Tag Archives: Philip K. Dick

Read this book: Rendezvous With Rama

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The beauty of fiction is that when it’s done right, it is timeless. Think of books ranging from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled noir novels. Both writers are coming from very different worlds, yet their works contain a human element that transcends their eras.

Science fiction writers including Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, and Ray Bradbury also transcend not only their genres, but the times in which they lived and wrote.

RamaAnother writer to add to that list would be Arthur C. Clarke. I started reading him early, but somehow I missed Rendezvous With Rama.

This book is brilliant in the sense that although it was written in the early 1970s, it reads pretty fresh to someone living in 2015. What it lacks is the modern trend for hyper plotting (yes, there is too much of a good thing, in my view). What contains is a blueprint for hard sci-fi done right.

The basic plot: in 2131, an erratic asteroid is detected by astronomers, This asteroid, named Rama, turns out to be not an asteroid but a spacecraft of some sort. The manned ship Endeavour, helmed by Bill Norton, is sent to approach Rama with the intent of studying it. What they find is an immense, mysterious craft, mind-bogglingly large and packed with unexplained features.

If there is one fault with Rendezvous With Rama, it would be that the characterizations are on the thin side. But Rama is the main character, not Bill Norton or his fellow explorers. And Clarke makes Rama shine. What he gives us is a beautiful portrayal of a ship waking up. Clarke deftly describes the many facets of Rama, always giving just enough information to keep the pages turning.

rendezvous with rama

Surprisingly, Rendezvous With Rama doesn’t come off as dated in any significant sense. There’s ethnic diversity, though he never lingers long on any one character to develop this further.that seem even more ahead of our times. For instance, Clarke describes a stable three way marriage between two men and a woman.

Aside from rendering Rama beautifully, Clarke also shows us a human race that has colonized not only the moon and Mars, but also Mercury and the outer moons of Jupiter and Saturn. He explains these societies briefly, though complete enough to paint a vivid picture.

rama-inside2

Rendezvous With Rama is simple in the best sense. It is a timeless adventure tale that will fill you with wonder. Check it out.

Fun with skulls

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I’m not a macabre person by nature, but I like skulls. I’m not talking about actual human skulls, but representations: drawings, T-shirts, liquor bottles, candles, etc. Sure, it’s a cliche by now, but it’s still fun.

skull-art-prints-by-Gerrard-King

(Image courtesy of Gerrard King)

Where did my affinity for skulls start? Who knows? Maybe from the image of Hamlet holding up poor Yorick’s skull and talking to it. I always got a kick out of that when I was a kid. (Here’s a picture of Doctor Who‘s David Tennant as the moody Dane.)

Tennant Hamlet Yorick

Obviously I’m not alone. Skulls are everywhere in pop culture, and not just American culture. For instance, the Mexican Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos) holiday is a festival that recognizes the dead, and similar traditions can be found throughout the world. Though the Mexicans seem to have perfected the imagery.

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My own theory: these representations of skulls are a safe way for us to reference our own mortality. We can observe it at arms’ length, poke fun at it, while still acknowledging it. Sure, some people choose to avoid anything that will remind them of death, while others seem to revel in it. For most of us, we can acknowledge it, have a laugh, and then move on.

And now I’m happy to be adding a skull to the pop-culture pantheon. My soon-to-be-released novella, House of Flies, will feature a skull on the cover. House of Flies follows Alec as he battles a fly infestation that drives him to the brink of insanity. It’s a psychological horror story about suppressed grief and the avoidance of death, hence the skull. I can’t describe how cool I thought this imagery was when my designer first showed it to me.

House of Flies

It turns out that there have been more than a few skull-themed covers. The website Science Fiction Ruminations has compiled a collection of skull covers from the recent era. Here are a few funky examples — check out the site for more.

Philip K. dick

Robert Heinlein

Harlan Ellison

 

 

Read this book: The Last Policeman

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Apocalypse stories are divided into two camps:

1. The impending doom, where we see the event plus its aftermath (or see it thwarted)

2. The post apocalyptic, where a remnant of survivors has built a new and dangerous world from the wreckage of the old.

Ben H. Winters, in his novel The Last Policeman, gives us what should be a new sci-fi subcategory all its The Last Policemanown: the pre-apocalyptic world.

Hank Palace, the hero of The Last Policeman, has always wanted to be a detective (a desire that in part stems from the fates of his parents). A rookie cop with the Concord, New Hampshire Police Department, he gets his wish, but only because an impending cataclysm has opened up a detective slot.

This impending cataclysm? A kilometers-wide asteroid named Maia heading straight for Earth.

In the world of The Last Policeman, everyone knows that Maia will arrive in several months to end life as we know it. Several months of knowing that doom awaits. Imagine that.

Winters does a stellar job in describing what life is like in this world. And he does so mainly through the eyes of Palace, a solid, tenacious, and kind protagonist who the reader quickly grows to like.

Hank Palace is not a man trying to save the world. He’s just trying to do his job.

The plot is simple enough: a man is found hanging by his neck in a McDonalds bathroom. Suicides are rampant in this world, but Palace isn’t convinced this is a suicide. He doggedly investigates while others tell him not to bother. What he gets is apathy and stonewalling. But he never gives up, even as many in the world around him (literally) do.

In many ways this is classic crime noir. Think Raymond Chandler, with his misdirection (and even a femme fatale). This element of The Last Policeman hooked me. I’m a big fan of Chandler — he inspired me to write my novel The Last Conquistador, and I proudly employed his techniques.

Winters amps it up, though, in that he throws us a sci-fi curveball in Maia. On a technical level, I admire the way Winters uses newscasts, media reports, and recollections to tell us about Maia — how he effectively intersperses the info without giving us a data dump.

He also peppers The Last Policeman with fascinating details of life on a doomed planet. For instance, that McDonalds where the body was found? It wasn’t really a McDonalds. Corporate HQ closed, and the remaining stores were run by whoever wanted to sell their own food. All over the world people are abandoning their old lives to pursue a final dream. Or, they’re just giving up.

The Last Policeman is part of a trilogy. I’ve read the second, Countdown City (also great), and Winters does an even better job in describing a society desolate, dejected, but still clinging to threads of hope. In fact, he just won the Philip K. Dick award for best sci-fi book for Countdown City.

Life on a doomed planet: it’s not a cheery topic, but it’s rich with dramatic possibilities.

 

California: the muse of modern American sci-fi

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I’ve only been to California a few times. The state didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But a dense and intriguing article makes the case that the development of California in the 1900s was fodder for some of the best sci-fi writing we’ve seen.

Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick are titans of US sci-fi writers. Bradbury’s best known works include Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. Heinlein wrote Starship Troopers, among others, and Philip K. Dick is the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was adapted for the big screen as Blade Runner.

All 3 men were prolific, and according to this article by Michael Ziser that appeared on the website Boom California, they were often writing about the dramatic transformations that took place as California was turned from a sparsely populated harsh landscape to a lush multiethnic state powered by land management, urban planning, and the defense industry.

Bradbury, the writer states, “dramatizes the personal difficulty of adjusting to the radical novelty of West Coast civilization ray bradburycarved out of the desert.”

His evidence? Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles series of stories, which capture themes including development that alters an arid landscape, plagues that devastate native populations, societal makeovers, and a longing for a lost world.

In Bradbury’s classic short story There Will Come Soft Rains, which describes a fully automated house going about its business long after the family has been killed by a nuclear war, he may be reflecting the anxieties of mid-20th-century progress. Technology has outlived its creators.

robert heinleinLike Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, Heinlein wrote about a transformed landscape in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein merges technology and an alien world. Heinlein, the author writes, reflects the optimism of his era about the potential to remake civilization, while reflecting an unease with the technology that makes this possible.

Philip K. Dick, who wrote later than Bradbury and Heinlein, also told tales of colonization, but he also reflected a 1970s-era sensibility, as his stories often focused on infrastructure philip k dickand environmental threats. His story Survey Team includes a character who mourns for the lost world of his Californian boyhood.

“It was a lot different from the way he remembered it when he was a kid in California. He could remember the valley country, grape orchards and walnuts and lemons. Smudge pots under the orange trees. Green mountains and sky the color of a woman’s eyes. And the fresh smell of the soil…. That was all gone now. Nothing remained but gray ash pulverized with the white stones of buildings. Once a city had been in this spot. He could see the yawning cavities of cellars, filled now with slag, dried rivers of rust that had once been buildings. Rubble strewn everywhere, aimlessly….”

What a great piece of writing.

Science fiction is often derided as commercial and pulp. But this analysis shows that, like the best of literature, sci-fi can incorporate larger themes of our world and our humanity.

(Philip K. Dick image: Nicole Panter)