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In Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction’s worthy successor to Raymond Chandler.  Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer — they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler’s pulp noir will ring through with startling clarity to readers of this novel. The cadence of the narrative, the hard-boiled dialogue, the archetypal characters… Lethem’s Conrad Metcalf is a well-executed Philip Marlowe cover song with just a little bit of record scratching thrown into the background for texture.

On the other hand, those same columnist quotes, blurbs, and reviewers all seem to liken Lethem to Philip K. Dick. Personally: not seeing it. It’s a bit of a stretch, some optimistic name-dropping to match up Lethem’s mystery/noir heritage with some similarly classic science fiction antecedent. The ubiquitous drug use? Sure, okay — that’s a bit Dickian. A Möbius fold of reality unraveling around the narrator in some palpable and thoroughly eldritch fashion? Not so much. More than PKD, the scenes in this novel played out in my imagination as fearfully symmetrical to Cronenberg’s take on Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch — substitute Jim Henson-esque “evolved” animals for Mugwumps but otherwise that’s it, right down to Peter Weller as Conrad Metcalf.

Or maybe Punk’s review has got it down:

It’s Blade Runner meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Where was I? Oh right…

A part of me desires to do a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the text, to get all scholarly about it and run the blockade of Chandler’s lineage here. I want to look for the hidden significance of the doctors as urologists, to get semiotic on names like “Catherine Teleprompter” and “Danny Phoneblum”. But instead I’ll just give a positive nod. It’s a fun, noirish scifi romp with all the right moves and delivers slightly better than expectations.

★★★★☆

A version of this review originally appeared on GoodReads.com.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames is a solid ★★★★¹ and damn near close to ★★★★★ that we’ll settle for ★★★★½. But then again, I’m a serious Sedaris fiend.

Granted, if you’re reading this, it’s probably because you were curious what I thought of the collection. By now, you (dear reader) have already made up your mind about David Sedaris and have either worked your way through this collection² or else long ago discarded him, irrelevant as an expended filter tip.

So if you find yourself in the former category then by all means, read on. Read the rest of this entry »

1. On the GoodReads.com scale.[↩]
2. Or at the very least put it high on your “to-read” list.[↩]

Imagine for a moment that you go into the up-scale liquor store around the block that is celebrated city-wide for its fabulous wine selection.  You’re a bit of a novice when it comes to wine and are a little embarrassed to be here because your wallet is that ballistic nylon stuff and not something truly exotic like alligator skin and with that in mind you decide not to ask the sommelier for any help.  You browse around the store looking for a bottle of something called David Foster Wallace that was recommended to you by your friend with the alligator skin wallet.  You manage to find the bottle of DFW and admire the fancy bottle with its fancy label and its curlicues and footnotes and excellent leading.  The bottle seems really heavy and big and everyone has told you how excellent it is.  So you decide to try it but when you actually get to the counter you discover that you’ve picked up a bottle of something called George Saunders by mistake.  The George Saunders bottle isn’t as big or as fancy as the DFW and in fact it looks a little bit like a down-market or off-label knock-off of the vintage DFW but at the same time you believe that there is maybe something authentic and distinct about it anyway.  The sommelier gives you a funny look as he rings you up but you don’t say anything because you don’t want to look stupid in front of him and anyway you’re probably just being self-conscious about the whole thing like the time you had a glass of Pynchon at your friend’s house and you said that it was a good Vonnegut and everyone laughed and your friend explained that the Vonnegut has a much sharper finish and you’ll notice how the Pynchon seems to hang around in your mouth so much longer but he could see how you might make that mistake.  And you try to think about that night on your drive home because it’s that same friend with the alligator skin wallet that is coming over for dinner tonight with his wife and you remember how he plays golf with your boss and this is an important event to get right.  So that night before the main course you pour everyone’s glass in the kitchen so that no one will see the bottle and the secret will be safe with you.  And your wife brings out the entree and you bring out the wine and everyone digs in and finds it delicious.  Your friend with the alligator skin wallet remarks on how delicious the wine is and did you have any trouble finding the David Foster Wallace at the store?  And was the sommelier there helpful?  And what year did he recommend because this is really really quite good?  And you smile and try to decide whether or not to say anything because you know that you’ll need to say something but how are you going to make up something plausible on the spot.  But then your wife blurts out that it’s really a George Saunders and don’t you just love it?  Because she slurped down her glass of George Saunders and it was her third of the night anyway because she and your friend’s wife managed to down a whole bottle of David Sedaris as a warm-up but they both agreed it was too dry for them even though you and your friend think that it’s the perfect middle-of-the-week wine.  For a moment you’re paralyzed with fear because this was your shot, your chance to show off and really shine and display your competence and you blew it because you were too chicken shit to tell the sommelier at the counter that you picked up the wrong bottle by mistake.  But instead your friend raises an eyebrow and says that it’s wonderful, just delightful, and he’d never tried it before and though maybe it’s not as dry as the DFW, does it ever have a great finish and it’s just perfect for a dinner party, isn’t it?

Review originally published on GoodReads.com.

Mentioned here previously, 365 Tomorrows has become a favorite daily stop on my internet rounds for a little fiction.

Since it’s flash fiction that they have there, it’s good for a quick dose of something new.  Roughly 600 words and you’ve gotten yourself a refreshing fix of scifi.

Admittedly, it can be hit or miss.  But I’ve managed to find a few favorite tales there.  They have a talented group of staff writers and publish a surprising number of high-quality reader submissions.  Many of my favorites are reader submissions, actually.

Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already.  You’ll probably spend ten minutes per day there, as well.

A fun, rather endearing little novel by Austin Grossman (this is his first), Soon I Will Be Invincible offers us a “generic” superhero milieu that does as much to honor its comic book forebears as it does to satirize them. Grossman gives us a real loser of an evil genius (Doctor Impossible, who suffers from “malign hypercognition disorder”) that is every inch the protagonist this story needs — considering that he’s the villain being chased by the cattiest, bitchiest bunch of superheroes that ever seemed patrol the wild blue yonder. Read the rest of this entry »

As with many “Year’s Best” type anthologies (regardless of genre), it is difficult to evaluate Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction (24th Annual Collection) as if it were a whole. Unlike a themed collection (e.g., Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse), you cannot easily ask how each story is helping to advance or otherwise round-out the speculation or evaluation of that given theme. But that’s OK; that’s not why we pick up and read a collection like this. And it’s a hazard we’re willing — nay: happy — to take on.

That said, the rating for the collection here is a computed average of my ratings on the individual stories themselves. Out to four decimal places, the 24th Annual Collection scores: 3.3929 Read the rest of this entry »

How can you expect
a happy end in a book
where Hitler still reigns?

Though a bit slower to start than I expected, Farthing was (overall) an outstanding allegory on fascism disguised as an alternate history novel disguised as a murder mystery. By the time you’re about one-quarter to one-third of the way through it, you will have trouble putting it down. The attention to the language is excellent¹ and author Jo Walton pays peculiar attention to certain banalia like apparel, cooking, and eating. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Though I found myself pining for a bit of Irvine Welsh-style slang and cockney.[↩]

Quote:

…I think I’d probably tell you that it’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

There is an odd surface tension here; some readers may approach Idoru from the wrong bias, through the lens of Neuromancer and the Sprawl trilogy. Those readers will expect the traditional cyberpunk romp of amphetamine-fueled Yakuza battles and twisted violent sex in coffin hotels; those readers will be disappointed and may not be able to penetrate the skin of this charged, deeply emotional book. Idoru is William Gibson’s Through the Looking Glass. Read the rest of this entry »

Via Ecstatic Days, a formula for creating your literary name:

(1) Use the first name of your favorite writer as your first name.
(2) Use the name of your first pet as your middle name or for your middle initial (if your pet had a separate last name…you’re a freak).
(3) Use the first or last name of your favorite character in fiction–your choice–as your last name.

I guess that would make me:

David Felicity Case

Or something along those lines…

First and foremost: an uncritical read of this book will leave you feeling cynical and a bit cheated. It ranks up there with E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene¹. It would be very easy to find yourself getting defensive about the material presented in here; especially if you believe humans to be some special exception among animals. 

Meanwhile, with a more critical approach, you will find that you cannot get Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal out of your head: it is insightful, intellectually rigorous, even-handed, and at times palpably funny. Plus, you will find that it informs a great many (all?) of the human discourse (verbal or otherwise) that you encounter daily — how certain traits and behaviors came to be and the functions they serve. 

Don’t ask about their intentions though; we need to remember that evolution is goal-less, after all. Put most succinctly: 

We are built to be effective animals, not happy ones.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Though I will readily admit that I know these two texts primarily by reputation, having only read excerpts and not their entireties.[↩]