Bokononist Last Rites

These are the Last Rites of Bokononism. These lines are meant to be spoken by a minister of the faith and repeated by the dying person while the two are engaged in ritual boko-maru.

God made mud.
God got lonesome.
So God said to some of the mud, 'Sit up!'
'See all I've made,' said God, 'the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.'
And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.
Lucky me, lucky mud.
I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done.
Nice going, God!
Nobody but You could have done it, God! I certainly couldn't have.
I feel very unimportant compared to You.
The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn't even get to sit up and look around.
I got so much, and most mud got so little.
Thank you for the honor!
Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.
What memories for mud to have!
What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met!
I loved everything I saw!
Good night.
I will go to heaven now.
I can hardly wait...
To find out for certain what my wampeter was...
And who was in my karass...
And all the good things our karass did for you.
Amen.

From Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Google vs. the Family of Philip K. Dick

I knew that Google had a phone called the Nexus that uses the Android operating system. But it wasn't until I recently re-read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that I put the words "Android" and "Nexus" together and they clicked. 

In Dick's novel (and in the movie it spawned, Blade Runner), the most highly sophisticated androids are called Nexus 6s.

When Google first came out with the Nexus 1 for Android in 2010, the Dick family was already onto them. At the time, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dick's daughter, Isa Dick Hackett, sent Google a cease-and-desist letter warning them not to use the "Nexus" brand name, or a lawsuit would follow.

Google did end up using the name "Nexus," but the issue still wasn't settled even as late as 2014, when Google was actually due to launch the Nexus 6. According to several sources, there was suspicion that Google might call the phone the Nexus X instead of the Nexus 6 because of the legal issues (and, of course, because the phone was a highly sophisticated homicidal android virtually indistinguishable from humans without sophisticated empathy testing).

As Chris Matyszczyk wrote in an article for CNET, the name "Nexus" had to be more than a coincidence, and it was legitimate for Dick's family to call Google to account:

Naturally, one wouldn't dream of accusing Google of having some kind of disregard for intellectual property (facetiousness intended). And the word "nexus" has been used in many contexts. Moreover, just because you're a character in a novel, it doesn't mean you immediately get legal protection. It seems to be one of those nuanced problems that lawyers find lucrative.

The word "Droid," however, was deemed different. It was thought to be so characteristic of the "Star Wars" series that Verizon paid Lucasfilm a fee to license the name.

Perhaps "Star Wars" is simply a more famous movie than "Blade Runner." Perhaps Verizon is trying to be honorable in its business dealings. Perhaps, though, in such instances, it sometimes depends on whose pockets and determination are the deepest.

"You have got to be kidding me," says Nexus-6 Roy Batty.

By the end of 2014, the whole issue was eventually settled out of court with a confidential settlement amount, and Google released the Nexus 6. I hope that Hackett got lots and lots of money to let them use the model name her father invented.

Book Review: Cat’s Cradle (Part II: Writing & Themes)

Kurt Vonnegut
1963
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This post talks about Kurt Vonnegut’s writing and general themes in his work, particularly as used in Cat’s Cradle. For my synopsis of the plot of Cat’s Cradle, please see my last post.

Vonnegut's Style

Vonnegut’s style was very different from what most other authors were doing when he first started publishing novels in the 1950s and early 1960s.

His chapters are tiny—sometimes just a page or two. (Cat’s Cradle, for example, is less than 200 pages long and has 127 chapters.) The chapters also have a tendency to break right in the middle of a conversation or anecdote.

His writing is rapid-fire, hurtling through plot and character development at high speed. And he frequently punctuates his main narrative with side references and little bits of added information that seem totally out of left field but often come up later in unexpected ways. They are always funny without being overly clever. He constantly makes you wonder: how the hell did he think of that?

A clever writing style does not by itself make a person a great author, however. What made Kurt Vonnegut great were the subjects he dealt with, his willingness to lay himself on the line emotionally, and his drive to get to the truth, however painful. And how he tied it all together with a brilliantly dark sense of humor.

Vonnegut's History

Vonnegut did not have an easy early life, and much of his largely pessimistic and cynical outlook was undoubtedly formed by major traumas he experienced in his teens and twenties. He was born in 1922 and when he was still a young child, his parents were all but destroyed, economically and psychologically, by the Great Depression. His mother eventually ended up committing suicide shortly before he was sent off to World War II.

And the war itself was horrific for him, as the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s biography of the author describes:

When World War II broke out, Vonnegut was 16; at 20, he entered the army and was shipped off to Europe, where he almost immediately was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.

He was sent as a POW to Dresden. On February 13, 1945, British and American bombers destroyed the city by dropping high explosives followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm turned the non-militarized city into an inferno that killed up to 60,000 civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived by accident only because they were housed some 60 feet underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse.

Vonnegut’s job for weeks after the bombing was to gather up and burn the remains of the dead.

Dresden after the 1945 Firebombing

It is no wonder that Vonnegut wrote so much about the pain of war and the pointlessness of religion, business, and patriotic fervor. And it is no wonder that he was so sensitive to falseness, both large- and small-scale. Vonnegut spent much of his time in his writing trying to strip away artifice and to get to the truth.

Vonnegut's War

War is less of a central theme in Cat’s Cradle than in some of Vonnegut’s other novels, but it still rears its head in significant places.

First, of course, the narrator gets sucked into the San Lorenzan/ice-nine mess in the first place because he is writing a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He—along with Vonnegut, presumably—wants to know how the intelligentsia of America coped psychologically with what they had done to the people of Japan.

And the ceremony honoring San Lorenzo’s Hundred Martyrs to Democracy is a cynical and, at the same time, heartbreaking take on the hero-worship of soldiers who die in war.

The story of the Hundred Martyrs is that when World War II broke out, one hundred San Lorenzan men volunteered to fight. They all got onto a ship and took off for the war, but a U-boat sunk the ship and all one hundred soldiers died before it even got out of the harbor. Every year since then, San Lorenzo has held a ceremony to honor these heroes in which cardboard cutouts of world dictators are floated in the harbor and shot at by San Lorenzo’s six war planes.

After learning about the ridiculousness of both the martyrs’ deaths and the ceremony honoring them, we are prepared for total buffoonery at the ceremony itself. But instead we are forced to come face to face with the true awfulness of it all by the U.S. Ambassador to San Lorenzo, who says in his speech:

    “We are gathered here, friends,” to honor…children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which [these martyrs] died, my own son died.”
    “My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.”
    “I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.”
    “But they are murdered children all the same.”
    “And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”

Vonnegut's Religion 

Religion is much more prevalent than war as a theme throughout Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut’s vehicle for talking about it is Bokonon, San Lorenzo’s local holy man, a former sailor and somewhat questionable figure who, after being marooned on the island, created his own irreverent and unholy religion.
   
The Books of Bokonon, which Vonnegut’s narrator John learns about on the flight to San Lorenzo, are a series of parables and lessons in the form of calypso songs. They tend to reflect on the ridiculousness of life and to send the message that the only thing that is really holy is humankind itself.

The General Electric Company Board

Bokonon teaches that everyone belongs to a karass: a group of people with whom you are cosmically connected and are fatalistically destined to do God’s will, whether you want to or not. He also teaches that people often try to create artificial karasses, which he calls granfalloons, which are groups that people think are significant but which really have zero meaning on a cosmic scale. Examples of granfalloons, groups that appear to be meaningful but which are not, are: the General Electric Company, Cornell alumni, and any country at all. 

Vonnegut's Truth

Vonnegut had a real distaste for falsehood—from the big lies told by churches, corporations, and countries to get people to do what they want, to the little white lies told by individual people to make themselves look and feel better.

On the large scale, Vonnegut's shredding of both war heroism and religion is an expression of his general struggle to cut through these lies. Through the stories of the Hundred Martyrs and the Books of Bokonon, Vonnegut shows us that much of what we revere is self-deception; we are desperate to feel like we are part of something big and important, so we construct institutions to convince ourselves that we are.

And on the small scale, his characters usually seem pretty normal at first but then, through seemingly innocuous conversations and throw-away remarks, piece by piece, he reveals their odd and often depressingly sad backstories. Supposedly happy marriages turn out to be shams; supposedly successful people turn out to feel like tremendous failures; supposedly tight-knit families turn out to be full of tension.

In fact, the people who openly admit from the start that they are liars—like Bokonon and Newton Hoenikker—end up being the only truly honest people in the book. Bokonon admits that everything he says is a lie—and therefore Bokononism is the only religion John feels he can believe in. And Newton illustrates the destructiveness of untruth with a story about how his father at one point became obsessed with cat’s cradle, the string game. His father kept waving the cat’s cradle in Newton's face and demanding that he pay show some interest. Newton explains how confusing this was for him as a child, and how this kind of thing would teach a kid to doubt what he sees:

    “One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grown-ups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”
    “Um.”
    Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look at all those X’s…”
    “And?”
    “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

And, indeed, for Vonnegut himself, the more blatant and ridiculous he is with his lies in his writing, the more believable he is. It is his mission to peel the onion, to strip away the false fronts his characters put on until we are left with the bare and painful but also honest and funny truth.

Cat's Cradle String Game

It is distressing, but it also feels right. It feels better to come to grips with the truth, however depressing, than to carry on the ridiculous and always even more pathetic lies people tell to cover it up.

Vonnegut's Humor

All of this is pretty heavy stuff, of course. But Vonnegut’s books are never too heavy to read because of his biting, sarcastic, cynical wit. His dark humor is present throughout all of his writing, from silly acronyms and funny names to the embarrassing ways people die and the tremendous effort people put into pointless tasks.

On the surface, his humor might make it seem like he is being flippant about really serious subjects. But his flippancy and his deadpan delivery actually make the serious issues even more horrifying than if he had tried to present them seriously.

Vonnegut could not look at life in anything other than a clear-headed, unvarnished way. This was a blessing for his readers but was probably a curse for him. Given the overwhelming depression that he experienced at times, it is amazing that he was able to create stories with such humor in addition to such insight. It is a measure of his genius that he was able to make us look directly at such difficult topics, and make us question our own assumptions and actions, and make us laugh while he was doing it.

From The First Book of Bokonon:

     In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

     And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

     “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.                                 

     “Certainly,” said man.

     “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.

Book Review: Cat's Cradle (Part I: Story & Review)

Kurt Vonnegut
1963
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This week’s post contains a synopsis of the plot of Cat’s Cradle and a short review of the book. In my next post I’ll talk a bit about Vonnegut’s style and recurring themes in his work.

As authors go, Kurt Vonnegut is one of my all-time favorites. His writing is witty, dark, cynical, honest, and courageously personal. He used his books to express his feelings about the heavy issues that preoccupied him—war, religion, and the general futility of human endeavor—and he did it with narratives that are completely depressing and totally hilarious at the same time.

As with many of Vonnegut’s novels, many of the character details in Cat’s Cradle are autobiographical. The main character and narrator, John, is a writer (like Vonnegut) originally from Indiana (as was Vonnegut) who attended Cornell (as did Vonnegut). John is a little bit obsessed with World War II (as was Vonnegut). He wants to write a book about what important Americans were doing the day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

One of these important Americans is Felix Hoenikker, one of the fictional fathers of the bomb. John writes letters to Hoenikker’s three children, who all turn out to be very quirky people. The daughter, Angela, is a six-foot-tall extreme social introvert married to a former lab assistant of her father’s who now works in a secret government factory. The oldest son, Frank, has somehow become second in command to “Papa” Monzano, the dictator of an isolated, infertile, poverty-stricken island in the Caribbean called the Republic of San Lorenzo. And the youngest son, Newton, is a four-foot-tall layabout who dropped out from Cornell before graduating (as did Vonnegut). “Newt” is the only one of the three who writes John back, and he provides juicy information about not only his father but also his two siblings.

Meanwhile, through other lines of research, John learns from Hoenikker’s former supervisor that one of the non-bomb-related projects Hoenikker had been working on was a substance called ice-nine, which was designed to make liquids freeze at temperatures up to 130° F. The motive behind developing ice-nine was so that Marines would no longer have to slog through mud; when they encountered a section of mud they would otherwise have had to slog through, they could drop the ice-nine into it and the entire mud puddle would become solid.

The supervisor was using ice-nine as an example of the way Hoenikker worked, single-mindedly obsessing about projects even when they were physically impossible. Or so he thought. He didn’t realize that Hoenikker had actually succeeded in creating ice-nine, and that each of Hoenikker’s children had a thermos of it.

Ice-nine works by teaching other water molecules that are touching it how to freeze in a different way, at a higher temperature than normal ice. Once the molecules next to the original piece of ice-nine are frozen, they in turn teach the molecules next to them how to freeze at that higher temperature as well. The problem is that the chain reaction is unstoppable. If someone were to drop a piece of ice-nine into any body of water, anywhere, it would make that water freeze… and any streams or rivers next to that water would freeze… and any bodies of water touching those streams or rivers would freeze… and so on until every bit of water on earth was frozen.

In other words, it’s a bad idea to use it. Which is why the Hoenikker children keep it secret, locked in their thermoses, and bring the thermoses with them where ever they go.

Anyway, in a typically Vonnegutian series of coincidences, John becomes rapidly wrapped up in the Hoenikker family’s adventures, and, eventually, because of the ice-nine in the Hoenikker childrens' thermoses, the fate of all of humanity:

First, John gets assigned to write a newspaper story about a philanthropist who lives on the Republic of San Lorenzo. He ends up on a flight to the island along with the new U.S. ambassador to San Lorenzo and his wife, a bicycle manufacturer and his wife, and Angela and Newton Hoenikker, who are there to attend their brother’s wedding to “Papa” Monzano’s daughter.

John socializes with all of them (sometimes uncomfortably) during the flight, which leads to him being swept up in the ambassador’s entourage, invited to a ceremony at the palace to honor San Lorenzo’s World War II heroes, and eventually offered a job as successor to dictator “Papa” Monzano.
                                
Eventually, too, John learns that the ice-nine isn’t really a secret, and that practically everyone knows about it—including the CIA, the Soviets, and “Papa” Monzano. And, of course, by the end of the novel the ice-nine comes inevitably, ridiculously, horrifyingly, disastrously out of the bag (or thermos).

As a story, Cat’s Cradle is not one of my absolute favorites of Vonnegut’s novels. There are others in which I felt more of a connection to the characters; the people in this book, even including narrator John, are all somewhat aloof. 

But it is still one of his most potent books for me, delivering its anti-war, pro-humanity, we-are-all-fatalistically-doomed messages in the striking, succinct, and funny way that all of his best work does. Cat’s Cradle was also the first of Vonnegut’s books that I ever read, when I was very young. And it made a huge impression on me.

First, the concept of ice-nine was extremely powerful. I couldn’t stop thinking about it: the idea of what would happen if something like that really existed and got into the water system, quickly zipping out like icy tentacles freezing tributaries and rivers and oceans until everything was ice. It's brilliant and terrifying.

Second, and more importantly, I had never yet read anything that had such an irreverent, hysterical take on serious issues like war and religion—and yet still clearly took those issues very, very seriously. It felt more genuine and made its points better than any other more moralistic work I had read covering the same topics. He made me feel like I was laughing maniacally with him as we were falling off the edge of a cliff.

Book Review: Blackout

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2012
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED, DEADLINE, AND BLACKOUT.

And at last we arrive at Blackout, the third and final novel in Mira Grant’s Newsflesh trilogy.

Blackout has most of the same pluses and minuses as Deadline. It has the same engaging post-zombie-apocalypse setting and the same appealing cynicism and irreverence in its main characters. It’s got the same witty writing style, which is mostly still fun to read but at times, in this third book, seems to be getting a bit sloppy.

It has the same annoying conversational techniques for attempting to draw out the suspense. It has the same crazy Shaun hearing Georgia’s ghost in his head, and the same unnecessarily disruptive commentary about it. And the plot seems similarly haphazard and forced, especially when it comes to Shaun’s story line and the motivations of the evil CDC.

But at least Georgia is back, in the flesh, which makes a huge difference for the good. Georgia is by far the best character and narrator Grant has got, and it’s great to have her again.

Blackout picks up where Deadline ended, with Georgia waking up in a cell in a CDC facility. She quickly figures out that she is a recently-awakened clone of her original self with all her memories intact, right up to the moment Shaun shot her in the back of the head when she was about to turn into a zombie.

Aside from confirming that she is a clone, the CDC staff won’t tell her anything; they won’t tell her where she is or what’s going on or even let her go to the bathroom without an escort. But through secret messages passed to her she finds out that the EIS—the Epidemic Intelligence Service, a subdivision of the CDC—has undercover agents inside the CDC and that they are working on a plan to break her out.                

The EIS agents show her other Georgia clones being grown in the lab and explain that she’s just one of many. The CDC is trying to build a malleable, docile version of her that will do what they say, and then they will use that clone to lure Shaun in and imprison him. She herself is too much like the original Georgia, inquisitive and rebellious, so she is on a time limit. Once they are able to build a more brainwashable clone, she will be “decommissioned.”

She is also able to find out one key thing on her own. Her CDC doctors let her walk for exercise in an agricultural biodome attached to the facility, which, because of her knowledge of CDC installations, lets her know that she’s in Seattle.                                                                              

Meanwhile, her brother Shaun and the rest of the After the End Times blog staff are hiding out from CDC security at Dr. Abbey’s CDC-blacklisted lab in Oregon. Their main goal is the same as it was in Deadline, which is to find out why the CDC wants to kill people who have Kellis-Amberlee reservoir conditions when they are the best hope for adaptive immunity, and to publish the answer online for the entire world to know.

And Dr. Abbey also wants to know more about the Cuban mosquitoes that are now spreading Kellis-Amberlee through Florida. The virus is too large for a normal mosquito to carry, which suggests that the Cuban species was deliberately bred.                                                           

What follows is a series of contrived misadventures designed to get Shaun and Georgia back together so they can pursue the truth as a team again. It starts with Dr. Abbey sending Shaun and Becks on a mission to Florida to try to get a sample of the mosquitoes, so she can do genetic testing to find out where they came from. Shaun and Becks make the mistake of stopping first at his adoptive parents’ house in Berkeley to get a map—a questionable plan in the first place—only to find that the Masons have told the CDC they were coming. They escape from the CDC police and flee from Berkeley, not to Florida, but instead to…

…Seattle, of course, where they meet up with Mahir and Maggie, who have gone up there to get fake IDs from a shady character called “The Monkey.” The Monkey agrees to give them IDs if, conveniently enough, they first break into the Seattle CDC and plant bugs for him.

At this point, the EIS determines it is time to enact Georgia’s escape. They have just surgically removed all her tracking chips and self-destructing bio-bombs when Shaun’s invading team causes the CDC to go into lockdown. The EIS doctors think that the lockdown is because of them, and stay to distract security while sending Georgia off in the direction of the exit, where she runs smack into Shaun without either of them running into any CDC staff first.

After fighting off a horde of zombies and at least two more CDC security detachments, they make their way back to Dr. Abbey’s lab, where it is determined that they really need to go all the way to Washington, DC, to ask the president the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that.

When they finally make it in to see the president, he is, of course, there with an evil CDC doctor who tells them the truth about Kellis-Amberlee and the mosquitoes and all that, and then tries to enlist them into his evil PR machine to keep it secret. And, of course, when it turns out they won’t keep it secret, he tries to kill them, and they, the president, vice president, and a bunch of Secret Service agents have to escape by shooting their way out of the White House through another horde of zombies.

A bad guy whose motivation
I can understand

The main issue I had with Blackout, as with Deadline, is that I just do not buy the bad guys’ motivation. Usually bad guys are motivated by money, revenge, religious fervor, or a desire for world domination, all of which I can completely understand. But these CDC guys seem to really be doing what they’re doing because of an always vaguely and often incomprehensively articulated societal benefit argument that doesn’t have much convincing pull. I don’t understand how they could have been willing to spend millions of dollars and kill people, much less die, for their cause.

I’ve read and re-read the sections of Deadline and Blackout where the bad guys explain themselves. From what I can piece together, their thinking seems to go like this:

• In a very, very small minority of cases, some people with reservoir conditions can either develop immunity themselves, or convey immunity to people who are close to them.
• The CDC doesn’t want to tell people that there is a tiny possibility that some people with reservoir conditions could recover or that some people might be immune, because then people will hesitate to pull the trigger when somebody amplifies, and then more people will die. Most of the time the person will turn into a zombie and then will turn around and eat the person who should have pulled the trigger.
• So, for the time being, they are killing people who have reservoir conditions.
• They think they will eventually find a strain of Kellis-Amberlee that doesn’t cause reservoir conditions. When they do, they want to infect the entire world with it.
• The genetically-engineered mosquitoes were supposed to be their distribution method, once they came up with a strain they liked. But they got out too early. So, oops—they killed millions of people on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Killing people who have reservoir conditions seems like way too much of a leap, even for crazed evil CDC doctors. I cannot believe they would really do that just based on the fear that knowing that people have the potential to be immune would lead to a few more deaths by recently-turned zombies. How about developing a test for immunity instead? Maybe that would be easier than having a secret cloning program and a secret mosquito genetic modification program and finding subtle ways to kill thousands of innocent U.S. citizens?

Early on in Blackout, Georgia observed, almost in passing, that the CDC was keeping people controlled “through unnecessary security and exaggerated fear.” We see this in real life all the time when we are required to go through blood tests or loyalty tests or other security checks to go about our normal business, security checks that are more stringent and intrusive than the real odds of danger would warrant, as a way to keep us as a population cowed and obedient. There would be plenty of potential for realistic governmental evil and oppression by means of security theater; it seems like maybe that would have been a ripe area to explore further, instead of the medical mumbo-jumbo.

Space Travel Posters from the Museum of Science Fiction

Reader and science fiction fan CQ alerted me to these fantastic "retro-futuristic" travel posters by Steve Thomas. They are from an exhibition called Future of Travel at Reagan National Airport in Washington, DC. 

It turns out that the Future of Travel exhibition is part of an educational campaign and PR effort by the Museum of Science Fiction, which right now is only virtual but which will open its doors in an actual building in Washington in 2018. The excitement builds!

Book Review: Deadline

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)
2011
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ – – –

BEWARE… SPOILER ALERT FOR FEED

Deadline, the second book in Grant’s zombie-apocalypse Newsflesh trilogy, picks up the story about a year after where the first book, Feed, left off. It is 2041; Senator Peter Ryman has gone on to be president of the United States; and Shaun Mason is running the After the End Times online news agency by himself, following the assassination of his sister Georgia by former vice presidential candidate David Tate.

Like Feed, this novel opens with a gripping action scene. In this one, Shaun has to rescue his most seasoned reporter and a trainee out on his first field test from a sea of about thirty zombies.

The difference this time is that Shaun’s heart is no longer really in it. His sister's death has filled him with a profound loneliness. He has gone a little bit crazy, conducting frequent, extremely realistic two-way conversations with Georgia in his head. And he worries that, without her, maybe there’s no longer any point to any of what he does. To avoid endangering his staff with his distractedness and lack of enthusiasm, he has even taken himself out of the field work he was so good at before.

But, sure enough, something happens to suck him back in. At his office in Oakland, he gets a visit from Kelly Connolly, a CDC doctor who has faked her own death and escaped from her employers so that she could get to Shaun and have him expose a sinister conspiracy that she has discovered. And this conspiracy is related to Georgia’s untimely death, which is the only reason Shaun takes the case.

Dr. Connolly’s discovery is that people like Georgia, who have non-lethal “reservoir conditions” associated with the Kimberlee zombie virus, are dying of seemingly accidental causes at much higher rates than the average population. And anyone who notices this trend and tries to research it, or even bring it up to their superiors at the CDC, winds up dead themselves.

Not coincidentally, just as Dr. Connolly is revealing her discovery to the After the End Times staff, the entire city of Oakland is massively bombed by the U.S. military, which excuses the action by claiming it is trying to stop a zombie outbreak. Shaun, Dr. Connolly, and several of Shaun’s reporters barely escape to rural California with their lives.

They are then almost constantly on the run for the rest of the book. They visit rogue scientists unaffiliated with the CDC to have them look at Dr. Connolly’s data; they go to a branch CDC office in Portland to ask them about the results; and inevitably they wind up going to CDC headquarters in Memphis to confront the director. Everywhere they go, they are held at gunpoint, threatened, shot at, or “accidentally” shut into buildings with hordes of zombies. And after they finally get out of Memphis and head home to tell the world what they know, they have to survive a cross-country drive back to California during the middle of the largest zombie outbreak in recorded history.

Deadline is set in exactly the same world as Feed, has many of the same characters, and is similarly filled with near-constant action and suspense. But it is nowhere near as compelling a story.

For one thing, the characters aren’t as interesting. Grant killed off three of the best characters in Feed—two good and one bad—leaving us mainly with second-stringers in this second book. I wasn’t really attached to any of them, so when they are in danger or even die, there wasn't nearly as much of an emotional pull. The news agency staffers’ styles are not very differentiated, so most of their blog excerpts sound very similar to each other. And there are two short-lived romantic entanglements thrown in which serve only as pointless distractions rather than plot- or character-enriching experiences.

For another thing, the chief villain’s master plan is, well, weak. It’s a tremendous anticlimax when we learn what it is. It’s hard to believe that even he believes in his goals enough to kill for them.

The medical discussions and explanations—of which there are many in this book—are abstract and confusing. It’s hard to build up enough horror or suspense about substrains, reservoirs, chimera, and immunology when the explanations of them are so muddy. Grant said that while writing Deadline she got a lot of advice from real scientists and doctors about how to talk about virology, and it almost seems like maybe that was a mistake.

I also became irritated with Grant’s technique of having the characters realize something before we (the reader) do—usually because we don’t know all the information they know—and then excruciatingly slowly drawing out the reveal of what they know as a way to amp up the dramatic tension. One conversation in which Shaun knew perfectly well what Dr. Connolly was avoiding saying went on for three pages while he tried to get her to say it instead of just explaining it himself and moving on. It was filled with dialogue like this:

     “I’m going to ask you one question, Doc, and I want you to think really hard about your answer, because you’re legally dead, and if we want to hand you to this nice lady,” I gestured toward Dr. Abbey, “for her experiments, well, there’s really not much you can do about it. Don’t lie to me. Understand?”
     Kelly nodded mutely.
     “Good. I’m glad to see that we have an agreement. Now tell me: The reservoir conditions. What do they do? What do they really do?”

And then she wouldn't answer, and he'd try another tack. I think you should either have the characters tell us what they have figured out, or don’t tell us, but don’t tell us over and over that they’ve figured out something, and then make them go pale or have their eyes widen with horror, and then act all cagey about it for several pages. It doesn’t make it more suspenseful; it makes it annoying.

And Shaun, our lone remaining hero from Feed, who I really wanted to pin my faith on, is revealed to have a serious anger management problem. When he is stressed out, or anxious, or mad, he handles it by being nasty to underlings, slamming cell phones, punching walls, and shoving computer equipment. Once, in the past, he actually punched one of his employees in the face. It made me miss Georgia’s rational, steadying influence quite a bit.

And, finally, speaking of Georgia’s steadying influence: Shaun’s conversations with Georgia’s ghost do bring her back into the book a little and do mitigate his personality problems somewhat. But Shaun consistently interrupts the nice flow of those conversations by commenting on just how whacked out everyone must be by him talking to his dead sister. To wit:

     Don’t be so hard on yourself, said George. You’re tired.
     “That’s easy for you to say,” I snapped, before I could stop myself. Then I froze, casting a careful glance toward Maggie. I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting. I get a lot of reactions to the fact that I still talk to my sister. Most of them aren’t good ones.

     My eyes were normal until I was almost at the amplification threshold, said George thoughtfully. The retinal distortion didn’t kick in until then.
     “I know,” I mumbled, keeping my voice low, so as to hopefully avoid reminding my team that I was crazy. 

Commenting on it a couple times, early on, to show how people are reacting to his craziness, would be fine. But when every single time he talks to Georgia he also has to make some mention of how someone rolls their eyes or looks at him funny, or how he mumbles because he doesn’t want people to hear him, it distracts from these often crucial conversations and makes them herky-jerky. I'd rather just hear what Georgia's ghost has to say.

Anyway... while reading Deadline, I really thought I was going to be done with the Newsflesh trilogy. But then, of course, Grant added a twist—or actually two twists—at the end of this book that still made me want to read the next one. So forget everything I just said, and let’s go read Blackout.

Book Review: Feed

Seanan McGuire (writing as Mira Grant)

2010

Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

Feed is a zombie apocalypse novel. Zombies are trendy subject matter. And, as I’ve said before, zombies are the only fictional monsters that I’m terrified of enough that I studiously avoid watching even supposedly great movies and TV shows about them. But this book is really, really fun, and it’s making me rethink my sweeping anti-zombie-story stance.

The story takes place in 2047, three decades after a zombie apocalypse has killed off much of humanity and changed America into a shuttered, defensive, constantly vigilant society.

What happened was that back in 2014, medical researchers developed two separate helper viruses: the Kellis virus, a cure for the common cold, and the Amberlee virus, a cure for cancer. Both worked as planned on their respective targets. And, separately, the two cures would have been miracles for humanity.

But when the two came into contact with each other, as they quickly did, they combined to form the highly virulent hybrid Kellis-Amberlee virus, which not only spread like wildfire through the human population, but also had the unfortunate effect of causing people to die, and then after they were dead, to rise again as flesh-eating zombies, mindlessly seeking live people to gnaw on, until they eventually fell apart and died a final, permanent death

At first, most people didn’t really know (or want to believe) that a zombie apocalypse was really happening. It was George Romero fans and people in the sci-fi internet community who first recognized it for what it was and developed strategies for survival. They rapidly discovered that everything about the Living Dead movies was true, and the films became survival guides. To wit:

• To kill a zombie, you have to shoot it in the head (or otherwise decapitate it)
• A zombie bite will kill you and then cause you to become a zombie
• Recently-turned zombies are faster and slightly more intelligent (and thus more dangerous) than longer-turned zombies

The disproportionate survival of internet users meant that by 2047, the primary news medium has become internet blogging, which provides the world’s only real information lifeline. And, accordingly, the main characters in Feed are Georgia and Shaun Mason, brother and sister journalist bloggers, whose job it is to go out into the still-dangerous parts of the country to report what is going on to the majority of the population that is too afraid to leave their homes.

Georgia is the primary narrator of the story. She is snarky, witty, anti-establishment, and standoffish to all but her closest friends. She is also entirely devoted to her brother and to reporting the truth. The fact that she has a Kellis-Amberlee-related eye condition is a constant challenge for her to overcome, and a constant tension-raising reminder of the virus.

Georgia’s brother Shaun is a little wilder; he likes to go into the countryside and poke zombies with sticks to keep the viewers entertained. But underneath the daredevil image, he is devoted to his sister and to the team of support people who work for them, and would never seriously endanger them on purpose.

The book opens with a dramatic motorcycle zombie chase scene in which Georgia and Shaun barely escape with their lives. It hooks you in immediately and the action and/or suspense don’t really let up from there. Moments after returning from the motorcycle chase, Georgia and Shaun’s news team is invited to cover Senator Peter Ryman, who is running for president. They are embedded with the Ryman campaign and are thus in the middle of it all when, after a speaking appearance, the senator’s entourage is attacked by someone who sabotages the warning systems and injects some of the supporters and security personnel with the zombifying Kellis-Amberlee virus. Georgia, Shaun, and the remainder of the senator’s staff are able to fight off the recently-turned zombies, but then the senator’s home is attacked in a similar way, and one of his daughters is killed.

At that point, they all realize that someone is set on seeing the senator dead, and it becomes a race against time for Georgia and Shaun to figure out who and why before the election—and before they get killed themselves.

Feed is as fun and easy to read as a Stephen King novel, but with an extra Generation-X snarkiness that is really appealing. This book is proof that you don’t have to have an obscure writing style or a zillion ultra-clever intertwining plot lines to make for an absorbing and fulfilling read. Engaging characters, a well-planned plot and ending, snappy and funny dialogue, and near-constant suspense will do that just fine. And although the book reads mostly as a light horror-mystery-action adventure, there is a large twist at the end that adds a great deal of seriousness and depth to the plot—and probably kills any chance of it being made into a Hollywood movie.

                                                                                            

One warning: this book is the first in a three-part trilogy. (I'll be reviewing the second installment, Deadline, in my next post.) If you think this novel might be one you want to read, and you don't like spoilers, do not read the descriptions on the backs of any of the subsequent books or any reviews of any of them before you read this one.

Book Review: Genesis

Poul Anderson

2000       

Awards: Campbell

Rating: ★ – – – –

I don’t know what the Campbell Award judges were thinking when they read this book. Genesis is a confused, undeveloped, sometimes pretentious story that veers from one partially-formed idea to another in a style akin to that of Vernor Vinge. The one advantage that this book has over Vinge’s novels is that it is relatively short.

The main character in Genesis is Christian Brannock, a man from near-future Earth. As a boy, Brannock dreams of discovering life in other star systems. As an adult, he finds work building transmission towers on Mercury; there he works with a semi-intelligent robot, Gimmick, with whom he is connected mentally, and the two of them come just shy of sharing a real consciousness. By the time Brannock reaches old age, Earth’s massive global computer network has acquired sentience. And when Brannock is about to die, because he had worked so closely and successfully with Gimmick, the sentient global computer network invites Brannock to upload his consciousness into it so that he can live essentially forever, virtually, as a part of its AI brain.

The sentient global computer network then somehow acquires the capability to spin off nodes of itself to do multiple separate assignments simultaneously, and to transport itself and its nodes anywhere at will. It spreads its nodes far and wide across the galaxy and the nodes take copies of Brannock’s consciousness with them as they go. Over many millennia, the virtual Brannock is able to observe and record thousands of different stars and planets—just what he dreamed of as a boy.

Finally, after several million years of exploration, the virtual Brannock gets bored and asks to be shut down. Instead of shutting him down, though, the central computer consciousness gives him a new assignment: go back—in physical form—and check on Earth. By this time, Earth is only about a hundred thousand years from being sizzled by its enlarging sun. And “Gaia,” the node of the galactic central brain that was left behind to protect Earth, has been behaving weirdly: her reports are getting more confusing and abrupt, and she doesn’t appear to be doing anything about protecting Earth from its impending sizzling.

The plot that I’ve just described is all basically fine. It’s everything about the rest of the book that is problematic.

For one thing, over the years that Brannock’s consciousness explores the galaxy, we get bits and snatches of what is happening back on Earth in the form of little periodic vignettes of human adventures. Only one of these vignettes is even semi-connected to the main story line, so they seem scattered and hodge-podge. It feels like Anderson had some random short stories that he wasn’t sure what to do with, so he just stuck them into this book where ever he thought they would fit.

For another thing, the writing is a bit pretentious; Anderson likes to use words like “sunsmitten,” “coolth,” and “laired” and is not able to make them sound natural. His descriptions are also unhelpfully poetically vague, especially at dramatic moments of tension when we most need him not to be poetic and vague. Most of the time, all he gives us is flashes of light and snatches of things almost seen. At one point when Gaia attacks Brannock’s aircraft, Anderson describes it thus: “Arcs leaped blue-white. Luminances flared and died. Power output continued; the aircraft stayed aloft…the dance of atoms, energies, and waves went uselessly random.” 

Another conflict with Gaia is pretty much just described as “strife exploded.”

And for another thing, what happens after Brannock reaches Earth seems unnecessarily convoluted and pointless. He splits into two parts: Brannock the A.I, which takes the physical form of a metallic robot, and Christian the man emulation, which takes the physical form of a human. (Maybe—or maybe Christian the man emulation is just a virtual copy of a man in a virtual environment. It’s not really clear, as it’s also unclear why he needed to split into two parts in the first place).

Brannock the metallic robot goes off to explore Earth’s surface. There he has his own little adventure, meeting up with the few humans who remain on Earth and trying to find a way to contact his home central computer core and tell it about Gaia, who, at this point, has gone completely off her rocker and is trying to kill him. It’s unclear where the home central computer core is in all of this, and why it couldn’t find out itself what is going on with Gaia, and why the core is not still on Earth since that’s where it all started anyway, and why Gaia is just a node and not the center of the galactic AI brain.

Meanwhile, Christian the man emulation goes off into some kind of maybe real, maybe virtual environment in which he meets Laurinda, the consciousness of a woman who was uploaded into Gaia long ago just like Christian was uploaded into the central galactic brain. Christian and Laurinda discover that Gaia has been running experiments, recreating various times in history and then letting them play out, to see how history might have wound up differently with different starting parameters. They take tours of the different scenarios, to try to see what Gaia is up to, and are horrified because as soon as Gaia determines that a given scenario is not going to result in the outcome she wants, she destroys it. But it is unclear to me why Laurinda doesn’t know all this already, since she’s a part of Gaia’s consciousness, and whether the scenarios are virtual or real, and if they’re real, where the heck are they stored and how she's able to get Christian's and Laurinda's hair and costumes to be chronologically appropriate instantly, and if they’re virtual, why Christian and Laurinda are so horrified at the scenarios’ destruction, since they’re not real.

It’s also unclear what Gaia hopes to gain from these experiments. At one point, Laurinda says that it seems like Gaia is trying to create a “genuinely new form of society.” What does that mean? Why is she trying to create it? What is she going to do when she gets it? If it’s virtual, what’s the point? And if it’s real, where is she going to put all the people in her simulation if she refuses to protect Earth from destruction?

Anyway, eventually Christian, Brannock, and Laurinda have to try to stop Gaia from doing her experiments but by then I’d long since stopped caring. And I never really got answers to any of my questions

There are many directions that Anderson could have developed more in this book, any of which would have provided good fodder for thought-provoking fiction. But instead it felt haphazard and undeveloped—like he was making it up as he went along.