BOOK REVIEW: THE CENTAURI DEVICE, by M. John Harrison

The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Several things I read about Harrison's book described it as proto-cyberpunk. I thought of it as sf noir, which come to think of it maybe makes it proto-cyberpunk. The future Harrison describes is one dark place. Escalations of the Arab/Israeli conflict has divided the Earth, which is no longer hardly worth visiting, between the two forces. Other planets offer their own special hells, often little more than spaceports and port cities filled with junkies and prostitutes. John Truck, our hero, has given up peddling amphetamines, and now looks for whatever long distance hauls he can pick up. But he finds himself the most sought after drifter in the galaxy, wanted by both Israelis and Arabs because he is the bastard son of one of the last, purebred Centaurians, a race wiped out in a genocide a century or so ago. In the ruins of Centauri, an archeologist as discovered a"device." Everyone assumes it is a weapon, but one that can only be operated by a person bearing Centaurian genes.


This is hard-boiled space opera with the body count and colorful characters you would expect to go with it. Genreral Gaw,  female leader of the IWG (Israeli World Government), is a squat, tough broad given to calling everbody "duckie," The leader of the UASR (United Arab something-or-other) has the prescient name Kadaffi.  There is a femme fatale, one Angina Seng, but the most fascinating characters are members of a religious sect known as Openers. They replace more and more of their epidermis with plastic in a effort to achieve total transparency. John Truck falls victim to one of their non-elective surgeries.


From 1968 to 1975, Harrison was literary editor of the British sf magazine New Wave. So along with J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Thomas Disch, and others he oversaw a genuine transformation in the literary style and subject matter of the genre. His leftist political stance delivers a good solid bitch slap to Margaret Thatcher's England and is a message worth keeping in circulation.



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MONDAY MORNING

BOOK REVIEW: BAD NATURE, OR WITH ELVIS IN ACAPULCO, by Javier Marias

Bad Nature, or With Elvis in Mexico by Javier Marías
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is what happens when you commit an irreversible act.


Our Spanish hero is picking up piecework in 1960's Hollywood, when he gets something of a break. Elvis Presley is on his way to Mexico to film Fun in Acapulco, and for some reason he has decided it is necessary that he have a true Castillian, rather than a Mexican, accent for his role. Our hero is hired as voice coach, flown to Acapulco, and enters the wonderland that is Hollywood on location. Although he is not able to improve The King's Spanish a great deal, it hardly matters. The Spanish he speaks in the film amounts to little more than, "Buenos dias, muchachos," or "Follow me, my four amigos." But Elvis takes a liking to our narrator and draws him into the inner entourage that after a day of filming hops in a private plane and flies off to whatever restaurant or strip joint has been recommended that day.


One night things do not go well. And since this is a Javier Marias story, much of what goes wrong has to do with language. The narrator finds himself stuck with diplomatically translating the insults that begin to fly between some Mexican gangsters and some asshole moneyman from the Midwest. Civility breaks down, and anything beyond that would be a spoiler. I will just say that although the narrator knows the events occurred forty years ago, he still feels he can never return to Mexico. And as for Fun in Acapulco, the official studio line is that the entire film was shot on sound stages in Burbank.


Bad Nature is fifty-five pages long, elegantly published as a New Direcctions Pearl, a new series of short works from an international list of authors. I finished it wondering two things. How can anyone pull off a 400 word sentence with 32 commas? And, when is Javier Marias going to win the Nobel Prize?


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KiM KARDASHIAN REVEALED !!!! (8)

... [T]he greatest provocations for lust are from our apparel; God makes, they say, man shapes, and there is no motive like unto it ... A filthy knave, a deformed quean, a crooked carcass, a maukin, a witch, a rotten post, an hedge-stake may be set out and tricked up that is shall make as fair a show, as much enamour, as the rest; many a silly fellow is so taken...Not that comeliness of clothes is therefore to be condemned, and those usual ornaments: there is a decency and decorum in this as there are in other things...Why do they crown themselves with gold and silver, use coronets and tires of several fashions, deck themselves with pendants, bracelets, earrings, chains, girdles, rings, pins, spangles, embroideries, shadows, rabatoes, versicolour ribands? Why do they make such glorious shows with their scarves, feathers, fans, masks, furs, laces, tiffanies, ruffs, falls, cauls, cuffs, damasks, velvets, tinsels, cloths of gold, silver, tissue? stones, odours, flowers, birds, beasts, fishes, and whatsoever Africa, Asia, America, sea, land, art and industry of man can afford" Why do they use and covet such novelties of invention, such new-fangled tires, and spend such inestimable sums on them?...Why are they like so many Sybarites, or Nero's Poppea, Ahasuerus' concubines, so costly, so long a-dressing as Caesar was marshaling his army, or a hawk in pruning...they had more need some of them to be tied in Bedlam with iron chains, have a whip for a fan, and hair-cloths next to their skins, and instead of wrought smocks, have their cheeks stigmatized with a hot iron, I say, some of our Jezebels, instead of painting if they were well served. But why all this labour, all this cost, preparation, riding, running, far-fetched and dear-bought stuff? "Because, forsooth, they would be fair and fine, and where nature is defective, supply it by art."

Robert  Burton , The Anatomy of Melancholy

MONDAY MORNING

BOOK REVIEW: RED MARS, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The last long science fiction I read was Dune the year it came out. Then a long period of no science fiction, and in the past year a return to the genre. And one thing I have liked about the mid-century sf I have been reading is its low page count. Most of these guys, and so far I have read only guys, get the story done in under 300 pages. And I really go for the ones that clock in at around 180. There's a good idea, the story moves fast, outrageous things can happen but the story can also be quite moving.


Red Mars is 572 pages long, and it is only part one of a trilogy. (SF writers used to crank out short stories because they only got around a penny a word. Nowadays it seems that long novels in series is the way to go.) But by all reports, Red Mars, and the subsequent Green Mars and Blue Mars are good solid entertainment and a relatively realistic look at how human colonization of Mars might play out. On the cover of the copy I had, Arthur C. Clarke hailed it as "The best novel on the colonization of Mars that has every been written." I don't know how big or how seriously competitive that field is, but I can say that is the best novel on the colonization of Mars that I have ever read.


With 600 pages of narrative you expect some character development, a sense of history, and a good plot. Robinson creates good characters. When we fist meet them they seem destined to fill stereotyped slots in an sf novel of this kind: The ex-Astronaut who was the first man to land on Mars; the gregarious Russian who spouts revolution; the female scientist who believes Mars should remain essentially untouched played against the male scientist fixated on terraforming the planet; the diplomat; and, the difficult, Russian beauty who will allow for a certain amount of erotic tension, but not too much. But the story, told in long sections that focus on individual characters, is never formulaic. The novel follows competent people working hard in an alien environment where where everything around them is deadly.


One hundred of them set off for Mars, and the book covers about thirty years. And yes, at times I felt like I was plodding through a James Michener novel about Hawaii or Texas or The Holy Land. (That feeling could return if I read the next two in the series.) Critics praise Robinson for writing hard sf, science fiction where the writer uses a serious scientific background to develop the plot. Most of that is lost on me -- I never did understand the whole space elevator thing -- but I did enjoy the way the colonization developed from 100 dedicated scientists to tens of thousands of new immigrants, sent either by the homelands to secure a spot on the new planet, or the equivalent of wildcatters out to exploit the treasure trove of metals the planet holds.


There is a mystery, actually several mysteries, involved, and the political maneuvering that becomes part of the expanding society rings true to what one would expect in a world that is part research station, part boomtown, and part escape valve for an earth that is going out of control. I have to say, though, that one description of a Martian sunset is very much like another, and that we have better get busy with advancing robotic technology to get these guys settled on Mars by 2026.


James Cameron has Robinson's trilogy under option, which seems as inevitable as the fact that nothing will probably ever come it. It could be the next Battlestar Galactica, and I don't mean this as a spoiler, but,if they do the trilogy, a lot of actors are going to have only one year contracts.


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KIM KARDASHIAN REVEALED !!!! (7)

(In a craven effort to move up on Google searches for Kim Kardashian, I have abandoned The Kim Kardashian Reading Series for this slightly more lurid title. I considered KIM KARDASHIAN EXPOSED !!!, but that seemed a bit much, and also mean-spirited in a way to don't intend. Of course if numbers don't go up, I may be reduced to even more lascivious headings. Meanwhile, Kim continues to share her readings with followers of Potato Weather.)

Idleness overthrows all, love tyrannizeth in an idle person. If thou hast nothing to do, thou shalt be haled in pieces with envy, lust, some passion or another. Through doing nothing men learn to do ill. 'Tis Aristotle's simile, "As match or touchwood takes fire, so does an idle person love." ...Love, as Theophrastus defines it, is an affection of the idle mind, or as Seneca describes it, "youth begets it, riot maintains it, idleness nourisheth it, etc."

Robert  Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy