I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (MAY 2021 EDITION)
The readings will continue until morale improves, etc.
The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of the hazards of reading PKD is that he wrote on a spectrum ranging from SF masterpieces to jumbled crap. This 1966 novel falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, where the ideas are better than the story, the characters or the dialogue. In this case, the idea is that Earth c.2080 is so overpopulated that the govt is putting people (most of them poor and non-white) into cryopreservation until a solution can be found. A potential solution appears in the form of the discovery of a parallel Earth that can be accessed through a defective warp drive in a teleportation vehicle.
PKD never explains how the vehicle works - instead, he focuses on the sociopolitical implications of the situation, which ostensibly involves a black Presidential candidate (Jim Briskin) running against the white supremacist incumbent. Briskin learns of the parallel Earth and promotes it as the solution to overpopulation as a campaign tactic, forcing the hand of the corporation that owns the technology to cooperate with his proposed emigration plan. It's only after this they discover the alt-Earth isn’t unpopulated as originally thought - it’s a version of earth where Homo sapiens died out (or never appeared) and Homo erectus man became the dominant species. And they’re not as technologically backwards as they first appear.
On the one hand, this is one of those PKD books with extra-clunky exposition and dialogue, while the story reads as though Dick had no idea where any of this was going and had no time to revise or change anything by the time the draft was done. Also, the racism angle is somewhat shallow and hasn’t aged that well in some respects. On the other hand, it’s insightful that every important character spends lots of time wildly speculating about the alt-Earth and its inhabitants rather than actually trying to find real answers, and then acting on their half-assed speculations, thus making things worse - which is a reasonably accurate metaphor for colonial imperialism. Flawed as it is, The Crack In Space is one of PKD’s more interesting thought experiments.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I like Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers, and I’ve been keen for awhile to read this one: an alternate history of the space race in which the incentive is not to beat the Russkies to the moon but the survival of the human race. In 1952, a meteorite strikes Chesapeake Bay, wiping out Washington DC and most of the Eastern seaboard and starting an extinction-level event in which climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable in 50 years. Humankind’s only hope is to get off the planet and colonize the Moon and Mars.
The story focuses on Elma York, a mathematician and former WASP pilot who works for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) with her engineer husband Nathaniel. As the new International Aerospace Coalition proceeds, Elma has to contend with the sexism and racism inherent in the program as she notices that qualified women pilots, computers and scientists (especially non-white ones) are being sidelined as astronaut candidates. The book tracks her efforts to overcome those barriers (as well as her own personal anxieties) as well as the technical challenges of sending people into outer space with far less advanced technology than the real space program had in the 1960s.
People have described it as “The Right Stuff meets Hidden Figures”, and that’s more or less accurate, though it stands out on its own (to be clear, Kowal started working on the book well before Hidden Figures was published). It’s said that SF is really about the present, not the future - this is also generally true about historical fiction (alt or otherwise), and Kowal uses her setting to reflect the systemic racism and sexism in American society, as well as our sluggish and politicized response to climate change. This occasionally backfires, when Elma’s responses to racism seem to come more from a 21st-century perspective than a mid-1950s one. But it’s still a fascinating and well-written tale overall, with a lot to say, and plenty of candy for NASA nerds like me. I’ll definitely be reading the rest of the series.
Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip by Stuart E. Hample
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve always been interested in the art of comic strips, and this (a Christmas present) is something of a curiosity - a collection of strips featuring Woody Allen as basically himself, or at least the neurotic persona self that was the basis of his early stand-up and film work. Allen didn’t write the strip, but he was involved in its production, supplying ideas to artist Stuart Hample and consulting him on the strip’s development. It ran for eight years in hundreds of newspapers; I vaguely remember seeing a few in print somewhere, though not in my hometown paper, which didn’t carry it. Anyway, the strip covered the kinds of topics you’d expect an Allen strip to cover - insane parents, failed relationships, psychoanalyst sessions and philosophy jokes.
And … well, I’m tempted to say your enjoyment of this will depend largely on whether you find Allen’s stand-up or 70s films funny (to say nothing of your opinion of Allen’s controversial private life). On the other hand, I do like his stand-up work and early 70s stuff, and I found this to be pretty lame. Hample himself admits that this was at least partly the product of the King Features Syndicate pushing for a mainstream strip, while Allen wanted the strip to be more surreal, weird and original. King Features generally won that argument, and it shows.
It doesn’t help that the strip was mainly written by a small team of writers, which may explain the inconsistency of the strip. There are a few good ones here, but most are your average comic strip gags. In the end, despite Allen’s involvement, it’s an ersatz version of him. Still, it’s an interesting bit of comic-strip history. Indeed, arguably the most interesting thing here is Hample’s preface explaining how the strip got started and why it’s not as good as it could have been. And then there’s the “introduction” by R. Buckminster Fuller: a surreal comic that he wrote and drew himself that starts by explaining the nature of the universe and segues to Allen’s role in it. It’s bonkers, and more interesting than any of the Allen strips. Maybe Bucky should have written them instead.
View all my reviews
Get Bucky,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1659669.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
The Crack in Space by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of the hazards of reading PKD is that he wrote on a spectrum ranging from SF masterpieces to jumbled crap. This 1966 novel falls somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, where the ideas are better than the story, the characters or the dialogue. In this case, the idea is that Earth c.2080 is so overpopulated that the govt is putting people (most of them poor and non-white) into cryopreservation until a solution can be found. A potential solution appears in the form of the discovery of a parallel Earth that can be accessed through a defective warp drive in a teleportation vehicle.
PKD never explains how the vehicle works - instead, he focuses on the sociopolitical implications of the situation, which ostensibly involves a black Presidential candidate (Jim Briskin) running against the white supremacist incumbent. Briskin learns of the parallel Earth and promotes it as the solution to overpopulation as a campaign tactic, forcing the hand of the corporation that owns the technology to cooperate with his proposed emigration plan. It's only after this they discover the alt-Earth isn’t unpopulated as originally thought - it’s a version of earth where Homo sapiens died out (or never appeared) and Homo erectus man became the dominant species. And they’re not as technologically backwards as they first appear.
On the one hand, this is one of those PKD books with extra-clunky exposition and dialogue, while the story reads as though Dick had no idea where any of this was going and had no time to revise or change anything by the time the draft was done. Also, the racism angle is somewhat shallow and hasn’t aged that well in some respects. On the other hand, it’s insightful that every important character spends lots of time wildly speculating about the alt-Earth and its inhabitants rather than actually trying to find real answers, and then acting on their half-assed speculations, thus making things worse - which is a reasonably accurate metaphor for colonial imperialism. Flawed as it is, The Crack In Space is one of PKD’s more interesting thought experiments.
The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I like Mary Robinette Kowal’s Ghost Talkers, and I’ve been keen for awhile to read this one: an alternate history of the space race in which the incentive is not to beat the Russkies to the moon but the survival of the human race. In 1952, a meteorite strikes Chesapeake Bay, wiping out Washington DC and most of the Eastern seaboard and starting an extinction-level event in which climate change will make the Earth uninhabitable in 50 years. Humankind’s only hope is to get off the planet and colonize the Moon and Mars.
The story focuses on Elma York, a mathematician and former WASP pilot who works for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) with her engineer husband Nathaniel. As the new International Aerospace Coalition proceeds, Elma has to contend with the sexism and racism inherent in the program as she notices that qualified women pilots, computers and scientists (especially non-white ones) are being sidelined as astronaut candidates. The book tracks her efforts to overcome those barriers (as well as her own personal anxieties) as well as the technical challenges of sending people into outer space with far less advanced technology than the real space program had in the 1960s.
People have described it as “The Right Stuff meets Hidden Figures”, and that’s more or less accurate, though it stands out on its own (to be clear, Kowal started working on the book well before Hidden Figures was published). It’s said that SF is really about the present, not the future - this is also generally true about historical fiction (alt or otherwise), and Kowal uses her setting to reflect the systemic racism and sexism in American society, as well as our sluggish and politicized response to climate change. This occasionally backfires, when Elma’s responses to racism seem to come more from a 21st-century perspective than a mid-1950s one. But it’s still a fascinating and well-written tale overall, with a lot to say, and plenty of candy for NASA nerds like me. I’ll definitely be reading the rest of the series.
Dread & Superficiality: Woody Allen as Comic Strip by Stuart E. Hample
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
I’ve always been interested in the art of comic strips, and this (a Christmas present) is something of a curiosity - a collection of strips featuring Woody Allen as basically himself, or at least the neurotic persona self that was the basis of his early stand-up and film work. Allen didn’t write the strip, but he was involved in its production, supplying ideas to artist Stuart Hample and consulting him on the strip’s development. It ran for eight years in hundreds of newspapers; I vaguely remember seeing a few in print somewhere, though not in my hometown paper, which didn’t carry it. Anyway, the strip covered the kinds of topics you’d expect an Allen strip to cover - insane parents, failed relationships, psychoanalyst sessions and philosophy jokes.
And … well, I’m tempted to say your enjoyment of this will depend largely on whether you find Allen’s stand-up or 70s films funny (to say nothing of your opinion of Allen’s controversial private life). On the other hand, I do like his stand-up work and early 70s stuff, and I found this to be pretty lame. Hample himself admits that this was at least partly the product of the King Features Syndicate pushing for a mainstream strip, while Allen wanted the strip to be more surreal, weird and original. King Features generally won that argument, and it shows.
It doesn’t help that the strip was mainly written by a small team of writers, which may explain the inconsistency of the strip. There are a few good ones here, but most are your average comic strip gags. In the end, despite Allen’s involvement, it’s an ersatz version of him. Still, it’s an interesting bit of comic-strip history. Indeed, arguably the most interesting thing here is Hample’s preface explaining how the strip got started and why it’s not as good as it could have been. And then there’s the “introduction” by R. Buckminster Fuller: a surreal comic that he wrote and drew himself that starts by explaining the nature of the universe and segues to Allen’s role in it. It’s bonkers, and more interesting than any of the Allen strips. Maybe Bucky should have written them instead.
View all my reviews
Get Bucky,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1659669.html. Please comment there using OpenID.