(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although it's certainly a valid trick that can occasionally be put to very good use (Memento comes to mind, for example), genre authors need to be very careful when when deploying the "selective amnesia" trope within their fantastical stories; because when done wrong, you get something like Will McIntosh's disappointing science-fiction novel Faller, whose logic often feels like the author just flat-out confessing, "For the purposes of my badly constructed plot I just happened to need this character to forget this random thing at this particular random moment, which is why they did; then for the purposes of my badly constructed plot I just happened to need this other character to remember this other random thing at this particular random moment, which is why they did." That always feels like a cop-out because it always is, an internal logic that makes no sense merely because the author is trying to hide a weak storyline; in this case, a story that begins with a big chunk of Manhattan floating in space and the people on it having no recollection of who they are or why they're there, but who for some inexplicable reason do remember that violent gangs string up their enemies on telephone poles as a way of intimidating everyone who's left, which is exactly what the violent gangs start doing the moment this chunk of New York starts running out of food.
The whole novel is like this, full of lazy moments of random remembrances and forgetfulness based on what McIntosh needs to have happen on that particular page of the story: humanity has apparently completely forgotten the very concept of English proper names, yet remembers enough about English to assign themselves poetically symbolic names like "Clue" and "Orchid" and "Steel;" humanity has forgotten what cars and planes are, but seemingly remember every single stereotype about small-town rural people being conservatively superstitious and their children plaintively playing hopscotch on the sidewalk with chalk like something out of a bad alt-country song. That makes it even more of a disappointment, then, when the cause of the planet-busting and mass amnesia is finally revealed and it turns out to be a trendy explanation that anyone even vaguely familiar with particle colliders can already guess; and this doesn't even take into account the pre-explosion situation McIntosh invents to get our players all into a place where they're taking such desperate measures in the first place, one whose details defy any and all believability whatsoever (including a ground war in which enemy combatants have invaded California yet not a single nuclear weapon has been used in retaliation; a global conflict that has left tens of millions dead over a final grab for the planet's last fossil fuels, yet with not even a single word said about the current state of solar, water and wind power; and a world in which a coalition of barely functioning third-world nations like Russia and North Korea can somehow completely overpower the endlessly vast and all-powerful US military complex).
The whole thing feels like a case of McIntosh getting one great image in his head one day (and to be fair, the image of a hollowed-out Midtown Manhattan free-floating in the sky is a great image), but then never seeming able to dream up 60,000 words of credible three-act story to wrap around that central image, which unfortunately is the case with way more science-fiction novels than any of us genre fans care to admit. It's getting a minimally decent score for at least being well-written and a fast read, although with a plot that only the most undiscerning hardcore SF fan could love.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
In a few weeks I'm going to have the opportunity to read Paul Auster's surprise new novel, 4 3 2 1, which has already been gathering up tons of accolades from early reviewers; but I've never actually read any work by Auster before, so I thought I'd start with the very first thing he published, The New York Trilogy which originally consisted of three separate small novels in the 1980s, but is now only sold as a one-volume set (but more later on why this is). And that's when I discovered the big surprise -- that far from the dowdy, boring academic writer I had thought Auster was all these years, based exclusively on the types of people who like his work and what they have to say about it, he instead turns out to be this incredible penner of so-called "New Weird" stories, the kinds of books that first became popular during the second half of Postmodernism precisely for being hard to define -- part literary, part horror, part mystery, part science-fiction -- and that have since become a staple of our current popular culture here in the 21st century.
And indeed, I don't know why it took so long for all this to click in my head, given how long I've been a fan of some of these writers, but reading Auster for the first time made me realize that there's actually a whole wing of popular writers sort of buried within the second half of the Postmodernist era who can be described this way, including Thomas Pynchon, Jon Crowley, Haruki Murakami, Tim Powers and more; and that since what these authors were trying to accomplish was so new and so hard to define, the literary world has ended up sort of looking at these writers in completely different ways based on the person (Pynchon is considered an academe who's lucked into some popular success; Crowley is considered a genre writer who has lucked into some academic respectability), instead of seeing them as parts of a much larger "New Weird" movement that unifies everything they've been doing over the last forty years.
For those who don't know, the term was invented by Jeff VanderMeer in the '90s, as a riff off the old term "Weird" from the Victorian Age; back then there were no such things as separate categorizations for "science-fiction" and "noir" and "horror," so basically anything metaphysical was thrown into this general catch-all label, which then encouraged writers to freely flow from one trope to the other within a single book. It was only in the Modernist period of the early 20th century, VanderMeer argues, that these genres became calcified and started developing their rigid rules that authors weren't allowed to deviate from; but what Postmodernism gave us was an explosion of these rules (as well as every other rule about "proper writing" that had been invented up to then), allowing a new generation of authors to once again go in and blend these genres together in interesting and unique ways. And although VanderMeer was specifically talking in his case about the newest generation of genre writers who were just starting to become popular in those years -- people like Charles Stross, China Mieville, Cory Doctorow and more -- I'm coming to realize that you can actually go back an entire generation to see the formation of this New Weird school of thought, one that got its start in the experimental hippie years of the countercultural era, but that didn't really come into its own as a cultural force until the Reagan years of the 1980s.
That's exactly what makes these first three novels by Auster so intriguing, certainly, that they're so hard to traditionally describe; ostensibly detective tales, in which private investigators are hired by shady clients to track down nebulous targets, all three of these books start getting weirder and weirder the further in you get, eventually becoming treaties on identity, the power of naming things, and how the concepts of Transcendentalist thought from the 1800s do or do not particularly fit in the Electronic Age of the late 20th century. The more you read, the less you understand what's going on, and soon the books pick up a creepy vibe much more akin to horror than pulp fiction; but the explanation behind this creepy vibe is much more like sci-fi than horror, even as the books never just come out and explicitly state that something metaphysical is actually happening, leaving it a question as to whether our narrators are perhaps simply going insane from existential dread, a clear reference to the work of HP Lovecraft. Then in the third book, The Locked Room, Auster adds an even more complicated twist to it all, by having a certain character reveal that there's actually these strange nebulous ties between the characters in all three novels; and by the time we're done with the whole thing, we realize that all three books are simply large chapters within the same shared universe and uber-plotline, which is why since the '90s they've only been published anymore as one large volume.
Make no mistake -- Auster is essentially the American Murakami, one who even started writing at almost the exact same time as the other, and anyone who's a fan of that Japanese genre master will automatically be a fan of his American equivalent, no question about it whatsoever. And that raises an intriguing question, of why Murakami has become a millionaire superstar by the 21st century, as well as other New Weird writers like Thomas Pynchon finally now being classified as the complicated, genre-bending authors they are, while Auster forty years later is still mostly considered an obscure academic writer who can only be loved by erudite professors? I don't have an answer to this, because it's clearly not the case -- anyone who loved the old TV shows Lost or Twin Peaks, for example, will also love Auster's books, and it certainly doesn't take an MFA to understand what he's trying to do -- and it's my hope that his newest novel, his first in seven years and one being published when he's 70 years old, will finally start turning the tide a bit when it comes to his public reputation. He's an author who deserves to have a much wider audience than he currently does, a writer who would be loved by millions of sci-fi fans if they simply knew about his existence in the first place; and I encourage all of you genre fans to go and check out some of his work when you have a chance, a surprisingly gripping and easy-to-read author who will leave you wanting more. We'll see in a few weeks how he's held up as a writer in the forty years since these debut novels; but for now, I for one plan on checking out a wide range of his subsequent oeuvre when I have a chance, and I encourage you to do the same. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
To review Jeremy Andrew Whitehead's Ames is an inherently frustrating experience, and a great example of why it can be so difficult to give a fair shake to self-published literature. Because to be sure, there's a great science-fiction novel buried within this manuscript, based on a really thought-provoking premise that brings to mind Charles Stross' cult favorite Saturn's Children -- namely, what would happen if a ship full of human colonists in suspended animation were sent to a planet to sleep underground for a thousand years, while a team of artificially intelligent robots spent a millennium terraforming that planet into a habitable state, just for those robots to realize a couple hundred years in that they don't actually need the humans at all, and that they could start their own civilization just fine?
That's a great concept, and gives Whitehead room to explore all kinds of interesting world-building questions related to a society that was built specifically for robots that are intentionally modeling themselves after humans; a world with no bathrooms but with recharging stations built into every vehicle and piece of furniture, a world where a small cabal of "first gen" AIs deliberately create millions of less intelligent minions that they control like Orwellian fascist nation-states. And what would happen in such a world if one of those long-dormant underground humans was finally woken up to reassert control? That's another fascinating question, one that fuels the action-adventure plot seen here; so what a shame that this book still needs so much basic work when it comes to proofreading and editing in order to be taken seriously as a piece of literature. And that's the problem with self-published novels in a nutshell; that in an age where it's so incredibly easy to convert a Microsoft Word document into a finished and published paper book for sale to the public at Amazon, it's becoming harder than ever for such authors to secure professional editing services to make those books worth reading in the first place.
Ames is essentially a 500-page book with only about 250 pages of actual interesting content, written by an aerospace engineer who mistakes the detailed procedural lists that come with product analysis for a compelling narrative; and so while that generates some really heady ideas for us to ponder, those ideas are couched within pages upon pages of mind-numbing filler, adding up to a wash whose bad parts equally cancel out the good ones. (Just as an example, the act 1 setup of the story takes Whitehead an entire 125 pages to get across, when it should've been over and done with by page 30 or so.) And this is not to mention the literal hundreds of basic grammatical errors found within the manuscript, things that spell-checks will never catch like Whitehead's habit of putting his dialogue's punctuation outside of his quotation marks instead of inside, which as a heavy reader drove me crazier and crazier with each successive page.
This could've been easily solved if he had had an extra thousand bucks to hire an actual professional editor to give this a once-over; and therein lies the problem, in that actually publishing the book through a place like CreateSpace only costs a tiny fraction of that, leading most self-published authors to skip this expensive and time-consuming but such critical step. I'm still giving Ames a decent score, because just the concepts alone being bandied about is worth giving it a look, especially for extra hardcore SF fans who aren't as bothered by basic grammatical mistakes; but for general-interest readers who are, this is going to be a frustrating read, something one hopes that Whitehead will fix before releasing part 2 of this planned trilogy.
Out of 10: 7.4, or 8.4 for hardcore science-fiction fans ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although I'm generally a fan of bizarro literature (as in "I don't actively hate it"), there's one big problem with this genre that prevents me from being a big fan or a fervent fan; namely, every bizarro novel in existence tends to sound exactly like every other bizarro novel in existence, a genre that can quite literally be defined as "a cartoon written out in narrative form," and therefore has a sort of randomly nonsensical "throw everything at the wall and see what sticks" nature that makes every book in the genre sort of bleed into one giant absurdist fairytale without a beginning or an end. Take S.T. Gulik's Birth: or The Exquisite Sound of One Hand Falling Off a Turnip Truck for a good example; not badly written at all, its post-apocalyptic tale of an everyman stumbling through a series of comically disgusting situations nonetheless feels like a book I've already read a hundred times before, precisely because I really have read books exactly like this a hundred times before. The genre in general is sort of the ultimate example of a book type that can only be loved by hardcore fans of that book type, but who will then read a book every single day of this type exactly so they can get their daily dose of exactly what they were expecting; and although crime and romance are genres of this type that get a lot more attention, bizarro is one of the more pure examples of this phenomenon, with Birth being a perfect example of one of those throwaway books that a bizarro fan might start at 10 in the morning on a Wednesday, be done with by 8:00 that night, then be ready to start another one exactly like it at 10:00 Thursday morning. It should all be kept in mind when deciding whether to pick it up yourself, or even whether to be a fan of bizarro lit in the first place.
Out of 10: 7.5, or 9.0 for fans of bizarro literature ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The promotional material for Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat claims that the novel is "reminiscent of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves," but as typical with this kind of stuff, that's simply a lie; in fact the one and only thing the two books have in common is that they both feature a space that's bigger on the inside than on the outside. Other than that, this book consists of not much more than a fairly pedestrian coming-of-age tale, plotted with the immaturity of a Young Adult novel and featuring dialogue that badly suffers from Joss Whedon Syndrome*, a book that hits all the notes you would expect from such a story (boy moves to Big City, boy makes new group of friends, boy gets into first serious romantic relationship, boy breaks up from first serious romantic relationship), only with a metafictional element holding the story spine together, in that it's the boy's older sister who convinces him to move there, and she and her boyfriend are both scientists who are working on some kind of shadowy project that supposedly supersedes the normal laws of space and time.
That's led St. Martin's Press to unwisely market this as a science-fiction novel, or at least a literary novel with strongly science-fictional overtones (thus the House of Leaves comparison on the dust jacket); but actual SF fans like myself will be disappointed by Three Years with the Rat, not only because the science part is dished out in such a poorly paced, haphazard way (smart readers can essentially glean everything they're trying to do in chapter 1, then the rest of the novel is a series of flashbacks where Hosking tries to slowly reveal the very information he fully showed in the first chapter), but because the eventual "science" that's revealed sounds literally like something a stoned undergraduate would come up with after a bullshit session in the dorm with their buddy**, then afterwards decide would make for a good subject off which to base an entire novel.
That's a huge problem here, because there's nothing compelling left once you discount the disappointing concept at the center of the book; and when combined with the immature writing style that's clearly being presented as something for grown-ups, that makes for a book that's hard to recommend and kind of a slog to actually read. I'm tacking on a few extra points to its score today anyway, as an acknowledgement that teens and Whedon fans will undoubtedly like this more than I did; but make no mistake, despite what St. Martin's is trying to peddle here, Primer this ain't.
Out of 10: 7.3
*Joss Whedon Syndrome: When dialogue supposedly meant for grown-ups is written in an overly twee and flippant style, which some people apparently like for some unfathomable reason, but for me is like fingernails down a chalkboard.
**"Dude, you know how, like, time seems to stand still when you're waiting in line at the grocery store? What if it actually does?" "Awww, duuuude." "And what if, like, you could control that time speed by putting six mirrors together directly across from each other in a cube, so that they're, like, all infinitely mirroring each other?" "Awww, duuuuuddde!" "And what if, like, what if you sat in the middle of that mirror cube, and like your entire past ceased to exist because of it, so then you could go back to your ex-girlfriend and undo all the dick moves that made her break up with you the first time?" "Stop, dude, stop! YOU'RE FREAKING ME OUT, DUDE!!!" ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
To be clear, Robert Kroese's "phenomenological inquisitor" tale The Big Sheep is not much more than a well-written ripoff of Douglas Adams' "holistic detective" Dirk Gently novels, combined with the characterizations found in the cult movie The Zero Theorem and the alt-history universe-building of a typical "slow apocalypse" science-fiction book. But I happen to love the witty and smart Dirk Gently novels; and given that Adams died several years ago and won't be writing any more of them, I've got no problem at all with Kroese taking up the slack and putting out books nearly identical in both spirit and tone.
Set in a version of the 2030s that has already seen a cataclysmic event in America come and go, it has left behind a tougher and weirder Los Angeles that among other things now contains flying cars (since the old highways of pre-apocalypse LA are no longer navigable), as well as giant sections of the city that have essentially been walled off like Escape From New York and are their own anarchic demilitarized zones, the subject of the newest wave of popular gritty TV shows within an entertainment industry that has been permanently commingled with the journalism industry, so that there's virtually no difference any longer between the two. It's within such a setting that we follow the adventures of metaphysical private investigator Erasmus Keane, as well as his tough but perpetually bewildered assistant Blake Fowler, as they simultaneously take on cases of an intelligent sheep that's been kidnapped from a top-secret genetics facility, and a teenage TV star who's become convinced that someone is out to kill her, the two investigations slowly revealing their complicated connections as the story reaches its absurdist, violent conclusion.
To be fair, there are some problems with the novel, which is why it isn't getting a higher score than it is today; the characterizations are a bit inconsistent from one chapter to the next, there's way too much telling over showing, and the book simply isn't as funny as Kroese seems to think it is. But that said, I was thoroughly charmed by the ridiculous machinations that fuel this novel's day-after-tomorrow storyline, the premise getting more and more preposterous and convoluted with each passing chapter; and in general it was a fast and always entertaining page-turner that will immensely satisfy fans of bizarro literature, as well as those who like the wackier side of science-fiction (think Terry Pratchett). The first of what looks like is going to be an entire series of Keane/Fowler adventures, I certainly would not mind a franchise being made out of these two engaging and memorable characters; and while this first volume doesn't exactly come recommended to all, certainly those who enjoy the kind of novels I just described should pick it up with no delay.
The Chicago Public Library recently established a partnership with online content sharing service Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly haThe Chicago Public Library recently established a partnership with online content sharing service Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly have access to several thousand old comics I've never read before, including most of the back catalog of Dark Horse, Top Shelf and Boom! Studios. And among these was a title I had really been looking forward to -- the complete 15-issue run of Dean Motter's Terminal City, collected up into one oversized graphic novel, which I had spent years seeing as individual issues on the shelves of comics stores but had never actually gotten around to reading.
For those who don't know, Motter started as the designer for many of the most famous album covers of the late '70s and early '80s, and helped create that Nagel-like look that we associate with New Wave music (the angular typography, the neon effects, the primary colors, etc); it was through those assignments that he gradually ended up creating a nebulous character for his own amusement named "Mister X," which then became an early and infamous example of vaporware -- announced as a high-profile indie comic years before Motter was ready to actually make it, the first four issues instead sporadically came out under the guidance of the Hernandez Brothers of Love and Rockets fame, with Motter finally taking over writing duties with issue 5 but the entire title becoming one of those semi-mythical hard-to-find projects that became such a hallmark of the early-'80s, with the entire run still yet to ever have come out in a definitive book form.
1996's Terminal City was supposed to have been Motter's chance at redeeming this universe, a brand-new title set in the same city as Mister X but not actually featuring that character for legal reasons, put out under a regular schedule and with proper promotional resources for the first time. And that's what makes the title so frustrating, I've discovered now after finally reading it, is that this finally definitively proves that Motter really had no good ideas for storytelling when first creating this universe; for while the setting itself is great, a "retro-future" story about a grand Art Deco utopian metropolis of the 1920s, which has become a decaying, dysfunctional land of endless slums by the 1990s, the storylines Motter actually writes to take place in this setting are nothing more than tired generic noir-type tropes, ones involving gangsters and stolen jewels, disgraced boxers and public daredevils, crooked cops and noble aging movie stars.
That's a real shame, because there's so much that could've been done with the universe itself that Motter builds up here; there's an entire century of history of this fascinating, unique city that could've been the focal point of the series, a sense of world-building that could've been a major source of delight and horror, but he instead ignores almost all of this to give us boring, cliched stories set within this barely fleshed-out universe. It's no coincidence that the most interesting parts of this book by far are when we get glimpses of this world-building Motter could've concentrated on -- the failed World's Fair that has left decaying artifacts scattered throughout the city, his version of Coney Island which has become a Warriors-type post-industrial wasteland -- and this would've been a much more memorable title if the series had concentrated a lot more on this, instead of the cheesy dialogue and go-nowhere plots of the stories he did eventually decide on. A big disappointment, and I doubt I will be revisiting other work of Motter's again. ...more
The Chicago Public Library recently established a partnership with online content sharing service Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly haThe Chicago Public Library recently established a partnership with online content sharing service Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly have access to several thousand old comics I've never read before, including most of the back catalog of Dark Horse, Top Shelf and Boom! Studios. This is the third graphic novel I've now read through Hoopla, mostly because I was attracted to its "self-aware Matrix" concept: that in the future, a mysterious new virus wipes out 99 percent of the human race, and in desperation all their minds are "uploaded" into a vastly complicated new version of the internet that was being developed at the time, the 1 percent of "meat-based" humans who are left now in charge of maintaining the city-sized server farms around the planet that house the other "virtual" 99 percent, all of whom are supposedly continuing to work on finding a cure to the virus. Our story, then, opens on a time of mounting conflict between these two groups -- the energy needed to keep the virtual population "alive" is starting to drain more and more resources from the Meat, while the citizens of the virtual Arcadia are starting to grouse more and more about wanting root access to their own source code, currently held by the 1-percenters and able to be switched off at any time.
Unfortunately, though, the execution of this concept is only mediocre, for a variety of reasons: the story itself is doled out in this way that makes it complicated to follow along; adding to this confusion is the so-so artwork, in which not only do too many people look like each other, but even single characters don't look consistently like themselves from one page to the next; too many of the characters are dumbed down to this Joss Whedon, 14-year-old Young Adult level; and perhaps most damningly, I had fundamental questions about the storyline's very concept as I was reading through the book, which kept yanking me out of the story's enjoyment because I kept spending too much time wondering why they weren't addressing my very simplistic questions. (If the entire reason the wiped-out population is being kept virtually alive is so they can come up with a cure to the virus, why do you need all four billion of them? If the biological Earth can no longer maintain the resources to keep all four billion of them and their ridiculously detailed simulacrum of the entire planet running, why not simply shut all of them down except for the scientists actively working on the cure, and house all of them in one virtual city that doesn't need an entire planet's worth of computing resources to render?)
Granted, not all novels should be dismissed just because a reader has a few nagging questions about the novel's concept; but in this case, these questions seemed so self-evident, and were such at the heart of the book's main conflict, that it kept pulling out me out of the act of enjoying it every time the conflict would arise, and they failed once again to address what seemed like the most logical and simple solution to their problem. Combined with the other problems just mentioned, this was enough to make this a more frustrating than enjoyable read, still worth checking out if you're a hardcore sci-fi comics fan but easily skippable if you're not. ...more
The Chicago Public Library recently entered a partnership with online content provider Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly have access tThe Chicago Public Library recently entered a partnership with online content provider Hoopla, which among other things means I suddenly have access to thousands of old comic books I've never read before, including most of the back catalog of Top Shelf, Dark Horse and Boom! Studios. This is the second graphic novel I read through Hoopla, because I was attracted to its intriguing combination of talking animals, the 1930s British countryside, and its steampunk-influenced take on War of the Worlds; but like I suspect will be the case with a lot of the books I read through Hoopla, although this was a perfectly fine experience when checking it out for free and reading through it over a couple of nights before bed, I'm not sure it would be worth spending $20 on and owning permanently. It's good, don't get me wrong; but by its very nature, it's the exact definition of "derivative," and it was hard after I finished it to not feel like it was a story I had already read a hundred times. It comes with a limited recommendation today in that spirit....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
So yes, I admit it, I went into Martin Seay's The Mirror Thief specifically searching for things I could find wrong with it, because it's been the subject this year of overhype -- a 600-page debut novel that spans across three different timeframes and genres, it's earned Seay a lot more mainstream press than most first-time novelists will ever see, where people have started comparing it regularly to the work of Thomas Pynchon -- and anytime I hear of these kinds of accolades for a debut novel, I'm immediately suspicious of the book in question, and about whether it's getting these accolades because of an overzealous marketing staff and a million-dollar promotional budget, and not because of its actual quality. But lo and behold if this didn't turn out to be a pretty great book anyway, despite all the hype; and although I can't attest to how closely it sounds like Pynchon (believe it or not I've never actually read any of his work, and I know, shame on me), it did remind me quite a bit of an author I'm a near-completist of, and one of my all-time favorite currently working writers in America, the fellow genre-bending Neal Stephenson.
Like Stephenson, Seay turns in an uber-story here, telling one giant interrelated story but through three sections that at first don't seem to have any connection -- a detective tale among con artists in Las Vegas during the Bush years, a coming-of-age story among the beat poets and juvie gangs of 1950s California, and a steampunk thriller set in 1500s Italy, in which a European alchemist is hired by the Ottoman Empire to steal away a crew of master mirror-makers from the tightly controlled monopoly of such fine craftsmen the Kingdom of Venice had over the industry at the time. And like Stephenson, the tendrils of these three threads start weaving tighter and tighter together as you make your way through the oversized book, until coming to a satisfying conclusion that finally fuses them all together (or, satisfying in my eyes, anyway, but more on that in a bit). Like Stephenson, there's a bit of an metaphysical element floating throughout the storylines, not the main point but just enough otherworldliness so that you can't quite call this simple literary fiction; and like Stephenson, the novel is a great example of big concepts being bandied about through plain language, a thought-provoking yet easy-to-read epic that will have you finished with the whole thing faster than you thought it would take.
In fact, there's really one major criticism to be made about the book; that a lot of people (judging by the reviews I've read from others) seem to miss the point Seay is trying to make at the end, and who complain that the three different story threads don't come together enough in the climax to make for a satisfying read. And it's true -- despite the comparison, Seay simply doesn't bring the whole thing crashing together in the same exciting and mind-blowing way that Stephenson is known for in his own multiple-thread epics (or for that matter, Stephenson's genre peer William Gibson, who became famous in the '80s precisely for his ability to juggle multiple storylines into one massive satisfying whole by the end). But that's not Seay's goal in the first place, so it's unfair to criticize him for failing to do something he never planned on doing to begin with; instead his goal is more along the lines of Battlestar Galactica's concept of "all of this has happened before and it will all eventually happen again," a more delicate type of thread-tying that's more about noticing and appreciating the subtle similarities between each storyline, the manner in which they each echo and reflect the others in intriguing ways, and less about tying them all together into one giant uber-climax that informs all three parts in equal ways all at once. In all it makes for a really engaging and enjoyable reading experience, an impressively self-assured debut that makes it easy to see why it's been generating so much buzz, and it comes strongly recommended to a general audience precisely because of this.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
One of the more interesting aspects of the "CCLaP 100" essay series on literary classics I've been writing over the years has been in researching the authors in question, and discovering that many of them have thirty, forty, fifty books or more as part of their complete bibliography, even though it's the same two or three titles that now get read by modern audiences 99.9 percent of the time. The question becomes, why have these other 47 books faded into unread obscurity? Are they truly subpar novels that aren't worth our time? Were they ever popular with contemporary audiences when they first came out? Or is this simply the reality of a writer destined to be remembered by history -- do they simply have to crank out 50 novels in order to produce two or three that are still worth remembering and reading a century later?
With these questions floating around in my head all the time, then, it's easy to apply them to the contemporary living authors of today, the ones who have already racked up a couple of ultra-popular titles and will likely make up the next wave of the so-called literary canon; take Margaret Atwood for a good example, whose 1985 The Handmaid's Tale is almost guaranteed at this point to be considered a classic by future generations, and whose brilliant post-apocalyptic trilogy of Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam also has a good chance of outliving her at-the-moment fans. And that's what makes her newest novel, The Heart Goes Last, such a heartbreaking thing to read, because it becomes clear quickly that this is one of those proverbial minor novels to be almost immediately forgotten by history within just a year of its publication, one of those red-linked titles at the end of her Wikipedia bio that obsessive fans in the 22nd century will wonder whether it's worth it to even track a copy down.
Yet another day-after-tomorrow speculative novel like so many of her best ones, The Heart Goes Last is unfortunately a half-baked example of one, with a central premise that is both trite and that makes no logical sense -- in an America that voted in the Tea Party after the Great Recession of the 2010s, things are quickly starting to devolve into Mad Max territory, with privately owned prisons being one of the few industries left that is still demonstrating economic growth, if it wasn't for the fact that those pesky prisoners keep doing things like killing each other and starting riots and becoming now-well-trained threats to society the moment they're released. Wouldn't it be great, some Halliburton-type corporation decides one day, if you could have all the economic benefits of a large prison but without the drawbacks of actual hardened criminals? And thus is the experimental walled city of Consilience started, populated with "volunteers" fleeing the anarchy that most American big cities have become by now, operating under a simple approach -- every month, half the town's population acts as prisoners while the other half are their guards and support staff, then the next month these halves are reversed, with everyone involved getting free middle-class room and board for their troubles, as long as they agree to never leave the town, and never talk to outside reporters.
Granted, Atwood's earnestness is in the right place with this book, but that's also the problem in a nutshell; the whole thing feels like some weird, not-well-thought-out nugget of an idea that popped into her head one night when watching yet one more Donald Trump rally, a sort of kneejerk reaction to the one-percenters that somehow got filled out to 300 pages before anyone bothered to ask whether the novel's central premise even makes narrative sense. What exactly are the economic benefits of a fake prison filled with fake prisoners? Why would someone fund a fake prison in the first place? If the entire town exists as a way to provide cheap labor for the outside world in exchange for middle-class safety, why not just get rid of the entire fake-prison concept altogether and make the town the entire point? And if this is supposed to be a model for a way to potentially save America from complete downfall, why are the town's founders so paranoid about not letting the public glimpse any of it? Especially when they're not really doing anything that people living under Mad-Max-type conditions would especially complain about? (The main thing the town's founders are trying to hide is that they peacefully euthanize troublemakers who refuse to tow the line; but in a world where bands of armed criminals roam the lawless countryside, murdering and raping while facing no repercussions at all, a little lethal injection of the worst malcontents would actually seem like a blessing to most.)
Ugh, the amount of questions regarding narrative logic that immediately pop up when reading this book is enough to boggle the mind, but that's not the end of the problems; Atwood then marries a bunch of cheesy, too-obvious details to this premise, such as the fact that all the houses in this town are modeled and furnished in the style of 1950s suburban ranch homes (the period of history when people professed "being most happy"), or the fact that "rock and roll music" has been banned from the town's private communications system, replaced instead with endless amounts of such Mid-Century goody-goods as Doris Day and Pat Boone. It's less of an Atwood novel and more a freshman writing student's hackneyed ripoff of an Atwood novel, an entire full-length book entirely fueled by a single thought one night while watching CNN of, "Ooh, I hate those Tea Party people so much;" and for an author like Atwood who has proven what a masterful and inventive storyteller she can be, such a book goes way beyond disappointing and into the realm of legitimately insulting, especially given that a million dollars was spent on marketing this book which could've instead been used to promote a thousand better novels from small-press authors you've never heard of. So the next time you're looking through the Wikipedia bio of Jack London or Nathaniel Hawthorne or Theodore Dreiser and get to wondering about all those books listed at the bottom of their page you've never heard of, keep The Heart Goes Last in mind and realize that they've most likely fallen into obscurity for a very good reason.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Last month I gave a favorable review to Ian Tregillis' The Mechanical, part 1 of a coming alt-history trilogy that imagines what the world would be like if the Dutch Empire had managed to invent robots in the 1600s; so that's why I don't have much to say about volume 2 of the series, The Rising, that I didn't already say in that original review. Exactly more of the same, it's perhaps best not to think of these as three different books in the first place, but rather one super-long three-part saga that is well worth any alt-history fan's time, one of those perfect genre exercises that combines thought-provoking philosophical issues with fast-moving action set-pieces, all within a deeply well-thought-out alternative universe that will make minds race with the possibilities. A strong recommendation for sci-fi fans; although as always with genre novels like these, it can be easily skipped by those who aren't already aficionados.
Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.4 for fans of alt-history novels ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
So to be clear, what makes Ian Tregillis' The Mechanical such a dazzling success as a genre novel is primarily his world-building and other "what if" skills; predicated on a fairly standard premise from steampunk literature ("What if physicist Christiaan Huygens had actually invented robots in the 1600s?"), what makes the novel so compelling is what Tregillis guesses would happen to world history as a result, presenting us with a retro-futuristic 1929 in which an all-ascendant Dutch Empire rules the planet (due to being the sole possessors of robots for the last 250 years), steam power was never developed (who needs steamships when you can just have 10,000 robot rowers in the bilge of your luxury cruise liner?), and a defeated French aristocratic diaspora live in exile in Montreal (along with a defeated Vatican), where Catholic rebels have formed a robot "underground canal system" (remember, no railroads) in order to save the "souls" of these artificial creatures, and whose main weapon in their no-tech society is petroleum-based epoxies that gum up a robot's intricate mechanics when hurled against one in battle. But that said, as all us genre fans have learned the hard way over the years, even the greatest premise in the world can't be saved without competent skills in dialogue, character development and the other building blocks of a decent novel; and so while Tregillis' skills in such aren't particularly spectacular, it should be noted that they're good enough to do the job, mainly getting out of the way so we can enjoy the heady theoretical 20th century so unlike our own that the author has posited here. Volume one of a coming trilogy (volume 2 is already out, in fact), this was a thrilling enough and philosophically challenging enough start to make me excited about continuing the series; and it comes strongly recommended to steampunk fans, although you might want to skip it if you're not.
I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of I have to admit, while I was reading Giacomo Lee's Funereal recently, it actually reminded me a lot of a book that CCLaP itself published a couple of years ago, Scott Abrahams' Turtle and Dam; not because of any plot similarities (to be clear, the books have very different storylines), but because they're both great examples of white Westerners writing convincingly about young people in contemporary Asia, with Lee's particular story taking place in right-this-second South Korea (or just "Korea" as it's known in the book, an early sign that we are now looking at this country from the standpoint of a local instead of a foreign visitor).
One of those books that seems to touch on every single thing about Asian culture we Americans find strange, at its heart it's the tale of mid-twenties slacker Soobin Shin, a wannabe indie-rock musician and unemployed marketing major currently working at a doughnut shop in a neighborhood in Seoul known specifically for all its plastic surgeons; the story really takes off when she discovers that one of their regular slovenly customers has just started a new business dedicated to "radical psychotherapy," in which despondent and suicidal clients are given an actual funeral with their actual friends in attendance, and where they lie in an actual coffin for hours at a time, under the belief that it will help them understand the true joys of life without the family shame of seeing an actual psychologist.
This is the ingenious joy of this book in a nutshell -- that this odd little detail helps us understand just what a shameful thing it still is in Korea to admit that one is seeing a medical therapist -- and essentially this entire novel is 228 pages of that, strange little stories about Soobin's surreal life as the new marketing director of "OneLife," which each serve as another way for us as Westerners to examine such bizarre (in our eyes) Asian phenomenon as K-pop, doomsday cults, love hotels, sexual submissiveness in corporate culture, karaoke bars as "brothel lite"s, and a lot more. A book that just almost dips into science-fiction at times, although still feeling like we're simply getting a glimpse at the ultra-cutting-edge elements of Korean life that most of us just don't know about, there's a good reason that Lee is getting compared left and right these days to people like David Mitchell and William Gibson (and has become the latest obsession of the brilliantly weird geniuses at Boing Boing, no small feat); and Funereal comes strongly recommended to those who are specifically into these kinds of stories, and especially those who want to understand hipster Asia better precisely through the weird little details that make it seem like some bizarro genre story.
Out of the large stack of books recently sent to us by horror publisher Word Horde, Molly Tanzer's Vermilion is the first full-length novel of theirs Out of the large stack of books recently sent to us by horror publisher Word Horde, Molly Tanzer's Vermilion is the first full-length novel of theirs I've gotten to read (the rest so far have been story anthologies); and it certainly does not disappoint, a sprawling and epic steampunk tale with supernatural elements and lots of strange little details in its world-building (such as the intelligent bears who live in the Rocky Mountain region, who like Native Americans have negotiated a territory-based peace with the US government). It's a big book to be sure, and you'll need to be an existing steampunk fan to make it through the whole thing; but this is also a great challenge for those who like contemporary urban fantasies, and who would like to see such storytelling run through the filter of Victoriana from 150 years ago. Strongly recommended.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The Mid-Century Modernist era was the height of book-length manifestos masquerading as action novels (see 1984, Atlas Shrugged, and Walden Two for great examples of what I'm talking about); but this subgenre is still alive and well here in the 2010s, as evidenced by Roland Hughes' awkwardly titled John Smith: Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars. Set 68 years in the future, after a cataclysmic event that not only broke apart the continents and ended most life on Earth but whose origins have been completely forgotten by the survivors, this ostensibly takes the form of an interview between a futuristic journalist and the last known person to remember the pre-apocalypse world; but in reality this is essentially a 80,000 word expository speech (or if you like, a 300-page Wikipedia entry), broken up every couple of paragraphs with one of exactly two phrases from the journalist in question, over and over again (either "I don't understand" or "You're crazy"). And it's...you know, an interesting enough scenario that Hughes is laying out here, if not heavily on the obvious techno-conspiracy side (corporations are evil, iPhones have made everyone a voluntary NSA slave, eventually we'll all be screwed over by this, etc etc); but I have to say, without interesting characters or a full three-act plot, a little of this stuff goes a long way, especially when your entire novel only consists of two people and one them spends 300 pages exclusively saying, "I don't understand, tell me more." Less a commercial novel and more like one of those free paperbacks you get handed by some weirdo in front of the train station, I suppose this will be up the alley of those who enjoy visiting the websites of the Drudge Report or Alex Jones; but the rest of you can pretty safely skip it, as long as you understand that this now officially makes you one of the "sheeple."
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Because of CCLaP's policy of reviewing every book that gets sent to us, I tend to read a whole lot of titles exactly like Mary Fan's Artificial Absolutes, part of a scourge of mediocre genre novels that are quite literally choking the small-press part of the publishing industry to death these days. The problem with such books, and why they've grown to be so troubling for the industry in general, is precisely that they're not terrible, so can't just be automatically rejected or ignored -- Fan writes with just exactly the kinds of skills you would expect from some Creative Writing 135 student at some random community college somewhere, turning in a sci-fi actioner here with clunky but not horrible exposition, wooden but not horrible dialogue, expected but not horrible plot turns, and a heavy dose of "Cyber-Fill In The Blank" to remind us on every page that we're in the FUUUUTURE (at one point a character literally refers to a "holographic calendar" on the wall, 'cause THERE AIN'T NO READING DATES IN 2D IN THE FUUUUUUUTURE), all wrapped up in the generic-looking, overly Photoshopped cover that you would absolutely and exactly expect from such a book. In the past, such a manuscript would sit in every publishing company's slush pile until the end of time; but in the world we live in now, where every manuscript that's ever been written can be easily turned into a paperback book at Amazon a week after finishing it, that's exactly what is happening in the millions, leading to a publishing industry that is literally drowning in subpar genre thrillers and that threatens to fatally implode from the sheer overload of bland forgettable novels that will eventually be read by exactly 76 people. Like I said, you can't just dismiss a book like Artificial Absolutes, because it's just exactly not-terrible enough to justify its existence (and to be clear, its Goodreads page is filled with enthusiastic reviews from genre fans who liked it a lot more than I did); but reading too many of these blandly mediocre small-press books is enough to kill one's soul, or at least put a serious damper on one's enthusiasm for small-press literature. Buyer beware.
(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.)
I'm happy to be announcing CCLaP's newest book today! A hybrid science-fictio(DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the small press that published this book.)
I'm happy to be announcing CCLaP's newest book today! A hybrid science-fiction/urban-fantasy thriller from Chicago author Kendra Hadnott, "Death Leaders" posits a world where supernatural beings of great power have lived among us since the beginning of time, keeping the planet's population under control through a series of deliberate deaths selectively chosen here and there. But the former humans who now occupy these posts still have their petty jealousies and office politics; and when our hero is assigned a young single mother in Chicago's west side as his next victim, just to find out that she is well aware of who he is, the wheels of a larger and larger conspiracy start grinding faster and faster, to what will perhaps be the end of the world as we know it. This is a hugely entertaining genre novel in the classic sense of the word, and a fine national debut for the just-graduated Hadnott.
This book will be coming out to the public on January 18th, 2016; as always, a free ebook ARC is available to each and every Goodreads member who might want to read it, so please just drop me a line at [ilikejason at gmail.com] to request your own. I look forward to seeing what you think of it!...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The older and more experienced I get as a professional book reviewer, the more I'm realizing that there are in fact two radically different types of science-fiction novel out there, a genre which I've been faithfully (if not indiscriminately) reading since I was a kid; there are the science-fiction novels that work just as great general novels as well, full of complex characters and a strong style and a plot that is airtight relative to its own internal universe; and there are the science-fiction novels that can only be loved by hardcore fans of science-fiction (say for example the ones who attend a large amount of SF conventions every year, which is why such novels tend to do well at convention-based awards programs like the Hugos), the kind that would otherwise be considered mediocre at best by a fan of general fiction but that fetishistically deliver on the exact kinds of genre details that those genre fans are salivating over. And in fact this is where we get the entire concept of "genre novel" to begin with, I've also come to realize; when someone calls a book one, they're not necessarily implying simply that it's a book written in that genre, but instead that it's an otherwise so-so book that is loved by its fans solely and exclusively for delivering the kinds of easy details that those genre fans are looking for in the first place (whether that's disturbingly intelligent serial killers in crime novels, haughty elves in fantasy novels, half-naked pirates in romance novels, dysfunctional families in hipster-lit novels, etc).
And while I'm a huge fan of SF publisher Pyr for all the legitimately fantastic novels they put out every year, I must also admit that they put out an even bigger number each year of these so-so con favorites, because this is the bread and butter of any genre publisher and, hey, even Pyr's gotta pay for baby's new shoes, right? Take for example the recent one-two series Superposition and Supersymmetry by defense-industry engineer David Walton, whose Goodreads pages to be fair are littered with mostly 4- and 5-star reviews, but that personally made me almost cause permanent damage to my skull from all the eye-rolling I did while making my way through them. Essentially crime novels set among the employees of a fictional atom smashing facility in New Jersey, the premise is that one of these employees has finally caused a successful Quantum Something Or Other (ah, the Quantum Something Or Other -- where would lazy 21st-century science-fiction be without it?), causing a Quantum hole in the universe where Quantum creatures have Quantum gotten in and are Quantum causing a bunch of Quantum damage to our own universe.
Filled with the kinds of half-baked two-dimensional characters you would expect from a mediocre genre novel (wives who exist for no other reason than to show you that the main character is a good husband, the random blue-collar friend who exists for no other reason so that the main character can present a dumbed-down expository explanation of what's going on), and told through courtroom scenes that sound like a sub-par version of a Law & Order episode (which is saying a lot), Walton tries to have it both ways here, with characters that sometimes react to all the magical nonsense without blinking an eye, but then sometimes spend entire chapters saying "What's going on? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!!!" when it's convenient for the plot that they do so. A mess of a series that is nonetheless loved by many, these are the kinds of novels that can only be tolerated by the kinds of genre fans who tear through a book like this every single day, and who don't really care whether it's well-done as a piece of literature as long as the word 'quantum' appears a thousand times in 300 pages. It should all be kept in mind before picking up a copy yourself.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The older and more experienced I get as a professional book reviewer, the more I'm realizing that there are in fact two radically different types of science-fiction novel out there, a genre which I've been faithfully (if not indiscriminately) reading since I was a kid; there are the science-fiction novels that work just as great general novels as well, full of complex characters and a strong style and a plot that is airtight relative to its own internal universe; and there are the science-fiction novels that can only be loved by hardcore fans of science-fiction (say for example the ones who attend a large amount of SF conventions every year, which is why such novels tend to do well at convention-based awards programs like the Hugos), the kind that would otherwise be considered mediocre at best by a fan of general fiction but that fetishistically deliver on the exact kinds of genre details that those genre fans are salivating over. And in fact this is where we get the entire concept of "genre novel" to begin with, I've also come to realize; when someone calls a book one, they're not necessarily implying simply that it's a book written in that genre, but instead that it's an otherwise so-so book that is loved by its fans solely and exclusively for delivering the kinds of easy details that those genre fans are looking for in the first place (whether that's disturbingly intelligent serial killers in crime novels, haughty elves in fantasy novels, half-naked pirates in romance novels, dysfunctional families in hipster-lit novels, etc).
And while I'm a huge fan of SF publisher Pyr for all the legitimately fantastic novels they put out every year, I must also admit that they put out an even bigger number each year of these so-so con favorites, because this is the bread and butter of any genre publisher and, hey, even Pyr's gotta pay for baby's new shoes, right? Take for example the recent one-two series Superposition and Supersymmetry by defense-industry engineer David Walton, whose Goodreads pages to be fair are littered with mostly 4- and 5-star reviews, but that personally made me almost cause permanent damage to my skull from all the eye-rolling I did while making my way through them. Essentially crime novels set among the employees of a fictional atom smashing facility in New Jersey, the premise is that one of these employees has finally caused a successful Quantum Something Or Other (ah, the Quantum Something Or Other -- where would lazy 21st-century science-fiction be without it?), causing a Quantum hole in the universe where Quantum creatures have Quantum gotten in and are Quantum causing a bunch of Quantum damage to our own universe.
Filled with the kinds of half-baked two-dimensional characters you would expect from a mediocre genre novel (wives who exist for no other reason than to show you that the main character is a good husband, the random blue-collar friend who exists for no other reason so that the main character can present a dumbed-down expository explanation of what's going on), and told through courtroom scenes that sound like a sub-par version of a Law & Order episode (which is saying a lot), Walton tries to have it both ways here, with characters that sometimes react to all the magical nonsense without blinking an eye, but then sometimes spend entire chapters saying "What's going on? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S GOING ON!!!" when it's convenient for the plot that they do so. A mess of a series that is nonetheless loved by many, these are the kinds of novels that can only be tolerated by the kinds of genre fans who tear through a book like this every single day, and who don't really care whether it's well-done as a piece of literature as long as the word 'quantum' appears a thousand times in 300 pages. It should all be kept in mind before picking up a copy yourself.
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