No Time Like the Future

Something for Cyber Monday?

Review of Labor Day by Joseph Farley

With Labor Day, Joseph Farley, a longtime fixture in Philadelphia’s underground literary scene, has raided parts previously unknown and come back with a science fiction novel, of all things, worth a second and even third reading. Of course, for those familiar with Farley’s poetry, it’s hard enough to imagine the poet behind the emotionally complex yet dispassionately composed Longing for the Mother Tongue working in common prose, let alone the most popular of popular genres. And yet, despite the whiff of pulp inherent in genre fiction, we should remind ourselves that on the same shelves where so much of tomorrow’s hamster bedding resides we also find the works of Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, George Orwell, Anthony Burgess and Ray Bradbury.

Of course, this is only to say that even the most sophisticated readers among us should keep an open mind. And, indeed, in the case of Farley’s novel, they won’t be disappointed if they do. What is delightful about Labor Day is, in a word, how thoughtful a book it is, without sacrificing an inch of plain, giddy Twilight Zone-style dystopian fun. Farley seems to have had a hilariously good time upending the conventions of both speculative fiction and literary pretension, without letting these ends eclipse the kinetic drive of a book with enough pulse to stir those looking for an exciting read over the holidays.

But perhaps the most interesting part of all this is how Farley strikes this balance: science fiction, like all genre work, has its conventions, and its fans expect, nay, demand them—to the point that (as yours truly can attest, having worked as a pro comic-strip writer) such readers will often react ferociously if a story swerves even slightly from the comfort zone of their cozy clichés. Farley, however, fiddles with the convention of convention itself, assembling Labor Day from a hodgepodge of smart readings and re-renderings. We find bits of 1984 in how the novel’s protagonist, Tom Fried (and do notice the dual pronunciation here, by the way), finds himself under constant surveillance; we also have something of an homage to The Metamorphosis, insomuch as Fried’s world is dominated by man-size cockroaches; and we even discover random references to key scenes from other works, as when a couple of police in Labor Day kick the bejesus out of an old drunk, à la A Clockwork Orange.

Still, to merely name these easy allusions isn’t to do Labor Day full justice. Labor Day ’s middle-age author, it seems, wasn’t satisfied until he had appropriated pieces of everything he grew up with, including one work that is about as sci-fi as an alarm clock: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Nor is this allusion nearly as oblique as that made to Burgess’s “bit of the ol’ ultraviolent.”  Arguably, any reader who isn’t reminded of the Draytons by Fried’s near apoplexy at learning of his daughter's plans to bring a cockroach home isn’t actually reading. Moreover, the scene comes after Farley makes it expressly clear that the world of Labor Day is, quite literally, post-racial as far as homo-sapiens are concerned; Fried, for instance, is described as having a “flat nose … almond-shaped eyes … [and] black curls,” as are all the other humans we meet throughout the novel. So, while at first glance it might seem Sidney Poitier’s Dr. Prentice is being compared to a man-size cockroach in Labor Day, Farley’s book is quite obviously aiming for something else altogether.

No doubt, race is a standard theme in American sci-fi. Don’t believe me? Consider whether ET is just an extraterrestrial, or whether our several definitions of alien are coincidental. No, by convention the bulk of today’s mainstream American sci-fi seemingly can’t keep itself from pitting a majority of lily-white humans against a malevolent minority of humanoids with a few features unnervingly dissimilar from humans’ (think Star Trek’s Klingons); at its softest, this implicit racism takes the form of a token alien friend like, say, Star Wars’ Chewbacca. But we must also remember that Han Solo wastes a good number of other others at the Mos Eisley Canteen before picking up Luke and company.

In Farley’s Labor Day, in contrast, the humans, including the protagonist, are the disenfranchised, oppressed minority segregated to the outskirts of civilization by man-size cockroaches. What’s more, the roaches are themselves, absurdly enough, descended from human scientists who spliced their genes with cockroach DNA to help their offspring survive a nuclear war. As for roach behavior, in Labor Day a cabal of elite roaches introduced late in the novel can only be compared to how the characters in the soap opera Dallas behave; these malevolent roaches are not so much a race in Farley’s novel but a class, more akin to Russian oligarchs than anything else.

Thus, it is important to clarify here that Farley’s treatment of race in Labor Day isn’t just a great example of how to turn a genre convention on its head but of how to do so while remaining socially conscionable. Granted, the novel opens with a scene in which Fried dines on putrefied rat yet is more nauseated by the sight of a fellow diner, a cockroach with “multifaceted eyes like an insect” who “slobber(s) a dark liquid onto (his) lobster.” But Farley eventually pushes Fried past his fear of the other: in an attempt to visit his soon-to-be in-laws at their high-rise apartment, he witnesses the deplorable conditions the building’s roach residents deal with daily. Not only is the elevator a death trap; the building’s security guard isn’t even remotely interested in guarding the place, and there’s filth strewn everywhere. Indeed, the prospects look so bleak for these roaches that Fried’s own poverty pales in comparison. (And that’s saying a great deal, considering Fried’s luxuries consist of eating a rotted rat once a month and occasionally buying a patch for his battered shoes).

So, eventually, the novel shows us that not all roaches are equal, and not all are the affluent oppressors Fried initially assumes they are, a revelation that has plenty of real-world resonance not only in terms of race relations but because of what Fried subsequently realizes on the heels of this epiphany: in actuality, his fight always was with economic exploitation and the select few in his world who benefit from oppressing the rest of the population, be those oppressed individuals human or roach. Furthermore, the lucky few in question consist of those Dallas-style roaches mentioned above: a handful of roach plutocrats planning a Nazi-like final solution for Fried and his fellow humans. So if we sum the entirety of Labor Day’s retake on standard sci-fi treatments of race, only Farley’s rich roaches have anything in common with the lily-white humans of mainstream sci-fi; in contrast, our protagonist, his friends, his family, and most of the roaches we meet decidedly do not.

Then again, all this talk of Labor Day’s racial themes might give the false impression that it is exclusively a serious book. In fact, it’s not, or rather, it is only serious insofar as you want it to be. If you’d rather forego focusing on all the poignant and socially relevant subtext, Farley so expertly pushes social satire into the realm of laugh-riot you’ll be far from bored. For example, early on he offers this bit of over-the-top absurdity:

The horizontal [subway] cars were filled with horizontal tubes. The cars resembled rolling beehives. Riders were forced to slide into tubes headfirst. They rode in stacks to the next station, smelling the sweat and other human excretions of former tube occupants. If the passengers wished to be discharged at a station, they had to push a button. If it worked, they were ejected at the station. If it did not work properly, there was an emergency button that could be pushed. If that button was also broken, a commuter could end up riding inside his or her tube for hours or days before anyone noticed. It was not infrequent for passengers to pass out or become hysterical from claustrophobia. This was not always a bad thing, for if the passenger was subsequently diagnosed as truly being claustrophobic or having post-traumatic syndrome, that individual was issued a special pass, enabling future transport on a car with seats.…

All this is to say, then, that Joseph Farley’s Labor Day isn’t just a book that riffs on and mines the best of the past half century’s literature, film and pop-culture; it plays with these pieces in such a way that we’re made to think even as we’re laughing ourselves silly.

Labor Day
By Joseph Farley
Peasantry Press
$29.99 HC; $10.99 PB
206 pages

Village of the Damned Idiots

Next door to my place of work is the Barnes & Noble that faces south on Union Square, and toward the rear of the fourth floor of this—by New York City standards—monstrous bookstore is the table of books “favorited” by the bookstore staff, a selection far more interesting than the pay-to-play tables that crowd the front entrance. It was from this table that I plucked Stephen Brijs’ The Angel Maker. The selling point? According to the blurb, the Brijs’ variation on themes featured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, of an outside world looking in and failing to understand the true meaning (and importance) of events that unfolded behind closed doors. The Angel Maker reflects mightily on this argument between appearance and reality through the story of Dr. Victor Hoppe, a victim of biology and circumstance.

Dare one discuss any aspect of this book without ruining its plot? This is no small challenge for a novel that literally throws the mystery of its story in the reader’s face on the first page when the good doctor arrives in his boyhood hometown after a long exile with three tiny and terribly ugly children in tow. Hoppe is barely communicative on the why and wherefore of his absence, his return, and origin of the little deformities. As the story switches back and forth among narrators, from local townsfolk to the children’s nurse, from Hoppe’s colleague to the good doctor himself, the wall between what is hidden within and suggested without is breached for the reader and, presumably with truth in hand, we are set free.

In Jekyll and Hyde, that truth is ugly and Darwinian. Beneath every top-coated and becaned Edwardian lives a murderous, club-wielding simian. What Utterson and the reader will reckon with by the novel’s end is a science recast as evil-smelling green, smoky potions little different from the mood-altering opiates of sunny England's shady dens, threatening civilization as they knew it. It is the science of the Gatling and Maxim gun, of exploded bodies from long-range munitions. A pretty picture it was not in Stevenson’s time and, as we look back, all seeming just a run-up to the atrocities of World War I.

The Angel Maker suggests an equally ugly future, albeit with a little less science fiction sturm und drang. At first, readers are drawn to think Brijs is berating us with a novel of biotechnology run amok when placed in the hands of the misdiagnosed and mistreated. But scientific prey is not what is being stalked, although there are perfunctory jabs at scientific careerism. No, the true culprit of The Angel Maker is religious ignorance, and Hoppe’s ancestral home of Wolfheim is rife with it, from the parish priest and local abbess to Hoppe’s housekeeper and the triplets’ mother. The ignorance of basic biology, largely replaced by Christian palliatives, reveals the dependence of Wolfheim’s natives on an education that has no basis in the scientific understandings of the late 20th-century, an education that precipitates all of the disasters that ensue, from Hoppe’s Frankensteinian experiments to the untimely deaths and literal bodily misuses of those who come within his reach.

What most disturbs the American reader of Brijs’ condemnation of religious parochialism is how shockingly universal that ignorance may well be. As an addict of left-leaning blogs, I’m too familiar with the remarkable stupidities of America’s true believers (favorite bumper sticker alert: “Dear Jesus, please save me…from your followers”). What I know less well are the dangers associated with Europe’s own breed of religious tunnel visionaries. Is Brijs’ Wolfhem of the 1980s a literary convenience? Has the appalling lack of knowledge of reproductive biology been done away with in the more rustic climes of the European Union? Or does such ignorance prevail today, perhaps gaining in ferocity as in the U.S., paving the way for European versions of Texas school boards and Creation Museums?

At a minimum, Brijs answers Stevenson when he suggests our better angels are not the moral credos of religion done right. While there is at first reason to think The Angel Maker a profoundly religious book because of the energy with which it takes up its Christian themes, it is, if anything, a profoundly anti-religious work—and not specifically anti-Christian at that—because it holds nothing but disdain for the education in misperception any religious weltanschaung demands.

Palimpsest

By Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Books, 2009)

Through incredible energy and talent, Catherynne M. Valente has been steadily building a name for herself pretty much since the day she started publishing. Her two-book story cycle, The Orphan's Tales, was at one point perhaps her best-known work, nominated for several awards and winner of a few, too. That was until Palimpsest was nominated for a Hugo, while Amazon's editors deemed it the best science fiction and fantasy novel of 2009. All of this success, however, still doesn't quite prepare you for—and perhaps disarms you against—the fact that Palimpsest is kind of freaky.

As the gossip preceding its publication went—possibly lifting a phrase from the author herself—Palimpsest is about a sexually transmitted city; that is, you're only allowed to visit if you find someone who has already been there and have sex with them. When you fall asleep afterward, you go to the city in your dreams; and if you are so blessed—or so unlucky?—after you visit it once, the waking world seems much diminished, and you do everything you can to return. Aiding you is that everyone who has visited is marked with a tattoo—perhaps small, perhaps large—that is itself a piece of a map of, a part of, that dream place. So you spend your time moving away from the life you knew, looking for those other people, for those tattoos, to connect with them, just to stay, in your dreams, in Palimpsest, as long as you can. The plot of the book follows four people who arrive in Palimpsest at the same time, first relating what each of them are willing to do just to get back—and then what happens when they discover that they are connected in a deeper way than they first understood.

Those of you who aren't habitually science fiction or fantasy readers—and maybe some of you who are—may be turning away at this point. You should not. Because Palimpsest, to me, works best as an extended metaphor: for addiction, disease, and profound loss; for the ways disparate people build their own tribe based on a common need, a dissatisfaction that overrides their differences. It's a fantastical book about some very real things, and in its fantasy, comes perhaps closer to letting the reader touch the real than a more realistic portrayal of the same thing ever could.

Which is another way of saying that the best reason to read Palimpsest is because it's absolutely beautiful, heady, hopeful and sad. This isn't just because of Valente's muscular imagination, her seemingly inexhaustible ability to create image after arresting image; it's also because she writes as well as anyone out there. The idea that literary fiction has all the best writers is as false as it is shopworn—obviously, there are great (and lousy) writers in every genre of both fiction and nonfiction. But Valente is a particular feast for those who love language and literature. To me, her writing is folkloric, medieval, Romantic, and at the same time, startlingly modern. There aren't many people who can write sentences as eerie and gorgeous as hers. How gorgeous are they really? I can hear you asking. You'll just have to find the book and find out.

P.S. Here's the word palimpsest in Merriam-Webster:

1 : writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased. 2 : something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.

Yes, I had to look it up. You're welcome.

Dicked Over and Over

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of Philip K. Dick, who for some reason, I skipped right over during my geeky high school years (with the bizarre exception of A Scanner Darkly).  I’ve since ploughed my way through Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner), The Game Players of Titan, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, and presently, We Can Build You. And yet what has come to fascinate me most respecting this reading binge is not the literary qualities of Dick’s prose (it’s pretty workmanlike, truth be told) or the depth of his philosophical insights (they run quite deep—scary deep, in fact), or the theater of the absurd plotlines.  These aspects of his work have their respective merits—and demerits—but I’ll leave those for others to ponder.

No, what has caught my attention is the fact that all of Dick’s writings are still in print!  We’re talking here, folks, about some 35 novels and short story collections.

This is no small matter for a science fiction author or indeed any author operating in a “pop” genre.  As a long-time reader of science fictions—coming up on 30 years, in fact—the observation over time of what manages to stay on the shelves or what gets pulped offers more than enough opportunity to comment on and complain about our economic, educational, an cultural tastes and inclinations.

Dick has become such an opportunity. It’s not that he’s bad.  It’s more a question of is he that good. But let me contextualize…

I first realized all of Dick’s work were in print when I headed into the Barnes & Noble on the north end of Union Square to pick up novels by a British contemporary of his, a writer whose own febrile imagination struck similar chords.  At the time, the only novel I owned by John Brunner was a chewed-up edition of Last Stand on Zanzibar.  Re-reading it, I noted how easily the passions that Dick poured into his works on the politics and technologies of mind control were matched by Brunner’s acid reflections on overpopulation and government bureaucracy.

Part of the “New Wave” movement in British science fiction, spearheaded by writers like Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Last Stand is a true sci-fi tour de force: chapter titles are “coded,” while multiple storylines are heavily interlarded with narrative experiments, from disjointed newsfeeds to floating conversations run together. Despite the distinctly 1960s-ish characters and their concerns, you can’t help but admire the sheer energy of the novel’s Herculean effort to immerse the reader in the—for lack of a better term—freneticism of the world Brunner imagines.

The world has been overrun by bodies—human ones, of course--precipitating explosive acts of mass violence by those gone over the edge who try literally to clear the physical space around them. Before there was going postal, there standing on Zanzibar.  In the hubbub of disembodied party banter and screaming news flashes that weave in and out of the more straightforward story of a dormant spy who, without warning, is “activated,” Brunner’s experiments in writing do more than describe lonely crowd effects: after all, why show you a world on edge when he can have you feel it?

Does it work?  Sometimes, and sometimes not, but Brunner is ambitious, which explains my decision not only to replace my ratty version of Last Stand but to see if I could also get hold of his other major novels, Shockwave Rider and The Sheep Look Up.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, where’s your science fiction section?”

“Top floor, on the far right wall as you come off the escalator.”

“Thanks. Ah, here we go.  Ok, let’s see: A…A…Anthony, Asimov, B…B… Bradbury, Brin…C…  What the hell?  No Brunner…?  Let me check again. Well, how do you like that? No Brunner.  I wonder what else is here.”

“Whoa…”

And that’s when I saw it. An entire shelf and a half given to books all  similarly trimmed, bound, and designed: apparently every novel published by Philip K. Dick.  Some I knew from reputation already: the ones I listed, as well as Ubik and VALIS.  But there were any number that I had not heard of.  But that didn’t seem to matter.  Someone at Vintage Press and the estate of Philip K. Dick saw gold in them thar hills and decided to put all of his novels—good and bad—in print.  Most, if not all, did not even have their type reset, but instead were little more than scanned pages from earlier printings, resized and newly covered to fit the collector’s edition effect.

Personally I can’t help but admire a good marketing tactic when I see one.  It certainly has kept all of Philip K. Dick’s novels in print (and me buying them). But I mourn for John Brunner, whose better novels deserve better fates.  So I guess it’s off to the American Book Exchange for me.