A Plague of Angels (a book review post)

I'm going to lead with the fact that I haven't quite finished this book; however, I'm within 20 pages of the end, and I'm fairly certain that nothing can redeem it at this point, so I feel pretty safe in all that follows.

But let me remind you that I like Tepper and think of The Gate to Women's Country as a must read. Or, at least, a should read.

And I love A Plague of Angels as a title. However, it seems to have no connection to the book other than as a title, which is more than a little disappointing.

As is common with Tepper, this is a post-apocalyptic style novel. It's not quite post-apocalyptic because there doesn't seem to have been what we would think of as an apocalypse-level event, but the effect is the same. Man, after having used the Earth harshly, takes off for the stars in hopes of finding a better place to live than what they're leaving behind. Of course, not everyone goes, and this is a story about those left behind and putting together the pieces of the world into something livable. Except this story takes place so far after the exodus that it's a legendary event to most people. A story passed down and passed down and passed down.

So far so good, right?
That's what I thought, too.

The first bit of oddness is the Archetypal Villages that are scattered around the land and populated by Archetypal Characters. These people have no names, only titles: Orphan, Oracle, Hero. There can be only one character of any given type in a village. Now, these villages seem to have some relevance or importance early on in the book, and maybe they did when Tepper started the writing, but the whole thing about them gets shrugged off later on when one of the apparent masterminds of the world states that they are only places for misfits to live who have no other place in society. Not only that, but some of them are largely populated by androids.

So, you know, in a world where civilization and society have collapsed, some group of people decided to go around gathering up all of the orphans and creating a whole village for each of them, because it does seem that each village must have an orphan. But only one at any given time. And, when the village could't be supported by enough other misfits, this group of people supplied androids to fill the roles.

No, this whole premise is in no way supported by the text, especially the fact that this group of people supplies these android play-actors to these villages but seems to make no other use of them. For anything.

And then there's the part where mythological monsters spring back into being after the exodus. Why? No reason is given, though there's an implication that they were called forth so that the Heroes would have things to fight. Called forth from...? Yeah... No idea.

And talking animals show up, oh, somewhere a bit after halfway through the book.  Why? Because some guy started teaching them to talk.

But all of this is supposed to be coming out of the ruins of our own world so, well, I think if animals could learn to talk, it would have already happened since there are plenty of people who spend a lot of time trying to learn to speak with animals.

Oh, plus, there's a very convenient "battle of five armies" at the end of the book that's so contrived that the author has one of the characters state that it feels contrived but decides that it's okay because he was not the one that contrived it.

And I haven't even mentioned the "walkers," because, as it works out, they're too stupid to bother to mention.

This whole book, by the time I got to the end, felt like some kind of sweep-the-kitchen pizza. But, you know, not in a pizza kind of way. Unless that pizza was literally made from the sweepings of the actual kitchen floor, including dog and cat hair, stray coffee beans that bounced into corners, and bits of dry cat food that cat sticks into odd places probably to see if the dog will find them.
Not something you'd ever actually want to eat, is my point.

And this is the first book of a trilogy!
One that I will not finish, because I'm not going onto anything built off of this story.
In fact, this one is so bad that it's put me off of Tepper for a while.
To say that it was a disappointment isn't saying enough.

The Gate To Women's Country (a book review post)

Generally speaking, post-apocalyptic books aren't my thing. Post-apocalyptic stories tend to revolve around one thing: how horrible everything is after the apocalypse. This book is not like that. Refreshingly so.

In fact, I didn't know I was reading something post-apocalyptic at first. Yes, that means I didn't know what the book was about. My wife told me I should read it, and I did, and I did that without reading the back cover blurb or anything. Yeah, I trust my wife that much. Her reading standards are much higher than mine, and mine are already pretty darn high. Basically, if she tells me I'm going to like something, I can believe that that is true.

So, yeah, I started reading it without knowing it was post-apocalyptic, so when I got to the part of the story that revealed it was a future society, not just some alternate or fantasy society, it was really an "oh, wow" moment. And, yes, I do realize I ruined that for any of you who might decide to pick the book up, but, really, how many of you were actually not going to read the back cover? That's what I thought, so get off my case. It's right there on the back, so I'm not spoiling anything!

I'm going to make a comparison, now. Everyone loves Ender's Game because they were caught off guard by the ending. Everyone is always, "Oh, wow! I didn't see that coming!" But not me. Not only did I figure out what was going on before the reveal, I knew what was going on almost as soon as it started happening. I liked the book, but there was nothing surprising about the ending to me, and, what's more, at the time I read it, I didn't know the ending was supposed to be a twist. It just seemed the natural outcome to me. I was surprised to find out that other people were surprised by the ending.

The Gate To Women's Country was more like The Sixth Sense in that regard for me. All of the clues as to what is actually going on in that movie are right there in the movie, but you don't see them for what they are. It makes the movie even more brilliant, because you can go back and watch it again and see how all the pieces are laid out and see how you just missed putting them together because you were too caught up in the story. It's rather like missing the forest for the trees.

There is a thing going on in The Gate To Women's Country that's rather brilliant, but what makes it more brilliant is that Tepper lays it all out in front of you -- she basically tells you what's happening -- but you don't see it. I did manage to work it out before the big reveal in the book, but it was rather late, only a few chapters before the reveal, and a definite "oh my God!" moment.

Considering the secret at the center of the novel, a case could be made that this is a dystopian novel. [When I say that, I mean it in the context of the original definition of the word, not the warped view we have of it currently. So, for your cultural edification: The current popular view of "dystopian" amounts to the same as "anti-utopian" or "the opposite of utopian" (which is anything that is not an actual utopian society (so any society currently on Earth (yes, we are all dystopian))). The actual definition of a dystopian society is a society that looks as if it's utopian but has something wrong or flawed at its core. An example would be the society in Brave New World which looks and acts like a utopia except that the population is largely controlled through the use of drugs.] I suppose that depends upon which side of the morally ambiguous question you fall. It's an interesting question, but not one I can go into without spoiling the entire book. But, trust me, I'd love to go into it.

It's a good book. A very good book. It's well written and will probably keep you wondering what it's actually about for quite a while. In a good way. Because you can probably pick up on it not being about what it appears to be about fairly early on. The characters are really good, too, and many of them are not exactly who they appear to be, too, but also in a good way, in the way of getting to know someone, say, away from work when you have only ever known them as a work acquaintance.

The only warning I would give is that the book has a definite feminist slant and, if you can't go in for that, you should probably skip the book; it will probably make you mad. And that, more than anything, will be quite revelatory. If the book makes you mad, it's probably about you.

The Scarlet Plague (a book review post)

Jack London is a writer I greatly admire, as much (or more) for his work ethic as for anything he ever wrote, though I did love both The Call of the Wild and White Fang when I read them as a teenager. In fact, they started me off on months worth of reading books with animals as central characters. Which I eventually moved away from, because, the farther you got from London, the worse the books got. But I digress...

We often think of post-apocalyptic literature as being a new phenomenon but, really, it's not. In its modern iteration, it goes back almost 200 years, all the way to Mary Shelley, but even ancient cultures wrote apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories. With that in mind, London's The Scarlet Plague isn't all the old and isn't all that original in what it does. In fact, there are strong echoes of Shelley's The Last Man in London's book.

What it does do that is interesting, though, is that it jumps 100 years ahead of when London wrote it and set that year as the apocalypse but, then, it jumps ahead another 60 years as its setting and has the last survivor of the collapse of civilization telling the story to his grandchildren. In that, we get both the story of the apocalypse and what happens after the apocalypse.

Of course, one of the big draws for a book like this is seeing how the author was seeing his projected future. London miss-projected on flight and filled the air with dirigibles rather than airplanes. But he got wireless communication even if he did also keep newspapers. I suppose the downfall of physical print media would have been unfathomable during it's rise at the beginning of the 20th century. Amazingly, he also pegged the world population.

There's a section where Smith is trying to explain diseases and germs to his grandchildren. That bit is particularly interesting in light of the current controversy over vaccines. I'm going to hazard a guess and say that London would have been pro-vaccine.

It's a fairly short read, so, in that, it's certainly worth it. It took me less than two hours. And you can get it free for the Kindle, so it's hard to lose there, too. Seriously, it's more than worth it just to see the perspective of someone writing about now from 100 years ago. It's not the greatest thing ever, not even great by London standards, but it's good. And better than a lot of drivel coming out today.

A to Z 2014: Abandoned Places

I know the official theme release day for A to Z is long past, but I have to (for all kinds of National Security reasons) keep mine under wraps right up until the last moment. That's how these things work. I wouldn't want my theme out there wandering around the Internet all unprotected and getting into trouble. My themes have been known to do that, cause trouble and stuff. Okay, maybe not, but I do have to guard my theme more closely than the Colonel guards his chicken recipe.

Because I feel like it; that's why!

Abandoned places have long been used to great effect in all kinds of horror environments. And Scooby Doo. Abandoned (haunted) houses. Abandoned warehouses and factories. And, my favorite, abandoned amusement parks. There's always that gypsy fortune teller machine that scares Scooby and Shaggy, then there's a great chase scene. Oh! And super hero cartoons, too. I'm pretty sure the abandoned amusement park has been used in both Batman and Spider-Man cartoons.

As much as I'm tired of the whole dystopian/post-apocalyptic thing, I think abandoned places have been quite under used in these stories. Think this

Of course, it works because the Statue of Liberty is so recognizable, and the sight of it like this speaks more to us about what has happened than words could have. It's all we need to know.

I think the tendency is just to make up places to be abandoned; how much work does it take to make up an abandoned house for your haunted house story? Not much. But I think there are plenty of actual places out there that have already been abandoned that could add that extra kick of realism to a story. And some of these places have great atmosphere; if you could put that in a bottle and sprinkle it on your pages...
Hey, I'm just sayin'.

Beyond that, some of the stories of these places are just interesting. And the pictures are cool. So you can always just look. Or, you know, add them to your list of places to see before you become an abandoned place yourself.

And, to give credit where credit is due, my wife came up with this idea. I think, now, she has come up with all three of my themes? I know she came up with at least one of the other two (but I'm not looking back at the moment to check the other one). I had a theme of my own for this year, but she sent me a thing with all these pictures of places, cool pictures, and, after I'd looked at them, she gave me that, "Hey! You could use this as your theme!" After looking back at what I'd planned... well, you see which theme won out, don't you.

So enjoy the month! These may be the shortest posts I do on any consistent basis.

Dystopian Marketing

I have made no secret of my dislike of the whole "dystopian" thing in popular culture these days. Much of my dislike springs from the fact that it, mostly, is not actually dystopian but post-apocalyptic, and I got over the whole post-apocalyptic thing back in the 80s. Names mean something to me, which is part of the reason I never liked Tim Burton's Joker movie. What? You're telling me that Burton never made a Joker movie? Sure, he did; he called it Batman. I walked out of that movie completely dissatisfied and the first comment I made to friends that I saw it with was, "I might have liked it if they'd called it The Joker." [I'm not just giving an opinion here. If you watch any of the interviews with Burton at the time, he says repeatedly that the movie was focused on the Joker. That's the character he found interesting. He could really have cared less about Batman.]

Anyway, if you want to know more about my whole thing with dystopians and calling things what they are, hop over to Indie Writers Monthly and read the post.

Now, I have a question. Last month, I did a little experiment focused on getting reviews. Mostly, that didn't work out. I did get one review from it, so it wasn't a total failure, but one is hardly what I'd call successful, either. However, I did get some sales from the push for reviews. So here's the question: What is it that makes you go from thinking you might want to read a particular book some day to actually buying that book in preparation for reading it? I know what it is for me (sort of), but I don't think, at this point in my life, that I'm a good example of how people buy books. Then there's that it seems to work to some extent (no matter how much I don't like doing it) when I say, "Hey, buy my book! please" And I do know that I don't do that "enough," at least, not according to all of those marketing people who say you ought to have such and such a ratio of self-promotion to other stuff. I tend to, um, not self promote at all.

So, yes, specifically, I'm looking to find out what it would take those of you out there who have been thinking about buying one of my writing things to move from the "thinking about it" side of things to the "doing it" side of things, but I'm assuming that it's the same process for my stuff as for any other books. So let me know:

What's the thing that pushes you over the edge from just thinking about buying a book to actually buying the book. Aside from how it might benefit me, I am curious. Let's call it a data study.

And don't forget, after you answer that question, here, hop over to Indie Writers Monthly and read all about the "dystopian thing"!

Fahrenheit 451 -- A True Dystopian

This is not the first time I've read Fahrenheit 451, but it has been, oh, about 30 years, and you can forget a lot in 30 years. I had. In fact, I had forgotten what a wonderful book it is and, actually, how relevant it remains, now, 60 years later. It's also amazing to see all of the foresight Bradbury had into the world that would be, which is now the world that is. [It was not amazing to see how much of Fahrenheit made it into Snow Crash and not in a good way. Not in an homage way. In a "I really like this and am going to take it and use it in my book" way. Like the mechanical dog. I didn't think it was possible for my view of Snow Crash to fall any farther than it already was, but Stephenson surprised me yet again. Not in a good way.]

The thing that stood out to me most is the true nature of the dystopian world of the Firemen. I'm not a fan of dystopians, but that's because I'm not a fan of current dystopians, which are not dystopians at all. Almost across the board, they are post-apocalyptic. The Hunger Games is not a dystopian story; I don't care how it's marketed or what publishers say or whatever. [And the distinction and where it went wrong is a post unto itself, so I'm not going to go into that now.] But Fahrenheit is in no way post-apocalyptic (although you could say it's pre-apocalyptic, I suppose). It's not even a government imposed dystopian. No, the Firemen and the book burning is something that came from the people, and that's what makes the book so scary.

And, possibly, real.

There are so many things in our current society that Bradbury was only glimpsing when he wrote the book, but they are so much worse, now, than then. I'll focus on two things:

1. We don't like to make people feel bad. About anything. This has been a growing trend over the past few decades with our movement toward positive thinking and making everything "politically correct," but it doesn't stop there, because we've started to stop allowing kids to experience losing. Losing feels bad. Over the past few years, there has been a growing trend in kids' sport teams (like my daughter's old softball team) to not have any losers. No scores. Just two teams of kids who are all winners. And many schools have begun adopting grade-less systems, because bad grades make kids feel bad.

In Fahrenheit, one of the reasons that people don't read is that reading makes them feel bad. As a society, the people want to have fun, and they can't get that through reading.

2. Thinking is hard work. And it makes people feel bad. If they read, they will think. If they think, they will realize just how not very special they are and how much they don't have and that makes them sad. Thinking about anything for too long becomes a bad thing; it's thinking they're really trying to get rid of, not the books. And I'm not talking about the government; I'm talking about the society. Books get shorter and shorter because no one wants to think (and we all know about the current TL;DR crap). Eventually, books become anathema to the society, so they start burning them. They burn them until it becomes a law.

I was looking over a survey recently dealing with people and whether they like to have "intellectual conversations" and 80-90% of people responding say no. I think the numbers where slightly higher for women, but that could be cultural (men want to appear smarter and women want to appear less smart than men). The most common response to the question was, "I don't like to think that hard."

That Bradbury was tackling these topics back in '53 (actually earlier, because Fahrenheit was based off of a short story he wrote in the 40s called "The Fireman") says a lot. It says that we've been struggling over the loss of books in our society for much longer than we normally think. It also says that, although these issues have grown in the decades, books, even if not physical, are still a strong force in our society, and that's a good thing. Of course, the metaphor that Bradbury is making is that the loss of books, the loss of knowledge, the loss of thought will lead man to his doom (a fiery apocalyptic doom in Fahrenheit), and I don't think that he was wrong. His warning is still as applicable today as it was then, just before the greatest wave of censorship the United States has ever seen would was across the country (something the Tea Party would like duplicate, I'm sure).

All of that aside, the language of Bradbury is superb, his language exquisite. Things like, "...under an ancient windmill that whirred like the sound of the passing years overhead." I can hear that sound in my head when I read it, and it gives the passage a weight that just isn't found in a lot of modern books. And my favorite passage:

She had a very thin face like the dial of a small clock seen faintly in a dark room in the middle of a night when you waken to see the time and see the clock telling you the hour and the minute and the second, with a white silence and a glowing, all certainty and knowing what it had to tell of the night passing swiftly on toward further darkness, but moving also toward a new sun.

It's full of foreshadowing and beauty. Very evocative. And the book is full of that stuff.

There's a reason this book is considered a classic, but many books that are no longer relevant are classics. This one surpasses those in that it is a classic and still relevant. I'm quite sure this is a book that more people should still be reading.

Zombies: A Cultural Metaphor

Society has changed in the last four decades. This is not to say that society isn't always changing, but the change that has occurred recently (recent being a relative term) is one that we've never seen before. Technological progress, throughout the ages, has always been seen as a good thing. I don't mean scientific discovery, which has not always been viewed positively, but the actual trinkets of technology that scientific progress has made possible. Mankind has always had an innate sense that he could do no wrong. That belief has dissipated like morning mist.

Four decades ago, a zombie was still just a zombie. A re-animated corpse. Slow. Stupid. No will of its own. It was something created by man that man controlled. The only exception to this rule was Frankenstein's monster, but the Frankenstein monster became a special case and has never really been viewed as a zombie. Even though zombies could be controlled, they were still dead things. Just animated. They had no more need of sustenance than does a marionette. They did not hunger. They did not want. They only obeyed.

That all began to change in 1968 with the release of Night of the Living Dead. For the first time, the dead, en masse, rose up against the living to devour them. It was the first use of zombies to symbolize that man might, just possibly, be playing around with forces he didn't understand.

The 80s arrived and, with it, a culture of teenagers that didn't believe they would live to be adults. Post-apocalyptic literature/entertainment hit its stride. Not that it hadn't existed, but, prior to the 80s, (and I am now going to lump all of this together into the dystopian category) dystopians had really been isolated events.
And I mean it when I say we didn't believe that we would make it through high school without nuclear holocaust being thrust upon us. In middle school, for a Christmas door decorating contest, my homeroom did a whole Nuclear Winter theme. We even re-wrote several popular Christmas songs with lyrics like, "I'm dreaming of a nuclear winter."

However, the cold war ended, and we don't really believe an actual nuclear holocaust will happen anymore. No, now, we believe man will destroy the Earth in much more subtle ways. Like a zombie apocalypse. Zombies have become the representation of our fear that mankind will, ultimately, be unable to control the technology that he plays with. Zombies have evolved. They are no longer re-animated corpses. They're fast. They're smart. They're hungry. They want to destroy us. Destroy life. They're smart, but they are unthinking. Their intelligence is applied only to achieving their goal. Devouring us Destroying life. Hmm... somewhat like the single-minded way in which corporations pursue financial success.

In short, zombies have become a cultural metaphor for all the ways in which technology will destroy us.

However, that's only  the metaphor in its simplest form. The obvious one. The one that has to do with our nightmares over what secret things governments and corporations are doing in the dark. It lives off of our fears that we'll wake up, shivering and drenched in sweat, and find out that society has collapsed. No rules. Only chaos.

The deeper part of that fear extends down to where we believe that technology is actually turning each of us into zombies. Especially the generation that's growing up around us. The generation of technological zombies. You know it's true. People refuse to be detached from their technology. People that grew up without it and know it's possible to leave home without a phone and still survive refuse to go without, so how do we show the (little) people who have never known life without cells that it's possible to go without? It's with us everywhere. And it's scary. But, still, we embrace it. We can't help it.

Despite the data that the use of cellular devices, in whatever capacity, while driving is more dangerous than driving while intoxicated, we choose to believe that we can handle it, and we don't have the excuse of impaired judgement that intoxication brings. Despite the new warnings by WHO (the World Health Organization, not the Doctor. Or the band.) that cellular devices bring a greater risk of brain cancer, especially in children and adolescents, we will go on using our bits and pieces of technology and deal with any consequences later. Despite the continued statements of desire to connect with people in actual face-to-face contact, we will, more and more often, forsake physicalness in favor of a virtual reality that we can "control."

We are becoming the zombies that we fear. Soulless creatures walking through life but only seeing things through the tiny input devices we hold in our hands. And just wait till they can actually put that stuff right inside our skulls. Is it any wonder that we have become so incredibly fascinated with zombies? After all, vampires could be defeated. How do we defeat ourselves?