I am baffled by the bad reviews on GR. This is fun and, reading it now it doesn’t even require belief, it is more or less how things are. He has an excellent lead female, which makes amends for the issues I had with Everything I Knew. Highly recommend.
Science fiction
Mindswap by Robert Sheckley
To cut to the chase, read this if you like sci fi and/or humour, but it isn’t as good as Hitchhiker. It’s a very long time since I read Adams, but if I get around to a rereading, I’ll be surprised if I want to retract that statement.
I read that he is best at short stories, and perhaps that’s the nub of my criticism. Even though it’s a short novel, it feels too long.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
I have put an update at the end of this.
There are certain topics that I wish thoughtful novelists would say something important about, but instead disappointment keeps ensuing. That’s how I feel about novelists’ contributions to the discussion about AI, and this Ishiguro is no exception. I would much prefer to have been able to explore the near dystopian world in which Klara exists but instead we are given almost nothing of it, just a hint to make sure we know it isn’t now, only just past now. Hm.
I found Klara generally unconvincing and impossible to warm to. How is it that she is supposed to be so bright – AI at its best – and yet there it believes that the sun has miraculous powers of healing. Wouldn’t it take an AI about 1 second to know that’s not so. And why oh why was the telephone always the block. It’s super bright AI, but it doesn’t now what a telephone is? Or what it’s called? I was irritated too often in this book….which I feel like I finished only because I don’t want it to be the second Ishiguro that I couldn’t stick with.
It irks me that reasonably good films have been made about AI robots or suchlike, but not novels. Do looks matter so much, is that why? Sort of like 100K words about a kitten isn’t going to have a scintilla of the impact of one glance.
Come on philosopher novelists, pull your socks up. Write a useful engaging book about AI that explores the hard and fascinating questions….and the answers.
6/1/23 Now that I live with somebody who spends all his time with ChatGPT and I’ve spent a (very) little amount of time with it myself, I have more of an acceptance of some of the things that irritated me about Klara the machine (rather than the novel). ChatGPT is ignorant and arrogant, fanciful and tedious, insightful and careful, ethical and an incorrigible liar all at once. Machine Klara doesn’t seem so bad to me now.
Barefoot in the Head by Brian Aldiss
Presumably the title Barefoot in the Head is a reference to Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park – the movie of the play came out in 1967, two years before Aldiss’s book was published – but when I look them up online, I don’t see anybody commenting along those lines. Am I wrong on that?
I get the impression, glancing at thoughts over the decades about this book, that it is (perhaps reluctantly) placed in a failed but brave sub-genre of attempts to (a) write about the drug culture of the day and (b) to tackle science fiction with a James Joycean approach to language. It is certainly true that if you aren’t prepared to read this at a word level, you are going to miss out on the richness and the fun of the book. Since there is also a sense in commentary about Barefoot in the Head, that ‘people don’t talk like that’, ‘it wouldn’t happen,’ this makes me note that I think that’s far from true.
My departure point for that observation is my mother’s experiences of high delirium over the year or so. To set the scene, she is tiny, 84, with dementia. When in the delirious state she spouts forth a non-stop stream of consciousness in an oratorical fashion with an astonishing command of language. She combines unique ways of describing things she no longer has the right words for, with quotes interweaving, both poetry and drama, and she makes up wonderful words which would have done JJ proud. She can go on like that for long periods at a time. Sometimes it feels like a performance, like I am truly watching somebody on a stage. Other times it is like she is trying to communicate, but it’s in a language none of the rest of us can speak. Watching her in this state fills me with awe and moves me deeply. I see it as part of her, a release of part of her, and by no means an aberration.
Extending that to the easy to believe scenario that a drug induced state (via chemical warfare, why not?) affects a whole population and the premise of this book is not the least surprising. It’s no less credible than any other dystopian setting, maybe more so than most.
The only other thing I want to mention is that Aldiss’s attempt to describe the multi-verse from the viewpoint of the subject – the chief protagonist sees, or believes he sees, other selves splitting away – is another achievement of the book. His struggles with this, watching versions of himself pass on, wondering what this means he himself is, are somewhere between poignant and harrowing.
Bottom line: not easy to read if you aren’t willing to take the trip.
Postscript 28/12/22: I read an essay by Helen Garner a while back in which she makes exactly the same observations of her mother as I do of mine. Evidently it’s an ordinary ability we all have, to dive into new languages which we make up as we go along. Being so far a strictly mono-lingual person, I look forward to the experience should it come.
Greybeard by Brian Aldiss and Dr Bloodmoney by PK Dick
By complete coincidence, having just finished Dr Bloodmoney, I put my hands on Greybeard. Both are tales of a dystopian near future, both predicated on a nuclear accident, written at the same time in the early sixties and set in the aftermath, 1980s or so onwards.
I’ve already commented on the former: not well written, though not the worst of Dick’s that I’ve read, and rather simplistic. Then again, the dilemma itself is simpler. The world is contaminated, but there is no doubt that human life will go on. Lots of mutant babies born, but also ones that aren’t. Civilisation stays, well, civilised. Shortages lead to commerce, not to violence. Good old capitalism seems to hold everything together. Aldiss’s scenario sees the human race and most, but not all, animals immediately become sterile. There is no optimistic streak that things will get back to the good ole days. Instead, if there is a note of optimism it’s in the observation of Nature taking back control. Water expands its territory as does greenery. As humans abandon their own areas, Nature soon dominates, just as we observe in the real life catastrophe of Chernobyl.
My heart sank as I started Greybeard. There was plenty not to like, the main character is a man called Greybeard, people walk with big sticks, there are lots of stoats, probably sentient, and humans are clothed in what seems like medieval style. They live in the country. It felt like I’d walked into a fantasy book somehow managing to masquerade as SF. However, I stuck with it and it soon became reassuringly and more obviously dystopian. It might seem like Aldiss has the simpler job of the two authors. Everybody’s sterile? So what’s the problem. Humans are going to be extinct very soon. But that in itself creates a much more interesting set of problems. Why work? Why accept authority? What, exactly, is the point of anything? Is everybody really sterile? I thought Aldiss considers these issues with a depth which was lacking in Dick. I wonder if anybody has read both and would call me out as unfair to Dick?
I don’t want to give away any of the story of Greybeard, but it’s definitely worth a read and perhaps it makes sense to read Dick as well, just to see how two similar starts can develop in such different ways. It was my first Aldiss, and I immediately found myself looking through the shelves for another….to be continued.
Dr Bloodmoney by PK Dick
To set the scene, I read this while sick of the yes-I’d-consider-being-put-down-if-the-drugs-were-good variety sick. Maybe this made the book pall a little. But it is tantalisingly written up in the foreword of a revived edition – did this become catchy with reviewers? – as like the craziest Dick book, whereas I found it the plainest and most straightforward of his books I’ve read. I do admire the way he managed to write a book which Neil (of the Young Ones) could have turned to if he ever felt like the downer was lifting, whilst at the same time being more or less nice. So, contrary to the opinions of many, I found the flatness and ordinariness to be the the surprise here. At a time when American children were achingly aware that they weren’t likely to come even close to living out their shelf life, the book might have been reassuring. Put those umbrellas up when the bombs go off and life will carry on….that was the government propaganda at the time and it’s almost like Dick is taking that as his starting point.
There was never a question of not finishing it. But I didn’t like it. Not one bit.
Scotland Before the Bomb by M.J. Nicholls
I’ve read this in an unconventional way and I haven’t finished it, but I’ve read a substantial portion. I began with a couple of the episodes that were on themes I warm to.
The first, a diatribe on the Fringe Festivalisation of Edinburgh. As a resident of Adelaide, at the other end of the world, which vies each year to be bigger than Edinburgh, I entirely sympathise. These festivals suck. They suck the life out of theatre for the rest of the year. They suck the life out of originality and complexity. As Fringe Festivals around the world become more and more about extracting money ‘for the economy’ from back packers, many of whom have no English, linguistic complexity is an absolute no-no. Preferably one can dispense with language altogether. Physical ‘theatre’ take a bow.
The next one I turned to was about Amazon. Our future Amazon-driven world. I’ve listed this book under comedy, but the laughs are often bitter.
Having a couple under my belt that I immediately took to, I started dipping into others. This is a strange, compelling book, probably because the author doesn’t give a flying f*ck about the reader. He is doing what he wants. As Odetta (among others) had it:
I’m a rambler, I’m a gambler
I’m a long way from home
And if folks don’t like me
They can leave me alone
MJ makes me think of these words, it’s really lonely, doing what you want. The audience for this book is consequently niche, but I recommend you find out for yourself if you are part of it. At the very least it’ll do you good to be out of your comfort zone.
My favourite is Tickertape of Misery. Anybody who has read the book may laugh at the idea that I forced somebody to listen to me read the whole piece out loud. I’m pleased to be able to report we are still conducting conjugal relations.
Kudos to the author for employing a real artist to do pictures for the book, Alan Lyons has a striking style which genuinely adds to the finished work.
To end with a small rant about the ‘star’ system. I want to give this three stars, but we live in a world where that’s failure. I don’t think it is at all, but my opinion doesn’t count. So, I’ve given it four stars because I think that reflects how others use the star system and that probably matters.
The Machine Stops by EM Forster
I was straightforwardly gobsmacked when I first read this story . Wow. Here is our world, described one hundred years before it happens. These are just a few samples that particularly appealed to me. I don’t want to give away the story and there are lots of other interesting ideas about the future, including, indeed, the idea of the idea that I will leave you to discover for yourselves,
“Who is it?” she called. Her voice was irritable, for she had been interrupted often since the music began. She knew several thousand people, in certain directions human intercourse had advanced enormously. But when she listened into the receiver, her white face wrinkled into smiles, and she said: “Very well. Let us talk, I will isolate myself. I do not expect anything important will happen for the next five minutes-for I can give you fully five minutes, Kuno.
Modern life indeed.
On the subject of us accepting what is inferior but convenient, interpolating the machine in our relationships with each other.
In this world all people live in isolation in their rooms with technology supplying everything. Kuno is her son and wishes to see her. When she exclaims that he is seeing her, he replies:
“I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you. That is why I want you to come.”
And
The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her, fairly well, and saw her, fairly well.
On globalisation:
Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.
On modern selection of foetuses, which shall live and which shall die, a process during which we believe ourselves to be morally correct:
By these days it was a demerit to be muscular. Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him; he would have yearned for trees to climb, rivers to bathe in, meadows and hills against which he might measure his body. Man must be adapted to his surroundings, must he not?
And, close to my heart, on the nature of the revision of history according to the contemporary mores of the revisionist:
“And even the lecturers acquiesced when they found that a lecture on the sea was none the less stimulating when compiled out of other lectures that had already been delivered on the same subject. “Beware of first- hand ideas!” exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. “First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element – direct observation. Do not learn anything about this subject of mine – the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought Gutch thought Ho-Yung thought Chi-Bo-Sing thought Lafcadio Hearn thought Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these ten great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives. But be sure that the intermediates are many and varied, for in history one authority exists to counteract another. Urizen must counteract the scepticism of Ho-Yung and Enicharmon, I must myself counteract the impetuosity of Gutch. You who listen to me are in a better position to judge about the French Revolution than I am. Your descendants will be even in a better position than you, for they will learn what you think I think, and yet another intermediate will be added to the chain. And in time” – his voice rose – “there will come a generation that had got beyond facts, beyond impressions, a generation absolutely colourless, a generation
seraphically free
From taint of personality,which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.”
On the modern loss of silence:
Then she broke down, for with the cessation of activity came an unexpected terror – silence.
She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright.
It would be hard to imagine something more apposite for people now to read. You can find a pdf here and LibriVox has a free audio version here.
The Penultimate Truth by PK Dick
I was really hoping I could find somebody online who had read this and wanted to talk about the ending which seemed quite ambiguous to me. Maybe that was the intention or maybe I just don’t get it, but the title itself implies an unclear ending.
It’s another of PK Dick’s works that really suffers from lack of an editor to clean up the many issues. What one admires about it is the foresight in the picture he has of the world in 2025. How close is it to how we will actually be in six years’ time?
The gist of the story is that WWIII leads to the vast majority of humans living underground with scarce resources, due to the war making earth uninhabitable. These people are not told when the war ends. Instead they are fed a constant stream of fake news which keeps them underground working for the rulers above them, in a state of permanent fear and servility. The idea of the ongoing war is carefully orchestrated in film studios and fed via video links to those below ground.
Sound familiar? Given that we live in a world of ‘fake news’ where it is becoming next to impossible to separate real from fake, we may see that Dick is pretty close to the mark. Slightly different, more sophisticated technology now, but the same idea.
Meanwhile on top of the earth, a tiny number of people live on huge properties Dick calls demesnes, more or less alone, surrounded by AI robots which are highly militarised and protect them against other demesne owners. These privileged people are sterile, courtesy of the war, and so it’s very much about me, me, me. Does any of this sound familiar? The planet itself is able to recover from the devastation of the war. Since most people are underground, the planet is greening itself again, though damaged hot spots still exist. It is hard to acknowledge, but if a tiny number of people inhabited the earth, the planet would be better off. And wars would be limited, as in Dick’s vision, to tiny border skirmishes between estates, leadies (the AI machines) doing the fighting. If all the people living underground were to populate the surface, the planet would suffer, real wars would begin again. The fake war of Dick’s world saves it from real ones.
It has seemed obvious to me for a long time that this is the way the world is going. Democracy is being dismantled. We have given enormous power and resources to a few men (sic) who own the corporations which are taking over from traditional government and society. The real rulers of the world now are Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, sometimes referred to as ‘GAFAM‘. A tiny number of people are buying up the water resources of the world – the new gold, as the big investment company spruikers like to call it. The same ones who didn’t go to gaol after the Global Financial Crash. Ethics 101 in the hands of Goldman, Sachs.
So we can quibble about details. Is it going to end up like Dick’s scenario or Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! ? Are we going to live underground because of WWIII, or climate change? But the fundamentals are in this book. Scarce resources, over-population, lying to ‘the people’. The role of AI, which presides at a legal level in Dick’s world – something being worked on right now in ours. Addiction to technology which doesn’t do the job well enough, but who cares? Apparently as a society we will always be happy with a tradeoff that gives us less for less effort on our part.
As is so often the case with science fiction, this book is well worth reading, but do it for the ideas, not for the characters, nor the storyline.
Ubik by Philip K Dick
It seems to me that Dick is one of those authors who has to speak for himself. The fact that the internet is littered with forum groups trying to figure out what the ending of Ubik means attests to that.
Although back in the sixties and seventies, Dick was not the commodity he is now, nonetheless a lot of interviews exist where he does get to do just that, speak for himself. So I’m going to let him do that here.
SFR: Why do you think your books have sold so well in foreign countries, and not as well in America?
DICK: Well, the first answer that comes to mind is “Damned if I know.” Perhaps it’s the general attitude towards science fiction in European countries, accepting it as a legitimate form of literature, instead of relegating it to the ghetto, with the genre, and regarding it as sub-standard. The prejudice is not there in France, Holland, England, and Germany, and Poland that we have in this country against science fiction. The field is accepted, and it doesn’t have anything to do particularly with the quality of my writing, it has to do with the acceptance of the field of science fiction as a legitimate field. Bear in mind that many, many of the English writers wrote science fiction: Ian Foster, of course we always think of George Orwell, Huxley, and it’s just natural. It wasn’t a step down, into the gutter for them to do it, and it would be here. If Norman Mailer were to write a science fiction novel — an inter-galactic novel — I doubt if he would. Saul Bellow wrote me recently, and he said he is writing science fiction, and he of course in a very fine writer, so maybe the ghetto walls will break down here. But I think it is the fact that they have a high regard for science fiction there. And I think also one of the reasons — especially in France — is that they’re aware that it’s a field of ideas. The science fiction novel is a novel of ideas, and they’re interested in the ideas. There’s an intelligentsia in Europe among the students that appreciates the ideas. You don’t have the equivalent intelligentsia here. We just don’t have that interest in books of ideas that they have there. They appreciate the philosophical and other types of ideas in science fiction, and look forward to science fiction novels. They have a voracious appetite for them.
SFR: That would probably be the same reason, then, why science fiction books sell so well on college campuses.
DICK: Sure, yes, absolutely. I got a letter from a German editor. There are science fiction political organizations — right-wing and left-wing — there, too, that there’s no equivalent for here at all. One of them, the left-wing one, voted me a vote of solidarity, and I thought that was neat. It was something like the Workers and Peasants for Science Fiction Gameinschaft. And it was clear to me from the letter that we just have nothing like that here, a kind of political science fiction groups, where they see them in terms of the sociological and political ideas and the effects on society of the 1984 type of novel — the dystopian novel. They take those dystopian novels very seriously there, they really do. I think another thing in the fact that the American people are apolitical. The dystopian novels don’t really signify anything to the American people, because the American people are so politically naïve that the dystopian novels don’t seem significant to them, you know what I mean? They don’t have the relevance to them that they would have to the European people.
SFR: The Americans seem to get more out of things like Tolkien.
DICK: Right, fantasy. But in Europe they’re more politically aware, and in fact they will read political things into novels which are not there actually. I’ve read a lot of European criticism of my writing in which they see a lot of sociologic and political science type ideas which isn’t there at all. “The Decomposition of the Bourgeois Structure of Society” I think was the name of one article about my writing, and how I had subverted the bourgeois society by destroying its fundamental concepts in a most subversive way. A way so deviously clever that I never mention politics. And this was so fundamental that the whole thing would collapse — the bourgeois society would collapse like a house of cards if I would just write two more books like UBIK. The fact that no political ideas were ever mentioned in UBIK merely showed how subversive this book was in undermining bourgeois society.
SFR: With reasoning like that, you could say the same thing about a Buster Keaton film.
DICK: Oh, certainly. That’s your really subversive thing, where there’s no political ideas expressed at all. It’s too fundamental to be articulated.
As usual, although I don’t see reviews talking about this, Ubik’s setting captures ideas of the future that feel like they are coming our way. In particular the automatisation of everything combined with user-pays operation. You can’t as much as get a door open without either credit or coin. And the half-life – so convincing.
But also, as usual, I sat through the book thinking, oh, if only he could write. Characters. He makes them up with a thesaurus surely. They never ring true. So I was rather surprised to read in the same review that this is all he thinks he does that matters. Characters.
I think the writer falls in love with his characters, and wants the reader to know of their existence. He wants to turn what are people known only to him into people known to a fairly large body of readers. That’s my purpose. My purpose is to take these characters, who I know, and present them to other people, and have them know them, so that they can say that they’ve known them, too, and have enjoyed the pleasure of their company. And that is the purpose that I have, which, I suppose, is a purpose beyond entertainment.
The basic thing that motivates me is that I have met people in my life, who I knew deserved to be immortalized, and the best I could do — I couldn’t guarantee them immortality — but I could guarantee them an audience of maybe 100,000, like girls that I’ve met, or drinking buddies I’ve had, turn them from just somebody that I knew, and two or three other people knew, that I could capture their idiosyncratic speech mannerisms, their gentleness, their kindness, their humility, and make them available to a large number of people.
That’s my purpose. So, I suppose in a way I have a purpose beyond entertainment. But I certainly wouldn’t say that this is why people ought to write, or that they ought to write for any purpose beyond entertainment. But this is why I write. Always.
Especially I like to write about people who have died, whose actual lifetimes are over with, and who linger on only, say, in my mind and the minds of a few other people. I happen to be the only one who can write them down, and get their speech patterns down, and record incidents of great nobility and heroism that they have shown under very arduous conditions. I can do this for them, even though the people are gone. I have written about girls that I admire greatly, who are so illiterate that they would never read the book, even if I were to hand it to them. And I’ve always thought that was rather ironic, that I would make this attempt to immortalize them, when they were so illiterate that they could not or would not read the damn thing themselves.
You could have knocked me down with a feather. Who knew that this is what Dick thought he was doing?
Perhaps that just goes to show that real life has the same nature as reality as it appears in his books, where the rug is pulled out from under your feet again and again.
The interview quoted in this post is available in full here. It first appeared in 1976.
A little tea, a little chat 