Fantastic Metropolis

Another book that left its mark on my year was Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen, which I reviewed for The Modern Word. Over the course of dozens of exquisite stories (and histories, novellas, glossaries, footnotes, etc.) VanderMeer vividly calls the city of Ambergris into being: an ageless, Byzantine sprawl populated by squabbling artists, lewd visionaries, and philosophers at war with their own obsessions. Like the best architects of imaginary cities, VanderMeer has crafted a dark mirror to reflect (and often distort) our own conceptions of reality, bringing into focus the many ways the human imagination attempts to make sense of an often senseless universe. One of the most intriguing books I’ve read in years, it was also the most fun I’ve had doing a book review since Mark Z. Danielewski’s astonishing House of Leaves.

My passion for Ambergris rekindled an old literary love—the literature of the fantastic, particular the works of Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison, and Gene Wolfe. This lead me to discover the joys of “interstitial fiction,” and I was happy to discover (and devour) a host of authors—undoubtedly the “usual suspects” rounded up when this fantastic metropolis is shaken down: K.J. Bishop, Stepan Chapman, Michael Cisco, Jeffrey Ford, Rhys Hughes, Robert Freeman Wexler, Zoran Zivkovic; you know the crew. And having said that, is it a surprise that my favorite anthology was Thackery T. Lambshead’s accursed guide? Particularly Ballingrud’s “Malady of Ghostly Cities,” Chapman’s “Motile Snarcoma,” VanderMeer’s “Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation,” and Cisco’s “1923 Reminiscence.”

As with many on this list, I was also taken by William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Aggressively stylized, self-consciously hip, and wickedly funny, I’m not sure if even Gibson knows what he’s created—fiction, satire, prophecy, or all of the above? Like a stripped-down version of Count Zero resonating a few energy levels closer to ground state, Pattern Recognition performs the remarkable feat of turning the immediate present into science fiction. And “immediate present” is the key phrase—Gibson’s book is a bubble track from a cloud chamber, a snapshot of a transition between two states of being trembling on the cusp between today and tomorrow. Although this sense of exhilaration comes with a built-in expiration date—Pattern Recognition dates itself as you read it—for the moment, it’s as thrillingly raw as one day it will seem quaintly charming.

To continue with books published in 2003, two other new books that really struck me were Tom Carson’s Gilligan’s Wake (review) and D.B. Weiss’ Lucky Wander Boy (review).

You can all sing along to this, right?—“Gilligan, the Skipper too, the Millionaire and his Wife; the Movie Star, the Professor and Mary-Ann…” It’s the most famous “sequential list” hit since the Alphabet Song. In the dazzling Gilligan’s Wake, Tom Carson takes these seven famous castaways and tells their stories, each related in the narrative style of an appropriate literary genre. By seeing them as symbols as well as individuals, by interweaving their lives through the fictions and realities of the twentieth century, Carson builds up a unique and compelling vision of the fascinations and horrors of the so-called American Century. From the surreal hallucinations of an institutionalized Gilligan—addled by thorazine and EST, his thoughts trapped somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Finnegans Wake—to the Great Gatsby secret life of “Lovey,” to the mad fantasies of the demented (and insanely horny) Professor X, the book continually amazed me, each chapter outdoing the last as it drove towards its satisfying but enigmatic conclusion. Although this brief description of Gilligan’s Wake may make it sound too preciously pomo, Carson isn’t doing this as a mere gimmick—he has something to say. The book is actually quite moving, and often at the most surprising places.

Lucky Wander Boy, on the other hand, has a more localized approach to nostalgia and the American experience. Its lone protagonist is a self-professed geek, a dot-com wage slave obsessed with the video-game arcades of his youth. Quietly writing a book he calls the Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments—in which games like Pac Man and Donkey Kong are mined for philosophies on modern life—our hero becomes obsessed with a “lost” game called Lucky Wander Boy. (Imagine a platform game designed by a Japanese Zen master with a fondness for Kafka and Beckett.) As his obsession spirals out of control, his sense of proportion begins to collapse, shortly followed by his sense of reality. With its perceptive take on Gen-X nostalgia, its insights into pop-culture and geek obsessions, and its loopy philosophical observations, Lucky Wander Boy is perfect for a reading audience founded by Douglas Coupland, sharpened by Chuck Palahniuk, and nourished by comic books and manga.