"Good Show": New story in Asimov's

The current issue of Asimov's Science Fiction contains (among other stories by a wonderful array of writers) my short story "Good Show." Let me know what you think.

http://www.asimovs.com/current-issue/

Sustained performance: Dashiell Hammett's THE MALTESE FALCON

No, I hadn't read this before. No, haven't seen the movie.

However, as soon as Sam Spade called someone "Sweetheart," I heard Bogart saying it, and something about the character—really, all the characters—fell into place. Everyone is performing.

You probably know the plot's essentials: Detective Sam Spade is tasked by a woman of questionable backstory to protect her from harm. Her tale is a ruse, and Spade is sucked into a quest for a centuries-old object of great value . . . and even more questionable backstory. There are murders, punches, and many guns drawn. (Oddly, though quite a few people are shot, every time we see a gun produced, it's quickly rendered useless; as in a Greek drama, the murders take place offstage. One man does drop dead at Spade's feet, but he's been shot (half a dozen times, supposedly) elsewhere.)

From the first scene, Spade is performing, not telling us what he truly thinks—either about the new case or about his soon-to-be-late partner. With every person he meets, he adopts a radically different tone. Much of Hammett's description focuses on Spade's changing face as he moves through responses and selects the one most useful for the moment at hand.

The other characters, as well, are performing. Some of this is the narrative's problem: everyone seems to be playing a scripted part, reciting speeches that announce who they are—though, in every case for the main players, who they are is concealed by these words. The leader of the gang in search of the Maltese falcon may be the most honest, but even he manages some late moments in which he alters the expectations of other characters in response to changing circumstances. It's fitting, because the falcon in question is, itself, a performer, a deceiver.

I expected storytelling more along the lines of Chandler, but the writing isn't nearly as good. Most of the time, it's direct and efficient, and when it isn't, it falters. Baroque metaphors and phrases leave the reader puzzled. Phrasing is sloppy, as when Spade checks his watch "on his wrist" (where else might it have gone?) or he rides down from a hotel's upper floors "in an elevator" (as if we hadn't considered that elevators provide rides). Hammett sometimes finds himself at a loss for a bit of interstitial description and usually reverts to the details of Spade's face once again.

It's easy to see why Hollywood thought this would make a great movie. The characters themselves behave cinematically, trying to persuade anyone who is watching, making wild gestures on the story's stage in the hopes that they aren't the next to be dispatched, permanently, to the wings.

Colorblind: Shirley Jackson's "Flower Garden"

The "horror" in any Shirley Jackson tale is less rooted in the standard sources of narrative horror (death or some other violation of the body's intactness) than in social fears. Regardless of what else takes place in a work of hers—or how successful the work is overall—Jackson is always most effective at conveying moments of social discomfort and disorientation. Even her most famous story, "The Lottery," is best seen, I think, as largely about the moment when a social insider suddenly finds herself on the outside. To anyone on the inside of a social construct or hierarchy (who has seen that structure as ultimately protective), the most existentially disturbing event would be when one sees the structure turn toward one as a foe.

"Flower Garden" takes its time in establishing the parameters of its conflict. The first half of the story is marvelously misleading. The younger Mrs. Winning, daughter-in-law of the elder Mrs. Winning, lives a narrowly circumscribed housewife's life, rigid in its regularity. For reasons not fully spelled out, but probably due to her husband's laziness, mentioned much later in the story by a secondary character, Mrs. Winning's expectations for a more aesthetically beautiful and satisfying life have been thwarted. Jackson presents us with a woman who is resentful but who has mastered ways to leave her resentments unaddressed or concealed. When a new neighbor finally moves into a nearby house Mrs. Winning has long wanted to live in (and about which she has meticulously fantasized painting and decorating), our protagonist largely suppresses her envy, taking pleasure in how well the neighbor's vision for the house matches her own. Of especial interest is the nascent garden. The Winning grounds don't get enough sun for a decent garden, but the modest cottage has enormous potential for beautiful gardens, and the new neighbor has brought a grand vision.

Though Mrs. Winning and her mother-in-law are both married, we only glimpse the spouses (and at first it seems they're both widows). The new neighbor, Mrs. MacLane, is actually a widow, and both women have six-year-old sons. (Mrs. Winning also has a baby of unidentified gender.) Though it appears that Mrs. Winning and Mrs. MacLane may not bond, in time they form a friendship built around daily market walks (clearly inspired by Jackson's actual walks in Bennington, Vermont, which also included a difficult hill), watching their children play, and having tea together.

Then comes an awkward encounter with a young black boy, Billy. Mrs. Winning's son uses the n-word—and Mrs. MacLane's son repeats it. Mrs. MacLane is ashamed and confused, whereas Mrs. Winning's focus is on her friend's reaction and the unfamiliar tone in her friend's voice as she reproves her son. To Mrs. Winning's dismay, Mrs. MacLane offers Billy a job helping tend her gardens; the next day, the boy's father shows up, and their agreement that this man—a widower whose wife was white—will work on the gardens finally establishes the story's crisis-bearing conflict for the third act.

There's no great drama to the tale in the end, and there's no revelation by our protagonist. But like "The Lottery," the story establishes both that there is a way the world is supposed to run and that the pressures to maintain that status quo are enormous even if unstated and unstatable. No one in the story ever addresses the source of the town's discomfort in the relationship between Mrs. MacLane and her hired man. Disapproval and social withdrawal are employed rather than anyone naming the source of the conflict.

In the end, Mrs. MacLane, who has moved from "the city" and may need to move back, is baffled by the people around her. Nothing truly horrifying happens, unless it is Mrs. MacLane's recognition that the ways of some people can never be changed.

Infinite spaces: Conrad's THE SHADOW-LINE

The Shadow-Line, a compact novel of compressed action, puts Conrad's unnamed young captain (who is himself, and thus the novel's subtitle: A Confession) through all the paces seen variously in other of Conrad's work. To breach the "shadow-line" between youth and whatever comes after youth, the protagonist must face more than one "double," the confusions of officialdom, a crew that doesn't know him, disease, and a ship becalmed in hell—and all this on his first outing as a captain.

The first act suggests we'll not be impressed by our "hero." His judgment of others is clouded by an unsourced petulance; he is quick to anger. And his career seems to have stopped before it has much begun, as he has sworn to leave the sea-going life behind for something more ordinary that he cannot even imagine. This serves as a long prelude to his adventure. Structurally, it's odd, a great deal of time spent returning our young man, much to his surprise, to the waters he's just left, having been awarded his first command without having gone through a long career of waiting. The opening confusions may be demonstrating that the protagonist's true place is the ocean, aboard ship; on land, he struggles to navigate the signs and speeches of people. We also see that he is not immediately empathetic with others, that he can't pierce their behaviors to grasp their personal circumstances.

Once aboard ship, he has, after the awe about his situation has lessened, more connection with the people who surround him: they have a mission, a set of tasks, and they are all men of the sea. The former captain haunts this posting. According to the first mate, the previous captain was a horror, playing violin rather than attending to the ship, growing more mad when the ship ran into trouble, and finally wishing doom on the vessel and all its men. How could such a person have ever led a crew? (I'm reminded of the frequency with which Star Trek's Kirk encountered starship captains who'd lost their minds or violated the Prime Directive; after a few episodes, one became convinced that the Enterprise was one of the few sanely managed ships in the Federation.)

On this haunted, cursed ship (for the first mate believes the late captain clings to it like a demonic anchor), the crew takes sick only a few days out, the vessel is trapped on an oppressively hot, utterly windless path of ocean for weeks, the medicine (likely sold ashore by the previous captain) is discovered to have been replaced by worthless powder, and the awaited winds, when they return, threaten to ruin the seriously undermanned ship. Sea and sky alike become an existential blank in which young Conrad looks to find meaning but is repeatedly confronted by an absolute and impersonal void. Our captain endures—and succeeds—through his noble yet messy bond with the men and his devotion to duty, bringing all hands safely home.

Though the novel takes place (given the autobiographical elements) in 1888, it was composed in 1915, at the start of the Great War, and dedicated to Borys, Conrad's eldest son, who had received a commission as a second lieutenant. The characters in the novel are not at war, but evidently Conrad intended to convey that, regardless of the circumstances, to be at sea is to be in some grand conflict. One's primary challenge is to live, and one can only do that with the support—and it is implied, in support—of others. Returned to shore, he is given some perspective by the captain who clued him in, initially, to the possibility of a command. This thoughtful mentor concludes that "a man should stand up to his bad luck, to his mistakes, to his conscience, and all that sort of thing. Why—what else would you have to fight against?"

We Have Met the Enemy: Ionesco's RHINOCEROS

Teju Cole's recent New York Times essay ("A Time for Refusal") on Eugène Ionesco's 1958 play Rhinoceros connects the play to our present (American) moment; in such a moment, everyone around us is turning monstrous while we, flawed creatures, aim to remain human—even as we grow more deeply uncertain as to why we bother and whether we might, after all, be wrong.

The play is a wonderful reminder of all the ways in which people yield to a movement—any movement. Though Ionesco's target is European fascism, it might just as well be any undertow from an innocuous fad to cultural despair. The plot follows a somewhat weak-spined character, made weaker by drink, who looks to others for some direction. Meanwhile, people are turning into rhinoceroses. Berenger, our protagonist, dines with a friend who sort of hates him; goes to an office full of anxious and angry people; and waits at home in the company of office-mate Daisy while the end approaches, Berenger and Daisy going in ten minutes through a lifetime's worth of relationship highs and lows.

One element that makes the play so compelling is the way Ionesco makes every character's reasoning seem, for at least a moment, reasonable. One might become a rhinoceros for purely passive reasons, the way some of us get a cold every year in the proper season. One might simply be curious as to what being a giant beast feels like. Perhaps one likes the company. There's my friend! My spouse! Maybe they're happier than I am! One hates to be on the outside. What's so great, after all, about being human? Have my relationships really panned out? No? Then why do we persist?

A more devious element is Ionesco's teasing apart the various ways we accommodate the madness of our world. If we can just finish lunch, we can address the rhino problem later. Another drink might get me through. Really, it's not so bad out on the street; one just has to watch where one is walking.

The two elements work together, the desire to continue with normalcy and the desire to yield to a new normalcy really being two sides of the same coin. The temperature rises in the pot, yet we both distract ourselves with other matters and opt to remain in the increasingly inhumane (or lobster-unfriendly) circumstances.

Our Trumpish times are not really much different from all our other times. Only, it does seem that the situation has been made more stark, the circumstances more dire, the sounds from the street—like trumpeting, thundering beasts—more inhumane. Some people keep reminding themselves that they are in the voting majority, as more voted against Trump than for him. But all those who didn't vote have also joined the noisy parade of giant land animals; passively, they've become part of the incoherent crowd. It could happen to any of us. Those of us suspicious of these times must remain, even in our ragged humanity, vigilant, making sure our skin isn't turning tough, checking our foreheads against the emergence of horns.

Tunneling in the dark: Whitehead's Underground Railroad

I often said to my literature students that they had to judge a novel on what it aimed to do, not on what they wished it to do. This doesn't mean one can't question a writer's choices, only that one should try to enter a novel by acknowledging the writer's guidance through an imaginary world and not by hoping to determine one's own path through that world.

Colson Whitehead's latest novel, The Underground Railroad, repeatedly reminded me of my own advice, and though I felt let down by the end, I think Whitehead accomplished what he set out to accomplish, leaving me to conclude that I wish he'd set out to accomplish something a little different (and to recognize that as my problem, not his).

I knew nothing about the novel when I began, so the turn that it takes (perhaps 50 pages in) from realism to a realism set in an alternate American history knocked me sideways and made me smile. "Ah, so it's not this kind of book, it's that kind of book." But that was wrong, too. Though Whitehead makes the underground railroad a literal (if modest) railway, and though Whitehead makes each American slave state its own imagery realm with its own rules, the fantastical nature of these elements remains restrained. The railroad is the one impossible element; the divergent histories of the states are, as presented, credible.

Much as Ellison's Invisible Man places each conflict experienced by its narrator in a different milieu, varying the level of satire and surrealism within each milieu, Whitehead gives us stories in each American state that somewhat reset the narrative terms for our protagonist, who now has some wholly different tale to navigate. But Whitehead also provides threads that bind Cora, the escaped slave, to a larger narrative, and characters carry over, so there's a sense of the past being buried and then resurfacing with each new "adventure," as in a picaresque novel with a pursuing villain who pushes us to the next tale-within-the-tale—or as in an America in which succeeding generations have found legislative and cultural ways to stifle black progress and re-devalue black lives.

Also echoing Ellison, we see the multitudinous ways black Americans have been afflicted by the culture that abducted and oppresses them. Had Whitehead stuck to a realistic historical framework, we'd have likely seen only the familiar forms of early-to-mid 19th century enslavement. Whitehead instead borrows images and ideas from later in black history, raising issues of education, objectification, white alliances, financial independence, sexuality, and enculturation.

While reading, I felt Whitehead spending more time than I wanted detailing scenes whose details didn't contribute to the book's themes and motifs. Given how the book turned aside from its strictly historical moorings, I felt the writing should have left behind a reliance on the necessities of historical fiction; I grew impatient. However, the resulting novel is a vivid creation, giving us alternate worlds that gain in heft by using details from our history while tweaking the when and where enough to make us question both past and present.

Coming soon!

If one defines "soon" as "within six months . . . maybe."

Next spring, Asimov's will publish a new story of mine, "Good Show," a tale of the unexpected dangers and massive responsibility associated with, yes, reviewing movies.

You'll see. It'll all make sense.

More as the time approaches.

Our place in the universe: Martin Amis's "The Janitor on Mars"

Blinded, betrayed, and bereft, King Lear's Duke of Gloucester cries out, "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods./They kill us for their sport."

That pretty well encapsulates the theme of Martin Amis's short story "The Janitor on Mars," appearing in his collection Heavy Water. In the middle of the 21st century, Earth is contacted by an alien intelligence, a Martian "janitor"; the term's full implication is unclear until late in the story, but our point of view character back on Earth is an actual janitor, a largely chaste pederast who works at a facility for at-risk youth . . . if I've understood the organization properly. Things are morally muddy, as consensual relationships, no matter how imbalanced in terms of power, are encouraged and protected. Someone has assaulted one of our main character's charges, however, and he presses the nearly speechless, victimized boy to give him a name. Meanwhile, all of Earth is riveted to TV screens showing the arrival of the human delegation at the appointed meeting place on Mars. It's a juxtaposition that shouldn't work, in part because the science fiction aspect digs deeper and deeper—and for a sizable portion of the narrative—into certain "hard" SF premises having to do with the history and purposes of powerful sentient species. Just when you think the story can't get more grim, it takes another step down its dark path, unrelenting in the logic that governs its universe. Our Earth janitor, for his part, wants to protect one damaged boy from the terrible encounter the whole world is watching.

The story is rich with mordant humor as well as science fictional ideas, and it's deeply humane as well, despite the hopeless framework. What connects the narratives on Earth and in the heavens are the story's ideas about power. Perhaps there is something that makes us stand out against the dark infinitudes, and perhaps, Amis posits, if it's our frailty and weakness, then that may be a good thing.

Oh, it's a trilogy: THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM, Liu Cixin

 . . . or, rather, if you're looking for it on Amazon or in a bookstore, it's by Cixin Liu.

The Three-Body Problem combines politics, international skulduggery, serious physics, computer gaming, and a first-contact event in ways that alternate between creative and clunky. Not only the plot, but the characters and the writing, too, shift from profundity to something that reads like middle-school fan fiction. A penultimate section of the book, containing information that no one in the book should reasonably possess, seems to have been separately imagined and composed, a physics-laden, high-minded space opera that might have been the seed for the rest of the novel . . . or not.

If you're an SF reader, you'll certainly enjoy much of the book, which throws together a host of ideas and which, at least to this layperson, takes its science seriously. That it is a work originally in Chinese, planted in a culture unfamiliar to most American readers, gives it a refreshingly unfamiliar shape—mostly. The Cultural Revolution gives impetus to some characters' actions, but some characters seem to have walked out of Hollywood central casting. Several thought-provoking concepts—political, moral, ecological—lie at the heart of the story, but several truly dumb ideas also propel the plot. Some dialogue is fine, but some is unspeakably bad, the kind of thing one imagines hearing in Communist propaganda films—long-winded, discursive speech no one would say and no one would tolerate hearing. The game that's so important to the novel—a vivid world that fails to prosper in its chaotic three-sun system—doesn't coherently connect with the larger story (obviously, the writer thinks it does, but I found it unconvincing) and also proves disappointing by being more literal than metaphorical in its purposes.

The central character, a woman who, as a young girl, saw her physicist father killed for the sake of the revolution, is compelling, though she leaves the stage quite often, and the characters who displace her never take on the same heft.

The first book in a trilogy (I didn't know this until I'd finished it), the novel can nevertheless stand on its own—unless you're hoping the author is aiming for a happier ending in the long run.

Winningly full: Harkaway's TIGERMAN

A joy.

Tigerman's hero is straight from Graham Greene (say, The Comedians or The Heart of the Matter): profoundly engaged with his own interior life, posted to a spot on the map that his British mind finds impossible to comprehend, the protagonist can't see himself as a hero, but he has to rise to the occasion for pressing moral reasons. Unlike a Greene character, however, Nick Harkaway's Lester Ferris is a man who must, in these times, act boldly in the physical world. He cannot change things for the better through an ambiguous gesture or by speaking the truth or a lie at a given moment; rather, he must, while also using such diplomatic means to achieve his ends, be what he frequently terms "a sergeant," a man who knows how much force to apply when encountering resistance as well as when to yield to stronger forces.

The less said about the plot, the better, but I'll provide this: on a dying, lawless island off the African coast, Sergeant Ferris's friendship with a wickedly smart young boy drives Ferris to build a counter-narrative to the failing world around him. Harkaway provides vivid depictions of the characters we truly need to know; it's an uncluttered novel because Ferris's world is so interior, unlike the wild island whose recesses and people he has mostly come to know through departures and destruction. The story feels utterly modern—through both the openly darker politics of the post-9/11 world and the internet-and-comic-lingo-savvy boy who shadows Ferris— but remains moored, texturally, in the recent British post-colonial past. Harkaway toys with the responsibilities and behaviors of lost empires, all the while providing proof that there's still room for the kinds of heroic thinking that formed—and malformed—those empires. Indeed, the narrative twines life and death about each other in a hug that is like the hugs that form the novel's central motif: sometimes people reach hesitantly for each other; a few times, a hug is suggested but not given; at key moments, the hug is a desperate grasping after life.

And how long should we hold on to what must pass into oblivion?

Smart and exciting, and featuring that rarity, a third act that pays off in every way, never neglecting the themes it has set in motion, Tigerman is, in its words, deeds, and deeply felt passions, a joy.

Overview review: The Old Man stories

Writer and Cambridge-dweller Jay O'Connell (author of Dystopian Love) gives a nice overview of my in-process Old Man series here.

I've been poking and prodding at the final story, but I've also been working on an unrelated piece of short fiction. More news soon.

Bill

Free Fiction

Till 5/25, "Vox ex Machina" (Asimov's, Dec. 2013) and "A Crisis for Mr. Lion" (Zoetrope: All-Story prize-winner, 2006) are free (and together).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JX0EFQS

And here's another story

"Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key," the fourth story in my Old Man series, recently published in Asimov's Science Fiction, is now available as an e-book via Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K6ZF8FQ

More stories via Kindle

I have joined together two stories that, really, have no business being together . . . except that I wrote them both. "Vox ex Machina," which ran in the Dec. 2013 Asimov's, and "A Crisis for Mr. Lion," which won the 2006 Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Award, are for sale (less than a buck!) via Amazon as one e-book. I believe Amazon Prime users may "borrow" them for free, but perhaps I've misunderstood something about the process.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JX0EFQS

Reviews of "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key"

I've received several thoughtful personal notes about the story; I thought I'd post here the links to some online reviews.

Tangent Online

Singular Points

SteveReads

Regarding "Each in His Prison" in the new Asimov's

The fourth story in my "Old Man" series is in the April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction, on shelves this week.

"Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key" is a direct sequel to "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," my Doc Savage/pulp hero homage that appeared in Asimov's in 2010. This latest story relies on not only the first "Old Man" tale but also 2011's "Clockworks," which takes place in 1962, and 2012's "Unearthed," which takes place in 1925. (All three stories appeared in Asimov's and are available in e-format via Amazon.) Readers will learn what has become of the Old Man in the five years since "Helping Them Take the Old Man Down" and will join a "gifted" young lieutenant who wants to solve the dangerous puzzles surrounding the Old Man. The story also sets up readers for a final tale, "The World Will Be the World Again," coming in the not-too-distant future. (I'm working on it! I'm working on it!)

I appreciate readers' continuing (and new!) interest in these tales. Let me know what you think of these stories.

Going Too Far: PILGRIM'S WILDERNESS and TRANSCENDENTAL

Last week I read two books. One book took me someplace I'd never been, provided rich descriptions of a strange world, and delved into a history of discomfiting beliefs and beings. The other book was science fiction.

Tom Kizzia's Pilgrim's Wilderness is stunningly good. A non-fiction account of a dominating and demon-haunted family patriarch who takes his wife and 14 (later 15) children into the Alaskan wilds, the book is written with such energy, it feels novelistic—but not in the way of some fake suspenser masquerading as nonfiction, like The Hot Zone. The book is novelistic in style—employing rich language to provide vivid descriptions—and in structure, shifting through time according to the demands of the narrative. To say much about what happens is to spoil some of the book's surprises. Suffice it to say that "Mr. Pilgrim's" story begins in a past cluttered with privilege, tragedy, and unexpected connections. It would end with deprivation, tragedy, and horror. What the man did to his family makes for a disturbing tale, but reporter Kizzia also wants us to see how people responded to "Pilgrim," how communities struggled to both accommodate the varying impressions the man purveyed while also being mindful of his children.

Some of the actors have much to answer for, as their own paranoid politics fuel perspectives just as damaged as Pilgrim's. But Kizzia is evenhanded in treating both the people of the town of McCarthy (and other human developments through which the family passed) and the U.S. government, which in some ways mishandles the Alaskan wilderness and the people who live there. The author has a dog in the fight, too, as he and his wife (now deceased) had constructed a cabin in the region, drawn by the beauty and isolation. This is an American story. People do sometimes want to be left alone. Yet sometimes people only say they want to be left alone. Some people head into isolation for reasons that may not be isolating, but binding, as they look for connections amidst the vast emptiness. And some people are hiding. Like many stories of the American wilderness, it's a story of survival—and as in many stories of survival, the most dangerous animal is human.

Read Pilgrim's Wilderness.

The book was such a dramatic contrast to James Gunn's deeply disappointing Transcendental, about which the less said, the better. The blurbs that hawk its connections to Chaucer are disingenuous: there's a ship named the Geoffrey and some aliens tell stories on the way to wherever-they're-going, but beyond those superficial nods (and occasional other tossed-off literary hiccups), there's no deeper commitment to the types of wild stories told by Chaucer's pilgrims; in fact, all of the stories are similar, the voices are similar, and the aliens weirdly lean toward thinking that, annoying as humans are, maybe their systems of culture and government are better, with the elephant-type creature going so far as to declare that maybe humans, with their monogamy, have the right idea. Almost nothing happens in the novel; "transcendence" itself doesn't seem especially transcendental, once it's explained (so the final let-down isn't much of a surprise), and the novel appears to be a set-up for a series of books . . . unless Gunn truly intended for this to be merely a shaggy dog tale.

Next "Old Man" story

The next story in my "Old Man" sequence, "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key," will come out in the April/May 2014 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction (which, due to the magic of magazine time travel, will be available beginning at the end of February).

The previous stories in the sequence ("Helping Them Take the Old Man Down," "Clockworks," and "Unearthed") continue to be available via Amazon.

The final story, "The World Will Be the World Again," is still being written.

Privacy Lost: Dave Eggers's THE CIRCLE

Why is this book typeset in “ragged right” rather than “justified”? Beats me. Mostly, it’s not noticeable, but at times, it’s sloppily done, with large gaps on the right that would easily accommodate the next word, and tremendous inconsistency with regard to hyphenation. Why mention it? It’s an odd choice that, to some readers, will stand out; also, in a book so concerned with technological innovation, the nefarious uses of technology, and the thoughtlessness with which some changes are embraced, the typesetting decision looks like what Eggers warns against: sloppy thinking in service to some ideal.

I hadn’t finished an Eggers novel before this one; I read perhaps a quarter of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius before losing interest. This novel does have a page-turning quality to it—enough of a narrative drive is generated, once you’re past the slow and uncompelling opening scenes—so one can move through it pretty quickly. With the exception of a few scenes in which descriptive writing takes over (often in ways that feel force-fed with symbolism and significance), the story is carried by dialogue. It’s not especially good dialogue. Everyone has the same voice, and only one character ever asks the questions an intelligent reader would ask. The main character is not only charmless, she’s a cypher. It’s possible that that’s what Eggers intends, given how she never makes a single good decision. (I’m not sure I’ve read another novel of which I could say that of the main character; I think even Humbert Humbert probably makes a few good decisions, or at least defensible ones.) This quality of hers may be why she’s hired, promoted, and successful.

In short: Mae is brought in, via an old friend, Annie, to work for The Circle, a Google/Facebook stand-in that has a cool campus in California and outsized ambitions to change the world using online technology. Mae quickly learns that one doesn’t merely work for The Circle; rather, one joins a community—a community that doesn’t like being snubbed and that wants to know everything about her. That, of course, becomes the tension-generating pivot around which the story turns, though Eggers’s handling of the technology isn’t convincing (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore does a better job of leaping several minutes into the future by way of Google while also feeling more grounded in tech-type thinking). There’s an interesting question at the heart of this book about knowing and being known, but the big moments are telegraphed, the insights are blunt, and the book’s set-up is so gradual and surface-level, it felt to me as if Eggers needed to rethink at least the opening in light of where he was going to take the character, shaping the narrative more subtly.

Fifty years ago, or even twenty, this novel would be a satire. For their times, 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World were satires, taking real things to their next level as a way of critiquing them. This book, at this time, can’t find anything to satirize. Mostly, Eggers describes things as they already are. The sole satirical element, to my eyes, was the proliferation of screens on our protagonist’s desk. “No one told you about monitoring your third screen? Here,”—and another computer screen is hauled within view. The way in which information is thuddingly and incongruously dropped into our protagonist’s lap seems the stuff of comedy, but it comes across as flat, especially since Mae simply yields to whatever is thrown at her.

I did enjoy the novel, but it’s not an especially well-crafted thing. Fittingly, it seems to be getting the critical praise it was crowd-designed to earn, but I was happy to see that citizen reviewers weren’t quite so impressed. It’s light entertainment with some half-considered ideas and no real surprises.

Long-Distance Romance: Burroughs's A PRINCESS OF MARS

As if to prove my lack of pulp and SF cred: I had not read this book before.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s first John Carter adventure, A Princess of Mars was originally serialized as Under the Moons of Mars. I prefer that more evocative title (the moons being an oft-referenced motif in the story), though in fact, A Princess of Mars suits the resulting story better—and identifies one of the novel’s two chief faults.

The tale starts well enough, and I was familiar with the beginning (or at least its most necessary elements) from the Marvel Comics adaptation from the 1970s. Trapped in a cave by a group of hostile Apache, one-time Confederate officer John Carter steps out of his body and is transported to the planet Mars. Burroughs does a wonderful job setting up his premise, providing teasing bits of information in advance, creating tense scenes, and capturing our hero’s confusion at each turn of events. Then there’s the implied subtext of the novel, with the Native/white man conflict in the U.S. providing a lead-in to warring species on Mars learning to cooperate through John Carter’s intervention (though largely they cooperate in slaughtering other peoples). Though the green, gigantic, tusked, four-armed Martians and the red-skinned, human-like Martians seem to each contain components of Native Americans, the green folks get the sorry end of the comparison, with their communal rearing of children, pragmatic dispatching of the disabled, and their warlike ways seen as barbaric in contrast with the culture of the red Martians, who only make war when they need to. However, by the time the book wraps up, it becomes evident that the culture is not its people, and green Martians aren’t innately bad, just badly led. I’m sure someone’s written a dissertation on how ERB distributes good and bad traits among the various Martian peoples.

I have no idea what the idea is behind the white Martian apes, who, like the green Martians, claim squatters’ rights in the ancient abandoned cities but only show up when the plot requires it.

The story’s main weaknesses are two: the Dejah Thoris thread, and the shaggy construction of the novel’s second half. Once the beautiful Dejah Thoris enters the narrative, John Carter is in love; not a terribly well-defined character prior to this, he now becomes focused on the source of his adoration, and thus his mood shifts depending on his reading of the moods of his beloved. It’s exhausting and not terribly interesting, and Burroughs withholds information so that he can provide us with some late-story entanglements that could have easily been avoided. Also, though the princess gets some bold speeches to indicate her self-regard, she’s a less interesting character than Carter—and somewhat petty emotionally. (This is repaired in the 2012 film version, though the movie was lumbered with a poor choice for its lead and a jumpy narrative.)

There comes a point where the story lapses fully into pulpiness in the style of A.E. Van Vogt’s Slan, with psychic powers that come and go, convenient coincidences in every scene, and the clear case of a writer merely chattering away (and sending his characters lurching about) until he’s filled his word quota. Certain fight scenes which seem crucial get rushed as if Burroughs lost interest, while other moments drag out as he works to tie up the many narrative threads. The story does become vivid again near the end, setting up the reader marvelously for further adventures and intentionally leaving several elements unexplained and unresolved.

All-in-all, a mixed bag, but worth it for the premise, the sporadic strong scenes, and the many flights of invention.