Book Review - All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders

I have just read the new novel All the Birds in the Sky. It is Anders's second novel, after Choir Boy, though this is the first work of hers I have read. It is by wrenching turns an epic story, an escapist fantasy, a romance, a mystery, an examination of our relationship with nature, and a damning portrayal of human intelligence.

The novel begins with two children, Patricia and Laurence. Both of them have a strange experience, at the age of six: Patricia has a conversation with several birds, who ask her the question, "Is a tree red?" Laurence builds his own two-second time machine, and meets a group of science geeks who consider this a sort of rite-of-passage. Then Patricia and Laurence meet, at the age of thirteen, and begin a life-long exploration of each other's talents, thus providing a microcosm of a much larger conflict, the worldwide conflict between magic and technology.

The first third of the novel, that of their middle-school years, is an overly sentimental and unnecessarily violent look at the stupidity of adults. Patricia and Laurence are both social outcasts, they are mistreated by their parents and by their teachers, and they are stalked by a man named Theodolphus Rose for reasons that are never made clear. In order to escape the world's cruelty, Patricia turns to magic and Laurence to technology, and we of course ponder the question, "Can they learn to understand each other?"

What is the difference between magic and technology? Simple: the knowledge of how it works. To Patricia, magic is just another kind of technology, as long as she is willing to listen to what the different living things of the world are saying in their own languages.

Put simply, it is a novel that depicts the war between machines and nature, and shows how both scientists and witches try to solve the earth's problems, only to find that they get in each other's way. The problem with the novel is that it is never "simple." It is overly complex and confusing, in spite of its short length. I see it as a failed escapist novel, one that depicts the world as aimless and cruel while the author attempts to find a meaning to life that is never clearly defined or felt. The question "Is a tree red?" is repeated several times in the novel, and appears to act as a plot device, but it is a dead-end sort of plot device, like Alex DeLarge's frequent playing of Beethoven recordings in A Clockwork Orange. Late in the novel, when the world is (quite literally) falling apart, Laurence says to Patricia, "Remember when we were kids? And we used to wonder how grown-ups got to be such assholes?" And he answers himself, "Now we know," referring to all the stupid acts of destruction that the two of them, along with other people whom they trusted, have recently brought to pass. The novel is about a war, but it depicts the war in the most predictable ways possible. The book uses complexity as a substitute for depth; no matter how many magic tricks and trans-dimensional devices people can invent, those methods ring hollow when the characters cannot decide what they actually care about.

The title All the Birds in the Sky could be seen as a symbol for all the different living things in the world that human beings will never have the time to understand. Yes, we yearn to know what this world really is made of, what we really need to do with our lives - but this novel does not hold still long enough to hear itself think. In spite of its experimental nature, the story consists of a number of cliches: the evil assassin disguised as a middle-school teacher, the parents sending their kid to military school, the cool hangout where people drink mystical puke-provoking potions, the novel suddenly wrapping itself up with a completely unnecessary battle scene that kills off half the characters. The most drawn-out cliche (also the most amusing) was the sex scene. What is it with contemporary authors describing the two characters' naked bodies for pages on end? Does she really think we do not know what a human body looks like? Yes, it is a scene of two people who have known each other for years, and suddenly they make love for the first time, but let's face it, this has already happened millions of times in literature!

In her acknowledgments, Anders actually wrote, "I really hope you guys enjoyed this book. If you didn't, or if there was stuff that didn't make sense to you or seemed too random, just e-mail me and I'll come to your house and act the whole thing out for you. Maybe with origami finger puppets." To me, this statement betrays either a general lack of interest in her own work, or a lame desire to sound modest. In my opinion, Anders either is not optimistic enough to write a convincing escapist novel (in which case she should have written a tragedy instead), or she could not decide what aspect of this world the characters were trying to escape from in the first place. Like Ready Player One, All the Birds in the Sky is a mishmash of science-fiction and fantasy, attempting to reconcile the two genres without identifying what it actually is about those two genres that makes them so endearing.

Book Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

I have just finished reading the oddly enjoyable Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Graham-Smith. It is the first novel of his I have read, although I have certainly heard of his other works.

The novel is written with a biographer's dispassion, summarizing the defining episodes of Mr. Lincoln's life, based on a series of well-repressed journals that Lincoln penned throughout his life, as well as on interviews that the narrator conducted with several unnamed people - who, I suspect, are vampires.

What follows is a nearly seamless blending of American history and dark, gothic fantasy. It is at once a brilliant satire on revisionist history, a wonderful tale of mythological creatures, and a subtle set of jabs at what we think we know about our beloved 16th president. Lincoln is, after all one of the most controversial presidents in our history. He led an attack against what was essentially one half of his own country; he was the first president to be born in poverty, with very little formal education; he was the first president to be successfully assassinated; and in spite of the fact that more books have been written about him than about any other president of this country, he remains today a subject of debate, inspiring authors even today to raise new questions about him, attacking his supposed rational for trying to "preserve the union." There is even a webpage - and I apologize in advance for bringing this up - that questions the existence of Abraham Lincoln:

http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2013/03/did-abraham-lincoln-exist/

But, enough about that. What about the vampires?

Lincoln's hatred of vampires began with an event that took place before his very conception: his father, Thomas Lincoln, witnessed his own father, Abraham Lincoln Sr., being brutally murdered by a vampire. Thomas Lincoln tells young Abe of this terrible day, and then Abe watches in horror as Thomas Lincoln suffers at the hands of another vampire who demands redress (Shylock-style) for a loan which Thomas failed to pay back. Abe makes a wooden stake, confronts the vampire, and stabs him through the heart. But Abe's thirst for vengeance is not quenched, and so he sets off on a journey to rid the country of vampires - only to find that this mission is far more difficult than he would ever have imagined. Abe (thus the author refers to Mr. Lincoln throughout the book) eventually finds help, from the most unlikely source: another vampire.

Henry Sturges, vampire and 16th-century Englishman, claims to be the only survivor of the doomed Roanoke Colony. He carefully advises Abe that some vampires prefer to be left alone and to do as little damage to society as possible, while other vampires crave dominance over the human race. "Judge us not equally," he tells Abe; "We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others." After this life-changing encounter, Abe begins to receive letters from Henry, instructing Abe to hunt down certain vampires who threaten innocent citizens of this country. These letters increase in number, and this crescendo is paralleled by another crescendo, that of slavery spreading and gaining political justification (as with the Dredd Scott Case, which is mentioned briefly).

Eventually the two issues meet, in a revelation that is at once horrifying and strangely logical: the vampires are in league with the southern confederates. Vampires are planning to take over the country, and the southern slaveholders have agreed to help them in return for a few positions of power in the new undead regime (actually, I do not think Grahame-Smith ever gives a name to the supposed new country that the vampires wish to create; perhaps it would just continue to be called the U.S.A., and other people around the world would come to think of "America" as synonymous with "Vampire"). The vampires like the slaveholders, because the partnership gives them first dibs on the flesh of slaves. Thus, it is with the help of super-powerful "vampire soldiers" that the South successfully fends off Lincoln's armies for four blood years.

Now, I can see a problem here. So easily we can come to the conclusion that we might already be seeking: here's the proof that the Confederate States of America was evil. They were allied with vampires! Aha, I knew it! Those damned slaveholders had a deal with the devil, right there, it's finally just black and white. Yes, it's very easy to say that about a lot of things. Maybe it would be better to think of all southerners as people who are bedfellows with vampires. Swap "southerners" with "Jews," and you would more or less have what a certain Austrian said eighty years ago. The book approaches this idea of absolutism, but does not carry it through entirely, and this ambiguity is one of the book's finest qualities. "Judge us not equally," Henry's refrain goes. There are shades of grey in the humans of the story, just as there are shades of grey in the vampires. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival, eventually comes to support Abe. Jefferson Davis is portrayed as a vile man, but also as a victim of supernatural creatures who give him very few options.

Whatever its messages, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a splendid novel. It is fast-paced, brilliantly researched, and includes many early "daguerreotypes" that show the dark-eyed vampires lurking in the midst of our history. I do not think there is much didactic intent in the novel. The vampires are not models of virtue, nor are they evil incarnate. They are simply higher forms of life (or "un-death"), making attempts here and there to interfere with human society for their own gain. Abe's rashness to kill the vampires gets him in trouble more than once. Toward the end of the novel there is heartbreaking scene. Abe, having just lost his youngest son to a poison administered by a vampiric assassin, admits an apologetic Henry Sturges to his office. Yet anything Henry says will only incense Abe more, reminding Abe of how vampires, whether southern or abolitionist, have taken over his life and turned it into a waking death. Abe grabs his axe and tries to kill Henry, and Henry takes the icon and snaps it in two. When a man has lost so many things that used to define him, what is left? Where does the man begin and his surroundings end? When Abe resolved to spend his life destroying vampires, did his life become a force of destruction, dooming any possibility of peace for the man?

Because that image of destruction, however fantastical, epitomizes Lincoln's plight when he became president. In order to keep his country, he had to attack it. Can this plan of action ever be truly justified? The killing of approximately one million American people, just so that a few more million people could be free? If southern slaveholders were so narrow-minded as to enslave their fellow man, then why did Lincoln want so badly to keep them a part of his own country? Might we have been better off without them? Most of the countries in Europe had already abolished slavery by the 1860s; I'm sure the Confederate States would have freed them eventually, though every day of slavery was another day of godlessness.

I think Grahame-Smith's reason for choosing Lincoln as his novel's vampire hunter (as opposed to, say, Jack Kennedy, or Alexander Hamilton, or Cab Calloway, or Regis Philbin), was to show that resolution is simply a part of life. We have to make decisions sometimes. Lincoln made a great and terrible decision when he chose to wage the Civil War. Grahame-Smith focuses on that decision, enhances and exaggerates it, when he portrays Lincoln as a man who has accepted a double-life. I think that, in a way, Abraham Lincoln was the 19th-century Peter Parker, pushing himself to do more than one man would ever be expected to do, while still trying to lead a normal life. No one will ever know if he did the right thing, but one thing is certain: he will never be forgotten.

Judge us not equally. Because how can we ever be sure who a person really is?

Book Review - Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline

I have just read the novel Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline. It is his first novel, and takes place in the near-future, in the 2040s. It is a dystopian novel, and, paradoxically, a utopian novel as well.

I want to start by saying, for better or for worse, that Ernest Cline is perhaps the biggest nerd I have ever encountered in my life. Throughout the novel he shows an encyclopedic knowledge of video games, from Atari to online multiplayer, as well a prodigious knowledge of cult films and television programs. He makes me sound like a surfer from Santa Cruz. Sporadically during the first half of the novel, he would suddenly halt the plot dead in its tracks to summarize the storyline of a famous game or film, or to remind us of exactly how long a TV show was on the air. It was cute the first time, but after a while I was tempted to reach my hand into the past, grab Mr. Cline, and pull him the hell out of his basement.

The story is one that we have all seen before, though perhaps not on such a grand scale. In the future, energy is scarce and everything is polluted. The world is bleak and dirty, and people escape by plugging into a virtual reality world called OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersion Simulation; as a librarian, who must keep up with all kinds of acronyms for my job, I was impressed by how many acronyms Cline managed to come up with). OASIS is, in fact, an entire galaxy of thousands of different planets, each with simulations that represent video games, movies, board games, historical periods, novels, brothels, bars, terrains, and damn near anything else you could think of. Every user creates an avatar with customizable appearance, and that avatar can gain abilities and credits by taking on "challenges" that were created by other users. People connect to OASIS by means of a special visor and haptic gloves.

The premise is all too familiar. In today's world of YouTube, Netflix, X-Box, World of Warcraft, etc., Cline's creation is remarkably easy to envision. The novel succeeds by means of Cline's spectacular imaginative power. What it lacks, however, is a decision whether to treat this world as science-fiction or as fantasy.

In our library, Ready Player One is labeled as Fantasy. The plot does, indeed, resemble an epic quest from Tolkien or Simon R. Green: the creator of OASIS, a man named James Halliday, has died and bequeathed all of his riches and all of OASIS to the person who can solve a series of puzzles hidden in the virtual realms and collect the supreme "Easter Egg." A young orphan named Wade Watts escapes his miserable surroundings by logging on to OASIS as much as possible, and he is the first to take a step successfully toward finding the mythical egg. Soon Wade, along with a handful of allies (whose names he does not even know, since they have only met online and share only their avatar names), are racing to obtain the egg before an evil corporation obtains it first and turns OASIS into a for-profit amusement park for the very rich. Wade must face riddles, demons, dragons, space battles, and hand-to-hand combat as he continues in his quest.

I've read that the difference between fantasy and science-fiction is that, whereas fantasy asks us to suspend our disbelief and experience the impossible while knowing it is not really there, science-fiction attempts to back up its ideas with enough facts that it becomes plausible to us, and we recognize that those ideas are already a part of our real world. While the premise of Ready Player One is plausible enough, the action of the novel is mostly the stuff of dreams and video games. Thus, I am left with the feeling of an author telling me, "Yes, life really is a dreadfully dangerous thing, but you can always imagine something better and then the world won't seem quite so bad - until you go outside again and receive a fresh reminder." When I first saw the cover of this book, I imagined the story as something where a person must play his way through a series of fantastical-yet-real challenges - a story that inspires us to rise to the challenges of everyday life, and that teaches us not to be frustrated by failure. But Ready Player One achieves neither of these effects. It paints the world as a harsh and futile place, and any taste of success in the novel feels contrived and forced.

This book has been called a "nerdgasm," a "cyberquest," one that "pleased every geeky bone in my geeky body." Yes, they are already working on a movie adaptation of it - directed by Spielberg! Holy cow! Perhaps that name will draw enough people to the theaters, so that it is not a box-office bomb like Ender's Game or Hugo. This book panders to an audience that "knows" how to seek virtual solace as a substitute for a real connection to the world. Richmond Lattimore once wrote of the playwright Euripides, "Even his own invention, bright optimistic romantic comedy, becomes drama of escape. Usually, escape is impossible. He believe in a world he disliked. His gods represent this world." No matter how much we want to escape the world, the only thing to which we can escape is more of the same world. The language and culture might be different, but the limitations are the same.

Perhaps I am being hypocritical. I play computer games sometimes, and I used to play them a lot more than I do now. I write my own fiction, much of which involves fantasy and science-fiction. But Ready Player One is an exciting, epic story that tells me nothing about the author. Every "challenge" in it, every "game-within-a-game" that Wade plays through, is taken directly from a preexisting work - and half of them are very old video games. Cline spends pages describing a tedious PAC-man tournament, a battle against a computer player in the old "Joust" game, "Tempest," "Black Tiger," and more. A video game is a simulation of a story, which is a retelling of something that might have happened in real life or simply come out of the programmer's imagination. And Cline actually describes the events of the gameplay - in other words, the novel becomes an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. Whatever meaning existed in the original game is lost now; Cline exploits the sense of challenge in a game, just as a means to make the eventual victory over the machine seem as if the gamer has earned it.

The book did not bore me. It was exciting. The second half of it moved a lot quicker than the first half, and I get the feeling that Cline was becoming more and more comfortable as an author as he went on. The dialogue was very 21st century colloquial. My favorite example is when Wade says to the evil corporate executive, whose cronies are derogatorily called "Sux0rz," "You and the other Sux0rz call go f--- a duck." Very classy. One hundred years from now, I doubt people will be able to appreciate half of the references and phrases that Cline uses.

What I wanted from this book was the feeling that I was experiencing a real adventure, one probably wasn't real but one that I wanted very badly to be real. I guess I was aiming too high, as usual. The best fantasy adventure novels I have read so far are The Golden Compass, Howl's Moving Castle, and the Akira manga series by Katsuhiro Otomo. Akira, now that I think about it, is a more successful blend of science-fiction and fantasy: set in a Neo-Tokyo, it portrays a group of teenagers who must adapt as their world becomes a battleground for a set of psychic juggernauts, who struggle to control their powers as they destroy the lives around them and are in turn manipulated by various forces. The action of the graphic novel is impossible, but I can believe in it the way I believe that a person's psychological and social struggle can bring him to do wonderful and terrible things beyond anyone's predictions.

Ernest Cline is, clearly, a very intelligent person. His plot is intricate and well-imagined. This will not be his last work, and I have high hopes for him. What I want is for him to put himself in the story. Ready Player One seemed to imply that the reader needs to stick a quarter in and enjoy the ride, through the kaleidoscope of gameplay and virtual artifacts, all the while knowing that we are being pulled through a preconceived storyline that has just a few endings, all of which have already been programmed in. What I want from Cline is, to quote Neo from the end of the The Matrix, "a world where anything is possible."