By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com July 12, 2020
Author’s note: The third and last work discussed in this post, High Life, has a well-deserved R rating because of sexual situations and violence. As such, that part of the post may not be suitable for young and/or sensitive readers. MEM
Last week I finished listening to an audio version of Neuromancer. William Gibson’s 1984 debut novel plunges the reader into an alternative 21st century full of wonder and depravity. The book is a tour de force, populated with vivid characters and boiling over with amazing ideas about the directions future society might take and the abilities its technology might impart.
The reader’s proxy in this adventure is Case, only in his mid-20s but as jaded as any film noir private eye on the wrong side of middle age. The story opens in Chiba City, a free-wheeling Japanese port where the American has given up hope of repairing the delicate brain implants that were sabotaged by the former employer from whom he’d stolen. Because Case is now unable to jack into cyberspace, where he once pulled off illicit exploits as a data cowboy, the expatriate has begun arranging extremely shady drug deals motivated by his mostly subconscious desire to goad someone into murdering him.
This elaborate scheme for self-abnegation is interrupted by a blank-eyed American man named Armitage and his bodyguard, a teched-out mercenary named Molly. They arrange for Case’s implants to be repaired so he can pull a mysterious job. The affair takes the trio and a small number of associates to the Sprawl, the metropolitan conglomeration that has overtaken most of American’s Eastern Seaboard; Istanbul, where Old World architecture and social mores mix uneasily with contemporary architecture, technology and authoritarianism; and Freeside, an immense cigar-shaped habitat orbiting the Earth where the decadent rich go to play.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com April 27, 2020
The 1999 animated feature The Iron Giant is a science-fiction story set in the late 1950s in Rockwell, a quiet coastal village in Maine. The night after an immense robot plunges into the ocean during a major storm, it’s discovered and then rescued by a smart, lonely boy with the unlikely name of Hogarth Hughes (voiced by Eli Marienthal).
The pair strike up a friendship, but this is the height of the Cold War, and foreigners — be they Russians, robots or extraterrestrials (let alone extraterrestrial robots) — are not looked upon kindly. When a haughty federal agent named Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) comes nosing around the farm where Hogarth lives with his mom, Annie (Jennifer Aniston), Hogarth is forced into an uneasy alliance with Dean McCoppin (Harry Connick Jr.), the beatnik artist who runs the local scrapyard.
The movie is loosely adapted from The Iron Man: A Story in Five Nights, a bedtime tale that Ted Hughes devised for his children and published in 1968. (The British poet, who died in 1998, is credited as a consultant on the film.)
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com April 19, 2020
Roughly a quarter-century ago, I read a story in a science-fiction magazine or anthology about an American writer who had been commissioned to write an introduction for a volume commemorating the 20th century. The tale was published, I suppose, in the 1990s, and was set at least a year before the turn of the century. (Which technically began on Jan. 1, 2001.)
Two things about the piece have stuck with me for a very long time. One is the central character’s struggle with the station wagon he rents in England. The driver’s seat is on the car’s right or starboard side; cars travel on the left or port side of the road; and the clutch is on the driver’s left side rather than his right. And yet the clutch, brake and gas pedals are arranged in the same configuration as in America and the rest of the world.
The writer has a harrowing drive to an isolated part of the United Kingdom, which helps inform the second thing I recall about the story. The character, having researched the atrocities of the 20th century, is overwhelmed by pessimism about the coming hundred years. And yet, shell-shocked both by his research and by his trip, when he begins writing the forward to A History of the Twentieth Century, With Illustrations, the author borrows what turns out to have been ludicrously optimistic words first printed in A History of the Nineteenth Century, With Illustrations.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Feb. 21, 2020
Victor Lavalle’s 2012 novel, The Devil in Silver, begins in the early weeks of 2011 with a large, powerful man named Pepper being committed to Northwest, the psychiatric inpatient unit of the fictitious New Hyde hospital in Queens. Pepper isn’t really crazy; he’s just hot-tempered, and a little socially isolated. Three cops bring him to the hospital because it allows them to bypass an hour or two of unpaid overtime that they’d need to book him in jail for scrapping with them.
The system is hard to escape, Pepper discovers, especially after two altercations indefinitely extend what could have been just a 72-hour stint in the psych ward. He loses two months after being heavily medicated; even when his mind has fought off the drug-induced fog, the 42-year-old professional mover still thinks and moves and talks like an unsteady nonagenarian.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Jan. 27, 2020
Writer Ted Chiang has a relatively slender publication history. His debut book was the 2002 anthology Stories of Your Life; last year, he published a second volume of stories, Exhalation. The website Fantastic Fiction lists the New York native as having stories in four annual genre-fiction anthologies and in 1998’s The Mammoth Book of Fantasy All-Time Greats.
Despite this, Chiang is prominent enough to have merited a 2017 New Yorker profile. This was due in no small part to Arrival, the splendid 2016 Denis Villeneuve movie about first contact with aliens, which is based on the 1999 Hugo and Nebula award–winning novella “The Story of Your Life” from Chiang’s first collection.
I’m happy to report that Chiang’s second book, Exhalation, is full of engaging, thought-provoking tales. The title story is a monograph written by, it soon emerges, a member of a race of robots that breathes not oxygen but argon. “Every day,” it writes near the start of the second paragraph,
we consume two lungs heavy with air; every day we remove the empty ones from our chest and replace them with full ones. If a person is careless and lets his air level run too low, he feels the heaviness of his limbs and the growing need for replenishment. It is exceedingly rare that a person is unable to get at least one replacement lung before his installed pair runs too empty; on those occasions where this has happened — when a person is trapped and unable to move, with no one nearby to assist him — he dies within seconds of his air running out.
By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Oct. 4, 2019
The 2018 book The Final Frontier is a collection of 21 stories that share the topic of deep-space travel. My favorite entry in the book was the final one, which I’d read before: Peter Watts’s “The Island,” which is essentially a three-character narrative.
The tale is set aboard Eriophora, a deep-space vessel that set out millennia ago and whiles away the centuries ceaselessly building a network of teleportation gateways. Each gate empowers not its builders but the offshoots of whatever civilization launched the ship; each one also destroys anything near it, which is among the reasons why the vessel cannot slow or even change course by more than a tiny degree.
The unnamed narrator, like all of her crewmates, is carrying out a limited rebellion against Chimp, the deliberately hobbled artificial intelligence that ruthlessly hews to the ship’s original mission. Make that most of her crewmates — the third player in the story is Dix, the 20-something son she’s never met, who is suspiciously loyal to Eri’s brain.
The narrator and Dix are awakened as part of a seemingly random rotation of personnel who shepherd the assembly of each new gate. As so often is the case, there’s a wrinkle, which is precisely why the ship has a crew. Chimp has detected an anomaly and wants to know if it will affect the build. The narrator discovers something amazing, something the AI likely would not have perceived on its own. In the end, though, she finds that her intuition — her uniquely human wisdom — may not be as well geared to comprehending the immensity and variety of the universe and its strange creations as she initially believed.
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 31, 2019
Over the last month and a half or so, I’ve been reading a handful of anthologies. Notable among them were Galactic Empires, a 2017 publication edited by Neil Clarke themed on, well, exactly what the title says; and Infinite Stars, also from 2017, edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and billing itself — rather grandiosely, I thought — as “The Definitive Anthology of Space Opera and Military SF.” I enjoyed both volumes but thought the former to be stronger overall.
It’s worth devoting a moment on Schmidt’s collection because it revisits some famous science fiction universes. Infinite Stars includes a new Dune story co-written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, which I found to be particularly weak, and an original “Ender’s Game” story by Orson Scott Card, which I didn’t much enjoy but felt arrived at a haunting ending. I particularly enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s “Binti,” which approaches space exploration and interspecies conflict from an African perspective, and “Night Passage,” an Alastair Reynolds tale set in his “Revelation Space” saga, of which (unlike “Dune” and “Ender’s Game”) I have no knowledge.
However, the real point of this post is to share a few thoughts about Old Venus, a 2015 themed collection edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
July 5, 2015
Worlds Enough and Time, the 2002 anthology by virtuoso author Dan Simmons, contains five short stories. (A few, in truth, are somewhat longish.) Two of the pieces are excellent; the other three are flawed but interesting.
The stories are presented in chronological order beginning with the oldest, “Looking for Kelly Dahl,” which was originally published in 1995. It begins as a cat-and-mouse tale about a dissolute former public school teacher named Roland Jakes who is hunting, and being hunted by, one of his former students.
Kelly Dahl was a largely unremarkable child when Jakes taught her; now, however, by some unknown process, she’s acquired godlike powers. You can get a sense of them by reading the story’s opening:
I awoke in camp that morning to find the highway to Boulder gone, the sky empty of contrails, and the aspen leaves a bright autumn gold despite what should have been a midsummer day, but after bouncing the Jeep across four miles of forest and rocky ridgeline to the back of the Flatirons, it was the sight of the Inland Sea that stopped me cold.
“Damn,” I muttered, getting out of the Jeep and walking to the edge of the cliff.
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
May 18, 2015
Trafalgar is an engaging anthology of stories about the adventures and misadventures of Trafalgar Medrano. This mischievous space-faring merchant hails from Rosario, a key Argentinian port on the Paraná River. (The city, which is real, is about 185 miles upriver from Buenos Aires, the nation’s capital.)
The book was written by Angélica Gorodischer, a longtime resident of Rosario who won a World Fantasy Award for lifetime achievement in 2011. Trafalgar was first published in 1979; an English translation by Amalia Gladhart appeared in 2013.
All of Trafalgar’s tales are literally that — stories told by the merchant. A few come to us secondhand — in one account, Medrano describes one journey to a group of men playing cards; in another, the narrator’s 84-year-old Aunt Josefina relates a story that Medrano told her the other day about a tragic love affair on a distant world. There’s also a monologue delivered to an unknown individual.
Most of the time, however, Medrano seems to be speaking to a woman in Rosario — typically, one presumes, the author herself, or at least someone who shares her profession. (The story told in the group setting, about a beautiful scientist who joins the mysterious frenzied dances of a primitive race on a remote world, appears to have been passed on to the author by one of those present, although it’s not clear whom.)
By framing her narrative this way, Gorodischer is exploring the experience of hearing stories.
By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
March 16, 2015
Author’s note: Recently, a young acquaintance who was working on a school project asked me what my favorite book was. I sent this e-mail and then realized, Hey, this would make a great blog post. I’ve made a few relatively minor changes to the text, and — well, here it is. Enjoy! MEM
“What’s your favorite book?” is a great question to ask someone! It’s hard for me to answer, however, because I love so many different books.
I am extremely fond of Tales of Pirx the Pilot, an anthology about a future astronaut written by the late Polish author Stanislaw Lem. (This book was published in Poland in 1968; it was translated into English and published in two parts. I refer here to the first volume, 1979’s Tales of Pirx the Pilot; the second volume, More Tales of Pirx the Pilot, appeared in 1982 and is also excellent.)
Pirx’s adventures are often kind of comical: In the opening story, a very persistent fly gets caught in Pirx’s capsule on his first solo rocket flight. Sometimes, they’re dull — Pirx’s first duty assignment in outer space is essentially watching two scientists who don’t really need any help at a very quiet observatory on the far side of the moon.
The protagonist is a bit bumbling and ordinary, but at the same time he is hard-working, stubborn and kind of charming in a quaint way. Also, Pirx manages to escape some genuinely dangerous situations. We can’t all be Captain Kirk from Star Trek (my favorite TV show when I was a kid), but I like to think that there’s a little bit of Pirx in everyone.
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