VAGUE SPACE

Ready Player One

Ernest Cline's 2012 debut novel Ready Player One is an ode to the '80s and as someone who knows people who grew up in the '80s, I thoroughly enjoyed the weird combination of futuristic plotting mixed with nostalgia for the time in which fictional virtual reality gamemaker James Halliday (and the author) grew up.  The basic story is this -- the year is 2044 and the world is pretty much a wasteland.  We've run out of oil as a planet and we're overpopulated and only the very rich can afford anything resembling the life we lead today.  The rest of the country live in desperate straits off the government's meager dole (because there are not nearly enough jobs for everyone) in mega trailer parks near formerly midsized cities where the trailers are stacked on top of each other up to a dozen levels high.  This was actually a feature in the plot of Cory Doctorow's novel from a few years ago Makers, and Doctorow is given a reverent reference in this story so I wonder if it was a cribbed idea, but it's a bleak future is what I'm saying.  The only relief, and most of the world's only interest, is an Internet "game" called OASIS, which is like Worlds of Warcraft or SIMS on steroids, a fully immersive virtual reality world in which your avatar enjoys all the things that he can't in the real world -- like movies and TV shows and parties and sex -- well, at least if you can afford to travel around the OASIS, which costs OASIS dollars and most of those dollars can't be earned until you power up your avatar levels through missions, which takes U.S. dollars to pay for initially.  And that brings us to Wade, a just turned 18-year-old high school kid in Oklahoma City living in a trailer with his aunt and about a dozen others, who has basically lived the past 5 years in the OASIS searching for the "Easter Egg" that Halliday left behind after his death -- the first person to find this Egg will get his full multi-billion-dollar inheritence and also have the ultimate control of the OASIS.  Sadly, Wade is dead broke and can't leave the "planet" where his (virtual) high school resides so he can't go on missions searching for the Egg.  Luckily, though, he has no life, so he spends all his time researching the life and loves of James Halliday -- which include such vintage '80s things like WarGames and Ferris Bueller and Family Ties and Silver Spoons and Atari -- tons of Atari games and references -- and even the first computer I ever owned, a TRS-80, which we lovingly called the Trash-80.  Damn I'm old.  Anyway, that's the basic plot of the story and it's dense, filled with not only these references but also a wealth of information on this virtual world, told in Wade's point of view, and it's really quite fascinating.  I'm not exactly a video game person -- the last game I played with any regularity was Madden on my PlayStation 2 -- and I never got into any fake virtual world or massively multiplayer game, but it was still utterly fascinating how well the author creates this world and how easily you begin to identify with both Wade and his avatar Parzival (long story).  And the story of how he becomes the first to have any kind of breakthrough in the 5-year-old quest by the entire world for Halliday's will of riches.

Looking for Stupid Shit to Ban Because We're a Backward Nation

(Editor's Note:  This was written before President Obama came out on gay marriage, which, yay!... but after North Carolina joined 30 other states to write a ban on it into their constitution, which boo!, so that may color my coverage of this somewhat minor issue in comparison, but yeah I still can't believe we're having debates about book bannings and contraception and gay marriage and evolution let alone global warming in 2012 for crying out loud, but this is what we do, and we are either a nation of completely backwards idiots or our media only writes about issues that seem to show that to be the case.  Anyway, read on...)

So I've read a couple John Green books over the past few months and I'm in the middle of "Paper Towns" right now because I happened to read the brilliant (and critically lauded) "funny cancer story" The Fault in Our Stars in the depths of my trauma over the potentially incurable nerve damage to my foot and it was, oddly, one of the only things that cheered me up (odd because it's a story about teenagers with incurable cancer).  And also, it was a really great book.  Green writes young adult novels aimed at teenagers and while I am not a teenager, my soon-to-be-published-(if-I-can-find-an-agent-or-publisher) novel that I wrote over the past couple years would likely be classified as young adult since most of its characters are teenagers and as such, I've definitely read my share of young adult novels in recent years, some very good, some not as much, and some -- like "The Fault in Our Stars" -- really perfect and what I aspire to be able to write.  So one of Green's books that I've recently read was "Looking for Alaska", his first novel, the highly acclaimed story of a lonely teenaged boy who ships himself off to boarding school where he meets a force of nature named Alaska and falls quickly and madly in love.  I won't talk about the plot too much because it's tough to talk about the story without giving too much of the plot away, but I didn't enjoy it near as much as "The Fault in Our Stars" and I think may have been written on a slightly less advanced level -- ie. the issues it discusses are likely much more relatable to teens than grown men -- but it's a good book, it's a good story, and there are definitely a lot of issues that it raises that should be discussed by teens.  So I would definitely encourage any young readers of mine to pick up "Looking for Alaska" (and any older readers to pick up "The Fault in Our Stars") but this post isn't about the book so much as it's about the politics of book banning that I find abhorrent, not only as a writer but as an American and as a human being. 

Stephen King Makes a Plea for Fiscal Sanity

I stopped reading Stephen King years ago, not because his writing wasn't great, or because his fiction wasn't thoroughly enjoyable (it largely was) but more because I grew out of an interest in the types of novels he happened to write.  In fact, the only book of his I read in recent years was his nonfiction account of his writing career - On Writing, which was excellent.  Equally excellent is his attempt to contribute to the discourse on American politics this week.  Not that anyone is listening to the state of politics anymore, but hey, maybe if America's favorite fiction writer says something...

Stephen King: Tax Me, for F@%&’s Sake!

What charitable 1-percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts. Charity from the rich can’t fix global warming or lower the price of gasoline by one single red penny. That kind of salvation does not come from Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Ballmer saying, “Okay, I’ll write a $2 million bonus check to the IRS.” That annoying responsibility stuff comes from three words that are anathema to the Tea Partiers: United American citizenry.

.....

Here’s another crock of fresh bullshit delivered by the right wing of the Republican Party (which has become, so far as I can see, the only wing of the Republican Party): the richer rich people get, the more jobs they create. Really? I have a total payroll of about 60 people, most of them working for the two radio stations I own in Bangor, Maine. If I hit the movie jackpot—as I have, from time to time—and own a piece of a film that grosses $200 million, what am I going to do with it? Buy another radio station? I don’t think so, since I’m losing my shirt on the ones I own already. But suppose I did, and hired on an additional dozen folks. Good for them. Whoopee-ding for the rest of the economy.

The Passage

Rice professor Justin Cronin's best-selling postapocalyptic novel The Passage is close to 800 pages, is apparently the first in a trilogy (which I didn't learn until I was almost finished), and incorporates so many loosely connected characters that at times it's maddening, but it was so damned compelling that I couldn't stop reading, plowing through a story I didn't want to start and didn't think I'd finished and now, sadly, I can't wait for the sequel The Twelve to come out in the fall.  It's not terribly well-written, at least not compared to the literary style I perhaps prefer, it's too damn long-winded -- going on and on about minor characters or settings or the intracacies of certain scenes that don't require more than a mere mention let alone a dozen pages, and this motherfucking bastard could have easily trimmed a third with some prudent editing, but fuck if I didn't read it every night, devouring the pages like the nightmare vampires inside devour the world.  It's a genre story -- part horror, part sci-fi, part Mad Max-esque end of the world stuff, part western -- and I don't like genre stories, or I haven't, not since I was in college and devoured Stephen King like a madman but I'd outgrown those stories and outgrown that sort of fiction and if it weren't for a compelling interview with Mr. Cronin in a literary magazine that I read named Slice, I never would have picked it up.  And again, I didn't know it was 800 freaking pages.  But I couldn't put it down. So yeah, I guess in the end, I highly recommend.

Death by Kindle

This is something I didn't know but probably should have and as a writer it doesn't sound good, but I'll let you determine for yourself.  Personally I don't really use my Kindle (purchased for me as a gift) that much, really just when I'm on the road, because I've found that reading a physical book is a more pleasurable experience.  But maybe it is really bad for writers, at least if Amazon intends to kill small presses in the process as this post (written by a small publisher) makes clear.

By now, if you’re following the industry in any way, you’ve heard that Amazon pulled the plug on over 5000 Kindle ebooks distributed by IPG (who handles all of SFWP’s titles). You can read about it here, and here, and here, and probably a hundred other places. This came about because Amazon wanted a larger slice of the pie. Though I see it as an attempt to take the whole pie, and I worry that IPG is only the first of many victims.

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Shutting down all the IPG titles was done with a flip of a virtual switch. In a matter of minutes, Amazon did more damage to independent presses than the last 30 years of chain bookstores.

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The small, indie presses are not the middlemen. They are the dying voice of true publishing and writing. They are more loyal and respectful of writing than the big presses…and certainly more so than Amazon, which invites authors to cast their work adrift in a vast, uncharted ocean. Attacking the indie presses is simply an element we’ve seen in every other facet of American corporate culture. It’s a reflection of the death of the ma and pop shops, the general stores, our neighborhoods, true indie music and film… Big fish eating little fish in some sort of insane attempt to…I don’t know what. It all seems pointless, especially when these big companies collapse in a blaze of horror and shame.

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I beg of you to remember that indie presses, indie bookstores, and indie-friendly distributors like IPG are the backbone of our literary culture. When they die, that’s it. Don’t be fooled by the apparent freedom offered by Amazon. It all may be fun and games now but, when they get tired of you, or when they fold, you’ll all look up and around…and find yourselves alone. Mark my words.

But, you know… Tra-la-la. No point in this rant, I guess. What I have done is create an SFWP page for all of our titles listing alternative ebook sources. So you can get them on the Nook, on your fancy iPad, on your phone, your computer, through Google’s ebookstore, through Indiebound, through our distributor, and so on. Endless choices. You can even hack your Kindle Fire if you want. Don’t let it be said I’m not trying.

 

Makers

It's been a couple years since I read Cory Doctorow's Makers, and I don't remember the plot entirely but I do know there were several plots taking place over the course of 20 years or so in the near future and things start with the widespread use of 3D printers to make products and conclude with people living in shantytowns while nostalgic rides are built in empty Wal-marts by these now discarded 3D printers that helped to, basically, destroy the world.  What the novel was about - largely - was technological innovation and invention and the boom-and-bust business world that takes advantage of it, but the device at the heart of these particular innovations and the eventual collapse of our economy is what fascinated me the most.  So it was with some surprise that I saw on the front page of USA Today's Money section an article about the growth of 3D printers.  And nowhere in the article is any mention of the downside of this growth.  But I will address the issue here.  Is the end really near?

The Fault in Our Stars

Cancer books normally scare me off.  Hell, I bought this novel based on my previous love for John Green's writing and rave reviews for his latest and I still didn't want to read it once I had it home.  Even though every review said it isn't really a cancer book, it isn't sad or maudlin or depressing.  But still:  Cancer book.  Who wants to read that?  Well I'm glad I did and I'm here now to try to convince you to do the same.  This is an amazing book.  I recommend it highly.

The narrator is a 16-year-old girl named Hazel and she's got cancer.  Terminal cancer of some form that is described in minor detail that I won't bore you with now.  But Hazel is funny.  Not like laugh-out-loud funny but full-on sarcastic, I'm going to die but I'm cool with it and the world kind of sucks, funny.  You know, funny.  She's an incredibly appealing narrator who becomes even moreso when she meets Augustus, a cancer kid in remission who finds her at a support group at her church (which is the victim of some well-earned barbs).  What starts as mostly a cancer story becomes a love story, something else I don't particularly care for in my reading but these two characters are so damned appealing that I couldn't help myself.  I couldn't help but love the story being told.  Hazel's parents and Gus's parents and Isaac from support group who is partially blind from the cancer are all perfect supporting characters and there's a wonderful connection to a book by an author in the Netherlands but I won't spoil with any more information other than to say that every character comes to life, no matter how minor, and everything in the story serves an eventual purpose.  The cancer angle is there throughout -- how could it not be -- but it's not an overwhelming presence, and even your attachment to the characters doesn't quite make you sad about their fate in life because they've accepted it, they are bravely facing it, so you as a reader go along.  As you must.  And John Green's magical writing takes you wherever he wants to.  I couldn't put the book down, I read it in just a few hours over a couple sittings.  And I would suggest that anyone -- even someone turned off by cancer stories or love stories or stories about teenagers or anything else -- would love it too.  Please give it a read.  You won't be disappointed. 

• Buy The Fault in Our Stars

Pity the Billionaire

Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank, the best-selling author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, the book that explores why voters in southern and rural states vote against their economic interests by voting for Republican economic policies, is back with a new book that explores the more recent phenomenon of the Tea Party rise and how the collapse of the economy in 2008 resulted inexplicably in a populist surge that celebrated an extension of free-market policies that actually caused the collapse, instead of a reversal of policies toward more economic regulation, taxation, and governmental intervention as happened after the Great Depression.  For me, this book went a long, long way to explaining this shocking diconnect in American discourse (and worldwide, for that matter, as Europe has followed the same austerity-based destructive path to recovery as we did) and helped explain the "why" of the Tea Party's rise and why there continue to be a large swath of the American public so disenchanted with government that they have actually bought the Republican talking points of lower taxes and less regulations and "job creators" hook-line-and-sinker, even though these prescriptions are in fact anethema to economic growth (because, and I've said this a million times, without demand from the poor and middle class, the job creators ain't going to create jobs no matter how low you make their taxes...)  The book was written before the Occupy Wall Street revolution that came this fall, and if Frank had waited, he would probably say that was exactly the rebellious movement that would have been expected after the collapse of the economy in 2008, the protests against the people and corporations who collapsed the economy, not the protests against the government that the Tea Party represented and that millions of misinformed middle and lower-class Americans continue to thrust their misplaced anger (or on each other, the other poor "living high on handouts with their cell phones and nice sneakers", one of the most BS attack lines created by the wealthy so we don't notice how the government has stacked things so nicely towards them and not the actual poor, who, you know, are fucking poor).  But I think Frank would say Occupy came too late at this point and even as it's changed the narrative of some in the media, it's not enough outrage and, crucially, there's no political party in the country and very few actual politicians (Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are a couple exceptions) who are giving voice to the 99% in the halls of power.  One wonders what it will take to change the narrative or to actually fix things in this country from the state that they are in.  But understanding how we got to this point -- the rise of far-right economic fervor in the face of a massive economic collapse predicated on policies proscripted out of far-right economic theory-- makes this informative book a must-read for all Americans.

Noise

I read Darin Bradley's 2010 novel Noise in a single day, not just because I remain housebound and bored in the aftermath of my hellish foot surgery.  No, I read this book in a single day mostly because it was an incredible read, brimming with imagination and characterization and a distorted vision of our near future, not quite a dystopian story, not quite a zombie tale (there are no zombies) but it reminded me of one of my favorite movies ever, 28 Days Later, in its story of the immediate aftermath of the collapse of society and how "ordinary" citizens like a small group of college kids attempt to survive.  The story is told in first person, by "Hiram", a name the narrator takes as part of the plan to survive, a plan written out by he and his friend "Levi" (nee Adam) in The Book, a Bible of sorts of survival narrative, spelling out what they needed to do before, during, and after The Collapse, written largely from instructions by Salvage, an underground radio and video network using analog signals after the U.S. went fully digital, which has been loudly advocating anarchy and may or may not have actually sparked or perhaps simply prodded The Collapse -- an economic collapse in which the U.S. government was forced to declare bankruptcy, a run on the banks ensues, and then -- basically, according to Salvage, it's every man for himself.  And Hiram and Levi are ready.  A fascinating and thrilling novel I highly recommend.

Hiram is quite an appealing narrator, written in an imaginative style that flips between the chaotic present-day events and flashbacks to key moments of a suburban adolescence that included the Boy Scouts and T-ball and lots and lots of Dungeons & Dragons but which oddly prepared him for the conspiracy theories and the end-of the-world survival instincts that kick in the moment they hear from Salvage that the Collapse has begun.  Passages from The Book - a combination Bible / Constitution / Survival Guide -- mix in with the narrative and help explain the graphic violence that Hiram and Levi partake in, defending heinous acts with a mindset of "us vs. them", "Outsider vs. Group", the theory that when Order collapses, you're going to need to kill and you're going to need to kill "innocents", because if you stop and render help to some poor soul, someone else will attack you to take your stuff.  Of course, the novel brings up doubt as to whether the Salvage edicts in favor of anarchy that the boys are following is a necessary last act of desperation in a world without order or if it helped spur the world without order in the first place.  The details of the story are told in delicate, yet adrenaline-pumping style, and although the transformation of some characters from mild-mannered citizens to cold-blooded killers is probably unrealistic, there is no excess violence for violence's sake and there are consequences to all of their actions, particularly their decision to take a National Guard Humvee by force.  Through it all, in fact, the author spends time to focus on the characters and what they are going through -- particularly Hiram, without any introspective bullshit you'd find in more mainstream tales because - fuck, these kids don't have time for that shit.  The world is coming to an end.

Really, really impressive debut novel.  You'll fly right through it.  I did.  And in the author's notes at the end of the paperback copy I had, Bradley admits that much of the background of the narrator comes from his own life (as is often typical, particularly in a first novel) and that the fictional town of Slade is based on the real city of Denton, Texas.  A city I wrote about on here before.  So that was kind of cool.

• Buy Noise

The Great Derangement

So the one thing I've learned in 2011 that I would like to share with my readers and that I cannot stress enough... do not ever, ever -- unless it is the absolute last choice to make to save you from never walking again -- do not ever have foot surgery.  Specifically bone fusion surgery on your big toe, but I think in general foot surgeries are bad ideas.  I won't get into the details because they might either bore you or make you think I'm just whining about the pain, but when I say that this surgery I'm currently "recovering" from is worse than the ACL replacement surgery on my knee a few years back, I'm not kidding.  I'm not at all actually recovering, the pain every day just doesn't stop and although there was a day or two where I thought things were improving, that was quite a long time ago.  I'm back on the Percocet, now over 3 1/2 weeks after the surgery, and the thought of making it through a day pain-free feels like a pipe dream right now, let alone actually being able to walk again or god forbid drive.  I don't know, I'm going back to the doctor this week.  But that's my main advice for the new year.