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Sun, 20 Jun 2004

Ambient

— SjG @ 4:44 pm

Jack Womack, 1987, Grove Press Books.

It seems to me that there is a grand poker game among speculative dystopian writers, dating back to Huxley, Zamyatin, and Orwell, if not even farther, with each player trying to out-play the previous extreme. If this is indeed the case, Burgess pushed out Orwell with the low spade in the hole, only to have the table taken over by a bunch of young, cocky beatniks and science fiction writers: Burroughs, Ellison, Bradbury, and Vonnegut. Then Philip Dick started dominating the game, even while Brin, Atwood, and Walter Miller, Jr played a hand or two. Things changed again when Varley and Gibson anted up. Varley called, Dick folded, then Womack saw Gibson and raised him an apocalypse or two. While there are still hands to be dealt, it seems that Womack is currently the player to beat.
Womack clearly has a debt to a number of the other players. Most often noted is Burgess, as much of Ambient is told in future dialects of English; also noteworthy, perhaps, is Chandler, who taught many of the players the rules of the game in the first place. But Womack brings an amoral ruthlessness and matter-of-fact brutality to his tale that outdoes his predecessors. It’s not that Womack’s dystopia is just a nasty place, it’s that there’s concerted, unrelenting nastiness oozing out of every alleyway, human oriface, and gun barrel. Do we find any sympathetic characters? Not a one. Do we still flinch at the outrages they endure? Yes, we do. Ambient is so over the top that it would be easy to dismiss it as an exercise in exaggeration and sick bravado. But it’s clear that it was written with a sense of (warped, black) humor, which allows us to stay with the story through otherwise untenable situations.
Yeah, there’s nothing like a good dystopian science fiction novel. Always make me want to write a few of my own. Fortunately for you, that desire fades quickly away, and I go play a few rounds of Counterstrike or something.

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Wed, 9 Jun 2004

The Gentleman from Indiana

— SjG @ 4:41 pm

Booth Tarkington, 1899, from the Gutenberg Project, read as an e-book from BlackMask.com

A well told, if conventional, love story and tale of life in the emerging American Midwest. Tarkington is at his best when he shows the changing character of places as they transition from obscure hicksvilles into “modern” American cities. He writes with the optimism of the American west, seeing the good in the evolution of the towns and the improvement of the populations, all the while giving occasional sad nods to the passing of a slower, more formal time.
This particular book lacks particularly deep characters, but nevertheless delivers an interesting tale of educated East-Coast people and their impact on a small, southern Indiana town. These outsiders come into the community and immediately set about changing it with their college-educated form of intellectual imperialism. Yet though though they come in as a force of change, they too are changed, and become a inseparable parts of community themselves.
Tarkington, in this book, shows a clear belief in the intrinsic quality of people; it is not classist, per se, because there are good but ignorant people; it is not based on race, nor is it based overtly on religion. But there is a morality that underlies his characters, and a good character is Good with a capital G regardless of minor flaws, but a bad character is Bad, and probably irredeemable. It’s interesting, since we don’t really see a similar belief expressed in The Magnificent Ambersons; there we find far more ambiguity and subtlety, or at least a development and evolution of consciousness among the characters.

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