Dracula

Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Published in 1897

The third of my assigned readings from Professor Eric Rabkin's course Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, the Modern World is Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker didn't invent the idea of vampires, but he codified the trope and most of our modern images of vampires are ultimately descended from Stoker's version of the vampire myth.

The story begins with English solicitor Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvania to meet with the elderly nobleman Count Dracula to discuss property in London which Dracula wishes to purchase. Dracula turns out to be immaculately polite, the very model of old-timely European gentility, eager to learn more about England and English ways, and (as the reader no doubt expected), utterly, alarmingly creepy. In the end, Harker barely escapes from Dracula's castle alive, his wits shattered.

Meanwhile back in England, Dr. Seward operates a lunatic asylum next door to the property where Dracula is about to take up residence. He is in love with Lucy Westenra, a young lady who is nevertheless engaged and then married to one Arthur Holmwood. Lucy is also best friends with Jonathan Harker's fiancee Mina Murray. (Dracula takes place in a very small universe and coincidences abound.) Lucy becomes deathly ill (Dracula is slowly consuming her, as readers know but not Arthur or Dr. Seward), and Dr. Seward is forced to call upon his mentor from continental Europe, Van Helsing, who speaks fractured English but immediately diagnoses poor Lucy's problem.

There's also an American from Texas, Quincey Morris, who is an excellent example of what British people in the 1890s thought Texans sounded like. He rounds out the team of vampire hunters. Although the novel doesn't really have a clear paramount protagonist, Mina Murray is an early deconstruction of 'useless woman' tropes; when the men are reluctant to involve her because she's a fragile female, things take a turn for the worse; when she's given the same respect as other members of the team, they make progress in their chase against Dracula.

I was surprised at how many recognizable modern-day vampire tropes appeared in Dracula. I was expecting a reading experience more like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Most modern-day Frankenstein tropes did not emerge until long after Mary Shelley's lifetime, and even a reader who is aware that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist (not the monster) is usually surprised to learn that in Shelley's novel Frankenstein is not a crazy old man but an over-eager young medical student, and while the monster really is an eight-foot-tall abomination, he can speak quite fluently and is arguably the most eloquent character in the novel.

In contrast, the title character in Bram Stoker's Dracula is very close to his modern-day popular image. The main differences are that this Dracula can walk about outside while the sun is shining (he just can't access any of his special vampire powers) and while a wooden stake can indeed kill him, a steel spike will do just as well. Also, he has a big, intimidating mustache, which generally didn't survive adaptations to other media. Otherwise, the original version of the character is almost identical to his modern image, right down to his grasp of English (he is explicitly described as speaking impeccable English but with a very foreign intonation). The novel invented the idea that vampires can't cross running water, a limitation that makes no sense but does prove very useful to force the plot to keep on the track Stoker has in mind.

In the novel, Dracula has three sexy vampire wives who try to seduce Jonathan Harker and are eventually slain by Van Helsing prior to the final battle with Dracula himself. As Professor Rabkin touched upon in his lectures, before Stoker came along, vampires were seen primarily as female monsters, and Stoker is singe-handedly responsible for the fact that male vampires aren't necessarily perceived as gender-benders today.

As a final odd factoid, Dr Seward may be the earliest character in literature to keep a journal in audio recording form. For what it's worth.

A Feast for Crows

A Feast for Crows
by George R. R. Martin
Published in 2004
Published by Bantam Books
ISBN: 978-0-553-58202-4

Spoiler Space:













A Feast for Crows, book 4, is the least popular of the five published books of A Song of Ice and Fire.

I didn't personally think it was all that terrible. It was somewhat slow-moving. It had the pace of the first half of A Storm of Swords without the plot acceleration of the second half of that book. But Martin's a decent enough writer that I could live with that. I enjoyed what the book gave me.

But I'm honest enough to admit that a key factor in my enjoyment of A Feast for Crows is that I read it in the year 2012, and I know I can move on and read A Dance with Dragons more or less immediately afterwards. That's important because A Feast for Crows is mostly setup, with very little payoff.

The Dorne and Iron Islands sections of A Feast for Crows -- basically, all the sections with 'new' viewpoint characters, with chapter headings that read as titles rather than names -- exist solely to set up the events of books 5, 6, and 7.  Remove the promise of later books from the equation, and the Dorne and Iron Islands bits become exercises for the reader to wonder, Why am I reading this again?

Additionally, there's the fact that in terms of world-shaking events, nothing much happens in A Feast for Crows. And unfortunately if you're the sort who enjoys watching GRRM kill off major characters, Aemon Targaryen is about the most important person who you'll get to see die.

A Feast for Crows is full of scheming and plotting and killing of minor characters. It's full of King's Landing politics, the Lannister twins, and character development (more so for Jaime than Cersei).  It's got Brienne wandering through central Westeros looking for Sansa and slaughtering bad guys, in sequences that strike some readers as pointless but become much more interesting if you assume GRRM is sneaking in events and information which will turn out to be important later. A Feast for Crows is definitely important in the overall scheme of things, but it's as short on truly world-shaking events as the first half of A Storm of Swords. The payoff is going to come later.

Now imagine you're a Song of Ice and Fire fan who reads A Feast for Crows in 2004. You're left impatient for payoff. You want GRRM to give you more, and you're heartened that he promises that book 5 is coming next year. And then you're left waiting, year after year.

I know, I know. GRRM is not our bitch. (See here for the historical origins of the mantra.) But it's not hard to see where the fan belief came from that A Feast for Crows is where GRRM began to go off the rails, and how this belief might bear no relation to the book's actual quality or lack thereof.

I didn't begin reading Song of Ice and Fire until book 5 was already a reality, all published in paperback and easy to acquire. So I have no particular reason to dislike A Feast for Crows. Yes, the book has few universe-shaking events, and the Major Character Death Count is relatively light. But it's all about setup, about introducing new players and moving others into position. A Dance with Dragons, the beginning of the three-novel-long finish that'll (presumably) bring all these plot threads to fruition, has been published and is sitting on the table in front of me as I write this, so I'm willing to cut A Feast for Crows some slack. 

In the Miso Soup

In the Miso Soup

by Ryu Murakami
English translation by Ralph McCarthy
Published in 1997
Published by Yomiuri Shimbunsha
ISBN: 4-7700-2957-8


Kenji works in Tokyo as a guide for foreign men who want to sample the city's sex industry. Two days before New Year's Eve, he is hired by Frank, an American who gives Kenji the creeps. Frank is a man whose countenance and behavior seem 'off' in a myriad of ways. He can't seem to talk about his background without contradicting himself, and every so often Kenji sees something in his face that could be suppressed psychotic rage. On the day Kenji meets Frank, the news reports that the mutilated body of a teenage girl who'd been into 'compensated dating' has been found. Kenji can't help but suspect his new client.

He has good reason to. Before long, Kenji is fearing for his life and trying to put on a friendly face to avoid becoming his client's next murder victim.

Ryu Murakami is definitely not to be confused with the unrelated Haruki Murakami. In the Miso Soup is a psychological thriller whose main target is Japanese society, a culture that Murakami criticizes for driving people to such loneliness that they willingly participate in the pseudo-sex industry.

This is the world of compensated dating, in which women go on dates with older men for money; these dates might end with sex but don't necessarily have to. This is a world where lonely businessmen will wait in cafes for the chance to chat with a teenage girl; sometimes the girl isn't so much in it for the money as for the social interaction, because she's as lonely as the businessman. From Frank's perspective, there's dignity in a woman who turns to actual prostitution to support her family, but for people addicted to the tragic farce that is the psuedo-sex industry, there is no dignity, whether they are male or female, worker or client.

From Frank's hideous, disturbed perspective, he is only doing the world a favor. Murakami's not saying in his book that Frank's actions are justified, and he's definitely not glorifying him or people like him. Frank's function from a literary perspective is to point out the hypocrisy of a society in which these institutions are some people's closest thing to real social interaction. He does so in an absolutely brutal manner, but it drives the message home.

A Storm of Swords

A Storm of Swords
by George R. R. Martin
Published in 2001
Published by Bantam Spectra
ISBN: 0-553-57342-X


I saw someone describe the overall structure of A Song of Ice and Fire thusly: books 1-3 are a self-contained trilogy with a downer ending, book 4 is intermission, and books 5-7 are a second trilogy.

Spoilers for the downer Book 3 below.















And I wouldn't expect anything but a downer ending from George R. R. Martin. I feel bad for my wife, though. Recently we were watching the final episode of Season 2 of the TV show, and as Bran, Rickon, Osha, and Hodor were grimly trudging away from the smoldering ruin of Winterfell, my wife said, 'PLEASE tell me this story gets a bit less bleak in Book 3.' And I had to reply, in all truthfulness, 'Nope.'

Everyone we care about had a horrific time of it in Book 3. By the book's end, Arya's been stripped of whatever innocence she may have had, Sansa's in a terribly uncomfortable situation, Tyrion's an outlaw, Bran's left behind everything to venture into parts unknown, and the Stark family and all who followed them have been smashed. Alone of all the first-tier protagonists in Westeros, Jon Snow ends the book in a much better position than where he started, but only after going through experiences that are probably enough to give him PTSD for the rest of his life. (And then there's Daenerys, but her story is still independent of everything else that's going on.)

GRRM demonstrates the rising seriousness and bleakness with a deliberate echo. In both book 1 and in book 3 Tyrion finds himself falsely accused of murder by people who would really rather just see him dead regardless of what the truth actually is. Both times, he protests that he's being framed, and then gives a confession-that's-not-really-one, and subsequently requests trial by combat to prove his innocence.

In book 1, when Tyrion is on trial in the Vale for the murder of Jon Arryn, we readers never believe Tyrion is actually in danger of losing his life. On the TV show especially, the whole plotline is played more for laughs than anything else (particularly Tyrion's ridiculous 'confession'). And there's never any doubt about whether Bronn (Tyrion 's champion) or Ser Vardis (The Other Guy) is going to win the trial by combat.

In book 3, Tyrion is on trial for killing Joffrey, and the situation is darker in every way. Not only has GRRM made it clear to us by this point that he's not above killing first-tier major characters like Tyrion, but the trial comes at the culmination of a book that's been a steadily growing pile of despair. Tyrion's 'confession ' in book 1 was amusing; in book 3 it's bitter.  And even when it looked like Tyrion's champion, Oberyn Martell, was going to kill Gregor Clegane in the trial by combat, I never really believed that Tyrion was going to win his freedom the same way twice.

Before I read book 3, I saw an online commenter say that GRRM's great achievement as a writer was fooling readers into thinking Tyrion Lannister was basically a good person. I never thought Tyrion was untarnished moral perfection, but he didn't fully cross the line in my head that separates 'ruthless but well-meaning' from 'morally twisted' until he quite unnecessarily murdered Shae on his way out of Kings Landing. I understand Tyrion's motivation, and I think GRRM has done a masterful job with his character. But Tyrion is steadily moving towards actually being the evil, twisted creature everyone takes him for. (I wonder how unspoiled TV audiences are going to react to Shae's eventual death; she's had a lot of screen time and is more of a well-developed character on the TV show than in the books.)

That said, I neither want nor expect my characters to show any sort of unvarnished moral perfection, especially not in this hideous universe that I would never want to live in. So I totally must call out a blatant trick that GRRM uses that became very apparent to me here. In the Cracked.com article 6 Tricks Movies Use to Make Sure You Root for the Right Guy, C. Corville suggests, 'Make Then American, Even When They're Not'. In other words, give your protagonist inexplicably 'modern' ideas about liberty and freedom in stories that take place hundreds of years ago:

Likewise, in Braveheart, Mel Gibson tells the local aristocracy: "You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom!" 2010's Robin Hood featured a Robin fighting for an imaginary version of Magna Carta that guaranteed democracy and equal rights. 

In 2004's King Arthur, set in fifth-century Britain, Clive Owen leads native Woads in their fight against invading Saxon hordes. But for Clive, this isn't just about warring tribes, it's about an idea: freedom. "All men are free, equal, and each man has a right to choose his own destiny!" he says. Throughout the film, he tells serfs, Roman conscripts and anyone who will listen that they are all free and equal by virtue of birth.

I'm sorry, but that's Daenerys Targaryen right there. As of the end of Book 3, GRRM has still never given us a convincing reason for her to be so fair and broad-minded, considering she's been raised her whole life to believe she's better than everyone else. A realistic person with Daenerys's upbringing wouldn't have objected to the Dothraki practice of raping women that they'd captured; she would have considered those women so far below her station that she wouldn't have had any empathy for them at all. And it's never really explained why Daenerys finds slavery so abhorrent -- we know that it's frowned upon in Westerosi culture, but we haven't seen much evidence that Daenerys got her dislike of slavery from the warped and incomplete Westerosi education she received. Besides, Daenerys seems supremely goal-oriented; one would expect her to at least seriously consider whether acquiring a massive slave army might be the most effective way to conquer Westeros.

Compare her to, say Catelyn Stark. GRRM generally portrays Catelyn positively but there's no doubt she's got an odious streak of classist bigotry in her. Not to mention her lifelong coldness toward Jon Snow -- we understand why she treats him as she does, but that doesn't make it right. In her morals and attitudes, Catelyn is a natural product of her culture. Daenerys, by contrast, is an alien dropped in from above.

Overall, though, any gripes I might make are minor compared to the splendid immensity of what GRRM has accomplished here. He finishes the original Song of Ice and Fire trilogy very strongly -- and it is a cohesive trilogy, with a genuine ending, just not one that would satisfy most readers if the story were never taken up again.

But already in Book 3, GRRM's spreading himself rather thin with the number of viewpoint characters. (I got the impression that after the book's first third he ran out of useful things for Davos to do.) This would, of course, cause major problems for him as he continued the series.

I'll just say that I'm happy I finished A Storm of Swords in 2012, rather than when it first came out. It would have been quite unfortunate for it to be 2001 and for me to be anxiously waiting for Book 4 to appear so I could find out whatever happened to Tyrion and Bran.

The Alice Books

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
by Lewis Carroll
Originally published in 1865 (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) and 1871 (Through the Looking-Glass)

The second reading in Professor Eric Rabkin's Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World class on Coursera is Lewis Carroll's two Alice stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. I read both of them about a decade ago. I re-read them for Professor Rabkin's class. (They'll likely be the only books I re-read; I unfortunately don't see myself having the time to read Shelley's Frankenstein, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness for a second time while the course is underway.)

Everybody knows these books in abridged form. And they survive abridgment better than most, because there's hardly anything like a story in the original books. There is nothing remotely resembling a plot or character development to get in the way of gleeful Victorian surrealism. I fondly remember playing a computer game as a kid, Cosmic Osmo and the Worlds Beyond the Mackerel, in which you explore a universe which is an unceasing parade of nonsense and things which are absurd for no reason. Lewis Carroll delivered a very similar feeling well over a hundred years earlier.

What I didn't remember from reading these books a decade ago was the sheer level of punning, by which I mean punning that seeks to pick language apart at its most fundamental level. I vaguely remember amusing myself as a child by making up dialogue like this:

A: Are you Brendan?
B: No, but my name is.

But such linguistic meta-meta-tomfoolery has found a home in Lewis Carroll's writing. In Through the Looking-Glass, the White Knight introduces us to the song A-sitting On a Gate, which is called Ways and Means. The song's name, which is called Haddock's Eyes, is The Aged Aged Man. (On Wikipedia, the song is under 'Haddock's Eyes'. I am sure there is a very logical and well-thought-out explanation for why that title was chosen instead of the other three choices.)

As any 19th-century literature enthusiast will tell you, the Alice books strike us as absurd for no reason because much of the cultural context has been forgotten. The books are full of parodies of cultural flotsam and jetsam which nobody recognizes anymore. (This is especially true of the poetry, most of which is mockery of specific stodgy old poems that children had to learn by heart back then. Nowadays they're only remembered for being mocked by Lewis Carroll.)

Additionally, the author was a mathematician first and foremost, and most of the insane logic in the books is actually his snide commentary on the debates raging among mathematicians of the day. What I'd like to hunt down and read is mathematician Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice, a guide to all that's to be found in the books. I like Professor Eric Rabkin's lectures, but he can't cover everything, and he chooses to focus primarily on issues of imagery and structure (although he does talk a good deal about Lewis Carroll / Charles Dodgson's math career, which I appreciate).

I'm not sure I would put the Alice books into the genre of speculative fiction, the way it makes sense to define the genre today. To me, a work in the speculative fiction genre, whether it's fantasy, science fiction, or alternate history, creates a fictional world that makes sense on its own terms (or is intended to, in the case of authors who happen to be inept world-builders). This means you can take the point of view of a native of the world, and from that standpoint the world's day-to-day happenings make sense.

I don't think that's possible for the chaos-lands of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World.  Lewis Carroll did not make it a high priority to make it seem that the March Hare and the Red Queen led any kind of day-to-day existence when Alice wasn't there to witness them. And that's fine. You can't fault the Alice books for not being good high fantasy. That would be like faulting a tasty Middle Eastern hummus dish for not being a good example of traditional Japanese cuisine. Genres are different, and that's OK.

From Far Formosa

From Far Formosa
by George MacKay
Published in 1896
Published by Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier
ISBN (SMC Publishing reprint): 957-638-072-3

George MacKay was a Canadian Presbyterian missionary who arrived in Formosa at the end of 1871 and lived in Tamsui for the next several decades. He became known among the locals for his proselytizing and for his skill at extracting teeth -- and grateful locals who had been suffering the pain of a horribly rotten tooth would naturally be ready to give MacKay's religious teachings a chance once the tooth was out!

MacKay is still well-remembered in these parts. He never managed to turn Formosa into a piously Protestant land, but MacKay Memorial Hospital is one of the better-regarded hospitals in Taipei, and MacKay is probably the best-known Westerner to have lived in Formosa in the 1800s. He learned to speak Taiwanese quite fluently (it's not clear in the book if he ever learned much Mandarin, although it wouldn't have been terribly useful to him in 19th-century Formosa anyway) and locals generally came to respect him for all he did. Eventually.

He describes the city of Bang-Kah (modern-day Wanhua, Taipei) as a den of sin, and quite unwelcome to the missionary and his first few converts; through sheer bloody-minded persistence, he managed to get the locals accustomed to his bible-preaching presence, and as the years passed, the locals grew to actually like him, which he is rather proud of. (He does not say, however, that he has managed to clean up the city's sinfulness.)

His 1895 book From Far Formosa is a quite interesting vintage look at Formosa through Western eyes. (The name Taiwan didn't become common in English-speaking circles until long after MacKay's death; he does mention the word Taiwan, but as a 'this is what Chinese people call Formosa' factoid.) Everything is told through MacKay's idiosyncratic viewpoint. There's a lot of talk of God and how Jesus is greater than Buddha in this book, but one shouldn't expect anything different; after all, MacKay's reason for coming to Taiwan was to spread the Gospel, not to snack on fried tofu and oyster omelets.

For me, the most striking thing about MacKay's style is that, even as he writes lovingly and in detail of his first few converts to Christianity, he barely mentions the local woman he married, or the children he had with her. He lets his personal feelings shine through where religion is concerned, but his family is clearly considered irrelevant.

That said, although I'm no devout Christian myself, I was genuinely touched by MacKay's sense of service in the duty of Christendom. I can fully understand the attraction of doing one's duty in the service of a good cause, and that's something MacKay describes very well.

As an educated Victorian, MacKay spends a couple of chapters describing the flora, fauna, and geologic history of Formosa in some detail (and yes, he's perfectly capable of writing about science without mixing religion into it). I'm rather fond of his dry 19th-century writing style as he enumerates the local animals and plants. Of the cat, he writes, 'similar in appearance and nature to the Western house-cat', which is a decent description of our own Zhao Cai, who is entirely of Formosan feline descent.

Of mangoes, he writes, 'Nothing can be said in praise of this fruit as it is found in North Formosa. It has the taste of turpentine.' When in season, mangoes in present-day Taipei are quite good; presumably we're benefiting from the modern-day transportation infrastructure which brings us a supply of mangoes grown in better climates.

Overall, MacKay's book is a fascinating look at 19th-century Formosa. Even if you're not enthralled by Christianity, MacKay covers a lot of other ground which is of interest. He describes his experiences in the 1884-85 war with France (which included heavy French bombardment of Tamsui; most Westerners living here now probably have no idea the war ever took place). He speculates on the ethnicity and origin of Formosan aborigines, and although his conclusions do not match the modern consensus, his observations are still a fascinating glimpse of 19th-century anthropology. And as I said, the Victorian writing style agreed with me. I devoured the book in a few days.

Household Stories

Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm
collected by Jacob Grimm & Wilhelm Grimm
English translation by Lucy Crane
Published in 1886

I'm taking the course Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World on Coursera, taught by University of Michigan professor Eric Rabkin. The first assigned reading is the Lucy Crane translation of the classic stories collected by the Brothers Grimm.

These stories, written in a Victorian-era translation that predates Disney and all other aspects of twentieth-century popular culture, are essential cultural literacy for anyone curious about the origins of modern fantastical literature.

Most of these stories are very weirdly off-putting because they don't quite follow the structural rules that underlie most modern fiction. These structural rules are so fundamental that I didn't even really appreciate that they existed until a few years back when I read Tales Before Tolkien, a collection of fantasy fiction which inspired J. R. R. Tolkien. Most of the stories contained therein were written in the 19th century, but many were based on far older material that predated the codification of what we think of as modern fiction, so they retained pacing and plot structures that seemed exceedingly odd to my brain.

This is also evident in Household Stories, which tells me that Lucy Crane was probably very faithful to the very old source material (otherwise the stories would likely have struck me as more modern). Possibly the strangest story is 'Mr. Korbes', in which a cock and a hen go to pay a visit to Mr. Korbes. Along the way they are joined by a variety of animals and sentient versions of inanimate objects. When the motley bunch reach Mr. Korbes' house, they beat him to death. No reason is given.

In another story, 'The Dog and the Sparrow', a dog and a sparrow are friends until the dog is run over and killed by a man driving a cart. The sparrow then takes revenge, methodically destroying first the man's livelihood, then his house, then taking his life. The latter two-thirds of the story are nothing but the sparrow's cold-blooded violence described in gruesome detail.

Some assorted other thoughts:

• Inanimate objects seem to gain and lose sentience rather arbitrarily. You know how the dish ran away with the spoon, back around the time of the cow-jumping-over-the-moon incident? Yeah, that sort of thing happens a lot here. Yet an anthropomorphic needle that hitches a ride with a couple of chickens out for an evening ride in their carriage gets transmuted into an ordinary needle in the very next scene with no logic or explanation.
• The world of the Brothers Grimm is profuse with kings and queens. It seems like every few miles down the road a traveler would come across another castle with a whole different king and queen in residence. This is awfully convenient for storytelling. That said, just look at a map of Germany from any era after the Dark Ages and prior to the 19th century, and you'll see that the great profusion of monarchs might not be that far from reality.
• There are evil stepmothers aplenty in these stories. I can't remember any evil stepfathers. (There are stepfathers, but they tend to be inoffensive sorts who fade into the background.) There's got to be some cultural factor at play here.
• Everything you ever heard about the violence of pre-Disney fairy tales is entirely true. In 'Aschenputtel', the Grimm Brothers' version of Cinderella, one of the Evil Stepsisters chops her own big toe off to fit into the discarded shoe. My own favorite scene of horror is probably the one in 'The Almond Tree', in which an Evil Stepmother tears her stepson's head off by slamming the lid of a chest on it. Then she loosely reattaches the severed head, props the body up at the table, and gets her biological daughter to smack him in the face, making her think she's accidentally decapitated her half-brother. Then the stepmother cooks and serves him to her husband.

Overall,  I enjoyed the collection. These are stories that survived as folklore for centuries before being collected for posterity by the Grimms. They are very different creatures than modern fiction, but they represent a literary tradition that's been folded into modern fantastical literature.

A Clash of Kings

A Clash of Kings
by George R. R. Martin
Published in 1998
Published by Bantam Spectra
ISBN: 0-553-57990-8

Once upon a time, a man named George R. R. Martin decided to try and write epic fantasy without even a whiff of sex or violence. And so I continue my read of Song of Ice and Fire.

Spoilers below!










Robert Baratheon and Ned Stark are dead. The deservedly unpopular King Joffrey is attempting to rule Westeros from King's Landing. Robert's brothers Stannis Baratheon and Renly Baratheon have each proclaimed themselves king; Stannis's claim is that he is the rightful heir, and Renly's claim is who wants a boring, dour man like Stannis as king, anyway? Ned Stark's son Robb has effectively declared the northern half of Westeros independent and styles himself as the King in the North. And Balon Greyjoy has declared himself King of his own little archipelago; he's not powerful enough to rule Westeros, but he does have sufficient military might to make things very difficult for Robb Stark and company.

With all the killing, looting, pillaging, and slaughter going on in Westeros, who has time to notice a little trouble brewing in the far north? Or take notice of the last heir to the previous dynasty as she raises some adorable pets off on another continent?

I have to point out this is the story of a poor country locked in a chaotic civil war in which the combatants do not clearly fall into two easy-to-grasp opposing camps, and loyalties hinge on complex and convoluted histories that a newcomer would find difficult to follow. In other words, this is exactly the type of conflict that is supposed to be difficult for Westerners to understand when it happens in Africa or the Caucasus. And yet not only is Song of Ice and Fire a huge hit among readers, but the TV series Game of Thrones attracts loads of viewers who haven't read a big fat book since graduating from high school. There may be a lesson in there somewhere.

Basically this is the story of political chaos. Westeros is constantly referred to as the "Seven Kingdoms", but I have to admit I don't have the faintest idea what the seven kingdoms are. The political units that factor into this story aren't geographical areas which can be demarcated by lines on a map; they are rival dynasties whose hold on swathes of land and local populations is inevitably tenuous and temporary. People don't have nationalities; they have allegiances. (This, by the way, is how geopolitics worked pretty much everywhere in the real world until relatively recently.)

Political chaos is horrific to live through, but it makes for some fascinating reading. I devoured A Clash of Kings in about a week.

Here are some disconnected random thoughts, in alphabetical order by name of the most prominent character therein:

• I mentioned the all-encompassing importance of bloodlines back when I discussed A Game of Thrones. Here, I was reminded again that while the little people might fight and die in this war, it's really the upper classes that truly matter. Every viewpoint character comes from the nobility (except Davos, who was born a commoner and elevated to the upper classes) and while there are a couple of commoner characters who get decent character development, they only matter insofar as they are important to the highborn viewpoint characters.
• I couldn't have been the only one absolutely astonished that Joffrey made it to the end of the second book alive. He's in a very precarious situation and too stupid to realize it. That said, he's one of the few villains I can think of who can be annoying and incompetent without having the narrative suffer because of it. He's being propped up by competent people but still has enough power to do real damage when he feels like it -- as Ned Stark would attest if his head were still attached. 
• Melisandre is creepy. (I don't expect to hear much in the way of disagreement.) She's also the first actual wizard to appear in this series. Prior to Melisandre's grand entrance, overt fantasy elements had been very muted in the series, appearing only in the form of ice zombies (or whatever they're called) and a couple of baby dragons. (I'm not convinced Mirri Maz Duur from the first book/season actually did anything a traditional faith healer from a real-world premodern culture couldn't have done.) The introduction of a character using actual unmistakable magic is slightly jarring. It doesn't help that as a magical assassin, Melisandre is carrying out her assassinations by just about the most stomach-churningly weird method imaginable.
• You can say that there are few moral absolutes and many shades of gray in Martin's characters, but it sure seems that anyone with Ned Stark DNA in their blood is pretty much an unambiguous good guy. (The following books may well prove me wrong. Maybe Rickon is destined for evil.)
• Sansa Stark annoyed the heck out of me for most of the first book. She was a prissy princess type and not terribly self-aware about it. That changed near the end of A Game of Thrones, when she could only look at the situation she was in and think, Well, being a delicate princess has worked out really goddamned well for me, hasn't it? I respected her in A Clash of Kings, which shows how good Martin is at character development.
• Theon is truly a world-class idiot, and faking Bran and Rickon's deaths proves it. I understand how it was meant to help him in the short term, but because he had no idea where Bran and Rickon were or what they were up to, he had no way of knowing they wouldn't just pop up alive after he put their alleged severed heads on display, causing him to be laughed out of Winterfell. As it happened, it was pure luck that they didn't resurface until after Theon's world came crashing down around him. It's a testament to George R. R. Martin's writing skill that I do not believe he had Theon do this simply as a dumb plot device to make Catelyn and everyone else believe B + R had been killed, because this level of stupidity is totally in character for this dunderhead as he's been written. I've been reading and enjoying Leigh Butler's reactions as she reads the book for the first time, and she sums up Theon nicely: The sheer level of havoc Theon has managed to wreak just through incompetence, arrogance and insecure panic is staggering. It would almost be funny if it weren’t for the appalling collateral damage that has resulted. Seriously, it’s like reading a comedy of errors written by Charles Manson.

I haven't seen the TV series, although I've read up on it online, including all the debates about how the series deals with sex, the narrative changes from the book, and so on. I've seen a couple of scenes on YouTube, and for the most part they're done quite well. Here's Ned Stark's death as shown on TV -- I can't find any fault with how it plays out.

I can't fault many of the changes in the narrative as A Clash of Kings was adapted to the screen. In the book, Robb Stark shows up for a couple of scenes early on before disappearing 'off-screen' for the remainder, which is fine in a book but an absolute no-no in a TV show. And Jaime Lannister spends literally the entire book chained up in Robb Stark's dungeon, which again doesn't play well on television. Some changes were inevitable. And some things that aren't in the books, such as scenes between Arya Stark and Lord Tywin, strike me as such a good idea that Martin must be kicking himself for not writing them into ACOK in the first place.

But something I kept noticing was the ever-present TV makeover of ugly people. I came across this image linked to by TVTropes:

But that's not all. There's Dagmer Cleftjaw, so called in the books because he's got a massive battle scar that splits his face in half. On TV he looks like this:

But the crowning achievement in TV makeovers must be the one given to Tyrion Lannister, who in the books is hideously ugly. Martin reminds us of this every chance he gets.  And this is before he gets a massive facial scar at the end of A Clash of Kings that puts him into "Phantom of the Opera" territory.

Here's what Tyrion looks like on TV, and therefore in the minds of the vast majority of people who recognize the name "Tyrion Lannister" at all:

So, uh, yeah. I'm not trying to bash the TV series or actor Peter Dinklage. I'm just pointing out that those TV makeup people can really work wonders.

A Wild Sheep Chase

A Wild Sheep Chase
by Haruki Murakami
English translation by Alfred Birnbaum
Published in 1989.
Published by Kodansha International Ltd.
ISBN (Vintage International Edition): 0-375-71894-X

Our nameless protagonist works at an advertising agency in Tokyo. His wife has just left him, and now he is dating a young woman with stunningly perfect ears. One day he designs an ad campaign that utilizes a seemingly innocent picture of some sheep at a ranch in Hokkaido. He had received this picture from an estranged friend of his, called the Rat. This picture sets the book's main plot in motion.

Things get very, very weird.

A Wild Sheep Chase is my second Murakami, after Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (which he wrote later). I didn't realize it at the time, but AWSC is the final entry in a trilogy  of which the first two volumes never became well-known outside of Japan. Reading Wikipedia I feel Murakami enthusiasts consider AWSC a bridge between Murakami's early work and his later, more well-known period.

As the plot of AWSC is entirely self-contained, you can read it without ever bothering with the rest of what is apparently known as the Trilogy of the Rat. (The fact that it was written as Part 3 of 3 might explain some narrative oddities, like the subplot involving the dead girl that is dropped early on and never mentioned again.) All one needs to know is that there's an entire history out there involving the protagonist, the Rat, and the bartender J, and everything else becomes clear in the novel.

Or not so clear, as the case may be. AWSC contains some fine Murakami surrealism, and it's often not entirely clear what is happening. At least I'm sure the plot will appear simple and straightforward if I just type it out in simple sentences:

Hero works for ad agency in Tokyo. One day the representative of a reclusive right-wing political figure comes to the office. The photo of some sheep grazing that the hero innocently inserted into an ad is of very grave concern to the shadowy organization that the mysterious man represents. Particularly that one sheep, with the star-shaped mark. The man commands our hero to leave his job, provides him with a large stipend, and tasks him to track down the sheep, else the hero's life will be made HORRIBLY DIFFICULT. All the hero has to go on is that his friend the Rat sent him the picture. Fortunately his magical-eared girlfriend is willing to come along to help.

There, that's marvelously straightforward, isn't it? And it continues to be thus as Murakami's hero progresses toward his goal: the sheep, in whatever form it may exist in.

Life Inc.

Life Inc.
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published in 2009
Published by Random House
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7850-6

I pretty much agree with Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc.  Yet I'm conflicted about it. Maybe unfairly so.

On the one hand, I'm sympathetic towards the worldview that he's expounding. His chief message is that the methods and madness of corporations -- which exist in order to maximize their economic value -- have insidiously seeped into our lives and ways of thinking. The ideology of corporatism has devalued us as human beings, changed us from citizens into consumers, and wrecked our notion of community -- largely without our noticing that such an ideology even exists, or that this is anything other than the natural order of things, or that we could shed this ideology without necessarily reverting back to pre-industrial times.

But on the other hand, I get suspicious whenever someone takes history and turns it into a narrative to back up one's views. Rushkoff uses a large portion of the book doing this as he describes how corporations were originally created to funnel wealth towards the already wealthy. This automatically sets off warning sirens and klaxons in my mind. Ever since I realized that a 'big-picture' historical narrative could be correct in every historical fact, and yet still be absolute rubbish, I've been awfully reluctant to read much into one, no matter how artfully it's constructed.


Rushkoff's view is that the ideology of corporatism has its origins in the Italian Renaissance. From the extremely contrarian way he describes the Renaissance, you would assume it to be one of the great misfortunes to have ever befallen the human race, one from which all of our current troubles can be traced in one way or another.

Now, he does this in order to make some interesting points. Rushkoff argues that our image of medieval Europe as a horrible place full of squalor and hardship is largely a misconception, shaped by the 14th and 15th centuries, which really were terrible times to be an ordinary person in Europe. But there is ample evidence that the 12th and 13th centuries were far more pleasant, a time when local economies prospered without being dependent on faraway economic centers of authority. This was the time of the great cathedrals, which were grassroots building projects financed by the townspeople rather than by any pope or emperor. He makes the astounding claim that Europeans from this era were generally healthier than at any other time in history, and if modern Europeans are taller that's largely because of hormones in the food, not better nutrition.

He has two reasons for setting our traditional understanding of history on its head. Not only is he damning the events of the 14th and 15th centuries, which gave rise to centralized economic control and the rise of corporations, but he also wants to describe finance as it was understood during the heyday of late medieval Europe. The heavy, centrally minted gold and silver coins from our modern stereotype of old-style money did indeed exist, but they were used more for long-distance trading and affairs of state than for modest local transactions. For these, people used light silver coins called brakteaten (Wikipedia spells it bracteate) which couldn't be hoarded, because they steadily lost value. They were invested back into the local economy quickly. Building cathedrals was a prudent financial decision for prosperous communities, because cathedrals would bring in religious tourists for centuries to come.

This is why Rushkoff speaks approvingly of the many local currencies that have begun popping up in the last few years. These currencies can only be spent within the local community and depreciate with time. I've never been in a position where I could use a local currency, but the concept intrigues me.

Rushkoff's book is much more than just a treatise on medieval currency and what it has to teach us, and my distrust of 'big history' when it's told to promote a particular point of view can't color my impressions of the entire book. He presents the problem of all-pervading corporatist ideology as one which does not fit neatly into a traditional left vs. right political axis, and finishes the book (in the 2011 edition) with suggestions for what ordinary people can do and organizations which are helping people to transcend an excessively corporation-driven lifestyle -- and not by escaping into hippie communes.

And as much as I rolled my eyes at his blatant creation of a narrative, I do believe he's basically right about the big picture.

Self

Self
by Yann Martel
Published in 1996
Published by Alfred A. Knopf, Canada
ISBN: 978-0-571-21976-6

Our protagonist is born in Spain in the early 1960s, the son of Canadian diplomats. He grows up in Canada, Europe, and Costa Rica. He attends a prestigious boarding school in Canada and is accepted to university in Ontario. There are many musings about the nature of life, gender, and sex, as seen through the eyes of our young hero.

So far, our protagonist (who is never named, although there is a solitary mention of having an androgynous given name) has led a life which precisely follows the same course of the author's. It is perfectly natural for the reader to assume that Self is an autobiographical memoir. The reader reads on...

Our protagonist spends a summer in Portugal before going to university. She takes classes in philosophy and literature, and the summer after her first year she travels to Greece where she meets an older American woman. The two women travel through Greece and Turkey together while enjoying a steamy lesbian love affair. Our heroine returns to Canada and conceives of a novel.

If our heroine thinks it the least bit strange that she used to be a boy and now she's not, she never lets on. If anything, her gender switch is a natural outgrowth of her/his childhood confusion about the nature of sex and gender.

Self is an odd little novel, possibly equal parts autobiographical and pure fiction, not that I really have any means of knowing.

When it was published, author Yann Martel was a Canadian literary author of very limited renown with a bunch of short stories to his name. Self was his first successfully published novel. It did not result in his becoming well-known. Nor, I suspect, did he expect it to. For the first couple of years of its published existence, Self seemed destined to go down in history as a middling work by one of the fifty preeminent living literary figures in the province of Saskatchewan. An OK book, readable but not brilliant.

Then Martel published another novel. This one was about a boy and a kittycat in a boat.

The boy-and-kittycat-in-a-boat book was rather more widely read than Self was.

It garnered rather higher praise than 'readable but not brilliant'.

It caused Yann Martel to have a higher public profile than he did before. In short, it is the sole reason why there are people who are not authorities on modern Canadian literature who are familiar with Self today.

One must feel some sympathy for Yann Martel. Now famous as the man who wrote that brilliant book about the boy and the kittycat in the boat, he apparently has looked back on his earlier work Self as 'terrible' and has wished 'it would disappear' (according to a Sydney Morning Herald book review).

It's not that bad. It's not mind-bendingly, gender-blastingly brilliant, but it's not that bad. I was cheerfully willing to oblige Martel as he led me on a tour of our gender-roaming hero(ine)'s love life and oddball literary projects.

The rape scene. It comes near the end of Self and was clearly meant to be brutal. I'm not sure what to think of it, as it contrasted starkly with what came before. I shall have to put my subconscious to work integrating the entire novel into a cohesive whole.

As it is, Self may be 'terrible' by the author's own estimation, but it has more parts that stick in my mind and won't go budge than many books which are much better.

A Game of Thrones

A Game of Thrones
by George R. R. Martin
Published in 1996
Published by Bantam Books
ISBN: 978-0-553-59371-6

This little-known novel has found a small following since its publication. It is a happy story of people who behave morally and never get hurt and cute puppies who definitely never get their heads chopped off. I found the novel unrealistic because nothing bad happens to anyone important and major characters never get killed. If you're lucky, you might be able to find information about the plot online, but you'll have to search hard because the book really isn't widely known.

Seriously now:

I'm generally wary of big fat novels with lots of sequels. Sometimes I like to pretend sequels don't exist. For example, I read Dan Simmons' Hyperion, enjoyed it, and then decided that my enjoyment of the novel would not possibly be improved by picking up the sequels, despite (because of?) the fact that Hyperion ends on a cliffhanger and leaves about a zillion unanswered questions. Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle I treated as one long novel spaced across three hefty volumes. As for Harry Potter, I waited until the last novel was out and then I just read all seven in one go. I found them to be enjoyable reads, but I'll admit I also felt that I needed to be up to speed for pop culture literacy purposes.

As it is for Game of Thrones. I haven't seen the HBO series yet (although my big George R. R. Martin fan of a sister-in-law will probably correct that soon enough), and I came to the first book partially unspoiled. (I already knew about the most shocking character death in the first book, but I didn't know precisely when or how it would happen.)

Part of why I finally picked up A Game of Thrones is a determination to acquaint myself with the plot on my terms, despite the fact that the English-speaking pop-cultural universe seems determined to bombard me with spoilers. I want to learn that Khal Drogo is actually Joffrey's father through my own reading, not because somebody spilled the beans on Facebook.

I expected lots and lots of characters. I got lots and lots of characters. My only problem with keeping loads of characters straight in my head is that I often have trouble telling which ones are going to be important and which ones I don't need to pay as much attention to. I think I was a couple of chapters past Littlefinger's introduction before I realized that he was actually an extremely important character whom I should be devoting mental space to following.

I expected loads of violence. I got loads of violence. When a certain first-tier major character was badly hurt early on in the book and spent a couple of chapters in a coma, I wrote him off for dead immediately, thinking, Wow. They really weren't kidding about nobody in these books being safe. I was too quick to pronounce him dead (so far) but there isn't a single character living at the end of the first book who I don't expect to be beheaded, disembowelled, dissolved in molten gold, thrown off a mountain, drowned, frozen to death, eaten by wolves, or impaled on a spike by the time the series draws to a close.

Based on Internet chatter, I expected lots of sex. As for what I got, while the novel's not prudish by any means, it contains no more sex than many other novels written for an adult audience. I suspect the issue here is not that the books are particularly full of sexual content; it's the HBO series, and the manner in which the series uses and presents sex to the audience, that's prompted all the chattering. (There's a lot of talk about how the TV series deals with sex, not all of it positive. I'll have thought of my own once I actually watch the TV series.)

So what do I take away from the novel?

Well, the absolute centrality of the importance of bloodlines to the mindset of the characters. Who you are is determined by who your parents were. Period. Now, of course that's nothing new. Not only is it how people organized real-world societies for hundreds and hundreds of years, you also see the same attitude pervading even modern fiction that doesn't take place in a pseudo-historical setting -- Star Wars, for instance

But in A Game of Thrones it's hammered home, again and again, that this is how these people think. For instance, I almost could have liked first-tier major character Catelyn Stark, but she ruined any sympathy I might've had for her through her hatred of her husband's illegitimate son, ultra-squeaky-clean-good-guy Jon Snow, for no reason other than the fact that he dared grow up in the same building that she lived in. But then, treating Jon with civility would probably be about as alien a concept to her as, say, instituting a democratic form of government at Winterfell and having the next leader of the North elected from among the peasantry. These people are Not Of Our Culture.

Also, as with Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, I'm fascinated by the political maneuvering. Politics and intrigue takes up a larger chunk of A Game of Thrones than Robinson's Mars books; I hope the subsequent books continue the habit. I like courtly drama and backstabbings and betrayals as long as they don't happen to me in real life; last year I read Shan Sa's Empress, a novelized account of the real-life Chinese ruler and seventh-century badass Empress Wu which was full of remarkably similar intrigue, and quite enjoyed it.

I also like that, despite the presence of dragons and ice zombies on the periphery, the main thread of the narrative is completely devoid of magic or supernatural happenings or anything that doesn't exist in our world. I respect that, although I'm aware that we'll be seeing plenty more magic and dragons in future books.

I'll have to continue reading George R. R. Martin's books, so as not to be spoiled when someone with loose lips blabs that Daenerys is really Tyrion's mother.

The Oracle of Stamboul

The Oracle of Stamboul
by Michael David Lukas
Published in 2011
Published by Harper Collins
ISBN: 978-1-44340-506-5

Eleonora is an extremely precocious Jewish girl born in Constanta on the Black Sea on the precise day in 1877 when the Ottoman Empire loses control of the city. She chafes under the strict rule of her stepmother, and when she is eight years old she stows away in the luggage of her merchant father to a new life in Stamboul (and that city is never called by any other name in the novel).

Eleonora's intelligence and perception attract the attention of some powerful people, and she is thrust against her will into the world of court intrigue. Meanwhile, we readers are treated to lavish depictions of late nineteenth-century Stamboul, written by an author who is clearly deeply in love with the city.

My wife and I lived in Stamboul for a month last year, as we took an intensive CELTA course at a local institute. We found ourselves a room in a townhouse within walking distance of the road known as Grande Rue de Pera to the people in the novel, and Istiklal Caddesi to people who live later in history than the nineteenth century. We were tourists when we had the time (which was not often, once the course started), and as such I was able to read the descriptions of nineteenth-century Stamboul that Lukas wrot with appreciation.

The story moves along at a good, steady pace, and I found it to be very much a page-turner. Then... the book ends. Even before reading anyone else's reaction I could guess this was going to be a sticking point with many readers. When Eleonora decides she's had enough of other people controlling her narrative and her life, she takes action to bring about the end of her intrigue-filled life in Stamboul on her terms. This is undoubtedly going to lead to a lot of readers saying, 'That's it?'

Well, yes, that's it. I can respect Eleonora, the strong-willed creation of Michael David Lukas' brain, and I'm willing to concede that when the central character says the story as far as she's concerned is over, then it's over, and I was happy for the ride while it lasted.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
by Haruki Murakami
English translation by Alfred Birnbaum
Published in 1991 (Japanese); 1993 (English)
Published by Vintage Books
ISBN: 0-679-74346-4

The Hard-Boiled Wonderland: Our protagonist is a Calcutec. He has been trained to use his subconscious mind for encryption of sensitive information. The bad guys are called Semiotecs. They are criminals who deal in stolen information for profit. The setting is a slightly surrealistic Tokyo. The plot is set in motion by the protagonist's meeting with an eccentric elderly scientist with an underground lair, and his oddball granddaughter.

The End of the World: Our protagonist arrives in the city and takes up work as a Dreamreader. He is separated from his shadow, which is put to work and will eventually die. The city is home to a herd of unicorns. Our protagonist starts work reading dreams in the library.

Confused? Don't be. Haruki Murakami shows us through the startlingly well-formed world of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland in the odd-numbered chapters. He never quite gives us enough exposition for us to be certain of the contours and rules of this world, and yet he relates our nameless protagonist's story with enough confidence that I assumed for a while that this novel took place in a universe Murakami had established in earlier books. (It doesn't.)

And in the generally shorter even-numbered End of the World chapters, the nameless protagonist (presumably the same man as the hero of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland chapters, although it's a while before we find out for sure), devoid of memory or knowledge of why he has come to the City at the End of the World, develops a regular everyday routine in his new surroundings.

I've been aware of Murakami's name for some time, but this is the first time I've read his work, or experienced this particular sort of surrealism. The protagonist of the Hard-Boiled Wonderland has lived something of a humdrum existence, despite his unusual occupation, and as the plot progresses he sees his life torn to pieces. But Murakami keeps us at an emotional distance; I felt intellectually engaged, but never really cared much what happened to him or the other (equally nameless) main characters, or how much worse his life was going to get.

Instead, it was in the far more fantastical End of the World chapters, in the world of furry unicorns and shadows that can talk, where I felt much more emotionally interested in what was going to happen. Somehow Murakami manages to make the novel work as a unitary entity, even in the early chapters, before the reader has a clue how the two settings are going to be connected.

Blue Mars

Blue Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published in 1996
Published by Bantam
ISBN: 0-553-57335-7

And so the trilogy reaches its end. Blue Mars opens with a newly independent Mars. Earth is a royal mess, having been hit by a horrific ecological disaster that was, surprisingly enough, actually not the fault of human beings. The Martians took advantage of the chaos and broke away at the end of Green Mars. As Blue Mars begins, the pieces are just beginning to be put back together.

I find it difficult to summarize a traditional plot for Blue Mars. It's the story of the evolving political situation on Mars, in the planet's first few decades as an independent entity. And it's the story of Mars' relations with a devastated but still powerful Earth, vast and varied and impossible to describe glibly with throwaway descriptions, home to many who view Mars with wary curiosity, and maybe, just maybe, would like to get off Earth and move there one day. (This is the source of much consternation and controversy among the Martians.)

But events are always seen through the eyes of individual characters. Each novel in the Mars trilogy covers several decades of in-universe time, and by the end of Blue Mars more than 150 years have elapsed since the beginning of Red Mars. Thanks to medical advances, we end the trilogy with the same core group of main characters, members of Mars' First Hundred, that we began with (although there has been attrition due to deaths).

There are new, younger characters, the descendants of the First Hundred, who dominate the narrative for whole sections of the book at a time, but in the end the story always shifts back to the perspective of one of the over-200-year-old protagonists.

As a result, we never stop seeing Mars from the point of view of approximately a half-dozen slightly astonished old people who have seen massive change in their lifetimes. These oldsters are practically immortals, symbolic of particular ways of thinking, of points of view, of ways of seeing the universe, and they remind me of the protagonists of Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, who keep getting reincarnated into new bodies over the centuries as history progresses. (But they are not literally immortal. As it turns out, humans over the age of 200 have an alarming tendency to drop dead suddenly of no clear cause.)

Although the author has acknowledged that the terraforming of Mars happens more quickly in the Mars trilogy than is strictly speaking realistic, the technology of the Mars trilogy never strays far into the fantastical. (As opposed to, say, Greg Bear's superficially similar novel Moving Mars, another story of Martian politics and independence, in which the level of technology is realistically advanced for the novel's first half, but then leaps into 'indistinguishable from magic' territory.)

This just makes the expansion of humanity throughout the solar system all the more exciting. By the latter half of the novel's timeframe, there are permanent human cities from Mercury to Neptune and Pluto, and the first starships are beginning to leave our solar system for lands unexplored. (One of our principal characters departs on one of them, never to return). Humanity has escaped Earth for good, and it's all the more exciting when it happens in the hands of an author who treats space travel realistically. Robinson uses the phrase 'accelerando' for the phase of humanity's existence when we are spreading through the solar system and technology is developing at a rapid clip, teaching me that it was not, in fact, Charles Stross who was the first to use it this way.

One thing I want to say about the Mars trilogy here that I didn't say in my entry on Green Mars is what a fundamentally optimistic work it is. Humanity has its problems, we squabble with one another and are unforgivably short-sighted, we can be cruel and petty and mean, but this is a universe where by joining together and being civil to one another, we can muddle our way through. The Mars trilogy ends on a note of hope. The future's going to be bright.

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster

Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster
by Dana Thomas
Published in 2007
Published by Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-0-14-311370-6

This book is about a topic that is entirely foreign to me. I am indifferent to luxury goods, and I am equally indifferent to what is fashionable and what is not. I'm not saying this because I'm proud of it; I'm just objectively reporting on what my brain finds interesting and what it does not. My brain still insists on misreading 'Louis Vuitton' as 'Louis Mutton'. If handbags were a unisex item, it wouldn't occur to me to see them as anything but practical and utilitarian.

However, I find business case studies interesting (probably a relic of my years teaching business English), so I was interested to read Dana Thomas' account of how the great luxury houses got their start in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, often as the creation of a lone genius, such as Coco Chanel or Louis Vuitton. The latter focused on making trunks for the travelling upper classes during his lifetime; his namesake company still continues to make old-style trunks today at the workshop in Paris, not that you'd know it by walking through a modern LV store.

The major luxury brands went into a decline in the 1960s and 1970s, but experienced a resurgence in the 1980s as the nouveau riche in Europe, North America, and most importantly Japan took to them to show off their wealth. Now mass-produced, mass-marketed items (with declining standards of quality, purists grumble), the luxury groups are no different from any other multinational.

Am I fooling myself about my supposed indifference to luxury brands? Thomas' book focuses on clothes, perfume, and handbags, which I (happy to smell like cheap aftershave) barely notice in my everyday life. But my wife and I chose to shell out the money for a new MacBook rather than a much cheaper alternative to replace our aging machine (another MacBook). Isn't Apple just another luxury brand?

Maybe in some ways, but it'll take a lot of convincing to make me believe I bought an Apple just to be seen with an Apple. Maybe my impression is skewed by the sort of cafes I hang out in, but Apple computers aren't nearly uncommon enough in this city for me to perceive them as a luxury item. And if I was under the impression that someone thought I owned a MacBook to be seen with a MacBook, I would be embarrassed more than anything. Am I fooling myself?

Typhoon and Other Stories

Typhoon and Other Stories
by Joseph Conrad
Originally published in 1903

I promised myself that this year I would read ten novel or novel-like entities written by people who died before 1950. The first of my ten classics is Joseph Conrad's Typhoon and Other Stories, a collection of four stories, ranging from short story to novella length, which have been consistently published as a consistent unit since Conrad originally wrote and published them that way back at the beginning of the 20th century.

Conrad's an interesting figure in the globalization of world history. He was a European who wrote with his heart in Asia and Africa. By standards of the time he was remarkably unconvinced of Europe's inherent right to manage the world. And yet to a modern eye his fiction is influenced by 19th-century notions of European superiority -- he was, after all, only human -- and I've never come across a point in his fiction where we see the world through the eyes of a non-European, or even meet a well-developed non-European character.

Of course, it is worth noting that despite his British citizenship, he was actually a native of Poland, a country that, for most of his lifetime, did not actually exist on maps. In other words, he himself belonged to a colonized people.

He's also respected in English-as-a-foreign-language circles for his near-unique status as a great English prose stylist who couldn't speak English at all until he was in his 20s. (Vladimir Nabokov, among others, is also well-known as a nonnative English speaker who wrote respectable English prose, but Nabokov learned his English as a child.)

Possibly as a result of his linguistic background, Conrad's got an odd prose style, a strange rhythm to his long sentences, that many readers find difficult or maddening. I just happily accept it as part of his particular style. Read Conrad, deal with his sentences. It's part of the package.

---

Typhoon, the lead novella, is a straightforward adventure story, as a British ship, under a Thai flag, is sailing not far from Taiwan, transporting a boatful of coolies to Fu-chau. (And here I was, thinking the correct old-timey Romanization of the city now known as Fuzhou to be 'Foochow'. I'd be hopelessly lost as a late-19th-century expat.) The ship manages to plot a course straight through a particularly nasty typhoon, providing an opportunity for a host of character portraits of various members of the crew.

In Amy Foster, a peasant from Eastern Europe intending to emigrate to America is the lone survivor of a shipwreck off the English coast and finds himself in a bucolic fishing village. He's not in America, but he doesn't care; he stays and marries the one girl who had been kind to him. Cultural tensions emerge. The story ends tragically, drowned in a sea of irony. Decades later, Hollywood outputs a product that is not intended for my demographic.

Falk takes place in a large East Asian city that is never specified (based on geographical clues I assumed Bangkok) and deals with a cast of characters who are entirely European. The narrator is a sailor who runs into trouble with the local tugboat captain, Falk, who incorrectly believes our narrator has designs on his girl. The girl in question is a Western woman, a relative of a German captain.

(Try as I might, I could find no sign in the narrative that the woman had actually returned Falk's advances, other than blushing and demurely looking down at her knitting when he came over to visit. Presumably, at that time, such a response was considered equivalent to crying, 'I love you, my dashing Captain Falk! And yes, I will marry you!')

And then Falk confesses that there is something about him, an episode from his past, which the woman and her family ought to know about before accepting him as part of the family. Let's just say I did not see that particular plot twist coming, and leave it at that.

To-morrow (the title's got the old-fashioned hyphen and everything) deals with a young woman who lives with her blind father in a seaside village, and her crazy old landlord who lives next door. The old man's son vanished overseas several years ago, but the father remains convinced that not only is his son alive, but he is returning home 'to-morrow'. (No matter how many years pass, the old man is always certain his son is returning 'to-morrow'.) He intends to marry his phantom son off to his young lady tenant when that happens.

Then one day, the son actually shows up. The father, of course, doesn't recognize him (after all, he's not supposed to appear until to-morrow). Drama ensues.

---

I do have to admit that on one level I feel like I read Conrad more for the history than for the literary qualities. Yes, the man was a literary genius, and I don't find him difficult. (To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, most 19th-century British literature I've read, I found to be easy to read and engaging. However, despite repeated attempts, I absolutely cannot stomach Jane Austen. I don't know why. Other people can have her.)

However, there's the pervasive sense that, more than his contemporaries, Conrad's writing is 'good for me', in both the positive and the negative senses of the phrase. Immersing my mind in Conrad's context of 19th-century globalization is good for me. That is why I read him. Enjoyment of what I'm reading takes a back seat.

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Monkey: A Journey to the West

Originally by Wu Cheng'en

Retold by David Kherdian

Published in 2005

Published by Shambhala

ISBN: 1-59030-258-3

Journey to the West is one of the central books in the East Asian literary canon. If you're an educated East Asian the book has almost certainly left some kind of impact on your brain. Even if you've never read a version of it, you probably know of key episodes in the story. Even in the unlikely event you're not familiar with the plot, you certainly know of other works of fiction that were strongly influenced by it.

You can't be a consumer of media in East Asia and remain untouched by Journey to the West (or other central works of East Asian literature, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms or Dream of the Red Chamber), any more than you can be a media consumer in the Anglosphere and be wholly untouched by Shakespeare or the more important Greek myths.

Journey to the West is an episodic adventure story heavily influenced by Buddhist and Daoist philosophy and sensibilities. The Tang Dynasty monk Xuanzang has the task of venturing to India (a fantastical, made-up India) to retrieve Buddhist scriptures. Although Xuanzang is the nominal protagonist, the story is really about his sidekick, the powerful supersimian Monkey. Monkey is the focus of the narrative, Monkey is the truly memorable character, and Monkey is the name by which the book is better known outside of China.

In David Kherdian's abridged retelling, the focus is squarely on Monkey. The first half of Kherdian's retelling is devoted to Monkey's origin story. The narrative describes Monkey's establishment as Monkey King, his spiritual training, and how he acquires great powers and powerful weapons. Finally, at roughly the book's halfway point, Xuanzang (called Tripitaka here) shows up and the Journey properly begins.

(Don't turn up your nose at the thought of reading an abridged version. A completely faithful Journey to the West would be immensely long, and what's been cut is apparently more episodic adventures, not intellectual or spiritual complexity. If you want to read the whole thing, there are two very well-regarded complete English translations; one is three volumes long, the other four volumes.)

As always when I read premodern fantastical literature, my mind tries to apply the logical rigor found in modern genre fantasy. I ask myself questions like, if two combatants are locked in a deadly duel and one of them magically grows himself to a height of 10,000 feet, is that really such an overwhelming advantage? I can think of lots of tactical reasons why being that tall would be a major disadvantage in battle. And seeing how battles between strong supernatural beings in this universe generally play themselves out as duels between shapeshifters, I wonder what would happen if one of the combatants got creative and transformed himself into a horror not found in nature or legend but something uniquely shaped to trap and kill whatever form his opponent happened to be in at that moment.

This is the same kind of thinking that also makes you wonder why it was so damn impossible for Achilles' mother to make her kid's heel invulnerable, too.

At one point we meet Laozi, the legendary old Daoist said to have written the Dao De Jing. He's running an alchemist's lab up in Heaven, full of bubbling cauldrons and various potions and concoctions. Suddenly it dawned on me: according to Journey to the West, the famed old philosopher and central figure of Daoism is actually a celestial mad scientist.

There's a lot of other memorable imagery in Kherdian's book, and I feel not only has my Asian cultural literacy been bolstered, but I also might one day seek out one of the unabridged versions.

Green Mars

Green Mars

by Kim Stanley Robinson

Published in 1994

Published by Bantam Books

ISBN: 0-553-57239-3

Green Mars is the middle book in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy.

Green Mars begins around the turn of the 22nd century. Mars has been settled for several decades. Terraforming projects are incrementally inching the planet's atmosphere (and, increasingly, its developing biosphere) towards a more Earthlike new normal. New settlers are arriving and more Martian natives are being born. Meanwhile, Earth is a mess, dominated by a dozen or so 'metanationals', mergers of 21st-century-style multinationals and nation-states. These same metanationals are in charge of exploiting the natural resources of Mars.

The surviving members of the First Hundred -- the first permanent settlers on Mars and the trilogy's main protagonists -- have mostly taken up the cause of a Free Mars, sovereign and independent of Terran metanationals' meddling. This is not, of course, to say that they agree with each other, or that there aren't deep philosophical disagreements that threaten to tear the cause of Martian independence apart.

Green Mars is about the Martian people's decades-long march towards revolution.

It's been a long time since I read the first entry in the trilogy, Red Mars. (I don't even remember what year I read it in -- I think it was 2008 or 2009.) It was probably a mistake to let my knowledge of the characters and backstory to lie dormant for such a long time, especially as when I began Green Mars I wasn't sure where to turn online to refresh my memory without inadvertently spoiling myself.

If you are the kind of reader who must always have a good grasp of who each character is, what they are talking about, and what the past events they are obliquely referring to are, then you'd better read these three books in order, and (unless you have a good memory for details) without significant breaks in between. These books are vast, they are full of details, and nothing is ever forgotten. And Green Mars offers the casual reader no help at all. There's no helpful list of dramatis personae, and no introductory passage from the Encyclopaedia of Mars about the early years of Martian history, full of exposition to catch the reader up.

On the other hand, if I were the sort of reader who always had to feel cognizant and in control, then I never would have gotten through Lau Siew Mei's Playing Madame Mao. I cheerfully got myself slowly back up to speed by quietly assimilating the references to what had gone before -- all of which, of course, seemed to assume the reader was already familiar with the events of Red Mars.

Working my way through my stack of Kim Stanley Robinsons was practically a New Year's resolution for me. Robinson is a brilliant author, wields very well-thought-out concepts, and his books make me feel smarter. But I'll never call one of his books a 'page-turner'. It's clear throughout Green Mars that the installment will end with the people of Mars throwing off the yoke of their colonial oppressors, in an extraordinarily messy revolution that will require another 700-page novel to pick up the pieces. And Robinson sure takes his time getting there.

Green Mars's sizable pagecount is devoted largely to two things. One is politics, and I just ate that up. I love a realistic depiction of political struggle when it's written as an exploration of human nature, and not for the author to advance some stupid agenda of his own.

The other thing he writes about at great length is Mars, and this is where I found the book a bit of a struggle. And I feel bad about that. It's not like I can complain. I'm not going to write in an Amazon review, Robinson's book about Mars, Green Mars, is pretty good except for the parts where he writes about Mars.

But one of Robinson's main goals in this trilogy -- in Red Mars, in Green Mars, and I expect in Blue Mars too -- is to make the reader feel the natural beauty of the Martian landscape. And he sets out to accomplish this through text. Lavish textual descriptions, filled with geological terminology. And to be honest, they left me rather cold. They are what make the books a long slog for me.

I don't want to harp too much on the dryness of the 'Martian beauty' sections. They're obviously a central part of Robinson's vision. And he always gets back around to human beings and their psychologies and the march of history, which I enjoy reading about far more. My problem might just be that my brain's not wired to easily picture a visual image based on a text description. If I'm to appreciate something's visual beauty, I have to actually see it.

And on that note, go look at this high-resolution picture of Victoria Crater taken from Cape Verde by the Opportunity rover.