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By Bryan, November 15, 2010

For the Win
by Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a populist tech guru and co-editor of popular culture blog BoingBoing. He is also internationally recognized copyright scholar but he claims his first love is science fiction. His prolific fiction output is often overshadowed by activist work in the fields of copyright, personal privacy, and consumer rights. With a few caveats, For the Win is the best of Doctorow’s novels I have read so far.

For the Win features a group of young (and old) MMORPG players from all over the world who start a union to take on game companies and repressive governments. Their efforts garner mixed results with some new rights for online workers paid for in RL blood. The book is really a thinly veiled economics lesson. Doctorow’s fatal flaw is doing what the best YA authors do not do: talk down to their readers. There are clearly times when the narrative stops and there is a break for the “okay kids, now it is time for a lesson” nonfiction passage. Of course the in-game economics are the same as RL economics and there are camouflaged explanations of our nation’s most recent crisis of capitalism. If unconcerned with aesthetics, it is a great book for kids who want to learn about economics or adults that want to learn about MMORPGs. (Or maybe anyone who wants the financial meltdown explained to them without having to the hear words Geithner or Bernanke.) Doctorow is surprisingly neutral towards labor issues considering how polemical he is about other issues, e.g. privacy in Little Brother and copyright in Content. If you are someone that is concerned with aesthetics, I recommend one of the most underrated novels of 2009, Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Lethem’s book deals with the same issues of class, media alienation, and semi-AR but in a more satisfying way. You can find my original review here.

It is a shame Doctorow’s fiction has yet to achieve the clarity and conviction of his nonfiction. For the Win finds him juggling too many characters, many of which I don’t understand the motivations of, and a lot of the action takes place “in-game.” Should I be enough of a jerk to mock, “OH MAN THAT WAS AN AWESOME KEYSTROKE!”? But the thing is, and this is a major theme of the book, if millions are playing these games and I’m not, that just means I’m a dinosaur. I can make my jokes as I whistle past the cultural graveyard.

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By Bryan, August 9, 2010

Gentlemen Broncos

Fifteen year old Benjamin (Michael Angarano) is an aspiring SF writer whose manuscript is ripped off by Chevalier (Jemaine Clement) his aging literary hero.  Getting his manuscript back is hilarious business as Benjamin also has to moonlight for mother’s custom nightgown business to make ends meet. Chevalier isn’t only person that wants Benjamin’s story. A local film production company is also trying to pervert his precocious novel. Gentlemen Broncos is a story within a story. Besides Benjamin’s quest to get his words back, we see his book, The Yeast Lords: The Bronco Years, envisioned by three different minds on three different budgets. Yes, The Yeast Lords is as funny/awful as it sounds. Imagine the rad doodlings of Napoleon Dynamite’s notebooks come to life. Brought to us  by the same creative team behind Napoleon Dynamite, Broncos hilariously spoofs pompous SF writers and their geeked-out conventions (both literary and hotel-bound). You’re allowed to laugh if you are a nerd. Come to think of it, you probably won’t get it otherwise. I laughed the covers off my paperbacks.

The opening credits are a buzz inducing collection of trash surreal SF paperbacks with the lettering altered. If you appreciate that kind of thing you might enjoy:

Good Show Sir: Only the Worst Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Covers
The name says it all.

Awful Library Books
Yeah, the worst books ever offered up to be chortled over before hitting the dustbin. All genres, but tends to lean to outdated nonfiction.

- Bryan

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By Crystal, April 27, 2010

I am freaking out at the impending end to my beloved TV show Lost.  What could possibly take its place???  Books??  (Just kidding, a little library humor thrown in for free.)  If you’re in the “so sad to see Lost end” camp like me, here are my suggestions to work through your grief and move on.

• Battlestar Galactica – if you haven’t watched BSG (the new series), you’re in for a wild journey.  Like Lost with great characters, intriguing mythology, mystery and suspense, but in Space!

• Are star-crossed lovers Sun and Jin or Desmond and Penny the reason you like to get Lost?  Read The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger or watch A Very Long Engagement starring Audrey Tatou.

• Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy – if you especially enjoy the philosophical side of Lost, Pullman’s novels will definitely fill the void.

• Rose and Bernard, although minor characters of the cast, have a huge following among Losties! For more retired persons/senior citizens on adventures, read The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian, or watch the Oscar-winning animated movie Up.

• The Prisoner – this amazing British TV series from the late 1960’s starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan will satisfy your need for deep intrigue and mystery.

• The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher – if you especially like Sawyer’s biting wit (and those nicknames!), you’ll dig this fantasy series featuring Chicago’s only wizard in the Yellow Pages, Harry Dresden.

• One of my favorite scenes on Lost occurred when Hurley declares a desire to write the script for The Empire Strikes Back and send it to George Lucas.  For more hilariously geeky conversations and lovable characters, don’t miss The Big Bang Theory.

• If you enjoyed Charlie’s flashback story about his band Drive Shaft, read about real rock stars in books like Hammer of the Gods, or watch music documentaries like The History of Rock n’Roll.

• My personal favorite suggestion to overcome Lost grief, and one I hope to someday achieve: travel to Hawaii and visit locations where Lost was filmed.

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By Bryan, April 3, 2010

Cyberpunk is a subgenre of SF which features a mash-up of high technology and underground culture. The “cyber” is derived from cybernetics, nominally the study of control and communications in machines. The “punk” refers to cultural attitudes typical of the characters (if not the authors themselves).

Cyberpunk proper exploded and died in the mid-1980s with a handful of loosely associated authors. William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the Mirrorshades anthology, and the Cheap Truth fanzine were the cornerstones of the scene. Never before had a SF genre movement attracted as much media attention or ultimately have as much cultural influence (no  cyberpunk = no Matrix films).

This list includes edgy SF works that cyberpunk authors drew inspiration from, classic cyberpunk texts, and books by some of today’s best SF writers whose work evolved from the cyberpunk meme.

Check out cyberpunk books

- Bryan

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By Bryan, March 1, 2010

Man In the High Castle
By Philip K Dick

Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?)
By Philip K. Dick

With the success of his recent novel Chronic City Jonathan Lethem seems everywhere these days. A huge influence on Lethem was novelist Philip K. Dick. Lethem edited Library of America’s  Dick reissues which became the best selling titles in the popular imprint .  It is a good time to find out what the fuss is all about and check out where Lethem got a lot of his inspiration. I want to talk about audio versions of two of Philip K. Dick’s most well known novels Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The latter being the basis for the film Blade Runner.

Man in the High Castle is set in a speculative future where the Axis powers have won World War II and the USA has been divvied up by her enemies. Japan occupies the West coast and Germany occupies the East. Set within the occupied Pacific states, the novel presents a cross section of the post war population: a high level Japanese bureaucrat with a taste for American antiques;  an antique dealer who tries hard to please his Japanese rulers; a working class counterfeiter of said antiques; and the counterfeiter’s ex-wife who lives off the grid in the small  rocky mountains towns. Through hints from a metafictional novel within the novel and use the Chinese I Ching oracle all the characters have slow revelations about not only the veracity of the antiques, but reality itself. By the end some characters can’t deny there must be another world where the Allies have won the war. It’s a complex book that will have you thinking until your brain sprouts new wrinkles.

It is also a short book and Dick packs far too much conceptual content inside such a meager page count (or disc count as the case may be). I’ve only listed about half the characters and ignored a number of subplots. None of the characters are really developed fully, and subtle philosophically ideas fly at you like tennis balls shot from a machine. It’s hard to keep up.

If ever there was a book that did not lend itself to audio version said book is Man in the High Castle. The reader Tom Weiner does his best, but really the material he has to work with is raw. Especially awkward is his rendition of Robert Childan, the conflicted antique dealer, who is constantly second guessing the social implications of his every action in the stilted phrasing of someone thinking to himself in a second language. Credit to Weiner to for capturing Childan’s false consciousness though.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a seemingly more straight forward affair. Weary, working class bounty hunter Rick Deckard must “retire” six Nexus One androids. He must do this because his electric sheep has ceased to function. He needs a load of cash to buy a real life animal to cure his wife’s depression and restore their place in the social hierarchy of their run down apartment complex. What we get is a hardboiled detective story that also causes us to question the role of television and religion in our lives, not to mention what we are willing to sacrifice or deny to remain happy, to ensure those we love remain happy.

What makes a good spouse? What makes a good lover? Deckard himself might be an android. God might be an android. If yourself and God and the lead character in the book you’re reading all androids what’s the difference between an android and a human?  What separates us from animals? What separates us from God? What separates us from… each other. This is a profound novel. It contains the best pitch for owning a pet goat I’ve ever heard.

Despite that characterization the plot is straight forward. Deckard goes after his androids one by one. Its a harrowing adventure that makes him question himself in very literal ways. The reader is forced to ask themselves the same questions. Having a single narrator lets us identify with Deckard more and it lets Dick flesh out the character far more than any of the cast of Man in High Castle. There is a moment in most Dick novels when reality falls apart. By making Deckard so real (forgive the pun), when this moment hits it is all the more effective. Similar moments in High Castle fall flat.

The book’s emotional resonance is helped by a tremendous reading by Scott Brick. Brick is kind  of the Matt Damon of American audiobook readers. He nails the haggard, arguably misguided, Deckard perfectly.  Brick’s Deckard is far more fragile than the Marlboro man portrayed by Harrison Ford in Ridley Scott’s film. Also spot on is Brick’s interpretation of the “special” J.R. Isidore, a man so lonely he’ll let himself he used by heartless robots just for a wee bit of friendship, or something like friendship. Brick  has narrated hundreds of novels and when asked what his favorite was he responded Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

It is strange a book as disjointed and uneven as Man in the High Castle won the Hugo Award in 1963. Even then an alternative history novel in which Nazis win WWII was old hat. It was Dick’s epistemological acid hit that blew readers minds. Written four years later, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a far better read. I often wondered if Do Androids Dream was so popular because of its association with Blade Runner. Now I know it is one of Philip K. Dick’s best books. I highly recommend it in print form and CD read by Scott Brick. Man is High Castle is intellectually stimulating enough to check out, but I only recommend the CD version owned by the library to hardcore Dick fans.

- Bryan

[Editor's note: since the release of the film Blade Runner most editions of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? have been published using both titles printer on the cover, as does the version reviewed by Bryan. Searching the library catalog for either Blade Runner or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will retrieve the audio book.]

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By Beth, January 1, 2010

Sugar

This heartfelt film by the writers of Half Nelson realistically follows the life of a minor league baseball player from the Dominican Republic. With a stunning lead performance and an unexpected resolution, this is not your average sports movie.

Bright Star

The butterfly scene alone makes this lovely film about the doomed love of poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne worth your time.

Moon

A Science Fiction movie for people who don’t like Science Fiction movies, this is more art house than action film.

- Beth