VALIS - Philip K Dick

I waited way too long to write this, so my memory isn’t as clear as it could be.

I recently read The Man in the High Castle, which could by some metrics be considered Philip K Dick’s least Dickian work. By those same metrics, VALIS might be the most Dickian of his novels, at least among those I’ve read. To make this statement less meaningless, I should probably define what I mean by Dickian, which is the use of science fiction tropes to evince distinct veneer of unreality. Blurring of this sense of truth is universal in Dick’s fiction, be it the phony police station and paranoid hunt for replicants in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the uncertainty of which characters are truly dead in Ubik, or the personality-splitting Substance D in A Scanner Darkly. VALIS dials this up further by making Dick himself the narrator and protagonist of the book, despite the narrator and the protagonist being two different people(though also not).

The book ostensibly stars Horselover Fat, a recovering drug addict and amateur theologist who becomes convinced of having received information from a sentient pink light beamed into him by a satellite called VALIS. The book functions as a kind of first person pedestal story, with Dick discussing (ang tagging along on) Horselover’s quest for deeper truth and embroilment in strange conspiracies pertaining to early Christianity and time dilation. Only Horselover Fat is also Philip K Dick—his first and last name, in fact, being crude translations of Philip (from the Greek) and Dick (from the German). This is something Dick himself admits in the first few pages but then glosses over for most of the book in an elegant display of gaslighting.

The plot is light and hard for me to remember in great detail, but it is almost besides the point. Dick is somewhat like Raymond Chandler in that his fiction is more about mood than story, and that is particularly true in VALIS (perhaps that also makes it his most Dickian?). There is some stuff involving a rock star whose child is a reincarnation of Christ and subliminal messages through an arthouse film, but mostly the drive is the interaction between the characters, who (another Dickian touch) are erudite deadbeats, intelligent and eloquent but too damage to function in society.

I wouldn’t recommend VALIS as an introduction to Philip K. Dick’s work, but for those who have read several of his books and enjoy his style, it’s worth reading.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I first read The Man in the High Castle in grad school. It wasn’t my first encounter’s with his fiction (that was, bizarrely, the largely forgotten We Can Build You) but I hadn’t read much of him at the time, and while I liked it, it didn’t grab me the way his other seminal works did (especially Ubik). That’s a bit surprising, as I’m a sucker for alternative history, and on rereading I found it displayed many of Dick’s usual strengths: nuanced characters understated but eloquent description, heady concepts. There is always an iceberg quality to Dick’s fiction, in that you sense you’re seeing only the small portion of the story peeking above the surface, while a mountain of detail lurks below, unexposed but supporting the visible tip.

The premise of High Castle is pretty well known: the Japanese and the Nazis won World War 2 and now fight for hegemony in a conquered America. Interestingly, the characters are all fairly unremarkable people: a Japanese bureaucrat, a store owner specializing in Americana fetishized by the Japanese, a fired metalworker, a judo instructor. As always with Dick’s work, tiny, fascinating details lurk in the corners: in this case, it’s society’s fascination with the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that guides the behavior of many of the main characters.

The titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, only appears at the very end, though he looms throughout as the author of a book called the Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which posits an alternative alternative history in which the Us and Britain (but not Russia) won WW2. The Nazis are as expected not fans (they never did like books much), and attempt to assassinate him. Such attempts originally drove him to retreat to the eponymous High Castle, but one of the characters (Juliana Frink, Judo instructor) finds him living in a regular house, having resigned himself to whatever fate may bring him.

It is here that Dick’s universal fascination with the nature of reality—a cornerstone of essentially all his fiction—peeks through, just a little. Despite being a book about an alternate reality, the nature of what is true doesn’t feature in High Castle the way it does in, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or A Scanner Darkly. That is, we presume throughout the novel that what we are reading is, in the context of the story, true. It is only at the very end, when Abendsen reveals to Juliana that he used the I Ching to compose every bit of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This leads Juliana to suggest that the I Ching actually used him, and through his words told a fundamental truth deeper than reality: that Germany and Japan actually lost the war. This is such a Dickian idea—that there exists a reality more true than the factual universe the characters are experiencing, and that such a truth mirrors (but is distinct from) the universe of the reader—and I’m embarrassed to say I missed it the first time around.

Dick truly is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth century. I’ve always bristled at the notion of some genres as more inherently “literary” than others, but if that term means anything, it is the idea of words and stories being able to convey a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. And Philip K Dick’s novels do that as well as anybody’s.

Foundation and Empire - Isaac Asimov

Second in the Foundation series, Foundation and Empire feels more like a discrete story than the original, which was comprised of numerous shorter works stitched into a larger narrative. Empire is still not a single story, however, but two. The first story, speaking most directly to the book's title, concerns the last gasp of the first Galactic Empire as an ambitious general sets his sights on Terminus, the home planet of the first foundation. The story plays out much like those from the original book, where a wise and level-headed protagonist shepherds through the successful unfolding of Seldon's plan.

It is the second and longer story of the book, The Mule, where things get more interesting, for it is here where the Seldon prophecy appears, finally, to break down. The cause of this breakdown is the eponymous Mule, an enigmatic warlord with mutant powers to great and specific to be detected by the broader sweep of Seldon's psycho psychohistory. The story thus plays out more like a mystery, as hidden forces pull at the husband and wife protagonists, dragging them into the maelstrom of galactic conquest and goading them to seek Foundation's salvation from its would-be conqueror.

The prose remains vintage Asimov, though feels a bit more refined than that of the first book, perhaps because the stories themselves were more comprehensively planned. As always, it’s the ideas themselves that sparkle, the words and characters serving mainly as vessels.

Foundation - Isaac Asimov

It’s been a long time since I last read Foundation. I picked up the series back in high school and was entranced, burnign through the four novels I thought comprised the complete series in a matter of months (there was actually a fifth book already published at the time, but it wasn’t around when the collection my dad had was printed, so I was unaware of it until recently). I recalled the overall premise very clearly, and could visualize a few key scenes, but much of the details escaped me, which gave rereading the first book a nice sense of rediscovery.

The premise, put briefly, is this: a mathematician named Hari Seldon uses a new branch of science called psychohistory to predict future events with great accuracy. He deduces that the Galactic Empire in which he resides will collapse in a matter of centuries, leaving in its wake thirty thousand years of barbarism and savage warfare. Such an event cannot be stopped, but its intensity and duration can be curbed through the preservation of knowledge that will otherwise be lost in the calamity. To this end, he creates his Foundation, two planet-sized organizations on opposite ends of the galaxy, charged with sheltering the galaxy’s scientific and philosophic treasures for a millenia before ushering in a new golden age 29,000 years ahead of schedule.

Seldon is the most recognizable character in the series, but he’s far fro mthe most prominent, considering he is dead for all but the first couple dozen pages. Indeed, the substantial timescale of the story means that no one protagonist sticks around for long; the first book alone has three protagonists over its 150-year span (excluding the first chapter, in which Seldon himself qualifies as protagonist). These are Salvor Hardin, a crafty politician and the first true ruler of Terminus; Limmar Ponyets, a shrewd trader; and Hober Mallow, a merchant who sees the key role commerce can play in the Foundation’s survival.

The jump between characters is not particularly jarring, because in all honesty they aren’t particularly different. Each is an intelligent and percpetive skeptic who uses reason and a keen understanding of human psychology to think his way through a “Seldon Crisis,” defined as a key inflection point in history that Seldon had predicted in his calculations. None of Asimov’s characters are particularly complex, though they have enough humanitry in them to make you root for the good guys and take pleasure in the downfall of the bad guys.

The writing, like the characters, is servicable but not particularly inspired. I had read a lot less when i first encountered these books, and I was surprised at how plain the prose is. Still, Asimov is an able craftsman ,and while ther language doesn’t sing, it hums along nicely, and clearly conveys the story, which is his true strength.

Novels have three legs: story, characters, and language. Generally, a book can be good with only one, but needs at least tw oto be great. However, Asimov performs a feat by writing a great book with only one leg to stand on. His power of imagination, and the richness of his ideas, are enough to carry Foundation even while the language and characters are nothing special. I look forward to picking the next in the series back up, and plan to buy the fifth and finally learn what happens.

The Collected Fantasies Vol 1: The End of the Story - Clark Ashton Smith

Clark Ashton Smith is not a name I’d come across until recently. Though he is widely regarded as one of the three biggest voices to emerge from the Weird Fiction world of 1930s pulps, alongside Lovecraft and Robert E Howard, I would argue he has become the most obscure of the three. None of his works have received the major motion picture treatment, nor do any of his characters or stories have the universal name recognition of a Conan or a Cthulhu.

The reason for this may be that, unlike Lovecraft and Howard, who focussed the bulk of their talents and energy on short fiction, Smith was a poet above all, and seemed to consider prose writing as a side project of sorts, somethign to help pay the bills. It was, however, a very fruitful side project, since he wrote and published well over a hundred short stories in his lifetime, with 53 of them published in the seminal journal Weird Tales alone. (By comparison, Lovecraft, widely seen as the author of a sizable canon, wrote only 65 stories total).

Comparisons with Lovecraft are inevitable, and would not have been ill-received by the author—the two were friends and mutual admirers—but it is a gross oversimplication to call Smith’s work Lovecraftian. For one thing, he covered a much wider range of genres than Lovecraft, who dabbled in satire and fantasy on a couple of occasions, but for most of his literary career remained firmly fixed in the horror camp, veering only between cosmic and terrestrial strains.

Smith, on the other hand, wrote stories of high fantasy that hewed closer to Fritz Leiber or Robert E Howard, as well as sci-fi of a Bradburian or Vancian bent. Whiel certainly he favored plot over characters, as did Lovecraft, Smith’s creations are more full-blooded, bespeaking a greater comfort and familiarity with humanity than the perennial misfit Lovecraft ever managed (though Smith’s dialogue could be as stilted as Lovecraft’s at times, a fact that is so ubiquitous among pulps it seems more like a stylistic choice than a defect). Romance also gets more mileage in Smith’s writing, with characters professing love for one another and engaging in canoodling that, while hardly enough to go toe-to-toe with Tropic of Cancer, goes far beyond anything I remember from Lovecraft.

Smith is most regarded now for his prose style, rather than his stories, and it does bear a pleasing grandiloquence, though I think Lovecraft gets short shrift in this regard, since he too could cobble together gravity-defying towers of archaism-stuffed csubclauses that imporbably remained aloft. I enjoyed Smith’s writing now, but I would have absolutely loved it at 20, when my passion for earnest if strained metaphor had reached full flower (probably better I didn’t find it until late,r though; it would only have spurred on my worst impulses)

All told, Smith’s stories were a good find, and I intend to track down the second volume soon, Eventually, i suspect I’ll get all of them.

Death's End - Liu Cixin

Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem Trilogy reminds me of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. Both tell stories massive in scope, where the focus is less on the arc of an dividual character than that of the universe itself. Each tells a continuous story over a long span of time, with a new central character for each installment, while the characters who set the initial story in motion—Ye Wenjie in The Three Body Problem and Hari Seldon in Foundation—loom large in the mythos but are never much more than background characters.

In Death's End, the main character is Cheng Xin, a physicist from the common era who plays a critical role in the shaping of the Human-Trisolarin conflict. The story picks up after Luo Ji's discovery of Dark Forest Deterence, wherein a message identifying the location of the Trisolarin and Human solar systems is used to leverage mutually ensured destruction and stave off war. Cheng Xin is nominated Swordholder to succeed Luo Jito, meaning decision that in the event of a Trisolarin attack she will bear the ultimate decision to initiate the message and doom both worlds. The Trisolarins call her bluff, and her failure to act results in humanity's enslavement.

From there, the book takes a series of odd and fascinating turns. Rather than turning into a rebels versus empire tale of conflict, it explores a vast range of philosophical and scientific principles, carrying Cheng Xin across a sweep of time and space that dwarfs the not inconsiderable scope of the previous two books.

One of the most unusual aspects of Death's End is its tone. The other two books were contemplative in their own right, favoring reflection over action, but increasingly the story becomes in a away a meditation on it’s own smallness. I was struck by its melancholy, an emotion I don’t see reflected very often in literature. Tragedy is used a lot, but tragedy is grand and operatic. Melancholy is small and quiet and sad. In this sense, the latter half of Death’s End reminded me more than naything of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. As in Shute’s novel, the characters in Death’s End face an apocalypse—indeed, one on a much larger scale than the one featured in On the Beach —with more resignation than anguish. There is grief, to be sure, but it’s grief of a muted, elegaic sort. It’s a bold stylistic choice to end a three-part epic, but I think it was the right one. Liu’s work has always felt like classic sci-fi, which dwelt more in the realm of ideas than characters, and the detached way in which it depict’s humanity’s end and potential new beginning seems apt.

The Dark Forest - Liu Cixin

The Dark Forest picks up right where The Three Body Problem left off, with humanity’s research into cutting edge physics hamstrung by sophons, leaving Earth at the mercy of the incoming Trisolarin fleet, set to arrive in a little over 400 years time. However, in other ways the book feels like a departure from the first one, taking the story in a looser, more philosopihcal direction.

Set in various instances occurring over a 200-year period, the book leaves behind most of the characters from the first novel, focusing instead on Luo Ji, a disillusioned physicist who begins the book as a womanizing gadabout. A chance encounter with Ye Wenjie, the woman responsible for alerting Trisolaris of Earth’s location and thus setting off the invasion, leads to Luo Ji learning the fundamental axioms of Cosmis Sociology, a new field Wenjie has theorized.

Some time later, Luo Ji is named one of four Wallfacers, a UN-sanctioned program that imbues four humans with incredible latitude to conduct their own projects in secret, with the end goal of defeating Trisolaris in the upcoming Doomsday Battle. Wallfacers are instructed not to reveal their true intentions to anyone, and to even act in deliberately deceptive ways, as the sophons can read or hear any information conveyed to others through speech or writing. Luo Ji squanders his power by living a life of secluded luxury, before changes in circumstance force him to ponder an actual solution.

Luo Ji’s story is the backbone of the novel, but there are many more characters and plot threads interwoven around him. The Dar kForest is a rich, sprawling book, and while sometimes the dialogue can feel a little stilted—perhaps a result of translation from the Chinese, which I would imagine makes it very toug hto capture cadence precisely—the writing is evocative. The book poses bold ideas with confidenc,e and all of the solutions proposed feel logical and real. I can’t speak to the physics used wit hany authority, but Cixin’s reputation for researc hsuggests a solid underpinning, even in places where the technology presented ventures far beyond what is currently possible.

Vingt mille lieues sous la mer (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) - Jules Verne

Vingt mille lieues sous la mer is the fourth Jules Verne novel I’ve read (the third in the original French), and I must say, it’s been my least favorite so far. This surprised me, as the subject matter is something I’m inherently interested in, and while my readings of Verne have never strayed that far form his greatest hits, Vingt mille lieues is arguably the greatest hit of them all (I’d argue Voyage au centre de la terre is second, and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours third, though I admit I’m basing this on my own perception and little else).

Verne could be considered the prototypical nerd, in his use of narrative to obsessively catalog scientific minutiae. Whatever the story, you can bet that at some point, Verne will digress from the action at hand to write 500 breathless words about the origins of igneous rock, or the taxonomic details of coral. In some cases, this is more feature than bug—in de la Terre à la Lune, for instance, when his recurring treatise on ballistics lends credence and weight to what would otherwise be a spare narrative.

The key difference, I think, is that in Lune and Voyage au Centre de la Terre, there is an underlying urgency to the story that keeps Verne’s digressions in check. The cannon needs to launch at the precise date and time in order to hit the moon, and Axel can only spend so much time poring over subterranean fungi before Professor Lidenbrock drags him on to their ultimate destination. In 20,000 lieues, however, the story is essentially a chronicle of Professor Arronax’s time on the Nautilus, which Captain Nemo cruises about the oceans on a whim. Without that forward drive, Verne has no incentive to rush to any one conclusion, and as a result, the detours become the trip. Much of what happens feels like it is of no real consequence, and most events seem primarily positioned to allow Verne the opportunity to spout scientific facts and theories, some of more merit than others (Atlantis makes an appearance). In other Verne works, the opportunity to wax scientific is only part of the reason for events—there’s generally some forward plot momentum going on too.

And the descriptions of fish, my god, the descriptions of fish. There must be close to a dozen passages that are little more than taxonomic litanies of every bit of flora and fauna in a given sea. This is particularly frustrating for a non-native reader, as the names of many creatures he describes fall outside the scope of my e-reader’s built in dictionary, and by the third or fourth fish, I’m just too tired to bother looking them all up on my phone. As such, I’m stuck deducing what he means from the description of each animal. It doesn’t help that he tends to use less common names for some animals (though perhaps this is an issue of age more than erudition). Notably, he uses the word squale for shark in most cases, when a modern French speaker would opt for requin.

This all sounds a bit nit-picky, and maybe it is. Despite the book’s faults, there were still moments I truly enjoyed ,and Verne retains his capacity to make his own wonder at the world infectious. And Captain Nemo is a good character, intriguing in his sombre nobility. He is an honorable man who does dishonorable things, which is about as much nuance as you’re likely to get in a Jules Verne character (like Lovecraft, Verne is the kind of genre fiction writer who eschews character development almost entirely in favor of raw story, and whose vision is so honed and rich that he gets away with it).

Valérian et Laureline: L'Integrale Volume 1 - Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

Valérian et Laureline is a long-running French comic book series. I’d only learned of it recently, but it’s apparently quite the institution in Europe, and has served as inspiration to everything from Star Wars to The Fifth Element. Since much of it was published as short stories in serial magazines like Pilote, categorizing it as a book is somewhat arbitrary. The Ottawa Library has it in a multi-volume omnibus format (L’integrale), so that’s how I’m reading it.

Valérien is a spatio-temporal agent from Galaxity, the Earth-based capital of the Terrien Galactic Empire in the 28th century. His job is to travel back in time and prevent temporal paradoxes caused by careless or malicious time travellers. The series is gleefully pulpy in tone, full of technobabble and concepts with no pretense of grounding in physics. I admire hard science fiction for the intricacy of its concepts and its spartan adherence to known laws, but I have room in my heart for the goofy stuff, too, and Valérian et Laureline definitely falls into that camp.

Volume 1 contains three multi-issue stories: Les Mauvais Rêves (Bad Dreams), La Cité des eaux mouvantes (the City of Moving Waters), and L'Empire des mille planètes (The Empire of a Thousand Planets). The first two follow the heroes’ efforts to thwart a rogue spatio-temporal agent Xombul at various points in history (the 11th century and 1986, respectively). The third story shifts to a distant galaxy where spatio-temporal travel is unknown, and Valérian and Laureline act less as time cops than Star Trek-esque explorers.

The plots are messily enjoyable, full of twists and turns, and the dialogue is full of pulpy banter and excessive exposition—a trait that would be irritating in other concept,s but is so fundamental to the pulp sci fi of that era that it becomes part of the fun. There are some funny bits scattered throughout. My favorite is the gag of having Laureline describe her version of past events to Valérien, while the image shows what actually happened. I look forward to Volume 2.

The Three-Body Problem - Liu Cixin

Despite a teenage obsession with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, I’ve never been particularly drawn to hard science fiction. As such, I approached the Three-Body Problem without much in the way of expectations.

The story concerns scientists in the People’s Republic of China over the last fifty years, as they grapple with the discovery of alien life. The aliens, dubbed Trisolarans, live a harsh and precarious existence due to their planet’s incomprehensible orbit around three suns (a peculiarity from which their name is derived). They discover Earth thanks to the efforts of Ye Wenjie, a disillusions astrophysicist who sees in alien life a means to curb the excesses of humanity, which she believes cannot be trusted to govern itself. She partners with an idealist billionaire named Mike Evans, with whom she forms the Earth-Trisolaris Organization (ETO), a body with the traitorous objective of ensuring Earth falls under Trisolaris’ control.

Much of Trisolaris’ history is explained through a cryptic video game called Three Body, which was designed to recruit new members to the ETO. Through it, we learn biological quirks of the Trisolarans, and gain a crash course on the titular three body problem, which involves efforts to calculate the interplay of three different objects through orbital mechanics.

As a genre, hard science fiction is traditionally more concerned with ideas than characters, and the Three-Body Problem follows this template while providing just enough personality to keep the protagonists engaging enough to follow. The dialogue can come across as clunky, though I hesitate to criticize this since it may be an effort to capture the rhythms of Chinese in translation. There is also a lot of blatant exposition in the dialogue, a common trope of hard sci-fi that I find a little irritating. However, it was neither frequent nor egregious enough to pull me out of the story, and much of the science is handled deftly enough for novices to absorb through the text without descent into clunky footnotes.

In contrast to the sometimes stiff dialogue, the prose is slinky and lyrical, yet understated, its crisp, clear sentences filigreed with illuminating images. Liu peppers the text with similes where other writers would likely employ metaphors, a decision that I wondered might come from the story’s Chinese origins—this is merely speculation, since I speak no Chinese, but the smattering of Asian poetry I’ve encountered in translation is similarly filled with such devices.

The Three Body Problem is book one of a trilogy, and very much feels incomplete on its own. However, it drew me in enough that I will be sure to seek out the sequels in the near future.

De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) - Jules Verne

This book is insane, even by Jules Verne standards.

The year is 1865. The civil war has been fought and won, and the Union’s crack team of artillery scientists is 1at a loose end. They’ve spent the last several years developing new and exciting ways to kill each other, and now they’ve got a miserable stretch of peace on their hands. Fortunately, their intrepid president, Impey Barbicane, has a solution: build a giant cannon and shoot a bullet at the moon.

Of course.

The United States jumps on Barbicane’s proposal with gusto, and soon the whole country has shoot-the-moon fever. Not to be outdone, a charismatic Parisian named Michel Ardan joins the venture by volunteering to ride inside the bullet. His thoughts on the whole thing are wonderfully cavalier—when asked how he’ll return to Earth once his bullet—a decidedly one-way mode of transport—collides with the moon, his response is simple: he won’t.

The story is punctuated by Vernian digressions explaining in copious (an uncharitable writer might say tortuous) detail: the origins of the solar system, the basic physics of firearms, the composition of explosive powder. These asides emerge sometimes through dialogue between the characters, sometimes form the narrator himself. While their insertion is somewhat artless, I have to say that I find these asides charming, in part because the intervening years have rendered some points startlingly inaccurate. At one point Ardan argues with a naysayer over whether or not there is any air on the moon. Ardan insists there is, and the flow of the narrative leaves little doubt that we are to assume he is correct. The following passage gives a good sense of the tone, which straddles a thin line between staying true to its premise and celebrating its absurdity:

The crowd returned its attention to their hero, whose adversary remained silent. Ardan continued his assertion, speaking without aggression or vanity. “You see, my good sir, one cannot deny with any real certainty the existence of an atmosphere on the moon. Such an atmosphere is likely somewhat thin, but the scientific consensus is that it exists.”

“Not on the mountains,” barked his opponent, not wanting to cede the point.

“No, but in the valleys, and there should be no problem for heights of a few hundred feet.”

“In that case, you’d better take care! The air’s going to be very thin!”

“Good sir, surely there’s enough for one man! What’s more, should I need to ascend, I’ll do my best to conserve it and only breathe on special occasions!”*

Mostly, though, the book’s charm shines through simply because Jules Verne loves science so. much. His outbursts feel like the literary equivalent of that dorky kid in math class with his hand thrust halfway to the ceiling, straining to be picked by the teacher to answer a question about quadratic functions. It’s that earnestness that carries the book.

The narrative itself is slight, with only the most rudimentary plot: some eccentrics decide to shoot a bullet at the moon, they build a cannon,they fire it, the end. Books from that era in general show less interest in “raising stakes” to hold the reader’s interest, allowing for digressions and a detached narrative tone that can often seem almost heartless, as if the plight of the characters was not a story to be viscerally felt, but an experiment to calmly observe and record. Verne, with his perennial interest in science, leans into this trait more than most.

The language itself I find hard to judge. As French isn’t my native tongue, I’m less attuned to changes in style and more or less accept the prose however it’s served to me. However, Verne’s earnest humor shines through even for a non-Francophone, and I found it genuinely fun to read. It may feel like a minor work compared to Voyage au Centre de la Terre, but it’s worth picking up.

*Passage translated from the French