Ambrose & Elsewhere

Someone has developed a caffeinated doughnut. I can hear myself getting fatter as I think about it.

I suppose many have seen this before but a link at a Gawker post (about blurbing for hire) led me to John Warner’s Blurb-o-matic. My favorite was “A fuzzy legend of renegade clowns that will leave you bowled over!”–I almost considered writing something that might go with the blurb. Only laziness saved me, as so often before.

I stepped out of the house this morning into full sunlight and a light fall of snow. The sun was glaring through a rift in deep blue-gray clouds. Presently the sun closed its eye and I walked on to work through the gray snow-flecked world.

I’ve missed winter in this El-Niño-plagued year.

I’ve been rereading C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism for the first time in at least ten years, and I have been struck (as I often am when reading Lewis) how insightful and how dim he can be. He’s always dividing the world up into Us and Them, and about Them (the people with whom he has no sympathy) he can be quite thickheaded. My favorite instance is when he contrasts readers of H. Rider Haggard with readers of John Buchan, the latter being obviously inferior for some reason.

But when he’s not UsAgainstThemming he can say things that are remarkably shrewd. In particular I was thinking of his chapter “On the Meaning of Fantasies,” which is mostly about daydreaming and its relationship to writing and reading. From this, and from something in Surprised by Joy, I gather that he was a little scared by his propensity to daydream, perhaps not realizing how universal it is. But he doesn’t let this prevent him from tracing fantasies in the psychological sense to fantasy in the literary sense and why it appeals to some and not others. (Those dread Others who bedevil his nonfiction. Still, he may have a point here.)

As Tychê would have it, yesterday I saw this story about daydreaming at Scientific American’s website. Researchers have found that “a default network of regions in the brain’s cortex–a grouping known to be active when the mind is completely unoccupied–is firing away as a person is engaged in routine activities,” suggesting that this “default network” is the daydreaming mind, which becomes less active as a person’s activities become less routine.

I wondered (and still wonder) if the daydreaming mind can remain active while the more alert on-task mind is operating. It seems to me that sometimes when I’m telling a story (out loud in a lecture or while pounding out a piece of fiction) my thinking changes and becomes a trancelike state where I can both dream and act.

On the other hand, that may just be caffeine intoxication.

I have some negative things to say about this book, Tobias Buckell‘s debut novel, Crystal Rain, so I should begin by observing that I enjoyed it, finished it without compulsion, and recommend it, with some reservations.

On with the negativity. The book begins with a prologue (usually a bad sign) in which someone crash-lands on the planet where the novel takes place. He’s not the protagonist and we don’t learn his name (although he has one, as we learn later). The first few chapters continue in this offhanded way, bouncing from viewpoint character to viewpoint character without settling on one long enough to make him/her interesting. This can work if the action in the braided chapters is so compelling that the characters aren’t the focus of interest, but these chapters seem to be deployed largely for exposition purposes: many a shadow looms, but little is done to advance the plot. If one can hang on until chapter six or seven, the plot really begins to roll. But that’s a long time to ask the reader to wait.

The novel has hero problems, also. His name is John deBrun, and he is set up in an interesting way. He washed ashore a generation ago, has not perceptibly aged since then and he has no memory of his life before then. Also, he has a hook for a left hand, a nicely piratical touch. So far, so good. But his character, as displayed in the story, is a rather floppy one. After his home town has been sacked by the invading Azteca, one would think he would go in search of his wife and son. Instead, he goes to Capitol City, for no very obvious reason except that the author wants him there. That’s a pattern which persists through the book: the hero isn’t motivated, he’s moved, like a chess-piece.

On the up side: Buckell invents an interesting and complex social situation, with the Nanagadans separated from the hostile Aztecans by a range of mountains, the Wicked Highs. (Buckell also excels at the naming of names, an important trait for an sf/f writer.) The Nanagadans are a diverse but largely Caribbean people, whose dominant religion is a form of Voudoun with physically present gods: the Loa, a nonhuman species. The invading Azteca, bred by a hostile group of nonhumans called (by the Azteca) Teotl, remain pretty two-dimensional Bad Guy Evil Villain types, with the exception of one named Oaxyctl, whose development through the book is its most sustained and interesting piece of characterization.

The book is virtually science fantasy. There are gods (nonhuman aliens) and magic (oldfather technology), but the setting is low-tech, with pistols and locomotives and lighter-than-air dirigibles: a culture that is groping its way back to technology and industry after a war-caused disaster. Buckell pulls this off to good effect, I thought.

Crystal Rain is something less than the sum of its parts. Hands down my favorite scene in the book was an airship flight by John and Oaxyctl, where they are pursued by an Aztecan airship and have to fight it out in midair, but there are many other good things in it. Still, as a whole, it doesn’t cohere. Buckell, a past master of short fiction, seems to be feeling his way in the longer form. But his talent is undeniable and I expect his novels will only get better as his experience deepens.

Rich Horton says a few kind words about “A Covenant with Death” as part of his appallingly successful effort to read and review everything, everywhere.

On rereading the story recently I was a little disturbed to find in it an undoubted woman in a refrigerator. I would have avoided this had I known what a cliché it has become, something along the lines of “You killed my brother!” The Women in Refrigerators Syndrome was first tagged in comics, but once the term enters your awareness you see them everywhere in pop culture. The Kim Bauer character in 24, for instance, exists only to be put in (or dangled near) a refrigerator (or cougar), and there are great weeping buckets of other examples.

Of course, death and dismemberment can come to anyone rather abruptly in Morlock’s world, but the casual opportunistic use of any character’s blood to paint the hero in more sympathetic colors is probably a mistake. The management regrets the error.

Of all the obituary posts on Robert Anton Wilson in the past couple of days, the one I enjoyed the most was Wonkette’s, which shrewdly observed: “[U]nlike the ‘political thinkers’ who clog Washington’s green rooms on Sunday mornings, Wilson was hilarious … on purpose.”

I hadn’t been aware of his leftist-libertarian party “Guns and Dope” (a great name for a band). I read the Illuminatus! trilogy and a couple of the Schrödinger’s Cat books many years ago, but they didn’t do anything for me–except infect me with a strong distaste for conspiracy-theory plotlines which persists to this day. Sounds like his non-fiction might be more entertaining, if not necessarily enlightening.

Not to keep on kicking the Slate.com movie reviewers To go on kicking the Slate movie reviewers: there’s a hyperbolic review on that site of Mike Judge’s little-seen Idiocracy entitled “The DVD That Will Save America”. The title is no doubt meant to be ironic, irony being easier than saying what one means.

The plot of the movie sounds an awful lot like the future in Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” (which was adapted to fit the Kornbluth/Pohl collaboration Search the Sky). These stories all have something to them, but Idiocracy seems to mimic their most repulsive premise. That is: upper/middle class people have less children than lower-class people do, and therefore the future will be full of morons. This can only be true, even for the sake of argument, if upper/middle class people are genetically superior to lower class people, a sentiment open to doubt.

Long years have passed since Minnesota unleashed Jesse Ventura on the unsuspecting policy world. It’s nice to see my home state is still in the vanguard of imaginary government. Maybe this sort of thing could be adapted to Iraq?

Read, reread and rereread with increasing lack of comprehension at Sartre’s Slate’s “Movie Club” feature:

“What was Little Miss Sunshine if not a brilliant ontological dissection of the perils of sublimation?”

I think the answer is, “A movie.” But I’m not sure what “ontological” can mean in this context, particularly modifying “dissection.” It certainly makes Little Miss Sunshine sound more like Saw 4: Being and Nothingness than the thin film of something described here.