Things I Learned About "The Mystery of Rio"

➩ Digressions and amusing anecdotes about the history of a place can be entertaining to read. But when all of those digressions and anecdotes are mainly interested in portraying how violent, sexually obsessed, superstitious, toxic, and ignorant the people of a place are... it really gets old. I started wondering if the author just sees Rio as some sort of colorful, brutal porn cartoon.

➩ Digressions and amusing anecdotes about the history of a place can be entertaining to read. But when all of those digressions and anecdotes eventually become the novel itself, so much so that the narrative is sidelined and characterization comes to a standstill and the themes get lost in the mix... it can get frustrating. And eventually boring.

➩ No matter how skilled and imaginative a writer is - and make no mistake, Alberto Mussa is phenomenally skilled - if you decide to solve your murder mystery by explaining it all happened because of magic... I can't help but roll my eyes a little. Um, isn't that sort of a cheat? Pretty unsatisfying.

She sings a song to God, who listens. God in return gives her pain, sadness, loneliness, and above all else, love. God cherishes the martyrs and Mariette walks the martyr way, a thorny path and a bloody one. She sings a song about her love for God, and some of her sisters listen while others turn away, or seek to silence her song. She will sing on, relentless, to believers and disbelievers, true and false friends alike. She cannot help herself: she embraces her ecstasy, her martyrdom. Perhaps she was born to sing, to suffer, and so transcend.

Hansen sang his own song when writing this pristine novel. Each bride of Christ is given their moment, each moment is given its due. Their humanity is on display, small moments and large ones, generous gestures and mean ones, all are small pieces of the larger whole. The natural world is on display as well: the land and the seasons, the blooming of flowers, the coming of frost. Hansen exults in the minutiae - no act or thought or bloom or blade of grass is too small.

That is the lesson I took from this book: the living world is as alive with meaning as the spiritual world. And just as vital. Not a battleground, but a staging ground, or a testing ground. A journey as important as the destination. If our world is a consequence of God's will, an enactment of God's plan, then this world is as holy a place as God's land beyond.

The novel Sugar Bush is published to instant acclaim, capturing the zeitgeist. The author Kingsley clutches his teddy bear and his niece Jessica plots his demise. There is suicide, there is murder; there is the peeling back of layers and there is a reckoning.

Materials that form the model: pages from a book, blood and water, thoughts and desires from the minds and dicks of men. The model is of a woman; the woman is a model.

The book is slim and sharp, an arrow launched at the male gaze. The humor is dry, cold, and evil but is only a brittle veneer, a cover for the anger and empathy beneath. The meta is deployed like a weapon turned upon its shooter: Potter acknowledges he is a man writing about women, an author representing the representation of women, the irony there. The postmodern "narrative" is mirror facing mirror, shingles of plot overlapping, and yet a clear and merciless trajectory is followed. This is a tale of revenge.

Dennis Potter was fascinating. I love him for writing the films Pennies from Heaven, a bleak and ruthless musical, and Brimstone & Treacle, a dark and nauseating family drama. Two favorites of mine back when I was a (sick) kid. This one is less nihilistic but no less challenging.

fuck the world and fuck the people in it. right? fuck ‘em. you spend your life trying to do things, accomplish things, putting yourself out there. do people even remember those things? does the universe even care? you are just a cog in the great world-machine that doesn’t even want to know you, that doesn’t recognize the things you’ve done. who could ever want you, you are just a useless part, now that you are

you have many accomplishments, many great deeds. so why was that done to you, why are your insides on the outside, why are all the base emotions and fears and petty little anguishes out there on the surface, a formless cloud of contamination, making people sick to be around you. why should they fear those things? they have such things inside them too, a wounded and wounding toxic sickness of the soul. the hypocrites, they are all like you, full of

flee to your new home: a maze and a death-trap. just let those who drove you away come and try to get you, now that they need you. feh! let them try! let them come to your world-maze. let them come and let them die.

it is a book about a maze and the man in it. it is a book about three men. one bitter man on the inside. two men on the outside: one old and cynical and the other young and idealistic. it is a book about being a certain kind of man. different versions, different stages of the same sort of man: an explorer a change agent a man who makes things happen. it is about men who don’t need women, or things, or ideas. it is a book about men who need to move forward and make their mark, maybe many marks. men whose accomplishments - and only their accomplishments - define them. what is a maze to such men? simply a place to go.

it is a stark book and it is a melancholy book and it is a thrilling book and it is a surprisingly affecting book. it is beautifully written; it is a pulpy adventure as well. philosophies and perilous missions; rage and sadness and idealism and cynicism; transformation and alienation. alien beings; alien humans. so many things. project your own ideas onto the book; its body is pleasingly formed and ready to be clothed with your own perspective.

the man in the maze made the maze his home; he made of himself a maze as well.

Imagine a future world with many towering worlds within it! Urbmon 116 is one such world within a world; it thrusts from the earth with its 800 floors, engorged with over 800,000 residents. Urbmon 116 has everything a person could desire besides privacy. Its residents never leave this world inside!

Imagine a utopian future! A world that is orderly but not truly conformist. communal and neighborly and all about sharing and learning and responsibility and definitely not about being a maladjusted malcontent because then down the reclamation chute you will go. It's a utopian world of total openness! Who needs privacy? Nudity is no big thing. And why get hung up on sex; everyone does it starting from a fairly early age and it's happening everywhere - both for recreation and procreation - and all the time, in the one-room family homes and in the teenage couples' dorms and during social gatherings; in fact it's illegal to refuse your body to someone who wants it. No more sexual hang-ups! Copulate all you want and have as many kids as possible, it is all a part of God's plan! God wants you to fuck!

Silverberg is always a compelling author and he turns this story into a haunting masterpiece. His prose is smart and elegant and memorable. His descriptions of the busy, mechanized tower world put you right there in the middle of this buzzing hive; the same goes for the pastoral outside world, full of eerie ambiguity and unknowable traditions. He's even-handed in his detailing of tower culture: the rural culture outside these towers is shown to be just as disturbing and both cultures do have some positive values. This felt less like a portrait of a dystopia and rather more like a novel about a utopia that may be perfect for certain sorts of people. Imagine that!

Imagine a wide range of voices, telling you all about their lives in Urbmon 116, their dreams and goals and challenges and all the little things that define them and all the big things that they can only barely grasp! The World Inside is a medley of such voices. There is no single protagonist - although there is a central character criss-crossing throughout the stories - and POV characters reappear as supporting characters elsewhere. Each of these characters are rendered beautifully. They are complex, sympathetic, and all too fallible.

Imagine a 14-year old boy named Siegmond Kluver! He's rapidly rising up the corporate ladder, full of ideas and ambitions, the go-to guy for all the corporate honchos, the most popular boy in the building, and quite the expert cocksman - with a distinct preference for the older ladies. We watch him over the course of a year as he bounces around and jumps into various beds and climbs that ladder; we watch him as he begins to question himself and his world. We watch him as he has a mid-life crisis at the tender age of 15! What's a boy to do when he's succeeded at everything, when he's reached the pinnacle - the very top floor? There's only one direction left to go!

O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory? Such soothing words. The afterlife as a just reward - Jesus has taken the sting of death away; the victory that lies beyond the grave - for all those who love Him. But alas, there is no such savior, no such leavening of pain, no embracing of the afterworld in the three novellas that comprise Pale Horse, Pale Rider.

"Old Mortality"

First: death is a mask, a veil, a shadow cast long and dark... it reshapes those it has taken, makes them more than themselves, makes them grand symbols of what has been and what you could never be. They tower over their children and their children's children; death has given them a terrible glamour and death has reshaped memories. Death is a snare in that first tale, it catches and it keeps. It takes some away while it clutches the living to its bosom, it captures their memories so their paths move never forward but always behind, always in contemplation and replication of the past. Brave Miranda! Idiosyncratic girl. that idiosyncrasy could save her, that yearning to be apart, to be different. She sees through those veils. They aren't just veils, or memories or rituals, or quaint pictures on the mantle or keepsakes in the attic... they are obsessions, they doom her family, death smothers them with wistful sighs. Go, Miranda, escape! Leave that living death behind! Miranda is diffident in her own way, callous even, but you root for that escape. I liked her story, I respected "Old Mortality" but I did not love it. I felt very little connection to it on a personal level and I thank my parents for that, they are the children of Miranda, each escaped their terrible and shadowy families, each fled: little of the past obsesses them. The lives and deaths and obsessions of my ancestors mean virtually nothing to me. I'm a modern sorta guy, rootless. I read this as if I were reading a story of fantasy.

"Noon Wine"

Second: death is a sudden thorn in the side, a surprise bite from an animal that you did not know was beside you. It's just a thorn, it's just a bite, it's what happens, right? Wrong. The bite itches and burns: you scratch that bite: it becomes infected. all you are, all you were, all you could be... reduced to that awful and painful infection. Your life seeps out of you like pus. And you die, all because of a random bite. "Noon Wine" carefully and calmly sets up its story, its living & breathing characters. It makes you care for them, in its own hard way. Unlike the stories that surround it, Porter's life had little in common with this portrait of dairy farmers. But you wouldn't know that from reading it, so thoroughly and completely does she imagine these lives. She does not condescend to these characters. She does something else: she destroys them, and with a terrible sort of randomness. I can see myself as Mr. Thompson, his quick and angry act, a terrible reaction, that ax; a sudden thorn in the side, a surprise bite - they happen. But it was hard for me to envision an itch afterwards, a scratching to an infection to a death. Sometimes people have to die. Right? I wouldn't scratch that itch, I did what I did and now it's time to move on. Or so I say to myself, imagining myself as different, condescending to him and his family, their reactions, their horror. But how would I know? I've never killed a man, not yet at least.

"Pale Horse, Pale Rider"

And last: death rides beside us, always! It is not something to escape; it is our partner, our guide; it is a sudden bite and it is a velvety shadow; it will transform us and take us, one and then the other. "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" is a work of perfection. Not a phrase, not a word out of place. It moves from vivid dream to prosaic reality, to hallucination, and then to a new, cold-eyed reality. Death is present in every crevice of this story. Miranda returns; she is full of life and yet she dreams of death. Not of making her own death! Death is separate from but yet still connected to her, not an idea but a thing, a real thing. In the beginning of this story, death rides beside her but as a glamorous stranger. The time, the people, the place: world war one is coming to a close; a 'lady reporter' and a soldier about to be deployed are deeply in love; there is an outbreak of influenza in Denver. The novella is swooningly romantic and the novella swooningly despairs. But it breaks through it, in its own way. Miranda emerges but as someone truly different. Someone better? No, someone harder, someone deeper. Not better and not worse but different. The Miranda of "Old Mortality" has been obliterated; it is as if she never existed. Who is this new Miranda who has seen death up close, who has lived and loved and lost and died and been reborn... who has made death her friend? Why, she has become Katherine Anne Porter, of course.

Such curiously precise sentences, so exact, so perfectly constructed. They tell you everything and nothing. It's the meaning between those words, the implications of what is not being said that disturbs. Those slippery places, those half-conscious spaces. Admire Aickman for his perfect prose and his marvelous subtlety and his dry, dry wit. But love him for what he doesn't tell you, for taking you to a place where your mind must operate on a different level, someplace new and vague and troubling. He paints a picture of the night sky: the clouds and the treetops and the moon, all the stars in all of their strange remoteness. It is up to you to turn them into something, to make of them constellations - and other shapes.

I was surprised and a bit saddened to see two excellent reviews of this book insist that it is not horror. Dark Entries is horror at its most profound. Horror doesn't simply scare; it inspires dread and a certain kind of chilliness, a creeping sort of understanding that the mind often resists. He provides a story that will read like a dream and he provides a meaning that he will only hint at; it is up to the reader to connect the two, to turn the oblique and the opaque into something that has its own logic. Nightmare logic. Aickman is one of the absolute masters of the horror genre.

Dark Entries is Aickman's first solo collection. Perhaps this early in his career he was more invested in creating horrors that were at least somewhat tangible and familiar. Somewhat.

Ringing the Changes has a town that embraces the undead, and a couple that becomes trapped there. It has a suspenseful and eventually hair-raising narrative. But it is not about the undead; it is about the distance between two lovers, the distance that becomes apparent when contrasting the new and the old. A younger woman sees things her way, and rushes forward; she may quail in fear but she will dance with the dead. An older man sees his age, his ineffectuality; he will try to cross a gap and he will fail, impotent.

The Waiting Room has a traveler stranded in a train station, home to ghosts who were buried beneath. It is a ghost story and it is not a ghost story. It is about loneliness, a man as an island, a man alone and unconsciously yearning for a community, for support in his lonely world. He sleeps, and lives a brief dream of a happiness he has never had. He barely recognizes his own desperate need.

Bind Your Hair has a woman engaged to a man, and visiting his perfectly nice relatives in the country. A loving home that feels increasingly like a comfy trap, a soft and pillowy place where she may lose herself. It has a country village where people gather in the evenings, their clean strong limbs bared to the moon... for what purpose? It has two children, a peremptory guide and a savage biter. Our heroine can barely resist them. Bind your hair; bind away all that is you and become one of us.

Choose Your Weapons has a young man fall madly and inexplicably in love with an inexplicable, possibly mad young woman. It has hypnotism and a doctor who may know all. It has a crumbling house and a woman with two faces and a servant who grows younger. It has empty spaces at the heart of it, the gap between love and the reality of living, the excruciating smallness of minds that are obsessed by small things - things like money, class, a name, an appearance, poverty, wealth. Can love ever be stronger than such small things when one part of the pair values the latter over the former? Choose Your Weapons has one of the most nightmarish narratives I've seen in an Aickman story, as well as one of his most startlingly, beautifully abrupt endings.

The School Friend has a writer returning to her hometown and finding her friend much changed, living in a perhaps haunted house that is notable for its drabness, its dusty blandness. A school friend, once uniquely intelligent and idiosyncratic, turning drab, prosaic, dusty, and bland. The heroine slowly explores the house and the discomfort slowly increases. The horror seeps in from the frame until the whole picture is submerged. What's it all about? The meaning is hidden between the sentences, implicit never explicit, a teasing game for the author, a puzzle for the reader to work out. Here are the clues: two independent women; sexuality and gendered roles; childbirth and parenthood; a descent into the horrible mundane and an ascent - maybe - into the terrible unknown. My favorite story in the collection.

Anaxagoras, ancient Greek philosopher, differentiated mind and matter. Mind, unlike matter, "is mixed with nothing, but is alone, itself by itself"... matter is composite, mind is simple. Ah, the purity and independence of the lonely mind!

Poor Brat Farrar, a lonely soul, without affect, disconnected from the material world, disconnected from himself, a man and a mind alone. But at least he loved his horse! RIP, horse.

Ω

The Neoplatonic, medieval Christian theologian known as "Pseudo-Dionysus" posited that what comes from God - and all things come from God - is therefore good. And so evil is merely an absence of this good. An evil person is good in all ways - except when their will operates in this absence. This so-called evil person suffers from... a deficiency.

Lucky Brat Farrar, given quite an opportunity. His life an absence, his being lacking meaning, deficient in impetus... but he shall be given a purpose, a new being and a new identity. Doesn't hurt that that new identity is filthy rich!

Ω

George Berkeley, Empiricist, provoked his fellow philosophers with a simple formula: "to be is to be perceived" - if something were not perceived, it would not exist. Further, he insisted: we only have differing perceptions of things when we see them from different perspectives. Indeed, this is a no-brainer; but still - such an immaterialist stance for an empiricist!

Poor Brat Farrar, never perceived, never really existing. Poor little Patrick Ashby, his own being ended too early. Can one truly become the other? Can Brat achieve existence by taking on the identity of Patrick? And who then is being perceived - the long-dead Patrick, or the newly alive Brat? Who is the true Brat, who was the true Patrick - are the answers only a matter of perspective?

Ω

Henri Bergson, a Metaphysical philosopher, promoted an absolute path to knowledge: we must "enter" that object to grasp that object as it really is. We must use the way of intuition to have true sympathy; we must think in duration to have a true grasp of reality. We must identify with the object of our scrutiny.

Lucky Brat Farrar, able to grasp the reality of tragic young Patrick Ashby, taken before his time. Brat shall enter this persona and understand him, he will identify so completely with Patrick that he will then recognize the incompleteness within himself. Rare is the lonely man who can start his life anew; rarer still, the man who will use his new life to complete the life of another, to achieve justice, to find grace.

Ω

John Dewey, Pragmatist, decried the "spectator theory of knowledge" in which each idea corresponds to a fixed reality. Not so! cried Dewey. Truth is not static nor eternal; thinking is not a quest for truth. "Thinking" is simply the act of trying to achieve an adjustment between self and environment.

Poor Brat Farrar, torn in two and desperately concealing those tears. To give up this new life and be a good man - and so go back to that loneliness, that emptiness? Or to stay in his disguise, to forever move between truth and lie, to divide his true self from his environment? "Truth" for Brat Farrar is a slippery thing, always changing; but he recognizes it when it appears, and comes to like the feel of it. He shall move from spectator in life to participant: a painful journey. It is hard to be a rogue when one is also a thinker; it is harder still to live falsely when one yearns for truth.

Ω

Edmund Husserl, creator of Phenomenology, believed that to understand existence, we must stand back from it, we must pause and detach and reflect. In that space of detachment, we can understand our own body, our own life, our own subjectivity - and with that understanding can come an empathy with the subjective perspectives of others. Will these shared subjective states, this intersubjectivity, then constitute... objectivity?

Lucky Brat Farrar: as he begins to understand his new world, and to understand the living family of that sweet dead boy... so they begin to see him in turn. He moves from detachment to reflection to empathy. They move from wonder to understanding. Perceptions shift, deepen; subjective perspectives meet and a certain objectivity is found. Shall this latest iteration of Brat Farrar be his final self?

Ω

And lucky reader am I! In this world of sadness and anger, I needed a book where understanding was achieved, where subjective states collide but still come together, overlap, connect, where empathy and objectivity did not cancel each other out, where an empty man became full and a broken family became whole, where a happy ending was reached with compassion, forgiveness, and at long last, honesty.

Oh to live the life of the Ivory Tower, Tower of Babel, such freedoms such explorations such openings of the mind and spirit and body. All of the body's openings, always opening, dilating, expostulations outward and penetrations inward are par for the course. A course on microscopy, the lens focused on the viewer, its participants both students and professors, all of them horny and big-mouthed. But big-minded? Maybe not so much. Language and identity are both tools and weapons, to be wielded or discarded per each project's demands. The old die, the young live, and all of them want to fuck or be fucked. And yet there is a certain asceticism, an austerity present as well. At least when it comes to the messy world outside of that tower; heaven forfend such gross things should intrude on cloistered lives. The life of the Ivory Tower is an insular, incestuous one, the whole family of friends and foes and colleagues and lovers all together in one great big bed. Oh to live in such a place!

Simply read The Rebel Angels and you shall. Robertson Davies is an ingenious writer, full of wit and verve and occasional bits of genuine compassion. But only occasionally. The Rebel Angels is a book of the mind, but only if you consider pornography to be art of the body. These petty little people, I loved reading about them. Such silly creatures, mainly useless but certainly eye-catching, like ornate and fragile Christmas ornaments kept up year-round, gathering dust. Only the student Maria Theotoky felt fully real to me, dynamic, someone who could actually learn and grow, someone I could actually know. She is the flame around which all these clumsy moths fly, hopelessly and helplessly drawn to something bright and warm. I fell in love with Maria. I guess I am just as bad as any horny, big-mouthed, big-brained professor, just as prone to temptation as any typical Ivory Tower denizen. Perhaps these residents of the tower are human and relatable after all, no matter if they themselves feel otherwise. Okay, I feel for them, I can admit it. But they do go on, don't they. They babble on and on in their eccentric little Babylons. Shall they ever escape such closed circles?

What are those strange shapes in the distance, those shapes like a factory like a city like a cemetery, what are they? Where are those beings fleeing to, in a blind rush of terror like lemmings like a hive mind like things trained to fear, where do they run? Why are all those bodies in a ditch, piled up like debris like waste like a mass graveyard, why are they there? When did this atrocity take place, an atrocity so strange so inhumane yet so familiar, when did this happen? Who would do such a thing, it could only be an alien it could only be a monster it could only be a being who acts like a human, who could be capable of such terrible things? How would an author tell a story about humans crash-landing on a planet, a place full of appalling alien misdeeds full of eugenics full of genocide, how should he write about horror in space while also writing about the history of the fucking human species itself? What was where is why are when do who does how could they, we do such things?

1. Flat Earth trilogy by Tanith Lee

Dark fairy tales that twist and turn and bleed into each other. The concepts of evil, death, and madness become gods; these gods toy with humanity and with each other. Lush and often sardonic prose with both oriental and occidental influences. Empires rise and fall; men and women live and die and transform and live yet again. These strange fantasies inspired my mind (and dick) as a youth and were overdue a reread. Turns out they were more than inspiration; they helped create an entire worldview.

2. Kingdoms of Elfin by Sylvia Townsend Warner

More fairy tales, more darkness. But darkness of a different sort: human-scaled, knowable, perhaps not so much dark as grey. These faerie are inhuman in their whimsy and in their rules, yet understandable. One can understand children and animals, but empathy is not a helpful tool in that understanding. Wonder and prosaic reality live side-by-side. Hermetic, insular worlds are described with precision and a complete lack of sentiment.

3. The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling

An unsung classic fortunately reissued by NYRB. Politics are personal, as always, but here they have stakes well beyond social media and party talk. The mid-1940s and the American Communist Party, through a glass darkly and within the dark woods. A New York intellectual beats back death and then takes a visit to the country to visit his fellow elites; together they find the countryside is not full of the common man but rather individuals with goals and interests that lie beyond the easy formations of Left and Right. Trilling describes these humans with a dry eye but a heart full of melancholy. Wisdom must be earned.

4. The Game-Players of Titan and Now Wait for Last Year by Philip K. Dick

Chaotic narratives, dense plots, zippy storytelling: Philip K. Dick is always speeding ahead, the reader is always catching up. In the post-apocalyptic and very meta Game-Players, the game is life and strategies are just as important as identities; in the more melancholic Now Wait, the question is whether or not this game of life is even worth playing. Despite the berserk pacing, the aliens, and all of the mind-boggling ideas on display, Dick above all is arguing with himself about what is good and right, and what is just getting by.

5. A Civil Contract by Georgette Heyer

Marriage as a transaction, as a shelter, as something to grow into, as something that binds and something that frees. Heyer leaves behind her usual morning glories and her wicked epicureans and instead focuses on two sedate adults. The results are affecting and surprisingly real. Not a word out of place. A unique book in the author’s body of work.

6. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Her soft words like musical notes, her carefully composed sentences like verse chorus bridge refrain... she writes a song; the song is this book. This is a song against war and for love; this is a song about the stupidity of ego and the power of memories. At first I found the melody a bit off, distancing; the tone felt strange, oddly alien. But then, somehow and somewhere, the song took me over and I became entranced, enchanted. The archaic became timeless and I came to live in this sweet song.

7. Beneath the Shattered Moons by Michael Bishop

New Wave science fiction of the 60s & 70s is often frenetic, in your face, over the top in its challenging displays of style and its barrage of ideas. Not so with the elegantly written, decidedly literary Shattered Moons. The author is in a brown study, contemplating mortality and the ways that lives can be controlled and the way that life itself will always remain uncontrollable. The dead speak here, they move and they emote, with more emotion than when they lived. And yet they remain puppets. Will free will ever surface?

8. The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

The great pageant of life turned into an actual pageant; the tides of life pulling people this way and that, almost against their will; life lived as if always performing on-stage, lives lived as if backstage and barely worth notice; the waters of life will pull some in, a drowning or at least a dousing, others will float on top, all too aware of the dangerous depths. Water and the stage: only two of the many ingredients in this perhaps overly-rich Christmas pudding. We are but puppets to our desires, says Byatt. She understands her characters like they will never understand themselves. But at least they know how to put on a pageant!

9. The Demon Princes series by Jack Vance

We watch the author grow as his protagonist grows: from sleek and ruthless, mission-focused, to thoughtful and sometimes even amused at the drollness of life, its oddness. The mission across all five books: kill the villains. Each are located within increasingly bizarre landscapes. Kirth Gerson moves from grimly detached to aware that he has become his mission, rather than his own man; what will he become after all are slain? Always the most stylish of science fiction writers, here the reader can trace the development of Vance’s prose from trim and sharp to whimsical and pleasantly plump. He’s my favorite of favorites, in all of his modes.

10. Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones

Sadomasochism as a way of life, no judgments here. Instead we have a chatty tale of a boy becoming himself, casually recounting the story of his lost love and his dawning realization of his own nature. And alongside the tale of a perfect love - perfect and therefore unreal, idealized - is the story of the boy’s parents, their own lives, their own love, the trap of their own making, and just as compassionately told. Which tale hurts more?

I also really enjoyed:

Murder Most Serene by Gabrielle Wittkop - A poison-pen ode to the horrors and beauties of 18th century Venice. Both the book and the city are decadent beyond belief. This is a murder mystery that cares little about the murder mystery itself.

Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie - This is both a cold case mystery via Rashomon and a portrait of characters then & characters now. Christie, always interested in defying expectations, defies even her usual structure in this unusual Poirot mystery.

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd - What comes around goes around in this time-twisted story of murder and predestiny, ritual sacrifice and arcane knowledge, identities melting and merging.

The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts - What is the Fermi Paradox? What is a noumenon? What is the thing-in-itself? Humanity is a species full of self-centered assholes, always overthinking things, but their relentless pursuit of knowledge never fails to amuse.

Rabbits by Hugo Rifkind - Aristocratic Scottish teens party hard while overlooking the fact that they have an outsider in their midst, carefully studying and miming their ways. But this story is barely about him, it’s about them. The moral of the tale: time heals no wounds.

Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane - A subtle and heartfelt story of children coming to understand both gender and, much more importantly, death… somehow existing in a kids’ fantasy about magical whales. Delightful and, per the title, surprisingly deep.

The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff - A modern classic that has become so thoroughly absorbed by so many of the writers that I follow and admire that at this point its lessons feel like common sense or even common knowledge.

Big White Ghetto by Kevin D. Williamson - few living writers can do disdainful appraisal like Williamson.

FILMS

1. 28 Years Later - Danny Boyle

2. Eddington - Ari Aster

3. Cloud - Kiyoshi Kurosawa

4. Superman - James Gunn

5. Frankenstein - Guillermo del Toro

6. Weapons - Zach Cregger

7. One Battle After Another - Paul Thomas Anderson

8. Dust Bunny - Bryan Fuller

9. Influencers - Kurtis David Harder

10. The Phoenician Scheme - Wes Anderson

Who was Earl Thompson? This portrait of America during the Depression, and its author, were complete unknowns to me. I actually have no recollection of how my mildewed and battered, torn and tattered paperback even came into my possession. The book was apparently A Big Thing when it came out, yet I've read nothing about it. Why is that? The author's talent with the prose is amazing: as poetic and as earthy as Steinbeck, with an interest in the same themes, the same era; but Thompson is somehow more empathetic, more alive in how writes about people, places, and times. There is no remove, no distance between author and subject, of the kind that I've experienced with Steinbeck. Thompson is right there in the dirt with his characters. The book feels beyond lived-in; it reads like an autobiography that was written while events were actually occurring, rather than being reminisced about when older and wiser. There is a palpable energy in this book, a livewire sort of aliveness that makes every description sing and sting, every person both Dickensian grotesque and fully recognizable, every horrible occurrence feel like something out of a rural gothic horror and also like something the author personally experienced, full of the kinds of details and character traits that make each and every scene feel completely authentic.

On top of all that, despite all of the despair on display, all of the broken lives and crushed dreams, this book is really, really funny. Sometimes the humor is meanly sardonic, other times warmer, based on recognizable human foibles and physical flaws; never in a way that feels like the author scorns who he is writing about or even the repulsive places where they struggle to eat, let alone get ahead. To me, the ability to illustrate the tragically humorous folly and smallness of life, while not actually being contemptuous of those lives, is the mark of a truly brilliant book.

...and yet, this masterpiece is impossible to recommend. I just have to get this out of the way: besides the over the top sadistic violence that occurs frequently, I'd say fully a third of this book details the extremely explicit fantasies or actions of our pre-pubescent hero and his sexual desires for his mother. Emphasis: extremely explicit. Wild to imagine this book being reprinted in our modern times. Jack alternately hints, begs, pleads, and demands the satisfaction of both his curiosity and his needs. He's constantly ogling her or finding ways to place his hands or mouth on her belly, breasts, groin, anywhere, when she's awake, when she's asleep, most usually in the twilight state in-between. He guilt trips and scolds her, molests her when she's out cold, he practically assaults her on more than one occasion. For a period of time he sleeps with an oversize makeshift pillow that has been fashioned into a pretend-person, fucking it furiously whenever he can as he imagines it as his mom. At one point, his degenerate step-father aids him in his goal (an especially grueling sequence); more frequently, stepdad gets in the way of young Jack's dreams, much to the boy's chagrin.

SPOILER ALERT: lil' Jack's dreams come true.

...and yet, the boy is indeed the book's hero, not just its protagonist. Take away his demented obsession with his mother (a hard thing to subtract, I know) and we are left with a portrait in pragmatic courage, dogged individualism, and the refusal to be cruel despite the cruelty surrounding him. This is a boy who is at first abandoned by his mother to the care of his grandparents, then taken up by her and her ne'er-do-well alcoholic husband in the second half of the novel as they traverse America, a boy with no education, very little in the way of guidance (his grandparents do try; they are the book's most genuinely positive and kind characters), constantly neglected and abused and lied to and barely fed and forced to not just survive with next to nothing, but often to support his parents... and yet he retains his intelligence, empathy, strong opinions, an ability to see beauty in life when it does appear, and most of all, a drive to achieve happiness throughout it all. "Scrappy" does not begin to describe him. "Ferocious" is a better adjective, but it is still one that makes him sound harder than he is. I'd use "spunky" but that is just a little too cutesy for a kid who makes it with his mom before he even reaches his teens.

One is tempted to see the relationship between mother and son as an allegory for America at its lowest point. Say, the boy representing the stubborn optimism of an American people that will always cling to its hopeful dreams in the face of their struggles, despite those ambitions being, essentially, the longing for the obliterating comfort of a return to mother's embrace, to the womb itself? Perhaps that would make the incestuous activities so fervently described easier to handle? The author places their actions and the many depredations occurring around them within the specific socio-political context of farmers-turned-itinerants living in the heartland of a supposedly liberal country; a country that dehumanizes its own people, reduces them to beggarly recipients of public welfare or scorns them as deplorable trash, but never deigns to view them as actual human beings. Certainly the portrait of an America hopelessly divided between an elite minority and everyone else, where everything is commodified including the smallest of spaces and especially the bodies of women - an almost Marxist analysis that upbraids the flaccid "good intentions" of liberalism while detailing the evils of capitalism at every turn - all of that critique is front and center. Often coming directly from the mouth of Jack's pro-union yet anti-New Deal grandfather. The novel may be the story of America trying to find itself and failing, writ small. Mom & son could very well be metaphors for all I know. But I'm not an especially deep thinker, so I didn't spend a lot of time trying to see them or their story as such.

Instead I saw a portrait of a woman both weak and strong but mainly weak, a kind-hearted person whose unrealistic dreams of a better life than her parents lead her on an inexorable path to larceny and prostitution, and finally into the arms of the only person who has persistently declared his undying devotion, her son. Instead I saw a portrait of a boy who refuses to buckle under the yoke of a society that embraces fixed identities and destinies, a boy who sees through all of the bullshit, who refuses to be fooled, and yet who maintains his own secret idealism at his core, insisting to himself that he will create his own destiny - society and those who would stop him be damned. The narrative of the book is teeming with human insects, praying mantises of both sexes eager to mate and to kill, but the book itself is teeming with human life and the need to be alive, the struggle to survive, making a life wherever and however one can make it. The book despairs but somehow, magically, does not depress. It is too busy being alive to be depressed.

A god shall walk among men, thus spoke Zarathustra; this one walks from the technicolor innocence of the comic book 1950s into the dark and grime of the real world 1980s. A meta commentary on that ridiculous, wonderful innocence, an homage and a critique as well. A boy-hero transforms into a bloodthirsty villain; a teen-hero transforms into a schlubby everyman. A schlubby everyman becomes a living god; a happy dream of flying is suddenly remembered!

But is this truly so? Here be dragons, and unexplored territories – at least in 1985, before Watchmen. Alan Moore had his ideas and themes already perfectly formed, his darker directions already mapped out. His smart deconstruction and reconstruction of comic tropes and hero archetypes never blunt his story’s visceral shocks or disguise its messily emotional foundation. The dialogue and narration move from angst-filled realism to surreal poetry. His Miracleman moves from knowable to unknowable. Garry Leach’s superb art moves from ambiguous waking dream to throbbing nightmare.

The answer to all the questions, the actual origin story... amazing. Out of the darkness, into more darkness. The dreamer dreams a dream; the scientists conduct an experiment.

…it is like origami: the mystery, the murders, the book itself. so many folds, folding into itself, doubling and mirroring, a mysterious but logical design, a strange architecture that will ultimately become something recognizable. perhaps it will be a paper crane. you take a flat piece of paper, or a tableau of an entire extended family poisoned, and you fold that fixed scene of slaughter, you look behind it and in front of it, at the characters on the stage and behind it, you fold and sculpt until you make something else of it entirely. a chance meeting, communicating without seeing, messages passed, actions carried out. loneliness and frustration and ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do or die. everyone has their own perspective, their own voice, all of these voices are small but important folds, this mystery would not hold up without each of these folds, this mystery of murder and intent and the impossibility of true understanding, this cunning but mournful structure that Riku Onda has created. these lost characters like delicate little orizuru, so fragile and oh so easily crushable, by life, by death. perhaps their paper wings will fly them up to paradise, or elsewhere…

Weird and dreamy Tanith Lee writes her version of a young adult novel; results are weird and dreamy.

Synopsis: weird and dreamy Hesta Web (and her “hot red hair”) runs away from her despicable mother to a weird and dreamy seaside town, abandoned by tourists during this off-season. Strange things occur and Hesta eventually finds her destiny in this cold and timeless place.

The novel is layered and does surprising things, much like the seaside village and its inhabitants, much like Hesta herself. Terrible things happen, but with a certain nonchalance: villagers slaughter an arrogant visitor in the pub, and nothing much is made of it; an apparition drops her crying baby out of a window, and it turns out to be a mercy killing. Hesta’s loathsome mother, mom’s equally loathsome lover, and a sad detective they’ve hired enter the village to find the girl; one shall be sacrificed, another shall meet a more welcomed death, and the third shall revert to childhood. Hesta herself is welcomed by the village, as a priestess come to minister her flock. A secretive agency keeps careful watch on it all, as this is a place where odd powers manifest, where the different come to visit and find themselves staying on.

Hesta is asexual, perhaps the first such heroine I’ve ever read about. There is a character who is revealed as trans and that reveal made this already intriguing person all the more so. There is an older gay man; Hesta comes to live in his house as his ally and equal. This is a queer kind of book.

When the Lights Go Out is a slippery thing, hard to grasp at times. It was a sometimes frustrating experience - I would have preferred it concentrate more on Hesta. The inclusion of other perspectives, including her pursuers, made the book feel unfocused. But that was clearly the intent: to have a certain lack of focus, a blurry narrative, prose like watercolours, ambiguous characters, things barely spelled out. In the end, Hesta having embraced her fate has come to understand the logic of this weird, dreamy place that she now calls home, in a way that the reader and all other such interlopers never can.

Ms. Wittkop wrote this sadistic flower of evil as a poison-pen ode to the horrors and beauties of 18th century Venice, and to the horrors and beauties of life and death. This slim novel is fecund and rotten in equal measures, a juicy, glistening, overripe fruit bursting with maggots and corruption. It is a gorgeous book, repulsive and appalling, lushly written, decadent beyond belief. What one would call a unique experience. A cadaver and its contents are described with a swooning romanticism, as an overflowing cornucopia; commonplaces such as a picnic and petrified wood are described with an equally swooning horror, as nightmarish atrocities. Everything is lavishly gilded; everywhere there are fat and hungry flies.

What is this story actually about? It wears the elaborate costume of a murder mystery: all the wives of Count Lanzi suffer excruciating deaths by poison. Who is responsible? The reader moves back and forth and without warning from an icily detached narrator to various Venetian perspectives, all of them jaded or wicked, all of them dripping with cynicism and self-absorption. I’m happy to say that I guessed the identity of the killer; Ms. Wittkop would have been unimpressed. She is not particularly interested in this specific serial murderer; to the author, all humans are serial murderers, in their way, just as all of life is also death.

Murder Most Serene is not for beginners, nor the easily appalled. I loved it. Its unbelievably perverse nastiness was somehow refreshing, despite the need for a shower immediately afterwards.

In the Night Garden

by Catherynne M. Valente

Tales within tales, tales out of space, tales that spring from stars that fall from sky to take human shape; the writer writes like the dreamer dreams dreams - some dreams yearning and romantic, others dark and tragic, each dream holding a little bit of the next dream in its heart: the story as Oriental Ouroboros: the Arabian Nights as template, as both starting point and point of resolution; themes and metaphors and symbols slowly surfacing, to disappear and then reappear again, transformed, reborn - a byzantine pattern of eastern arabesques and western curlicues, swirling together and then apart; the writer weaves a tapestry of stories woven within stories; tales that leap from earth in the form of beasts and birds, tales out of time, many tales within one great, enchanted tale.

The Vintner’s Luck

by Elizabeth Knox

he is neither soldier in the armies of the Lord nor adherent to the Day Star, son of the morning. he is his own creature, bound to earth

oh sweet angel, caught between ice and fire; oh sweet prose, liquid and lapidary; oh sweet story, sinuous and subtle, that says so little yet feels so much

a soulful and nourishing novel

Mio, My Son

by Astrid Lindgren

Mio, my son... such a kind and unassuming phrase, for such a kind and unassuming boy, in such a sweet story. Such a sweet story, full of longing and sadness - but only at first. At first there is sadness, a lack of love - but then comes happiness, an abundance of love. An abundance of love - but one tinged with a strange fear, a terror of the unknown. A terror of the unknown transformed: turned into a quest, a rescue mission. A rescue mission with a boy and his friend, both still afraid and prone to tears; brave boys and then not-so-brave boys, terrified in the face of a great evil. A great evil, surely - but one with a core of self-loathing: sometimes even evil cannot abide itself, so the author makes clear. The author makes clear that it is love, love most of all, that little boys and little girls and all things need. All things need love: the love between friends; the love of a neighbor; love expressed through gestures and deeds, on the face and in the eyes; simple, friendly, kindly love - the love of all things, every thing, every person, each a possible new friend; the love of a parent, saying a simple, loving phrase: Mio, my son...

The monstrous and very hungry girls eat dirt and plow fields; men come to live in their bodies. The abandoned wife wears the skins of snakes - snakes who her recognize her grace, even as a beggar. These little dog-things aid in copulation. Those strange flower/pig things root in radiation. Horses of light, horses of dark. Feral are the mermaids; your mouth will be their womb. A great thing clings to immortality but her partner wants only to procreate, and then die.

New legends. A bestiary. Pseudoethnography, pseudobiology, pseudomythography. The nature of man and woman, societies, cultures, civilization itself... explored but not explained. Dreamtime is real time. Each new myth, each new creature is familiar yet unique. It is a unique book as well.

Eakins' stories take different forms, strange beautiful jewels, no two alike. A bizarre creation myth... a tale of the Old West... reports from a desolate research station... a story from the steppes of Central Asia... the journal of a runaway slave. Eakins is true to each myth, fable, or personal narrative, adjusting her style completely to fit the story told. The prose is incredible! Most difficult of all was the intensely alien recounting of the slow transformation of ocean things into land things: "Salt": hard to read and harder to understand; finishing it felt like an accomplishment, like climbing a mountain somewhere remote, where no one speaks your language and everyone is faster on the path than you could ever be. Other stories were easier to read, easier on the brain, but just as satisfying and certainly just as rigorously - almost coldly - intelligent. The brisk "Auravir" is a sharp and witty Greek myth concerning a race of seductive golden monkey-people. The delightful "Banda" is a European fairy tale that details the lives of sweet little bear-things and their never-ending battles with witches over the lives of the children that cross their paths. Although each story is perfectly accomplished, perhaps the standout is "Oono". steeped in Inuit culture, it is about a hunter, his wife, two gigantic and godlike creatures, "dog-tooth" spirit guardians, and two passionate heart-spirits that dance, duel, and are eventually trapped together. The story was funny, resonant, profound - and highlighted as a favorite by Ursula K. Le Guin, which made perfect sense.

It's tragic that this brilliant collection is not better known. Buried treasure!