This week, you will find no pissy analyses of lifestyle liberals and the anti-shopping broadsides they write. You will find instead that I had a really hectic week, so I turned to my trusty reading stand-by: cyberpunkish science fiction. I dove into a stack of four books on Saturday morning, and I didn't look up until last night.
Book the first: I had high hopes for the anthology Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future. I love the posthuman speculative fiction, I love short story anthologies, I love Gardner Dozois' curatorial skills as an editor, there's no overlap at all between this and the definitive cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades, I've beeen hankering to read it for a while ... what's not to like? Other than the fact that I've already read a few of these stories, not a whole lot. For example, Joanna Russ's story "Nobody's Home" is in Women of Wonder (I have an old copy of this) and Michael Swanwick's "The Wisdom of Old Earth" is reprinted in his collection Tales of Old Earth ...
Which just happened to be Book the second. It's a collection of Swanwick's short stories, most of which are centered around the idea that we choose to be human -- and humane -- and could just as easily choose not to be. My only caution to any would-be Swanwick reader is that he does seem fond of the "Lady or the Tiger?" ending, as it popped up in both "Scherzo with Dinosaur" and "Radiant Doors." That said, the book's reading for two sweet little tales in the middle, "Ancient Engines" and "North of Diddy-Wah-Diddy." Both reminded me of Ray Bradbury.
Know who else reminded me of Ray Bradbury? Theodore Sturgeon, who wrote my Book the third, More than Human. This "novel" is a string of novellas about a group of freaky outcasts who assemble into a group organism they label Homo gestalt. After the As decided they really didn't want to win their series against the Angels last Sunday, I pulled More than Human out and escaped into the lovely, enveloping prose. Sturgeon wields his words like a matador's cape: the reader is prodded by his cues. Consider this passage about twin two-year-olds who have had their rompers whipped away by the spiteful little telekinetic brat that lives upstairs:
At last they hunkered down as far as possible away from the door, put their arms about one other and stared numbly. They slowly quieted down, from chatters to twitters to cooings, and at last were silent, two tiny tuffets of terror.
If you can't read that without feeling a great deal of pity and anxiety for those hapless toddlers, you have a heart of stone.
Anyway, like much of Sturgeon's other work, this story seeks to use the freakish to explain the universal human condition. The final chapter of the book, in which he neatly delineates the difference between morality and an ethos, would make a nice jumping-off point for discussion in a philosophy class.
And finally, my Book the fourth was David Marusek's eagerly-anticipated novel, Counting Heads. You have no idea what I went through to find this book; local bookstores were all "Da-who-what-now?"
Like More Than Human, this book begins with a novella and moves outward. Aside from that genesis, and a spritely command of language, there are no other similarities. Counting Heads feels like a sequel to Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: people have willingly surrendered their autonomy to the lure of a networked world, and they have accepted that they are a commodity with market value. But it's not these weird and somewhat repellent ideas that make the book feel so alien; it's the fundamental human concerns that co-exist with them. Although Marusek spins the same wild yarns Stephenson does, there's more heart here. It hurts more by the end of the book.
Marusek had a story in Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future that I had been hankering to read ("The Wedding Album") too. Going from one paltry little story to a whole novel plus a story ... well, it was a very good week for reading. Buy his book. It'll bend your brain, but in a good way.
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