Prose fiction

Atlas Drugged — The Addictive Essence of Ayn Rand’s Juvenile Philosophy

April 22, 2011
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Atlas Drugged — The Addictive Essence of Ayn Rand’s Juvenile Philosophy

By Mike Gray A recent film, derived from a novel, has excited comment, some laudatory, some highly critical: Rand is something of a cultural phenomenon — the author of potboilers who became an ethical and political philosopher, a libertarian heroine. But Rand’s distinctive mix of expressive egotism, free love and free-market metallurgy does not hold up very well on the screen. . . . . None of the characters express a hint of sympathetic human emotion — which is precisely the point. Rand’s novels are vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. “The Objectivist ethics, in essence,” said Rand, “hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.” If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence.

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Fun and Games a Goofy, Violent Romp — And That’s OK.

April 18, 2011
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Fun and Games a Goofy, Violent Romp — And That’s OK.

Fun and Games, by Duane Swierczynski. Mulholland Books, available in June 2011. by Warren Moore Duane Swierczynski is known both for his work in crime fiction and writing for comic books. In his new novel, Fun and Games, he seems to combine elements of both, giving us a loud, pulpy textual equivalent to a summer action movie, with elements of both Quentin Tarantino and Richard S. Prather. It’s a book destined to be a guilty pleasure, but the pleasure is definitely there, and that’s a writer’s first job. The premise is interesting: Los Angeles — and particularly Hollywood — is the base of a clandestine group of “fixers”, rather like “Mr. Wolf” from Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction writ large. They construct and produce narratives that cover up various things the Powers That Be want covered up, from negligent homicide to assassination — in fact, it’s implied a couple of times that the group may have been responsible for the JFK shooting. They are efficient and lethal, with resources including untraceable poisons, seemingly limitless budgets, access to vast databases, and an array of weaponry that would make James Bond’s Q envious. They’re known as The Accident People, and the novel is the

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Prose & Poetry Update

April 18, 2011
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Prose & Poetry Update

I’m back and I’ve decided to drop the “Weekly” from the post’s title. At least until I hit a good, say, three months of regular weekly updates. Without further ado, here’s a few links for the fiction and poetry fans visiting the American Culture. To start things off, a few literary quotes concerning education: “Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic–Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.” - Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland “At forty you stand upon the threshold of life, with values learned and rubbish cleared away.” - Algernon Blackwood, A Prisoner in Fairyland “There is no education like adversity.” - Benjamin Disreali, Endymion “So long…as we consider finance, industry, trade, agriculture merely as competing interests to be reconciled from time to time as best they may, so long as we consider ‘education’ as a good in itself of which everyone has a right to the utmost, without any ideal of the good life for society or for the individual, we shall move from one uneasy compromise to another.” - T. S. Eliot Short Fiction Shtetl Days by Harry Turtledove “Jakub Shlayfer opened the door and walked

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Zeitgeist Alters a Classic War Novel

April 16, 2011
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Zeitgeist Alters a Classic War Novel

From Here to Eternity has been in print since Scribner originally published it in 1951. That version won the National Book Award in 1952, a year it was up against The Catcher in the Rye and The Caine Mutiny, among other titles. According to the New York Times, it “is frequently cited as one of the best American novels of the 20th century.” Not content with accepting the novel’s iconic status, James Jones’ heirs have decided this American classic must bow down to the vulgarity and identity politics currently admired by modern culture. When the classic novel From Here to Eternity was published in 1951, a few things were gone that had been in the original manuscript: explicit mentions of gay sex and a number of four-letter words. … Sixty years later Mr. Jones’s estate has made a deal to reissue a digital version of the book that restores those cuts. This begs the question: Why? Clearly, these edits didn’t harm the work’s status among literary elites. So what do readers gain in re-reading, or reading for the first time, this novel with the vulgar language and mentions of gay sex restored? Some may respond that this is the book’s

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Of Ambiguous Utopias and Heterotopias

April 15, 2011
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Of Ambiguous Utopias and Heterotopias

By Mike Gray Odonianism is anarchism. Not the bomb-in-the-pocket stuff, which is terrorism, whatever name it tries to dignify itself with; not the social-Darwinist economic ‘libertarianism’ of the far right; but anarchism as prefigured in early Taoist thought, and expounded by Shelley and Kropotkin, Goldman and Goodman. Anarchism’s principal target is the authoritarian State (capitalist or socialist); its principal moral-practical theme is cooperation (solidarity, mutual aid). It is the most idealistic, and to me the most interesting, of all political theories. — Ursula K. LeGuin Science fiction (SF) presents possibilities for writers to explore “what-if” societies that never existed or could never actually exist, given the inertia that inheres in all known cultures. Two SF novels that explore the “what-if” theme are Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton. In The Dispossessed: he action takes place in a two-planet system — each planet is, in effect, the other planet’s moon. The larger of these two planets, Urras, is a world much like the Earth we know — divided among a number of competing governments, the best of which permit private property ownership and a relatively free market, though subject to heavy taxation. The

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The Toy from Ganymede

April 14, 2011
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The Toy from Ganymede

By Mike Gray For years I’ve been trying to find a science fiction story I read a long, long time ago which describes the contemporary situation in Western civilization. And now, thanks to a helpful reader, I can tell you about it. The story was written by the great Philip K. Dick, who has managed to become famous posthumously for his books made into films — Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report — without people understanding his genius. “War Game” was published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine’s December 1959 issue. Now, tell me if you think Dick predicted his future, our present . . . . — Barry Rubin, “A Science Fiction Story That Predicted the Manner of Western Suicide”

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The New and Improved God

April 14, 2011
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The New and Improved God

By Mike Gray It seems that to many, the God of the Bible has become quite unacceptable to society—at least certain portions of His personality. His holiness makes us uncomfortable. His justice seems a little harsh. His righteousness seems totally out of touch with our culture as a whole. So, what are we to do with a God that makes us feel uncomfortable and inferior? It’s easy, we perform a lobotomy. We simply perform an operation to remove the offending attributes! That sounds outrageous, of course, but it is happening in the Evangelical world. You don’t have to look far for examples. Not long ago the rage was a novel named The Shack. It presented a God that was far more palatable, more gentle, more feminine, more understanding, more weak than the God of scripture. After all, the God of scripture demands that sin be punished, that righteousness prevail, that His children die daily to the power of a cruel instrument of execution called the Cross. The God of The Shack was something like a lobotomized God, where all the offending characteristics had been surgically removed by a very sharp pen. The danger was never what The Shack included about

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‘Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt, Deconstructs the Deconstructionists

April 12, 2011
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‘Sloth, by Mark Goldblatt, Deconstructs the Deconstructionists

By Lars Walker One of the most interesting tricks of the mystery writer is “the unreliable narrator.” When you aren’t sure if you can believe what the storyteller tells you, it adds a whole level to the puzzle. Author Mark Goldblatt has added a further level of complexity. Not only does the narrator of Sloth (released last year by Greenpoint Press) sometimes deceive the reader, he may in fact not even exist. He never tells us his name. The only name he ever uses in the story (one chosen in order to deceive the woman he loves) is Mark Goldblatt, the name of the actual author of the book. But he didn’t borrow it from his author. He borrows it from his friend Zezel, who is an author and uses it as a pseudonym. (Or is he and does he?) You see the kind of book we’re dealing with here? Mark Goldblatt (the real one, I mean. S. T. Karnick assures me he actually exists, and that’s good enough for me) has written a parody of postmodern novels in which he out-deconstructs the deconstructors. Layers of meaning and misdirection are everywhere (as well as a lot of word play and

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Hayek and SF

April 12, 2011
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Hayek and SF

By Mike Gray Jeff Riggenbach continues his exploration of how libertarian thought and thinkers have impinged on science fiction (SF). Riggenbach finds libertarian echoes in the works of two well-known SF authors, William Gibson and Alfred Bester — although these writers may not have been conscious of them. In Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, the central character is: . . . . Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old independent marketing consultant with a rare skill set to offer the advertising agencies and design firms that make up her clientele. She is, Gibson tells us, a sort of “dowser in the world of global marketing,” a person whose job is “finding whatever the next thing might be.” As she explains to a hopeful young designer of hats at one point in the novel, “What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does.” Cayce fits the Hayekian paradigm of how a limited mind can make the greatest use of information that is constantly in a state of flux: he peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists

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The Murder of Mystery Genre History: A Cautionary Tale About the Perversion of Cultural History

April 5, 2011
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The Murder of Mystery Genre History: A Cautionary Tale About the Perversion of Cultural History

Review of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson By Curt Evans On the back cover of The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010), the blurb tells us that the fourteen essays contained therein represent the “very best in contemporary scholarship.” If so, this should be a matter of grave concern to people interested in the history of the American mystery genre before World War II, or in the preservation of what is best in the culture and fostering of good works in the future. As the Companion is a skimpy book of less than 200 pages and it has fourteen essays, potential readers should be immediately clued in to the fact that the essays tend to be rather cursory. A listing of the topics further reveals that the book’s coverage is esoteric, leaving noticeable gaps: Introduction (4 pages) Early American Crime Writing (10 pages, excluding footnotes) Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction (8 pages) Women Writers Before 1960 (12 pages) The Hard-Boiled Novel (15 pages) American Roman Noir (12 pages) Teenage Detective and Teenage Delinquents (13 pages) American Spy Fiction (9 pages) The Police Procedural on Literature and on Television (13 pages)

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Sleight of Hand Shows Beagle Remains Magical

March 25, 2011
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Sleight of Hand Shows Beagle Remains Magical

A Review of Sleight of Hand, by Peter S. Beagle (Tachyon Publications, 2011) by Warren Moore When I talk to my students about writing, I describe it as a mediated telepathy, a sort of magic transference of people, scenes, and ideas from the writer’s head to the reader’s, more-or-less intact. Like any good sort of magic, it’s mysterious, can be dangerous, and can take a long time — maybe forever — to master. it might be easier, however, just to hand my students anything by Peter S. Beagle, who has worked his own literary magic since he wrote his first novel, A Fine and Private Place, in 1958, at the age of nineteen. Over the years, he’s written travelogues, movies, TV episodes, and songs, but he’s best known as a fantasist, and his novel The Last Unicorn (1968) is a genuine classic of the genre, having been favorably compared to such writers as Lewis and Tolkien himself. But for a man who got such an early start, and who a classmate described as the most intimidating figure in a Stanford Writing Workshop that also included Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey, Beagle’s output seemed slender for much of his career. Brilliant?

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Interview with Gary Alexander: “An Irreverent Goldbrick” and author of ‘Dragon Lady’

March 24, 2011
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Interview with Gary Alexander: “An Irreverent Goldbrick” and author of ‘Dragon Lady’

By Libby Sternberg Dragon Lady, Gary Alexander’s evocative and absurdist tale of the early days of the Vietnam War, is a page-turning read that will make you laugh and cry. Told from several vantage points in the protagonist’s life, Dragon Lady seamlessly shifts from Saigon in 1965 through to the present day . . . and beyond, as the narrator tells the story of his obsession with a Vietnamese girl named Mai, his increasing unease with the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and his reflections on his own life since his tour in Saigon. (For a brief synopsis, see the end of this post.) Here is a Q and A with its author, Gary Alexander: LS: You served in Vietnam. Could you tell us a little about that experience? Gary: Most of my Army career was spent in clerical duties. Like Private Joe in the book, I preferred a roof over my head, and a big, clunky typewriter was my weapon of choice. Even in 1964-65, many of us had doubts about the Domino Theory. Not that we had extensive knowledge of that region and its history. It was because we learned early to doubt the wisdom of those above us.

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"Culture is the expression of the guiding philosophy of the day."—Murray Rothbard
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