Fantastic Metropolis

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

(Nan A. Talese, 2003)

“Science fiction,” Samuel R. Delany once wrote, “is a tool to help you think,” and Margaret Atwood’s stunning new novel (possibly her best since The Handmaid’s Tale) wants us to think about the implications of bioengineering and, by implication, what it means to be human. In a near future where sunshine is poison, the weather’s gone crazy, and botched genetic experiments roam the blasted landscape and trashed-out safe compounds the rich once inhabited, Snowman (née Jimmy) believes he may be the last Homo sapiens on earth. He lives with a small tribe of childlike mutants engineered for beauty and social harmony by his boyhood friend, the wildly bright and amoral Crake, in the wake of a hemorrhagic plague designed to euthanize humankind so nature can (with a little help) get things right. Slowly unraveling, Snowman drifts through this post-apocalyptic world hearing voices from his past and remembering his unhappy childhood in those compounds, his conflicted relationship with Crake, and his obsession with Oryx, a child prostitute he discovered one day on a kiddie-porn website who, through a series of implausible coincidences, follows him through life. This psychologically rich, philosophically dark, acidically satiric, and spiritually despairing novel challenges us repeatedly to contemplate the possibility raised by one of Snowman’s former acquaintances: “Maybe there weren’t any solutions. Human society… was a sort of monster, its main by-products being corpses and rubble.” No wonder Atwood explains her religion, Pessimistic Pantheism, as the belief that “God is everywhere, but losing.”

Buddha: Kapilavastu & The Four Encounters, Osamu Tezuka

(Vertical, 2003)

Osamu Tezuka is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the headbangingly popular comic books known as manga. Born in 1928 in Osaka, he grew up on Walt Disney (he saw Bambi 80 times) and the Fleischer Brothers (Koko the Clown, Betty Boop, et al.), and took in innovative German and French films during his medical-student days. He soon turned his back on a career as physician, though, and, by the early ’50s, dominated the manga scene. When he died of stomach cancer in 1989, Tezuka left behind more than 150,000 strips, several extraordinarily influential anime (Astro Boy among the best-known), and one manga masterpiece: Buddha.

Tezuka eschewed the flat, static representations found in traditional manga. In their place, he introduced such dynamic cinematic techniques as multiple camera angles, close-ups, and jump cuts. Rather than thinking of manga as simple stories that could be contained within a few panels, he conceived of them as sprawling narratives that could easily exceed a thousand pages. He preserved traditional manga’s iconoclastic impulse while adding serious themes to a genre already a lot more comfortable in its relationship to sexuality and bawdiness than its American counterparts. The upshot is an art form that at its best rivals the novel in its structural complexity, character density, and thematic sophistication. Antecedents to contemporary manga (Japanese for “whimsical pictures”) extend back more than a millennium to the chojugiga, satiric scrolls drawn by Buddhist monks in the sixth century depicting anthropomorphic animals acting like less-than-model humans. But Tezuka more than anyone is responsible for the form’s proliferation in the second half of the twentieth century. Siddhartha isn’t born until three-fourths through the first volume of a proposed eight, Kapilavastu. Its dovetailing story focuses instead on Chapra, a slave committed to moving up the social pecking order, and his growing friendship with Tatta, a smartass street urchin with magic powers.

The second volume, The Four Encounters, follows Siddhartha as he grows from a frail, gloomy, introspective ten-year-old into an adult seeker who leaves his wife and child in search of enlightenment. Along the way, he becomes involved in a Rube Goldberg contraption of royal intrigues that intertwines his fortunes with those of a tough, sexy bandit named Migaila, a power-hungry archer named Bandaka, and a wise Brahmin. Tezuka has reconfigured Siddhartha into a revolutionary—both of consciousness and society. He is obsessed with finding humankind’s place in the cosmos and the cause of perpetual suffering in a universe of impermanence. But he is also continually striving to challenge and overturn the caste system and, by implication, the very notion of hierarchy. But the unfolding of his tale—epic in scope, sparking with energy—is only part of the readerly pleasure. The exaggerated, sometimes creepily cute, big-eyed, pug-nosed, spiky-haired echt-manga characters are set against an often meticulously drawn background reminiscent of Japanese landscape painting. Against the beautifully detailed realism of these are placed metafictional sight gags where, for example, Tezuka himself makes Hitchcockian cameos while bit characters complain about the lack of color on the pages they inhabit. Such tonal inconsistency, which serves to reinforce the story’s theme of impermanence, is further underscored by characters vacillating between high diction and anachronistic street slang. In Tezuka’s world, the exquisite collapses into the goofy in a New York minute, the goofy into the melodramatic, the melodramatic into the brutal, and the brutal into the sincerely touching. The surprising result is a work wholly unique and downright fun.

Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

(Putnam, 2003)

I came to this one late this year and I approached it warily because, honestly, I had begun feeling Gibson had ceased exploring new and interesting roads in his fiction a while ago. He seemed content, instead, to just keep doing Gibson—i.e., fast-paced SF novels set in near-future worlds that rehashed the same hipper-than-hip thematics. So reading Pattern Recognition was a happy surprise. Here he has moved away from science fiction, and yet set his novel in a contemporary, post-9/11 London, Tokyo, and Moscow that are hauntingly strange, defamiliarized to the point where it feels like we’re seeing our world through a warped and deeply revealing lens. The narrative revolves around Cayce Pollard, an American woman whose job is to troll streets sensing the next fashion trend and feeding it to corporations so they can benefit from it. She also becomes involved in a cult built around shards of a mysterious film that has begun appearing on the internet, and soon is on the trail of the filmmaker responsible. While I found the last fifty pages too obsessed with tying up loose ends, and while I found the film itself much less imaginative than it could have and should have been, I thoroughly enjoyed Gibson’s extraordinary eye for cultural detail; Cayce is, after all, in many ways his alter ego. Too, I found Pattern Recognition one of the most powerful engagements with 9/11 in fiction yet, shot through with the heartbreaking awareness that we are all, like Cayce, weeping for our century, “though whether the one past or the one present she doesn’t know.”

Letters to Wendy’s, Joe Wenderoth

(Verse Press, 2000)

In this funny, bitter, and bright epistolary critique of American commercialism, desire, and sanity, an unnamed and deliciously unstable narrator composes a series of very short (most five-to-seven sentences in length) letters over the course of a year to Wendy’s, the fastfood chain, and to Wendy, female icon of U.S. consumerism, whom he wants to ravage. Along the way, he meditates upon the nature of the Frosty, our culture of commodification, and the pleasures of porn, while slowly if relentlessly unraveling. This is a wonderful, wholly original, MIG-fast read from a small press usually associated with poetry.

The Book of Embraces, Eduardo Galeano

(W.W. Norton & Company, 1989)

I’m not really sure what the right word is for this beautiful mosaic text. When in doubt, let’s call it a novel, or, better, a “novel.” In fact, though, it’s a compilation of surreal images and very short narriticules (most only a few lines long, none more than two pages of prose) that are sometimes political in nature, sometimes surreal, sometimes philosophical, sometimes fictional, sometimes factual, and almost always highly metaphorical, meditative, and elusive. None contributes to an overarching plot. Some characters reappear here and there, but one doesn’t read to discover what happens to them. Galeano was born in Uruguay, and his work inhabits the same narratological space as such magical realists as Borges, García Márquez, and, particularly, Cortázar, but his concern with form and his visual awareness set him apart from these writers in a deeply stimulating way.

VAS: An Opera in Flatland, Steve Tomasula, Stephen Farrell (Art & Design)

(Barrytown, 2003)

This gorgeous book is a must-read for anyone interested in notions of textual collage and exploration of the technological reality of the page. The comic narrative concerns a guy living in a (literally) two-dimensional suburban world who is struggling over whether or not to get a vasectomy, but it’s the form of the narrative—i.e., the body of the text about the text of the body—that makes this novel an unforgettably unique pleasure.

P, Andrew Lewis Conn

(Soft Skull Press, 2003)

If Andrew Lewis Conn’s impressive debut novel were a DVD, you would find it in the cult section of the video-rental store alongside those risky narrative oddities you’re genetically wired either to love or loathe—or, often, a little of both at once. P follows the peregrinations of pudgy thirty-three-year-old ex-porn-star and failed pornographer Benji and super smart doobee-smoking Nietzsche-reading nine-year-old runaway Finn as their paths sporadically intersect on the streets of New York one day in 1996. Benji is haunted by memories of his dead lover, Penelope, and how they were seduced, worn down, and ultimately burned out by the universe of blue movies. Finn, the daughter of a divorced showbiz lawyer-mom, feels like a prisoner in her claustrophobic world of the Upper East Side. Both search for something that feels like a real home and real human contact. The innovative form their tale takes is in good part an appropriation and manipulation of Joyce’s Ulysses with a Nabokovian-Pynchonian backbeat. P begins, for instance, on 16 June (i.e., Bloomsday), flirts with stream-of-consciousness, and embraces linguistic sportiness. One chapter is governed by headlines, another shaped around a catechismic series of questions and answers, and a third mimics a screenplay set in a psychedelic nighttown. Unhappily, sometimes such self-conscious pyrotechnics carry the whiff of the undergraduate classroom with them. Sometimes they seem forced and inflated, more willing to imitate than transform the source material in imaginatively liberating ways. And, like most small-press books, P is peppered with gaffs in layout and proofreading. But somehow all that doesn’t matter much in the end. Conn’s technical talent, handle on smut arcana and insight, and strong sense of character and place make P a sharp, funny, punny, moving avant-pop love song whose heart understands “that every human relationship is, finally, a story of loss.”

Observatory Mansions, Edward Carey

(Crown, 2001)

Observatory Mansions is a sort of postmodern gothic novel whose real protagonist is, well, Observatory Mansions, a dilapidated block of flats on a traffic island in a small city somewhere in England that once upon a time used to be a real mansion set on gorgeous grounds. Francis Orme, the 37-year-old narrator who wears white gloves so he never really has to touch anything and works as a mime in a wax museum, recounts the delightful eccentrics who frequent the place—Claire Higg, who watches television day and night and thinks of the actors on it as her friends; the porter, who doesn’t talk, but hisses; Peter Bugg, who can’t stop sweating and crying; et al. Everything drifts in a gray, bland temporal fog until Anna Tap, the new resident who is slowly going blind, shows up and sets Observatory Mansions in motion. More concerned with character and consciousness than plot, this debut novel is an odd, dark, funny investigation into existential bizarrerie.

Changing Planes, Ursula K. Le Guin

(Harcourt, 2003)

One afternoon during an excruciatingly dull layover at O’Hare, Sita Dulip of Cincinnati discovers an “interplanar technique” allowing her to travel, not just between airplanes, but also between planes of existence. Trapped for hours in an uncomfortable plastic chair at her gate, Sita finds “by a mere twist and slipping bend, easier to do than to describe, she could go anywhere—be anywhere.” Before long air travelers everywhere, copy of Rornan’s Handy Planary Guide in hand, are vacationing among alternate realities. What follows in Ursula K. Le Guin’s seemingly whimsical collection of linked fictions are sixteen anthropologies of brilliantly weird cultures employed as extended metaphors for and enactments of the power of the human imagination. Islac, for instance, is filled with genetic misfires (a waitress who is part corn; insect-teddy-bearish hybrids that live off children’s books) resulting from botched attempts to make better flora and fauna. On the Frithian plane people dream other people’s (and animals’) dreams for entertainment, while on the Yendian you can catch immortality from a fly. At their strongest, these stories by the high priestess of American speculative fiction are Borgesian in their evocative abstraction and inventiveness. At their weakest, they are much less substantial than that—something closer to Borges Lite. Either way, their almost childlike simplicity is deceptive. The more you look, the more the strange worlds they conjure investigate some aspect of our own—from the inherent instability of selfhood and language to looming ecocatastrophe—seen through a vibrant, satiric imagination darkly.

Textual Harassment, run by Lance Olsen

For hundreds of other suggestions by me and lots of other readers, or to suggest your own choices and/or argue with me about mine, let me conclude by inviting you to Textual Harassment, the forum I run on my website, Cafe Zeitgeist. Textual Harassment is a possibility space where a continuous discussion of interesting edge novels, books of theory, comics, and story collections is going on. For my purposes, “the edge” can take many forms–speculative fiction, outre fantasy, postmodern fiction and theory, cyberpunk, post-cyberpunk, alternative, critifictional, slipstream, transgressive, avant-pop, hypermedial, avant-garde, experimental, innovative, hypertextual, comix, etc. In other words, as long as it makes your brain itch, well, that’s good enough for me.

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Lance Olsen’s most recent books are Hideous Beauties (Eraserhead Press, 2003), a collection of short fictions, and Girl Imagined by Chance (FC2, 2002).