Via Boing Boing this morning, I found an interesting New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik on the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick has long held a certain amount of fame for writing the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based, but in recent years he’s also become increasingly respected by the Keepers of the Literary Standard, as evidenced by the anthology reprints of his much of his oeuvre in the ’90s and the recently published Library of America omnibus edition of his most significant novels. As Gopnik says, “Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fueled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three.”
Now, I must be honest, all I really know of Dick’s work is some of the movies that have been based on it. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner, but I was very young at the time, and it confused the hell out of me. I remember being baffled that it didn’t follow the movie more closely, and Dick’s tendency to invent words caused me no end of frustration. I’ve always intended to give the book another try, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
In any event, Gopnik’s essay — which covers Dick’s fascinating and tumultuous life, and also offers some insightful criticism of his work — is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject. However, the point I really want to address with this entry actually turns on a single paragraph:

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OK, you know you’ve been reading too much Harry Potter when you’re proofing a technology-related document at work, you start reading a sentence that begins, “Defense against viruses,” and your mind sees it as “Defense Against the Dark Arts.”
And I’m still only on Book 5. Somebody help me…

I think I must be the last person in the Northern Hemisphere to jump on the Harry Potter bandwagon. (Or should I say the Hogwart’s Express? Nah, that would be way too clever and precious, and may even induce vomiting in some of my more sensitive readers…) I simply haven’t had much interest in reading children’s books, nor have I been able to quite fathom all the grown-ups I’ve seen on the train who seem utterly engrossed by them.

However, I’m a sucker for a good pop-cultural groundswell, and with the final book and fifth movie in the series debuting in the last few days, and the constant buzz of excitement coming from practically everybody I meet, well, I’ve finally given in. I started reading the series for the first time a few weeks back (I just began Book 5 today), and yes, I did attend one of the midnight release events on Friday. I’ll be writing more about my experiences with Harry soon.

In the meantime, I was really amused to see that not even Sith Lords are immune from hype. No matter what one may think of J.K. Rowling’s writing style or the stories themselves — Harold Bloom, I’m thinking of you, you sour-pussed old killjoy snob — you cannot deny that this weekend was a remarkable, watershed event. Millions of copies of the same book were distributed all around the world in a single weekend, a good percentage of them in a single night, and a significant number of those books were read cover-to-cover before Monday morning. That’s almost unbelievable. Has there ever been any other mass entertainment that has come so close to being a ubiquitous experience, i.e., something that everyone was doing? Maybe the mini-series Roots back in the ’70s, or the initial surge of Star Wars‘s popularity (although both of those played out across longer timeframes than this single, three-day orgy of reading…), but I’m not sure even those things were so big. It’s truly mind-boggling, and I doubt it will ever be repeated.

(Credit where it’s due: the photo came from here — I also like the one of Vader in the shower — and there’s an explanation of that photo set here.)

Just in case anyone is keeping track, I finished Slaughterhouse-Five the other night. It was the first time I’ve ever read it, and the more I think about it, the more I think I liked it. I’m not prepared to say much about it yet — I’m afraid my brain’s literary-analysis lobe has atrophied quite a bit since I finished college and embarked on a steady diet of non-fiction and lowbrow genre crap — but I plan to write more after I ponder it for awhile. In the meantime, however, I recommend this classic American novel for those who, like me, missed reading it in school.

I’ve now moved on to a collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction called Welcome to the Monkey House. As with Slaughterhouse, I’m enjoying it. Some of it, anyway; I find short-story collections are, by their very nature, pretty hit-and-miss, with some stories doing more for me than others. There are enough hits happening, however, that I think I’m becoming a definite admirer of Kurt Vonnegut. But there is one thing about him that I’m not getting. All the cover blurbs on these ’70s-vintage paperbacks of mine rave about how funny he is, and I’m afraid I just don’t see it. Humor is, of course, highly subjective and, I believe, often dependent on historical context — in other words, I’m suggesting that maybe this stuff was knee-slapping in the era of Vietnam and Watergate but no longer carries the same punch. Or maybe it’s just me. Either way, I’m not laughing much at Vonnegut’s writing. I find his words truthful, elegant, frequently powerful, often clever, but not funny. He does have a way with an image, though. Consider this line from his story “Who Am I This Time?”:

…his eyes (were) still on her. Those eyes burned up clothes faster than she could put them on.

Oh, yeah, I like that. It’s got a little noir flavor there, which makes sense in the story’s context, it perfectly converys the man’s expression, and it’s a line that stays with you after you read it. Very nice.

But I still didn’t laugh.

As long as I’m in a complaining mood today anyway, I may as well mention that one of the reasons I’m not a big fan of so-called “literary fiction” is the way authors of this stuff so often play with the standard rules and techniques of fiction writing. Presumably they’re trying for some kind of effect, and also presumably fans of LitFic appreciate and enjoy this; me, I just think it comes across as pretentious and gimmicky.

Case in point: I’m currently reading a novel called This is the Place by Peter Rock, which, in general, I am enjoying. (Rock has created some wonderful evocations of Wendover, Nevada, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, two places I just visited last month.) However, the guy is apparently unaware of the existence of the quotation mark. None of the book’s dialogue uses it. Instead, you’re just supposed to pick up from context that someone is speaking, as in this passage:

How you doing, Jamie? The bartender knew what she wanted before she said a word. He brought two cocktails and she drank the first one fast.

 

I’m doing, she said. Hard at work here.

It’s not a huge thing, but it’s driving me crazy. It’s sometimes confusing, but the biggest issue is that I just don’t see any reason, artistic or otherwise, for doing it, and it’s coming off as more of a distraction, an affectation, than anything that adds value to the work…

Andrew Leonard has a nice personal remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut over at Salon. I think you’ll have to sit through a commercial to read the whole thing, but here’s the part I liked:

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One of the regrets I’ve carried forward from my college years was my failure to form personal relationships with any of my instructors. While friends of mine can talk of networking opportunities or outright friendships with their professors, I doubt my former teachers would even recognize my face these days. And things aren’t much better on my side of the equation, as a conversation with a co-worker and fellow U. of U. alum earlier today forcefully demonstrated: we were talking about the horrors of writing workshops, and she asked me who my teacher had been during a particular workshop experience. To my surprise and sincere discomfort, I couldn’t remember the man’s name. I could summon up his face reasonably well, but the name was a complete blank. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I have the same problem with most of my professors.

The shame of this realization sent me scrambling across the Internet, compulsively searching for any mention I could find of the four or five names I can still recall. And lo and behold, I stumbled across this upcoming release from the University of Utah Press: Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma.

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I normally reject the idea of literary manifestos as pretentious ego self-stroking (on the part of whomever writes the manifesto) that treads on my anti-authoritarian “do whatever the hell I like” nature, but here is one I can get behind wholeheartedly, John C. Wright‘s NEW SPACE PRINCESS MOVEMENT:

The literary movement will follow two basic principles: first, science fiction stories should have space-princesses in them who are absurdly good looking. Second, the space princesses must be half-clad (if you are a pessimist. The optimist sees the space princess as half-naked). Third, dinosaurs are also way cool, as are ninjas. Dinosaur ninjas are best of all.

 

…The second thing to remember: bare midriffs. This is what science fiction is actually all about. Let no one tell you differently.

Oh, yeah. That’s the stuff, baby. Thanks to Scalzi for cluing me onto this.

In a somewhat-related note, I’ve just learned from SF Signal that you can get science fiction and fantasy stories from this site — for FREE! Just in case you really don’t feel like working today…

No particular comment here, just sharing a nifty passage from the novel I’m currently enjoying. I especially like the image at the end. The characters are shy young Quakers who are beginning to discover that they have a thing for each other; the setting is New York in the year 1778, during the American Revolution:

Rob was enthused about the scientist William Herschel.With his improved telescopes, Rob said, Herschel had discovered nebulae and galaxies strewn across the heavens as a farmer could scatter flaxseed. …The night had grown cold, and they blew on their fingers and stamped their feet as they stared up at the spangle of stars. The arm of Rob’s coat brushed Kate’s cape and she saw tiny sparks dance in the wool.

–From Shadow Patriots: A Novel of the Revolution by Lucia St. Clair Robson