In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
In Cory Doctorow‘s SF novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (also downloadable for free), death, scarcity, and mandatory work have been eliminated. The network is direct-wired into your brain, and mortality is averted by backing up your brain, and downloading it as needed into a new clone body. People spontaneously cooperate–well, most of the time–and wealth isn’t measured by money, but by your reputation among your peers. Doctorow imagines a society in which many of the last decade’s utopian fantasies about new technology are actually given flesh. Among other consequences, this means a society in which Disney World is seen as the absolute pinnacle of aesthetic achievement, the highest accomplishment of the human species. Doctorow doesn’t limn this situation with cheap irony, but takes it pretty much on its own terms. There’s something slightly creepy about the dampened affect, the sincerity and desire to please, the embrace of warmth without a hint of tragedy, the way unhappiness is pathologized and therefore not taken seriously; but the novel works because Doctorow doesn’t belabor this creepiness, and indeed seduces us into accepting it, as a reasonable price to pay for conquering mortality. So you might say that what I found disturbing about this novel was precisely its refusal to be disturbing; but I cannot really say that without falling into an infinite regress, a self-reflexive loop. For in fact, as I read the book I didn’t find it disturbing; and if I find this lack of disturbingness disturbing, it is only because what I find disturbing is that I didn’t find this lack of disturbingness disturbing; and so on, ad infinitum. I think this means that Cory Doctorow is far more postmodern than I am, or than Baudrillard is, or than Dave Eggars and the whole McSweeney’s gang could ever hope to be.
Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, is the most cited, and probably the best, book on psychedelic experiences since the works of the late Terence McKenna. I read it with great eagerness, and found it delightful in parts, irritating in others, and finally vastly disappointing…
Breaking Open the Head, by Daniel Pinchbeck, is the most cited, and probably the best, book on psychedelic experiences since the works of the late Terence McKenna. I read it with great eagerness, and found it delightful in parts, irritating in others, and finally vastly disappointing…
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Jeff Noon‘s latest novel, Falling Out of Cars, is one of the best things he’s ever done. It’s a moody, poetic book, set in an almost-contemporary England, where a strange malady has affected nearly everyone’s perception. People are no longer able to separate the signal from the noise. There is a blockage somewhere between transmission and reception. Images and sounds are affected with blur and static; texts and clocks become difficult to read; mirrors are positively dangerous…
Jeff Noon‘s latest novel, Falling Out of Cars, is one of the best things he’s ever done. It’s a moody, poetic book, set in an almost-contemporary England, where a strange malady has affected nearly everyone’s perception. People are no longer able to separate the signal from the noise. There is a blockage somewhere between transmission and reception. Images and sounds are affected with blur and static; texts and clocks become difficult to read; mirrors are positively dangerous…
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M. John Harrison’s new SF novel Light is a brilliant metaphysical space opera, mixing paranoia and sexual dysfunction in the present with disaffection and alienation in the future, all to a backdrop of quantum strangeness. The novel is dark, brooding, and bitter for the most part–which I loved–although it has an affirmative, almost Nietzschean conclusion. The technologies involved, which include quantum mechanical jumps in space, advanced bioengineering, and various techniques of simulation, are not so much foregrounded as they are taken for granted in the future parts of the novel. The disorientation one feels reading the book has as much to do with this taken-for-grantedness as with anything else. Metamorphosis and discovery are all the more terrifying for being, as it were, domesticated. Harrison is a wonderful writer whom I only recently discovered, thanks to China Mieville.
M. John Harrison’s new SF novel Light is a brilliant metaphysical space opera, mixing paranoia and sexual dysfunction in the present with disaffection and alienation in the future, all to a backdrop of quantum strangeness. Something truly weird happens when existential angst gets mixed up with quantum mechanics. The novel is dark, brooding, and bitter for the most part–which I loved–although it has an affirmative, almost Nietzschean conclusion, which I am not sure I entirely buy. The technologies involved, which include quantum jumps in space, advanced bioengineering, and various techniques of simulation, are not so much foregrounded as they are taken for granted in the future parts of the novel. The disorientation one feels reading the book has as much to do with this taken-for-grantedness as with anything else. Metamorphosis and discovery are all the more terrifying for being, as it were, domesticated. Harrison is a wonderful writer whom I only recently discovered, thanks to China Mieville.
The amazingly prolific Warren Ellis does it again with Mek, a three-part miniseries that came out earlier this year. This time it’s about extreme body modification: the step beyond tattooing, and even beyond the usual fantasies of cyborgization. “Mek” is short for biomechanical implants. Everything from a laser pointer in your eye, to claws that emerge from your nails during sex–if you and your partner like it rough–to all sorts of bizarre weapons, concealed in your tongue or in the palm of your hand. The protagonist, Sarissa Leon, was one of the founders of the Mek movement. But in the years she has been out of town, the subcultre has developed in directions she doesn’t like, or even recognize. Now she’s returned to “save” the Mek movement–that is, her original vision of it as a kind of freaky avant-garde artists’ scene–even if she has to destroy it in order to do so. High-tech bloodbaths ensue, ironically enough since the violence that Sarissa unleashes is motivated by her not wanting to see the Mek scene degenerate into something that is more about lethal weaponry than anything else. All in all, Mek is a twisted and ambiguous tale about subcultural creativity, and the battle over who controls the meanings of these subcultures and their creations. There are no easy answers, but Ellis and his team of artists (most notably Steve Rolston and Al Gordon) create a vision of posthumanity that is neither utopian (like the Transhumanist movement) nor dystopian (in the manner of all too many moralizing ecologists), but rather something much more disconcertingly–dare I say–human.
The amazingly prolific Warren Ellis does it again with Mek, a three-part miniseries that came out earlier this year. This time it’s about extreme body modification: the step beyond tattooing, and even beyond the usual fantasies of cyborgization. “Mek” is short for biomechanical implants. Everything from a laser pointer in your eye, to claws that emerge from your nails during sex–if you and your partner like it rough–to all sorts of bizarre weapons, concealed in your tongue or in the palm of your hand. The protagonist, Sarissa Leon, was one of the founders of the Mek movement. But in the years she has been out of town, the subcultre has developed in directions she doesn’t like, or even recognize. Now she’s returned to “save” the Mek movement–that is, her original vision of it as a kind of freaky avant-garde artists’ scene–even if she has to destroy it in order to do so. High-tech bloodbaths ensue, ironically enough since the violence that Sarissa unleashes is motivated by her not wanting to see the Mek scene degenerate into something that is more about lethal weaponry than anything else. All in all, Mek is a twisted and ambiguous tale about subcultural creativity, and the battle over who controls the meanings of these subcultures and their creations. There are no easy answers, but Ellis and his team of artists (most notably Steve Rolston and Al Gordon) create a vision of posthumanity that is neither utopian (like the Transhumanist movement) nor dystopian (in the manner of all too many moralizing ecologists), but rather something much more disconcertingly–dare I say–human.
John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.
John A. Williams’ Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light is another book I found out about from Kali Tal’s list of Militant Black Science Fiction. It’s a strange and bleak book, published in 1969, and set in a near-future 1973. An official of a “moderate” civil rights organization, frustrated at entrenched racism, goes to the Mafia to order a hit on a white cop who has killed a black teenager. From this act of revenge, things escalate into a full-scaled race war in the cities of America. The book is powerful, as a cry of frustration with no easy answers. Along the way, we get a nuanced, insightful sense of race relations and racial history in America–including a look at the position of Jews and Italians, who have only been admitted into whiteness on sufferance. Not a perfect book by any means, but a disturbing and thought-provoking one. Cops still kill black men with considerable frequency today, and nearly always get away with it. It’s happened three times in Seattle alone, in as many years. I’m not favoring an-eye-for-an-eye retribution, and the paths such vigilante action might lead us down; but after reading Sons of Darkness, Sons of Light, I can’t help wondering about it just a little.
King Rat was China Mieville‘s first novel. Though it doesn’t have the scope and ambition of his subsequent books Perdido Street Station and The Scar, it’s still quite a wonderful book…
King Rat was China Mieville‘s first novel. Though it doesn’t have the scope and ambition of his subsequent books Perdido Street Station and The Scar, it’s still quite a wonderful book…
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The first part of Warren Ellis’ three-part miniseries, Reload, is out. Justified paranoia, government conspiracies, Presidential assassination, electromagnetic pulse bombs. Good stuff….
The first part of Warren Ellis’ three-part miniseries, Reload, is out. Justified paranoia, government conspiracies, Presidential assassination, electromagnetic pulse bombs. Good stuff. In this series, as well as in the recently-completed Transmetropolitan, and the ongoing Global Frequency (that I commented upon here), Warren Ellis has his finger on the pulse of the 21st century.
Well, the ninth issue (of a total of thirteen) of Grant Morrison’s The Filth is out; do I need to tell you how over-the-top fabulous it is?
Well, the ninth issue (of a total of thirteen) of Grant Morrison’s The Filth is out; do I need to tell you how over-the-top fabulous it is?
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I’m of two minds about the DC/Vertigo title 100 BULLETS, written by Brian Azzarello, and illustrated by Eduardo Risso. On a panel by panel, page by page basis, I find this comic pretty compelling. But conceptually, I have my doubts…
I’m of two minds about the DC/Vertigo title 100 BULLETS, written by Brian Azzarello, and illustrated by Eduardo Risso. On a panel by panel, page by page basis, I find this comic pretty compelling. But conceptually, I have my doubts…
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