The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Satire is one of my favorite genres just in general, and Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams are two of my favorite satirical authors because they mock fantasy and sci-fi, and as sci-fi is the current topic of discussion in our class Douglas Adams is the one upon whom I will focus.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has been done as a radio series, book "trilogy," television mini-series, and feature length film. If anyone answers the question of "What is the meaning of life?" with the number 42 then you'll know they're familiar with at least one of the interpretations of Douglas Adam's story. The tale of Arthur Dent and his journey's across the galaxy is fun, entertaining, and consistently clever as Adams drags the reader/viewer/listener (choose whichever you like) across the universe and back again. I can't really explain what it is that makes Adams' so funny, but perhaps it's the pure absurdity of his concepts, like sentient flower pots falling from the sky with the simple thought of "Not again." or maybe it's just his tongue in cheek approaches to humanity and it's fascination with digital watches, or it could just be that he's English. American's seem to find the English inexplicably hilarious. Any way you slice it, Adams' Hitchhikers Guide is rightly considered by many to be the penultimate in science fiction satire.

Oryx and Crake

Though I have yet to finish it, I am greatly enjoying Oryx and Crake and have every intention of finishing it. The hints at ramifications of genetic modification are very intriguing to me and the reverse-telling of the narrative from the Snowman's point of view after the apparent apocalyptic event makes me want to see exactly what it is that led to his present situation on the beach as some sort of crazed nomad.

So really I don't have much to say about the novel yet, I'm not too far in, but I am intrigued and very much intend to finish it. Alas, end of the year stresses and time crunches prevent me from finishing the novel at this juncture.

Bloodchild

Due to time constraints from impending deadlines this week I read a short story instead of the recommended novel, though it is by the same author. I understand this story was read in class, but I was absent on that Wednesday and so I've read it on my own time.

Bloodchild was to me, as the title might imply, just creepy overall. The concept of humans as hosts for parasitic grubs and the almost marriage of humans to their alien masters is just unsettling. Butler tries to reconcile the feelings of unease by echoing them in the narrator and having him reconcile with his alien mistress, with whom he had been raised. And yet, even with the alternative angle of this relationship being a romantic one, one cultivated out of love and tenderness, I can't get over the overall ickiness of it. Granted the one birth we see is botched, but the little red worms will still be in a host attempting to eat away at him regardless of whether or not he is sedated when they are removed. The whole idea of this story is to reevaluate our perceptions of love and relationships, the narrator accepts the egg willingly at the end knowing full well what will happen, and I like to think myself an open person in terms of those subjects, but this story is a bit too far for me to stretch at this juncture. Perhaps if man actually winds up as an incubation chamber for alien worms in a preserve on some planet somewhere I'll feel differently, but for the moment I'll stick with my reaction of ew.

The Scar

China Miéville is someone that I would consider to be one of my absolute favorite authors. I've only read two of his novels, but I am hooked and want very much to read more. The two that I've read are Perdido Street Station and The Scar, the first two novels in his Bas Lag series, and I've already purchased Kraken, a novel completely unrelated to Bas Lag and New Crobuzon, to read over the summer. So when I heard that this week was Cyberpunk and that there were a couple of Steampunk novels up on the reading list I thought I'd stray from the recommended titles and go with The Scar which I had been itching to read anyway. I felt it fit in with the themes of the week well enough to justify a break from form.

The Scar focuses on the lives of two individuals, Bellis Coldwine and Tanner Sack, who would have difficultly being from more opposite ends of the social spectrum. Bellis is a linguist and author, whilst Tanner is a Remade, a criminal who has been surgically altered in punishment for his crime. Tanner has had two tentacles attached to his chest, though we never discover what crime it was he committed and thus have no idea how tentacles really fit into the punishment, but he has them nonetheless. And so he is boarded onto a ship with hundreds of other Remade to be taken as slaves to the colonies to provide labor. Bellis is on the same ship, fleeing New Crobuzon for reasons also unspecified, and she takes a job as a translator for the captain in exchange for passage to the colony. And so the story is set into motion.

About midway through the journey the ship is boarded by pirates who kill most of the crew and take the rest along with the passengers and prisoners to the city of Armada. Armada is a city of ships. Literally hundreds of ships tied together, gutted, and built up to form a city with different regions, known as ridings, each ruled by their own governments. Bellis and Tanner both wind up in Garwater, arguably the most powerful of the ridings, which is helmed by a pair known simply as The Lovers. Here's where the plot really gets rolling and I'm going to in fact stop talking about the plot and discuss the world of Bas Lag instead because I don't want this to be a summary.

Bas Lag is the name of the world in which Miéville has set three of his novels, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council. It's home to a huge variety of intelligent races and strange technologies. Some of the races included are: humans, khepri (the females of whom have human bodies and scarab beetles for heads), cactacae (humanoid cacti), garuda (creatures with bird heads, wings, and legs but human torso's), cray (part human, part lobster), and vodyanoi (fat and froglike with webbed feet and toes). And there are several other races besides such as scab-mettlers and the anophelii that I really can't even get into. Miéville has built an entire world without taking the Tolkien approach and focusing more on the world-building than the characters.

In Miéville's novels you get a sense of the world without having it directly explained to you and you get a rich and fun plot to enjoy with the detailed world as an aside into which you can further delve. I think that's why I like his work so much, it's hugely rich and layered and still fun all around.

Babel 17

Language is a fascinating thing. Perceptions of the world in areas where languages arise hugely influence the structure of that language, like how the Inuit have so many words for snow. Even within the same base language there are variations based on location, for instance in Britain the vegetable known as the aubergine is the same as the vegetable that American's call the eggplant. Both countries technically speak English but they have several variations that might be mystifying to a non-English speaker.

Samuel R. Delany's Babel 17 is all about these linguistic variations and what they say about the people who speak them. There are other commentaries about society and the unity of people, but the core idea of the book is language. The heroine is a poet who is also a linguist and the man she meets and associates with mid-way through the book, the Butcher, is a linguistic puzzle that she wants to solve. The story is set in motion because a language needs decoding and translations and the lead's transitions in and out of thinking in various languages (largely her thinking in Babel 17, the language of the Invaders) leads to her being able to see solutions to problems that individuals speaking other languages just can't perceive. Language is the key to everything in this book, and as a person who is also fascinated by languages and their inner workings I really enjoyed it.

The novel is short, sweet, and to the point. It's really just an interesting jaunt into the structure of language and it's effects on people and if that's your cup of tea, and it is mine, then you'll enjoy it greatly. But if it isn't, you might not enjoy it so much.

The Stars My Destination

Space Opera's have never really been my thing. I think it's similar to the problem I have with Tolkien, I just don't enjoy the level of world-building that is described in comparison to the plot and characters that are narrated. So, for the first time this semester, I didn't finish one of the novels. I got just past Foyle breaking into the Presteign space-docks and I just severely lost interest. I was already sort of starting on novels for later weeks and I couldn't bring myself to read The Stars My Destination in lieu of the other books which I enjoyed more. Not particularly professional, or really even very academic of me, but nonetheless that is the decision I made.

As far as what I gathered from the chapters I did read you can tell I didn't particularly enjoy it. Foyle is, as was stated to me prior to my attempt at reading, a thoroughly unlikable human being. His speech pattern grated my nerves and he was just a general creep, though I did sort of pity him for his tattoo's courtesy of the scientific people and the fact that Vorga passed him by. Those occurrences combined with what little of his life prior to the wreck of the Nomad was described justified his rash actions in my mind, specifically his unmonitored jaunting and break in at the aforementioned space-docks.

All in all the novel just couldn't grab my attention. I feel bad about it because I am very much for reading a wide range of writing, but I just wasn't in the right mindset for a Space Opera, and perhaps I never will be. It's just not particularly my style.

Warbreaker

Now I'm not into tabletop gaming. I've never played D&D or Warhammer or anything of that sort, and I'd heard people saying that Warbreaker was, in their mind, a narrative of a tabletop campaign, and that was why they liked it so much. Well, despite the fact that I don't play tabletop games, I loved this book. I simply couldn't put it down.

From the get go I was confused and intrigued by the use of Breath and colors for Awakening, Sanderson doesn't really ever explain it but you grow to understand the basic rules as the narrative develops. Eventually Awakening is sort of explained when Vasher is trying to instruct Vivenna on how to Command objects in order to Awaken them, but largely the reader has to draw their own conclusions. And I liked that, it made me think. I had to draw my own conclusions and come up with my own theories which kept me reading to either confirm or deny what I thought to be true. Throw in a dash of political intrigue, several strong lead characters in whose story I was invested, and you've got a story I want very much to read. Literally towards the end of the story I was sitting on the couch reading and reacting to the climax of the story whilst my boyfriend sat by, holding my hand, waiting for me to finish the book.

And, as I mentioned in class, when I finished the book I was surprised. Slightly upset even. The .pdf file told me there were about a hundred pages left and so I was expecting to read about Kalad's Phantoms taking down the Lifeless army and Siri and Vivenna dealing with peace talks between Idris and Hallandren. But right after Vasher was revealed to be Peacegiver and Lightsong sacrificed himself to heal Susebron the chapter header was suddenly 'Epilogue' and I was a bit shocked, I was so invested in the story and the characters and how they all tied together that I just wanted to know more, and had been led by the .pdf's page count to expect that.

But it's probably good that the story ended where it did, it left me wondering about what else could go on in the world that the author had created, and so I am left again to draw my own conclusions and create my own ideas within that landscape.

Anansi Boys

I'm pretty familiar with Neil Gaiman. I've read most of his novels, several of his short story collections, a lot of his comics, and I follow his blog. So I guess I could be considered to be a fan. Though I've always seen it as a sort of casual deal, I wouldn't consider myself a super-fan or anything. But there's something about Gaiman that attracts that sort of loyalty from readers. He permeates through so many different media that most people have seen something or at least know of something in which he had a hand, even if they aren't aware of it. So who better to write a novel about a little known spider god in Africa?

And so we come to Anansi Boys. Technically considered to be a sequel to the considerably more dense American Gods, Anansi Boys is a romp with the sons of a trickster god. But the especially fun bit is, the presumed race of everyone in the novel is African. Now, I am white, as my last name would likely clue you in to knowing, so I never really noticed as a child how in every novel I read the only characters whose skin was actually described were those of other ethnicities. The assumed race in nearly every fantasy novel is caucasian. So Gaiman's friend, Paterson Joseph, who is black, was talking to him about this one day, and Gaiman thought that perhaps he should change that up a bit. Cut to several years later and Anansi Boys is released. And the best bit is that he doesn't make any sort of a big deal about it, that's just how the story is written. I didn't even think about it the first time I read it, I only noticed it when I was listening to the NPR interview and Gaiman mentioned it outright. He wrote the concept so well that it passed completely under my radar of consciousness.

And implanting concepts like that under the radar of conscious thought is a thing at which Gaiman is particularly good. The best qualities of his work aren't necessarily to plots, but the characters and the morals he sneaks in under your nose.

The Magicians

I live in the Harry Potter generation.

If you mention muggles, Voldemort, Dumbledore, or almost anything from the series in a conversation the chances are high that the person to whom you are speaking will catch the reference, regardless of whether or not they've read the series. Now that is impressive.

I mean, the Harry Potter books are such a cultural phenomenon that they had midnight release parties for each new book. I've never read a series that had that loyal of a following besides Harry Potter. And I am not ashamed to say that I went to two midnight release parties. And furthermore, I won the Harry Potter Spelling Bee at the release party for book seven. The winning word was Serpensortia, in case you were curious.

So how does a young adult fantasy author write a book today without being compared to HP? The fact of the matter is they can't. In today's publishing world everyone is looking for 'The Next Harry Potter.' They're all waiting for lightning to strike twice, so as soon as an author proposes an idea it's going to be held up to Harry Potter to see if it can make a comparable amount of money.

Some authors try to fight the Harry Potter stigma, but others just work with it. Lev Grossman is one of those. From one angle you could look at 'The Magicians' as Harry Potter at college in America. But, seeing at Grossman had the idea before the Harry Potter books began to be published, and because the novel is so much more than that, that's a bit of a one-sided view. But Grossman knows that that comparison will be drawn, and he seems to be okay with it, even referencing Harry Potter a few times throughout the book. But then, his whole book sort of plays off and references book series that are staples of the landscape of fantasy today. The land of Fillory is clearly a parallel to Narnia, and Middle Earth, like Hogwarts, is referenced outright, with one of the characters seeking to find it so that he can 'bang an elf.'

That delightfully classy piece of dialogue brings up a good difference between The Magicians and most other fantasy. It's about college aged kids, and they act like college aged kids. There's a good amount of sex, rather a lot of drugs, and perhaps magic replaces the rock and roll in this equation. But the kids are just that, kids. They're emo, they have their little spats, there are cliques and couples and all the other baggage of life as an adolescent. Throw in some magic and it makes for a very interesting literary cocktail. I mean, the novel could be seen to have no real plot up until about page 250, but the combination of characters and circumstances is interesting enough to keep most readers engaged until the grand quest finally gets rolling.

So if you're feeling some void after 'losing' Harry Potter, especially with the end of the film series coming up now as well, perhaps you should try filling it with some other books. I would recommend The Magicians to be a good start.

The Hobbit

Tolkien and I have a slightly rocky history. I first read The Hobbit when I was around nine years old, and as I recall I enjoyed it. So then I thought, 'I'll try reading The Lord of the Rings now!' This did not turn out to be my best plan. On my first attempted read through I believe I got to Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin escaping the Nazgûl by ferrying across a river in the Shire. There was just something about the writing style that I could not get past. So I put the book down (I was reading the compendium of all three novels) and I just settled for watching the movies when they came out.

In high school I gave Lord of the Rings another shot and managed to make it up to the fight with the Balrog in Moria, but I simply could not hurdle the density to Tolkien's writing style. I am hugely impressed by his world-building skills, they are almost unparalleled, but he writes as though he's writing a travel-guide that happens to have a plot that goes with it, which is just not a writing style that I can really enjoy, so I think I'll just enjoy the films and leave it at that.

With that in mind I am still constantly amazed by the depth of his creation. There are so many levels to the lore and society of Middle Earth that it's almost impossible to believe that one man create all of it. He invented not one but several languages and cultures, taking fantasy races that were already known and manipulating them in his own fashion as well as creating races of creatures that were entirely his own. The great appeal of Tolkien is that attention to detail, he can spend several pages explaining the appearance of a door for Heaven's sake, but that same amazing quality of his thinking is the reason I cannot read his works. The Hobbit is a novel I can read and enjoy exactly because it doesn't have that same level of detail. It's considerably more plot driven as a story, not really taking as much time to explain cultural histories and the like, although in The Lord of the Ring's defense the Hobbit doesn't cover nearly as much ground in Middle Earth, nor do the characters encounter near as many different cultures.

So I guess my thinking is this, Tolkien is a visionary world builder, but his writing style is just not my cup of tea.

A Wild Sheep Chase

J-Horror is not a genre with which I am going to claim any sort of familiarity. I actually hate being scared, so horror novels in general are something I tend to avoid. I've been fortunate thus far I this course in that none of the novels I've read have been anything I've found particularly frightening, but I was legitimately apprehensive this week because I know that the Japanese are very good at horror.

Luckily Murakami's “A Wild Sheep Chase” is not that frightening of a novel either, but that's not to say it isn't a good one. I went into the reading completely unaware of anything that the story might be, which is actually, to my mind, the best way to read or experience anything. With my blank slate of expectations I was able to absorb and appreciate each turn the story took for itself with no preconceived notions, and I found myself greatly enjoying the story because I didn't know where it was going.

Murakami sets up an average man, with an average life. A divorcée who works at an advertising firm living alone but for his grouchy cat. But then things start to get odd. First he begins dating a girl with apparently magical ears, then he is carted off by mysterious men in suits because of an image of sheep that an estranged friend had sent him. Thus unfolds what is essentially a supernatural mystery novel about finding out about a mysterious sheep with a star on its back that seems to have some sort of plan its been hatching, using human hosts to further its goals. What exactly that plan is we never discover, but it's clear it isn't good.

I'm not going to summarize the novel as I don't want to spoil it, and Steiling has already read it multiple times I am sure. But it does follow a very Japanese horror format sort of a thing. From the few J-Horror films I have seen I can gather that the usual plot is an average middle class person is drawn into unusual circumstances via their job or other average daily activity. Perhaps that is what makes J-Horror so particularly frightening, that idea that supernatural things could happen to anyone at any time. In most Western horror's the victims are sexy co-eds, or eccentric millionaires, not just average-joe's going about their day to day lives. Lately Western movies have been sort of adopting a bit of a J-Horror vibe, even going so far as to make American versions of classic J-Horror films like The Ring, but we never seem to quite manage to match that absolute creepiness that the Japanese have boiled down to an art.

Interview with the Vampire

Now I read my fair share of vampiric romance novels in my youth, largely written by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes who published her first novel at 15, which is a pretty good indication of the quality of those books. Anne Rice's work was always known to me, and I greatly wanted to read it, but I never got around to reading any of Rice's novels, nor even seeing more than a few minutes worth of any films based on her writing. And so this week I am familiar with the genre, the general vibe of the supernatural romance, but I am new to the novel, probably the novel that inspired everything Atwater-Rhodes wrote and thus inspired a lot of what I read as a pre-teen.

Interview with the Vampire. Arguably the definitive spiritual-romance novel, this is the one that started it all, sparked the idea of the brooding handsome monster who really just wants to be loved. Louis is that brooding creature, beautiful and deadly, struggling to retain his humanity in an inhuman wolrd. Lestat is the seduction, he is this apparently irresistable creature to whome Louis is constantly drawn, he can never truly escape him so long as his human emotions are retained. And Claudia is that bizarre observation of sexual maturation without the appearance of age, she is eternally youthful in the way she looks but an incredibly adept seductress and vixen who beckons her prey with her vulnerability and then destroys them with a childlike glee. This core trio makes up the novel. There is no real and true plot, it is just a recitation of the tale of Louis' life up to the time of the interview, and so the story is all about the characters. There is no quest on which they embark, the reader is simply invested in the emotional stories of the trio and their personal struggles.

And the investment in the struggles of the characters leads to that attraction, women tend to be suckers for the sensitive guy who's in touch with his feelings. That or they lean to the polar opposite and go for that violent and reckless “bad boy” character. Luckily Rice provides fodder for both of these styles of women in the form of Louis as the intellectual and Lestat as that unknowable loose cannon. In order to keep these two together so that they may play off of eachother Claudia is introduced, and she is that strongly female presence that keeps the two libido's in check, that controlling feminine influence that most female readers imagine they would be if put into that situation. Rice has allowed the reader to insert themselves into the world of the story and imagine themselves romancing with the characters, which they have done in spades through fanfiction and other fan outlets, creating a subculture centered around the world of these novels in which people deeply want to be involved.

Anne Rice has basically created the cast of perfect romantic heroes, and so the readers latch on to the one to whom they are most personally attracted and absorb themselves with that characters life story, thus inserting themselves into that world in their own mind.

Monster Island

Zombies.

Probably considered to be the monster of my generation. I've met very few people who don't enjoy a good zombie story.

But why do modern youth's seem to love zombie's so much? Is it that us against them mentality, the few against the many? Do we see prior generations as that mindless shambling hoarde, waiting to eat us whole?

This weeks text, Monster Island, is a great starting point for thinking about these questions. Even just it's format as a blog novel speaks volumes about how young people today think. For us books don't have to be bound in a paper form, they can be digital, never tanglibly existing, only ever displayed as points on a computer screen, and yet they carry just as much weight and viability as the heavier tomes of the past.

Now I'm pretty old fashioned, I much prefer print books to digital ones, but I can see the practicality of them.

I'm getting terribly off track from the discussion of zombies aren't I?

You'd think so, but not really. Our generation doesn't have any sort of a great real conflict with which to focus themselves so we create them in fiction. We've taken our perception of previous generations and exagerrated them into the archetype of the wave of zombies coming to eat our brains. The focus on brains as a food source is also indicative of the idea of the paranoia the youth has about becoming their parents, having their inidviduality, their brains, consumed by the daily grind of average life. Our greatest fear is sitting in a cubicle day to day, just getting by. The zombies are adult society and the youth are that rag-tag group of gritty survivors from all walks of life. And when the next generations come, they'll create their own parallel for that great fear of growing up.

Frankenstein

Let me just preface this post by saying I was raised on the classic Universal horror films, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolfman, etc. Frankenstein especially was one which stuck with me over time, perhaps because I saw basically every single Frankenstein movie made in black and white. I mean, we're talking Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, even Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Despite the fact that the last time I watched most of these films I was probably nine years old I still remember them and I have in my mind a clear idea of what the Frankenstein story is and what it entails.

Imagine my surprise when, in high school, I was talking to an upperclassman friend of mine who was reading Frankenstein and discovered that practically everything I considered to be Frankenstein was absent from the novel. No creepy labs full of Tesla coils on stormy nights wherein a wild-eyed scientist and his hunch-backed assistant bring forth a monstrous creature with an abnormal brain, no Transylvanian castles and townspeople with pitchforks, no burning windmill. I mean the monster isn't even terrified of fire for Heaven's sake, and he can talk. In fact, not only can he talk, he is fluent in a couple of different languages. Needless to say my entire childhood concept of Frankenstein was very much rocked that day.

I did not actually read the novel until the last week of winter break, I simply knew second hand of some of the differences from what I had overheard from people who had read the novel. So I guess the shock of the differences which I found in the text was cushioned by prior knowledge of a few of them. This is a common problem for me, I tend to find out twist endings of films before I watch them and video games before I play them so I'm adjusted to going into things knowing what happens. Regardless of that prior knowledge I was completely unprepared for Victor and my huge distaste for him. I can understand to an extent his reactions after creating the monster, becoming physically ill with the guilt and horror of his actions, but the reasoning behind his reanimation of dead flesh irritated me. This is a man who has literally everything, loving family, means to do what he wishes with his life, supportive friends and a generally pleasant upbringing. He went out to create the creature just because he could, he didn't think about the possible ramifications of his actions, how his creation might destroy his life. He simply pursued the selfish goal of seeing if he could accomplish what no one before had done, and it was the hubris of his actions that led to his downfall.


Hubris is a common theme throughout horror, some person who thinks that they can do anything and everything to no ill effects ends up creating something which becomes their downfall and usually takes out quite a few of their loved ones along the way. So it is with Frankenstein, starting with the creature killing Victor's youngest brother and culminating in the murder of Victor's new bride, yet at any point, even after creating the creature, the killings could have been prevented. The monster simply suffers from a lack of love or affection. He is too hideous for anyone, even the man who created him, to look upon, and so his loneliness fuels a homicidal rage towards the creator whom he blames for everything that has gone wrong in his short existence. Yet even after the murder of Victor's brother he could have simply created the partner for his creation and prevented the murders of his best friend and his wife. But he doesn't. He gets all the way to that threshold and stops. Why?

That is a question to which I have no answer. To my mind the creation of the bride might have a least sated the creature and made him less lonely, but I can understand Victor's fear of having two giant undead creatures roaming the Earth. Still, for all his intelligence, I find Victor to be an idiot, a selfish fool who cannot solve his own problems and thus creates his own death. There is no neat romantic ending to this and there is no real Gothic heroin, merely a fool of a man trying to play God and thus destroying everything he holds dear.

Horror Cliché's

Mad scientists
Inhuman monsters
Hubris of man
Metaphors for the human condition
The evils of science
Corruption of society
Mans own downfall is himself
Castles on mountains
Gypsies
Foreign countries
Stormy nights
Full moons
Heavy fogs
Creepy atmosphere
The living dead
Indestructable evil
Great personal sufferings
Tesla coils
Beautiful women
Creepy henchmen
Rustic villages
Transylvania
Inevitable nature of death