Review of Tenth of December by George Saunders

I read a lot of speculative fiction and like to alternate it with
reading classic fiction. Occasionally, I'll dip a toe in contemporary
literature, sampling some authors like Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy,
or George Saunders. Such forays often leave me feeling lost at the
crossroads of Depression Street and Anxiety Boulevard.

What is it about contemporary literature that makes it so
disquieting? Is it the schadenfreude to be derived from the
artful, horrific dissection of societal problems, neuroses, and
suffering? You damn right.

Certainly the lines have blurred between science fiction, fantasy,
horror, and other genres, but you can still expect scifi to be fairly
clean and simple. A typical short story explores an unusual
idea, future extrapolation, or scientific possibility in 5,000 words or
less. A few obstacles, then a resolution, one way or the other.

But reading a typical short story by George Saunders is like getting
on an elevator that hasn't passed inspection. "Trust me," it
says. "Huh, a talking elevator," you say. "You'll be fine," it
says. But you almost never are fine. Going up? The first few floors
can be hilarious, even exhilarating, and the characters are
adorable. You're loving the ride. Then you hear a strange
clunk. Someone has injected some Darkenfloxx into the air. The
carriage shudders, and then you're falling, rapidly approaching
terminal velocity. It's not just the terror of falling. It's the
crushing sadness of knowing that someone you love is going to
die... Or maybe they won't. (Think good Scarlett O'Hara thoughts.)

If you have anxiety tendencies like I do, a Saunders story can cause
you to put your hands to your face like Stefon on "Saturday Night
Live." This is just too bizarre, you giggle to yourself. Then it's got
you by the short hairs. Saunders is an acknowledged and highly
decorated master, like Harlan Ellison.

The eponymous story appeared in the October 31, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

Reading the "Tenth of December" collection at about the same time as
The Atlantic editor Scott Stossel's January/February 2014 feature, "My
Anxious, Twitchy, Phobic (Somehow Successful) Life," puts me in an odd
frame of mind. Stossel says he is subject to many phobias, anxieties,
and fears, and has coped over the years via psychiatric therapy,
drugs, and booze, yet he hasn't found a good answer. Although we live
in an uncertain world and a stressful society, he feels a lot of the
problem is certainly chemical, yet science can't seem to alter these bad
chemicals in a way that's very helpful or permanent. Gulp. Shades
of Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions."

Review of Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi

A happy and prosperous New Year!

Just getting around to reading last year's Hugo winner, "Redshirts."
Besides being a popular hit, this small masterpiece demonstrates that
the author knows all the rules of scifi writing and how to break
them, much to our delight.

The hilarious Prolog kicks off with one of the security detail officers on the Intrepid, a Star Trek-like starship, being killed by a massive, carniverous Borgovian land worm while on an away mission to the planet below. Before his untimely demise, Ensign Davis keeps having thoughts that don't seem to be his own. They also seem to be
violating the rules all fiction writers are held to by their editors, namely, to avoid background exposition at all costs. We immediately
suspect that Davis is being taken for a ride a la "Stranger Than Fiction," wherein he finds himself to be the main character in a novel over which he has no control of the narration happening to him.

Soon we learn that all the "redshirts" (junior officers) aboard
the Intrepid are aware of a high mortality rate on away missions. New
recruit Andy Dahl and his friends begin to seek the reason
why. The Intrepid is like any other ship in the fleet, yet its
mortality rate has gone up sharply. (Could this be due to another
demand we see from editors and producers, namely, that constant
obstacles be thrown in front of the characters to keep the action
going?) Gradually they become convinced they are fictional characters
in a television show from the past.

After an entertaining and laws-of-physics-bending trip to the year
2012, they meet their lookalike actors and manage to convince the
writers of the tv show to stop killing them off. Satisfied, they
return to their spaceship and live happily ever after. But people in
the real world are left shaken by the impossible turn of events. Did
they really meet these visitors from another world, or have they simply
gone crazy? The novel concludes with three touching and
thought-provoking codas, as each character contemplates the example
set by his or her fictional doppelganger.

Review of The Darwin Elevator by Jason Hough

Darwin Elevator by Jason M. Hough begins with an interesting mystery
about the appearance of a mysterious space elevator delivered by a
ship in high earth orbit above Darwin, Australia. What looks like
a boon for humanity is soon overshadowed by a plague that wipes out
almost all humans, except for some who basically become vicious
subhuman monsters. Close proximity to the elevator provides immunity,
so Darwin has become the last city on earth. Unfortunately, the aura
of immunity around the elevator seems to be disappearing.

The main characters are fairly likable: Skyler Luiken, a
rough-and-tumble Dutch pilot who runs a crew of immune scavengers, and
Tania Sharma, a scientist working for the richest man on earth, as they
try to unravel the connection between the elevator and humanity's
ultimate fate.

About a third of the way in, the preponderance of action became a
"Walking Dead" episode, and most of the crew had been killed in
various battles. Zombie's not my favorite genre, unless it's the
subtle kind, like "Les Revenants," so I lost interest every time the
story turned away from the basic mystery, flipping through pages until
the plot resumed. The novel does build momentum, however, with the
action increasing in intensity toward the ending and a new discovery
encouraging us to come back and read the sequel.

"Darwin Elevator" does everything right, but it seems to lack what I
look for in a story: real human emotion (other than fear or
adrenaline-revved survival instinct). Despite the fact that a plague
has turned most of humanity into animalistic zombies, it doesn't
really tell us what we can learn from the story of Darwin, or what it
means to be one of the last original humans. Not surprising,
since this is probably just the first installment in a series.

Mars Calling!

It was thrilling to watch the launch of the MAVEN mission to Mars from Cape
Canaveral yesterday. We wish the spacecraft godspeed during its 10-month-long
journey to the Red Planet. Third Flatiron is excited that its next anthology will be
Mars-themed.  "Redshifted: Martian Stories," is due out December 1, and we'll be
dedicating it to the MAVEN scientific team, many of whom are based right here in Boulder, Colorado. Here's the great cover design by Keely Rew and the lineup of authors:



Table of Contents
Eurydice in Capricorn by Neil James Hudson
Make Carrots, Not War by Maureen Bowden
Colorblind on the Red Planet by Vince Liberato
The Journal of Miss Emily Carlton by Lela E. Buis
The Canary and the Roach by Ian Rose
For Sale: One Red Planet by Jeff Hewitt
Cadaver by Robina Williams
No Ravens on Mars by Martin Clark
The FALCON by Jaimie M. Engle
First Step by Jason Lairamore
MarsMail by Michael McGlade
And a Pebble in Her Shoe by Kara Race-Moore
The Read Planet by Chuck Rothman


The recognition this week of the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's
assassination also brought back some sad memories. The image of little
Caroline Kennedy taking her mother's hand to comfort her brought tears
to my eyes.

Wikipedia.org notes: On November 29, 1963, following the death of
President Kennedy, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson issued Executive
Order 11129 renaming both NASA's Merrit Island facility and "the
facilities of Station No. 1 of the Atlantic Missile Range" (a
reference to Canaveral AFB) the "John F. Kennedy Space Center". He had
also convinced the governor of Florida to change the name of Cape
Canaveral to Cape Kennedy.

Confusion ensued, and ten years later, Cape Canaveral became Cape
Canaveral again. Well, at least for this week, it'll be Cape Kennedy
in my heart.

Review of Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross

It's always frustrating to contemplate the vastness of the cosmos,
especially in view of the fact that we can't travel faster than
light. That means covering the distance to even the nearest star would
take years at best. Add to that the fact that it's improbable we could
even travel at even a small fraction of that speed. Add to that fact
the fact that we are fragile beings and that seemingly empty outer
space is really filled with deadly radiation.

Oh, well, we must give up on space operas, right? Not if you're
Charles Stross. His latest effort, "Neptune's Brood," takes place in a
time when humans have staked a claim on a 50-light-year span of space
and can carry out business in pretty much real time. The fun part is
finding out how have they have done it. I was reminded of Vernor
Vinge's "A Fire Upon the Deep." In his universe, the speed of light
slowed down the further toward the center of the galaxy you got.

Part of Stross's solution is to make humans a lot less fragile. Almost
everyone has replaced their biological cells with cybernetic
"mechanocytes" that can mold to different shapes and hold the memories
and personality of humans. But it still takes years to physically
travel to the next star system. A network of laser beacons has been
arduously established over a 2,000 year period so that if a person
wants to travel abroad, they merely ship their "soul" aboard a laser
beam to the next beacon and assemble a body at the other end. It's
very costly, of course, so an intricate system of "slow" money has
been set up to finance colonization, while "fast money" is used within
local systems. FTL remains only a dream, and everybody knows it.

The action of Neptune's Brood takes place when forensic banker Krina
Alizond-114 stumbles upon the biggest swindle the galaxy has ever
seen. Recently arrived in the Dojima System in search of her sister,
she dodges assassins and sails aboard a Church of the Fragile ship
(crewed by a literal skeletal crew and headed by Lady Cybelle, its
Borg-like priestess) to the water planet of Shin-Tethys. Forced to
assume the shape of a mermaid and diving to the impossible depths of
Shin-Tethys, Krina meets her sister and learns that their mother, the
original Sondra Alizond-1, was involved in the destruction of a
legendary colony thousands of years ago. And now she is coming to
collect the spoils of the long con, even if she has to destroy her
daughters to do it.

Krina finds an ally in the form of a privateer who survived the colony
destruction and holds an ace up his hairy, ratlike sleeve that can
defeat the evil Sondra. We suspect that it must be FTL, but it
isn't. Quite nicely done, Charles.

Boulder Rides Out the Flood

I was a Rainbow Girl in my tweens. Wasn't there some sort of promise by God that He
wasn't going to be doing this stuff all the time any more?

Close friends and neighbors wait on Wagonwheel Gap before FEMA escorts them out.

After surviving heavy hail in late June, my neighborhood in Boulder is still trying to get its head around the latest flood, in which a stationary
rain system dumped around 18 inches of water on a town that usually gets that much precip in a year. There've been all sorts of arguments about whether this is a "hundred year" or "thousand year" flood. My husband calls it "the Milluge." There's a great explanation of how it all came down last week by Bob Henson of NCAR.

 Grave of the fireflies: Before and after photos of the wetlands near our home.

I finally found an open library where I could return my overdue books. The main and branch libraries all suffered water damage. Luckily, all fines are forgiven.



Only in Boulder: to have a special raincoat and umbrella for your pooch, even though it only rains every 100 years.

As the sun begins to shine on the saturated soil, I'm seeing our friends the "dog people" and their companions emerge after a week of cabin fever to see how everyone is and to talk about what happened to them during the flood. And hey, Boulder's Fringe Festival begins this weekend. There's no telling what will happen there, but it'll be hard to out-quirk the weather.




Reach Out

We were saddened to hear of the death of Joseph Howlett, retired owner of the Jamestown Mercantile, whose house collapsed on Thursday, when flooding first began. Joey always put a 10-gallon jug of water out for thirsty bikers like us who struggled our way up Lefthand Canyon on weekends. Rescue efforts for Jamestown, the Boulder Foothills, Lyons, and Estes Park continued all week, as FEMA volunteers and Chinook helicopters ferried people to safety. Planet Bluegrass in Lyons was completely leveled when the St. Vrain River exploded over its banks. The owners vow to restore the festival grounds in time for next July's RockyGrass Festival.

But the Greatest of These Is Charity

We've all heard stories about how long it takes to get funds to people affected by disasters and tragedies such as 9/11 and Aurora.  Boulder musician and teacher Julie Gussaroff and fellow musicians are starting to give benefit performances, with all the proceeds going *directly* to rescue efforts and county residents affected by the flood. The first official "Wake of the Flood" benefit concert is scheduled for September 28 at the Fox Theater on the Hill.

Meanwhile, Congress threatens to cut food stamps and shut down the government on October 1st. Not really a good time, folks. . .

Review of The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan

When we first meet Anais, she is a mess. She is being shipped off to the Panopticon, a home in Scotland for children who are in the care of the government, while authorities determine whether she attacked a female police officer and put her in a coma. The story uses a setting based on a design for institutional buildings invented by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham.

Fifteen-year-old Anais has been transferred from place to place and family to foster family all her life. She has a history of violence, drugs, and crime, and she has no self control. She might be schizophrenic. They say her mother committed suicide. She thinks she may just be an experiment and that she is being watched by the Panopticon. She wants her mother!

We can't help but care for Anais, as she goes from one grim situation to another, because she is brilliant and lovable despite her tough exterior. As a parent, I wish I had known the phrase her social workers use constantly, "It's not optional."

Author Jenni Fagan makes liberal use of Scottish slang and obscenities to punctuate the thoughts and fantasies of Anais and the friends she makes in the kiddie slammer. You'll probably need to have the Urban Dictionary close by to get past page one.

For all those who think nothing can be done about child abuse, rape, prostitution, and poverty: they're wrong. We've got to believe that--that Anais gets out, even as she finally realizes she has to deal with life alone.