more than human

So! I finished reading Pattern Recognition, and I loved it even if the ending was a little less than what I'd hoped for. I think maybe it was limited by the very thing I loved about it, which was that it was this cyberpunk adventure story set in a very realistic 2002. That meant the ending couldn't be too explosive, which is fine, but it was a little too real, and dragged a bit. Still, it was by far one of the most entertaining books I've read, ever, and I really, really loved the protagonist, despite her being a woman!

After I finished that, I wanted to read more Gibson, so I read Idoru, which was good and fun to read but not as good as Pattern Recognition, or Neuromancer, which I said before I didn't actually love that much. But that is in the context of my high expectations. It was well-written and provided everything I was looking for, and so Gibson has now cemented his place as my new Favorite Writer. But that isn't what I wanted to write about! What I wanted to write about is what I read after Idoru.

Last night I put down the book and thought, "what now?" So I went to Barnes & Noble to find a new book to read. I was looking for something with the same cyberpunk aesthetic, but I also didn't want to read too much Gibson all at once and start to get annoyed with him, which is what usually happens when I get into a new writer. So I was wandering through the sci-fi section and looking at some Neal Stephenson books that looked decent but not thrilling, and I noticed this book that had been put back propped against the other books, so that the cover was facing out. The cover caught my eye because I liked the colors. The book was:

More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon. I read the back and wasn't sure if it sounded good or not, but I saw that it won the Hugo and Nebula awards, and it did sound kind of intriguing, so I brought it over to the cafe with me along with the Stephenson books. I read the first thirty pages in the cafe, and then bought it and brought it home and spent the next four hours reading the rest of it. I have never in my life read a book cover-to-cover like that.

Apparently this book is kind of a big deal. I had never heard of it, although I did feel like the author's name rang a bell. It was written in 1953, and was one of the first science fiction books to be recognized and acclaimed as having actual literary merit. It is difficult to give a concise summary of what this book is about. Wikipedia says: "The novel concerns the coming together of six extraordinary people with strange powers who are able to "blesh" their abilities together. In this way, they are able to act as one organism. They progress toward a mature gestalt consciousness, called the homo gestalt, the next step in the human evolution." Okay, Wikipedia, that works. Basically there are several characters with unique abilities-- mind control, teleportation, telekinesis, hyper-intelligence-- who find each other and begin to function together as a single organism. The crisis of the story is really the moral crisis of how this unified being should operate within the world of humans. Which is all very interesting, but could make a really, really, bad story in the wrong hands.

What made it so satisfying was the way the story is constructed. There are three parts; each is essentially its own novella that builds off of the previous one(s). The focus, tone, point of view, and narrative voice change in each section. So, ultimately, the structure of the novel mirrors the plot, because each of these strands is unique and fascinating on its own but functions more powerfully as a part of the whole. The other thing about the story and the writing is that it manages to be actually legitimately surprising. There are some plot twists as well as some traditional moves, but because they are occuring alongside each other, you don't know which to expect, and they end up both being exciting to read because of it.

I definitely do not think this book would be for everyone, but it does seem to have gotten pretty stellar reviews across the board, and I am surprised it does not show up more often on lists of "important" science fiction. Still, I would recommend it solely on the basis that it is just so different from anything else I have read, and because I'd like to know if others respond to it the same way I did.

more books and a movie

I have been having good luck with fiction lately. Valis was really outstanding, and took a bizarre turn somewhere in the middle that I did not expect; that made me happy. Then I read A Scanner Darkly because on the Amazon page for Valis everyone was saying that it was his best work. So I was expecting a lot from it. Mostly it lived up, but at times it had a sort of nauseating effect that I did not enjoy but also recognize as intentional. The biggest problem with it was that it did the same thing that all of Dick's books that I have read (except for Valis) do, which is that it appeared to end about three times before the actual ending. He seemed to have a real problem with endings. There is always one wonderful chapter near the end that would be the perfect closing, and then he insists on including three or four more chapters after that. It gets boring.

After that I read The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. I found it delightful. I am not sure that it was as profound as all the blurbs on the cover made it out to be. But it was deeply enjoyable to read. I am going to add it to my list of independent reading books for my 10th graders (10th grade English is World Literature). I will say that it is the first Indian book I have read that is not excessively lyrical. It is an especially nice antidote to a book like The God of Small Things.

Now I am reading William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition. I am loving this book enormously for several reasons. I need to start by confessing that I did not really love Neuromancer, try as I did. I didn't like any of the characters, and it was hard to stay interested in it. What I did like about it was that it was well-written and charming and funny. This book has all of that, but also has characters who I like and a plot that keeps my interest.
The best part is that it has a female main character who is the exact antithesis of every science fiction heroine ever. I almost did not buy this book when I realized that the main character was female, that is how much I hate science fiction females. But this main character is alarmingly and disarmingly human, and feminine. She is a person, not a badass doing-things-that-men-do and looking-sexy-while-doing-them chick. She has flaws and vulnerabilities while still being independent and not hyper-sexualized.
The other thing that I like about it is that it was written in 2003 and, for all intents and purposes, takes place in 2003 or shortly thereafter, but it is written through this sci-fi lens that makes all this very real technology seem very futuristic. With one notable exception, everything the characters do and work with exists right now.

Also, Will and I saw Moon and it was absolutely wonderful. I don't really know how to explain this movie without giving too much away. We didn't know very much about it before we went and saw it; we had read a very minimal review of it which compared it to Philip K. Dick's work and that's why we decided to see it; I can say that the comparison is definitely apt, in the best possible way. There is essentially only one character in the movie, played by Sam Rockwell, and I am not even sure if I have ever seen Sam Rockwell in any movies before, but he does a really terrific job in this one. The story unfolds in a way that gives the audience a lot of credit and doesn't spoon-feed them at all, and it keeps a very steady, tense (but not edge-of-your-seat) tone throughout. It is a very smooth ride. I recommend it.

books I am reading

I have a pathetic attention span, so I am always reading at least two or three books at once. Usually one fiction and two nonfiction. Right now all of the books I am reading are exceptionally good.

I only recently started reading Phillip K. Dick, and I feel sad that I neglected him for so long. Valis is the fiction book I'm reading right now. It's a bit hard to describe. It is autobiographical, but written in the third person, about the religious and spiritual experiences that Dick had and wrote about in his Exegesis. Because of the voice, there's an interesting balance between his acknowledgement that he (or, the main character) is insane and the conviction that what he experiences is valid and spiritually significant. When you hear people describe this book it usually sounds like they're talking about the ramblings of a schizophrenic, and that's what I was prepared for. It's really not. There's a lot more to it than that.
When I was in college I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and that was 8 years ago so I don't claim to remember it accurately, but I think this book reminds me of that. From what I recall, the narrator of that story was losing his mind, and knew he was losing his mind, but was trying to maintain his grip on reality just long enough to document the revelations he was having that, even though he knew they were caused by his illness, he recognized as important. There was the same tenuous relationship between sanity and insanity.
I have only read the first six chapters of this book and I am not really doing it justice the way I'm describing it here, so I'm going to move on.


Another book I am reading is Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. I am a little bit obsessed with Foucault. I skimmed the first half of this book when I was in college and writing a paper on torture and self-mutilation in this 17th century novel called Oroonoko. That was my first experience with Foucault and he hasn't really ever gone away, but he came to the forefront again when I was doing research for my master's thesis last month. So I was reading some of his shorter work, and then Will and I watched this movie called Bronson, which is about a prisoner and made me want to read this book again, more carefully.
It is rather dense, which is what I found frustrating about it the first time around. Maybe dense is not the right word; "dense" implies that a lot of complex information is being thrown at the reader at once. This is sort of the opposite. It is so verbose that it is difficult to pay attention to it sometimes. I think that style was en vogue at the time.
Anyway, what I like about this book, and what makes it important, is the analysis of the relationship between the state and the prisoner. In the story "In the Penal Colony," Kafka imagines a machine used for torture and execution that literally inscribes the broken rule on the body of the condemned with needles again and again until he is impaled. Part of what Foucault is arguing is that as we've moved from torture and public execution to imprisonment, the subject of punishment has shifted from the body of the accused to his soul. The movie Bronson is a wonderful surreal depiction of this. The character annihilates his soul in order to render his punishment ineffective.


The last book I'm reading is James Paul Gee's Situated Language and Learning: A critique of traditional schooling. I adore James Paul Gee with every ounce of my being. He is a linguist and cognitive scientist who writes about how and why people learn and why our schools are so often ineffective. His main argument in this book, oversimplified, is that a) learning is a cultural process b) because it is a cultural process, it is inextricably tied to identity, and therefore c) if we don't do anything to help students identify with the culture of academic discourse, they aren't going to be motivated to learn. This seems obvious, but it is in radical opposition to the way educational legislation is going.
What I like especially is that he uses the experience of playing a video game to create a framework for the conditions necessary for learning. He wrote a whole other, less "academic" book on video games and learning, which I also read. Games invite the player to jump right in without a lot of boring preparation, learn skills through experimentation, and choose among varying levels of linearity in the narrative they participate in. They also don't punish the player for taking risks and pushing themselves (as long as you remember to save). I think that's really different from what happens in the traditional classroom.

Now that I've written about all these books, I also want to write about the movies I've watched recently. So you can look forward to that, coming soon.