Well, that explains everything then ...

How Ayn Rand and L. Ron Hubbard Came Up With Their Big Ideas -- powered by Cracked.com

Alan Moore Meets the Occupy Movement

Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural by Jim Steinmeyer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Charles Fort's renown rests primarily on four books -- The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo!, and Wild Talents -- unclassifiable shaggy dog collections of old newspaper and magazine accounts of rains of frogs and other assorted critters, mysterious disappearances, unexplained phenomena of all sorts, and so forth, all shot through with wryly sardonic humor and a palpable sense of glee at tweaking consensus reality. Unlike Charles Berlitz, Erich von Daniken, or most of the other hucksters who peddled tales of the paranormal after him, however, he never took himself too seriously, occasionally offering half a dozen conflicting "theories" explaining his subjects in the course of a couple of chapters. In his own way he was a true skeptic, as likely to doubt the fantastic and the supernatural as much as received scientific wisdom (his legacy lives on in the pages of the magazine Fortean Times which concerns itself at least as much with why people believe in the paranormal as whether it's actually true or not).



Steinmeyer, a professional magician and historian of magic, doesn't add much to Fort scholarship that hadn't already been said by Damon Knight in his somewhat more critical Charles Fort, Prophet of the Unexplained, but it's a lively, well-researched, and well-written portrait of a great American eccentric, and a good place to start for someone just getting interested in the man and his work.



View all my reviews

Paris in the Twentieth Century: Jules Verne, The Lost Novel by Jules Verne

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


By now this novel's history is well-known: originally written by Jules Verne as a followup to his first bestseller, Five Weeks in a Balloon, it was rejected by his publisher, who had been hoping for another rollicking adventure story like its predecessor, rather than the rather dour dystopian story Verne turned in. Verne evidently took this rejection to heart and spent most of the rest of his career writing the slick, fast-paced, somewhat formulaic, if often highly entertaining, proto-SF novels with which his name has become synonymous, while this book was forgotten until the manuscript was found in a family safe where it had been gathering dust for 130 years.



On the whole it's more interesting as an artifact than a novel: the story, about a young man named Michel Dufrenoy, a sort of hippie avant la lettre who dreams of being a poet in an age (the far-flung future of 1960) that only cares about commerce and technology, is not much more than an armature on which Verne hangs his often prescient depiction of 20th century Paris (what he gets right and what he gets wrong are often amusingly at odds -- he predicts a sort of version of the internet, yet his characters still use quill pens); as such this belongs firmly in the "Grand Tour" tradition of SF, alongside Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey or Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, where the world in which the story takes place is as much the point as the story itself.



Nevertheless, there's still an interesting autobiographical aspect to this story: Verne, the son of a highly conservative provincial lawyer, was something of a bohemian in his youth. He worked for a while as a sort of gofer and hanger-on to Alexandre Dumas pere and tried his hand -- unsuccessfully -- at playwriting before turning to fiction, so it's hard not to see at least a little of him in Michel Dufrenoy, and to wonder if the rather more ambivalent attitude toward technology depicted here was something Verne really felt before he embarking on a career celebrating its wonders.



View all my reviews

Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City by Nelson Johnson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Admittedly, I picked this book up because of the tv show, since I was curious to find out just how much of it was based on actual fact. After reading it, I can say that the producers have generally stuck to the spirit, if not the letter, of the historical record, and although they've taken a fair bit of dramatic license with the material, it's not because Atlantic City's history lacks drama. From its early days, when it was planned as an upper-crust health resort (something that went by the boards pretty quickly after speculators realized they could make more money catering to the desires -- legal and otherwise -- of day-tripping blue-collar workers from Philadelphia and New York) to its boom years (roughly from the Gilded Age until the Second World War) as America's Vice Capital to its near death during the 60s to its recent resurgence since the legalization of gambling there in the late 70s, it's not a place that has ever lacked for colorful characters, certainly not as Nelson Johnson tells it (special bonus: Johnson really, really, REALLY doesn't think much of Donald Trump), and while the show's decision to concentrate on the years of Nucky Johnson's (fictionalized as Nucky Thompson in the series) reign as Atlantic City's political and criminal boss in the Roaring 20s makes for some great drama, this book proves that there are plenty more stories here to tell.



View all my reviews

Zero History by William Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Following up on its immediate predecessors, Pattern Recognition and Spook Country, Zero History, once again revolving around the machinations of bleeding-edge marketing guru Hubertus Bigend as he manipulates a motley assortment of oddballs into tracking down what he perceives as the Next Big Thing -- in this case the designer of a line of clothing so exclusive no one knows their identity. Various characters from the previous books reappear, such as former rock singer-turned-journalist Hollis Henry, now ex-junkie translater Milgrim, and someone I can't name without ruining the surprise, but the book is less a sequel than a sort of remix or variation on a theme.



The book has the brisk pace and convoluted plot of a techno-thriller, which may seem like overkill given that it's basically about dungarees -- a decided come-down from the near-apocalyptic stakes of Gibson's earlier novels like Neuromancer, but damn if the guy doesn't pull it off. His gift for language is as strong as ever, with his patented mix of world-weary noirish romanticism and keen eye for the way technology informs and permeates contemporary life (this is a novel about people who interact via iPhones and Twitter as though there's no difference between that and "meatspace" contact") honed to an edge as sharp as one of Molly's razors.

[Note: I would be remiss in not pointing out that the novel's fictional clothing line, "Gabriel Hounds" is taken from the same piece of British folklore as my nom de blog.]



View all my reviews

Awww - I bet you say that to all the boys ...

I write like
Raymond Chandler

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

If you're looking for a quick ego boost, follow the link above and plug in a sample of your prose.

Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)

Farmer, who died this past Wednesday, is probably best known for his Riverworld series, although as a kid I especially enjoyed his books like The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, where he played mix-and-match with characters from the repertoires of Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs and other authors, anticipating the sort of exercises in genre deconstruction Alan Moore would later make famous in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Lost Girls.

My personal favorite, however, would have to be his short story "The Jungle Rot Kid on the Nod" (available in Ellen Datlow's Alien Sex anthology), which imagines Tarzan, as Lord Greystoke, giving his first address to the House of Lords as if it had been written by William S., rather than Edgar Rice, Burroughs.

"Pyelem G Vudhaus"

That would be P.G. Wodehouse to you and me: the spelling above is transliterated from Russian, where there is, oddly enough, a booming market in Wodehouse fandom. The quintessential English humorist, whose works had been banned as "decadent" by Soviet authorities since 1929, was virtually unknown in that country before 1989, when former dissident and self-taught translator Natalya Trauberg began circulating a Russian version of Wodehouse's 1919 novel, A Damsel in Distress in samizdat form (not for fear of official punishment -- the ban was eventually lifted in 1990 -- but because Russian publishers, perhaps not unreasonably, didn't think his stories of dotty aristocrats, upper-class twits, and Jazz Age ne'er-do-wells would sell to contemporary readers). To everyone's surprise, it and subsequent translations became wildly popular (and became even more so after Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie's Jeeves & Wooster television series was dubbed into Russian).

Thus was born the Russian Wodehouse Society, founded by Mikhail Kuzmenko (who writes under the name Sir Watkyn Bassett), and which not only puts on regular banquets emulating the the likes of those thrown by Bertie Wooster's Drones Club, but also maintains a lively and informative website, with a bibliography and an excellent collection of links and articles (in English) as well as discussion boards (in Russian). I highly recommend checking it out.

And should you decide to go to one of their banquets, throw a bread roll for me.

"The Way the Future Blogs"

Frederik Pohl is one of the grand old men of science fiction. He was a founding member of The Futurians, an early SF fan club whose members also included Isaac Asimov, James Blish, Donald A. Wollheim, and Damon Knight, and later served as editor for Galaxy and If magazines. He is the author of numerous novels and anthologies, although my personal favorites would have to be The Space Merchants and Gladiator-at-Law (both written in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth).

So how cool is it that, at the age of eighty-nine, he decided to start a blog?

"Ouch," he said.

Since just about any schmo can put up a blog these days, it's nice to see an author who can still find a new way to get her work before the public.