The Eighth Continent

Posted on February 12, 2024 by smellincoffee

Nick is a commercial diver who, as a side gig, volunteers with a rescue organization to save people during flood disasters. There are a lot of those these days: rising waters, frequent hurricanes, and people who continue to build houses on the coast (presumably because they have taxpayer-funded flood insurance to support them in their moronic decisions) mean there’s no shortage of people to save. During one op, Nick rescues a woman whose daughter is involved with a commercial venture on the moon, creating a new lift system that will reduce the coast of shipping materials from Luna to Earth enormously, and she offers him a job. Nick’s stamina, resilience, and quick-fix engineering skills would be perfect for their current project, and so presently he finds himself amid that magnificent desolation, working to create a new future. Unfortunately, he and the crew are unwitting pawns in a fight for power and money between multiple corrupt corporations and an equally corrupt government, none of whom mind breaking a few dozen eggs provided they can claim the entirety of the lunar omelette for themselves. Nick and company land without all their needed kit and are soon racing against the clock to complete their work, all the while accidents and emotional volatility claim life after life: to the inherent challenges of living and working on the moon are added the stress of not knowing what’s really going on, and the ever-real spectre that they’re pawns who will be abandoned to die as soon as their work is finished. The Eighth Continent is a ‘hard’ SF novel because of its heavy emphasis on detail — a bit like The Martian, but with dread pervading instead of humor – but also hard because there’s so little to enjoy. It’s all death, gloom, and stress, and I found the deeper I got into it, the slower I moved – -rather like I was struggling through the over-mounting piles of lunar dust. Although I like the idea of this, particularly since lunar developments are more plausible than Martian ones, as a story it was too grim to enjoy. Perhaps in a different mood and another time it would have landed with me better.

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Convenience Store Woman

Posted on February 10, 2024 by smellincoffee

Keiko has known since she was a little girl that she wasn’t quite normal. Her reactions were not like those of her peers, and they were different enough to cause her family alarm. Upon discovering a dead bird, her first thought was that it might be good for her father’s dinner: when one of her teachers was in an emotional uproar, Keiko addressed the situation by pulling down the teacher’s dress. So far, so quirky. It’s a little more disturbing when, annoyed by a crying baby, she ponders a nearby knife as a solution. Fortunately, Keiko has found a place where her strangeness is not disruptive: where her need for social scripts and routine is perfectly matched — the Convenience Store. There, she finds a literal manual for how to behave. There, she finds a consistent array of things that need to be done properly, with enough variety that she doesn’t lose interest. She is a perfect cog in the machine, and she lives and breathes its needs and atmosphere. There are converging factors, though, that will combine to disrupt her place: her age, for once, as she continually reflects on how the Convenience Store’s worker-cogs are replaced once they’ve worn down, just like unsold rice balls; her family’s continued prodding that she should really get a real job or at least a husband after eighteen years of the convenience store routine; and the final of an utterly obnoxious and soon-to-be-fired coworker who nonetheless prompts her to try something new. This is not, however, some predictable novel about love and inspiration. 

Given its length (scarcely over a hundred pages), I suppose it’s not saying much that I read this in one sitting. But perhaps it is saying something that I didn’t even bother to freshen my drink, or to go outside and have a look at the moon as I do when I’m reading at night and get restless just sitting. I read it in one go, utterly spellbound, and then I began listening to the audiobook version just to see what it had to offer. (Totally worth it. Not only did I get to hear the pronunciation of “Irasshaimase!”, which is a staple of the book, but the narrator Nancy Wu also portrays the difference between Keiko’s ‘real’ voice, the flat narrator, and her public voice, which was modeled on listening to her coworkers’ cadence and expression.) Although the novel’s blurbs and some reviews refer to this as comic, I don’t get that at all. For me, it was a thoroughly sympathetic and engaging account of a young woman whose brain is not set in the same mold as everyone else’s trying to be normal – in part so people will stop prodding at her to be normal. She doesn’t want to be an object of such interest and distress to her family. Because she doesn’t think or relate to people and the world around her the way that most do, she relies on acting to lower her profile and not be noticed: she labors to discern social scripts and follow them, she imitates the voices and emotions of those around her, and she relies on her sister for tips on what to say to avoid various lines of inquiry. She also thinks about society in a very abstract, detached way, which is one of the few things she has in common with a character who is otherwise an inexplicable connection for her. As obnoxious and abhorrent as he is, they’re both outsiders in their way. As mentioned, though, the novel does not settle for a nice ending, which I appreciated. This joins Ready Player One and Cold as Hell as books I had to experience in two mediums.

Convenience Store Woman was a fascinating little novel — tragic, sympathetic, and compelling.

Related:
Marian’s review @ Classics Considered

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Self Help

Posted on February 6, 2024 by smellincoffee
Narrated by Wil Wheaton & Ron Perlman
~ 4 hours
© 2022

Jack Diller is a loser in denial, a failed actor who keeps the bills paid (barely) by delivering food to Los Angeles’ upper middle classes, staring in awe at their mansions while trying not to think about the tiny rental house filled with old pizza boxes and empty Mountain Dew cans that waits for him after twelve hours of driving. Jerry spends much of his shift staring at his phone, and one night sees an obnoxious ad for an audiobook. It’s a self-help book by Hector Bruno, an action movie star from the 1980s. Although Jack isn’t much for audiobooks, out of curiosity he gives it a shot, and……finds Hector talking to him. Jack’s not just listening to a washed-up actor give vague life advice, he’s being confronted and coached by a man with such an audio presence that he can’t help but listen — and as Jack does, he finds something rising in him: THE KILLER INSTINCT. The polite pushover finds a sudden and inexplicable fount of self-confidence and cunning, and is soon well off the straight and narrow, culminating in a flight to the desert with a young hostage. (Not to worry, Iris, Jack’s really a nice guy. Really. ) 

Self Help made me hurt with laughter, though it helps that I’ve been in bed for several days with a savage chest cold so any amount of laughter hurts a bit. The voice acting in this is utterly brilliant, and I’m sorry that there’s no excerpt on YouTube to share, and that the ‘sample’ on Audible only demonstrates Wil Wheaton’s performance, and not Ron Perlman. I know Perlman chiefly through his role on Sons of Anarchy, where he plays King Claudius in a Hamlet-meets-bike-gang crime drama, and it was hilarious to hear him here, hamming it up with a soundtrack and turning a listless failure into an assertive if bumbling criminal. Wil Wheaton has never disappointed me in his audio performances — he is, in fact, the reason I’m an Audible member at all – and he’s up to his usual standards here. Although there’s some interest from the reader/listener wondering what the nature of the audiobook is (is Jack hallucinating? Is it some some of AI?), given that it appears to be conscious and reacts to Jack’s real-world choices, the meat is Wheaton’s delivery of a man-child discovering how to assert himself and move toward a goal, but quickly going off the rails and rationalizing all along the way. It’s dark, funny, sometimes surreal, and always thoroughly entertaining.

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Teeesing Tooosday

Posted on February 6, 2024 by smellincoffee

After delving through them, I discovered three local history books, none of any significant value. I offered him £15 for them. He told me that he’d never been so insulted and that he was going to donate them to the Old Bank bookshop. It’s remarkable that a man who was clearly in his eighties had ‘never been so insulted’. I’d been on the receiving end of considerably worse insults by the time I was five years old.

Remainders of the Day, Shaun Bythell

Perhaps the most beautiful of all of these lessons, and the one that deserves to be shouted from the rooftops and heard by everyone, is that we should all pay attention to the mingled beauty and ridiculousness of the people around us; that we should seek to understand them through humor, which, as in the stories of Flannery O’Connor, is at its best and most effective when it is equal parts deadly weapon and act of grace.”

Lauren Groff, preface to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories”.
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From London with Love

Posted on February 5, 2024 by smellincoffee

Valentina was just a girl entering her teens when her mother disappeared — to London, her dad said. The years passed and nothing was heard from her. Now, as Val reels from the death of her marriage, she receives word of another death: her mom, who has left her a bookstore in Primrose Hill. Although Valentina knew her mother was originally from England, she’s never had any real interest in going, but now she has nothing keeping her from making the trip and finding answers. Why did her mother leave her, and who was she, really? Such is the story of From London with Love, which is told in two parts: we follow Valentina as she makes her move to London and begins engaging with her mother’s friends and neighbors in Primrose Hill, trying to understand who her mother was and how she could have meant so much to the people around her when she’d abandoned her husband and daughter years before. Val will make her own connections to those people, and to her mother through a series of scavenger hunts that introduce her to the people and places of Primrose Hill — but, in alternating chapters the reader also follows Val’s mom Eloise from her own youth forward to her death. We get to know her in full far before Val does, leading to a wonderful sense of anticipation as Val gets closer and closer to the truth of who her mother was. It’s as if we’re standing across a street, watching two dear friends approach the same place from perpendicular roads, destined to bump into one another as they round the corner.  This also means we get to witness other sides of Val’s new friends’ lives through the eyes of someone who knew them longer and more deeply. With Love is also (as the name would hint) a love story, or rather multiple love stories: Eloise falls in love but ultimately chooses to marry someone else, wrangling with those consequences, and Valentina is intrigued by handwritten comments in a copy of her favorite book, going on a little hunt to see if she can track the person down. I thought there was some fairly obvious telegraphing of who she would wind up with, despite the red herrings, but Jio teased just enough to keep me on my toes. I didn’t realize halfway in that I was reading a romance novel of all things, but the mother-daughter relationship is front and center, and that combined with the whole “librarian inherits a bookstore, finds community” angle worked to make this a wonderfully sweet story, even for someone whose fiction reading generally involves shooting, stabbing, or science fiction.

His voice trailed off as he turned his attention to the night sky. “Look at the stars up there, fighting to be seen through all these city lights. It’s like a battle between two opposing forces: eternity versus modernity.” I smiled up at him curiously. “Eternity for the win?” “Eternity always wins,” he continued. “And that is the greatest comfort, isn’t it?”

“The fact of the matter is bad things happen to good people. They do. All the time. But it’s our choice whether we wallow in them for the rest of our lives, or whether we accept the invitation.” I furrow my brow, confused. “The invitation?” “Yes, to begin life’s grand second act. You see, that’s what your mother learned. Once she stopped looking back, she could finally move forward.”

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The Lunar Missile Crisis

Posted on February 4, 2024 by smellincoffee
“It happens to the best of us,” [Neil] Armstrong said. “Watch yourself on the way out. There’s one small step.”

The moon race began in earnest when Yuri Gagarin launched off the pad in April 1961. It ended really quickly when he collided with an alien spaceship and exploded, leading to a full nuclear launch by the Soviets which failed in the presence of the spaceship and which turned everything between Berlin and Moscow into a radioactive hellscape. When American, Soviet, and alien forces collide attempting to pick up a piece of the alien spacecraft, Sgt Kyle McCoy stumbles into making first contact and leads to a new age in human history. Unfortunately, his twin brother Connor has gotten in trouble with the mob, and figures that faking Kyle’s identity to go to an international conference will be as good an escape route as any. Kyle forgot to mention, though, that said conference is on the moon, and no one was expecting outright shenanigans there. Soon, both brothers are internationally wanted men, fleeing mobsters, flesh-eating mutants, and Vice President Nixon. The Luna Missile Crisis is a unique SF/alt-history title that examines both the best and worst of humanity, ending in frustration with a brief bit of hope.

I’ve previously read Bruno and Castle before, in their Black Badge collab that features an undead bounty hunter roaming the Old West and taking out forces like werewolves and vampires. Luna Missile Crisis is quite the genre shift, although there are similarities with nonhuman intelligences and otherworldly energy. LMC takes place in the late sixties, in which humanity has not only landed a man on the moon, but built an international base there, as well as quarries. A little deal has been struck with the aliens: in exchange for help repairing their ship, they’re willing to share some tech with humanity, tech that will lead us to other worlds before we’ve even invented the TCP/IP protocol. The alien arrival has essentially ended the Cold War, and even created a bipartisan presidency, with Nixon seconding his former rival. That’s not to say everything is hunky-dory, given that many humans are alarmed about the aliens, especially their influence on Earth governments — hence the aforementioned shenanigans. As far as SF goes, this is deeply on the ‘soft’ side: the aliens can communicate with humans telepathically, or at least once they have some practice, so the real issues in xenocommunication are reduced to much easier cross-culture problems. The alt-history side is developed well enough, though I’m not sure why the author felt it necessary to kill off LBJ and replace him with Nixon: granted, an alternate history where LBJ’s odiousness never touches the presidency is one I’m happy to read about, but it’s not as if Nixon’s presence is necessary. There’s a little nod to the history that might have been — the Earth-Luna ships are named Apollo, and Captain Neil Armstrong is the commander of that service. More interesting are the psuedo-horror elements, especially present when one of the McCoys crash-lands in the Dead Curtain, the hellscape created by the Soviet nuclear backfire. 

All told, this was a fun little novel, with a nice mix of various elements — humor, horror, SF interest, etc — but its ending was disappointing despite the hope spot.

Coming up this week….I accidentally read a romance, so look forward to some mood whiplash, and I’m currently two more SF titles

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Movie Watch: January

Posted on February 1, 2024 by smellincoffee

Movie watching has become more of a pasttime for me in the last year or so, so I suspect posting a list at the end of the year would be….ungainly. A buddy of mine and I have been watching 2 movies a week for the last few months. Bold titles were particular favorites.

The Graduate, 1969.  Dustin Hoffman doesn’t know what he wants until the mother of what he wants seduces him.  I was not prepared for pool-casual Mr. Feeny. Mr. Feeny? Mr. F-f-f-f-f-eeeny?!

Midnight in Paris, 2011. A beautiful film about an American writer who goes to Paris to socialize with his shallow fiance’s  materialist parents. (His fiance is Regina George, which is like, so fetch?)   He falls in love with the city and wants to be a novelist living there, like his literary heroes Hemingway and Stein.  As the gulf in values between him and his fiance becomes more and more obvious, he begins going on walks in the Paris night and finds himself welcomed into 1920s Paris,  talking with members of the Lost Generation.  

Un Chien Andalou, 1929.  One of the characters in Midnight was an avante-garde filmmaker. I forget his name, but this is one of his films. There were no subtitles so I have no idea what this movie was about, but its camera work reminded me a little bit of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. There were no Andalusian dogs despite the title, and I for one felt cheated. However, the film year nicely brings my average down. (Minimum goal: keep average film year under 2000. Ideal: keep it under 1985.) 

Repo Man, 1984. Emilio Estevez plays a frustrated punk who takes on a job repossessing vehicles, and then there are aliens. Fun early eighties period piece.

Margin Call, 2011.   Unexpectedly compelling for a movie that takes place over the course of two days, all of which involve men in suits staring at computer screens and talking about the bubble popping that will lead to the Great Recession.   Great acting by Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey, and Zachary  Quinto.

Moneyball, 2011.    Brad Pitt is Billy Beane, a player-turned-scout-turned-manager, who hires a real number-cruncher to make the most of a limited budget for the Oakland A’s  – and has an amazing, record-breaking season. Lots of actual baseball people in the casting, along with Hollywood types like Pitt and Jonah Hill.

Before Sunrise, 1995. Interesting movie about two young people who meet on a train, hit it off, and decide to throw their plans out the window and spent the day and night exploring Vienna and falling deeply in love.

Airplane, 1980. Yes, I’d truly never seen this before – but so many lines of it have permeated into pop culture that I felt like I’d heard half the dialogue already.  Thoroughly entertaining.

Go Back to China, 2019.   A trust-fund baby with a serious spending problem has her cards cut off after her father in China realizes she’s blown through half of her fund. He forces her to return to China and learn the family business (toymaking), where she grows as a person, meets her family, learns to appreciate Shenzhen etc.  Enjoyable, if predictable.

Love and Death, 1974. Woody Allen has relationship problems. Napoleon invades Russia. 

Ayaneh, 2019. Short film (15 minus) about a young Afghan woman who meets a young Swedish woman while swimming and develops feelings for her. The feelings prompt Ayaneh to begin pushing back against her family’s strict customs – wearing a western-style swimming suit in the pool instead of a full-body one –  and begin growing into herself. I liked that aspect of the film, but her family is treated as stock villains instead of people who would be wrestling with their own complicated feelings – loving Ayaneh, but not knowing what to do with how she is acting.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, 2022.  Raj Kuthrapali has left the world of physics to run a bookstore with his wife, but now she’s dead and he has a drinking problem. Then, his most valuable book is stolen and someone deposits a toddler in his store.  An enjoyable adaptation of the novel, though it has pacing/development issues, and Amelia is miscast as a standard-issue romcom hottie and not as a hippie with a mop of unruly hair and a passion for wearing rain boots in all weathers like she was in the book.   The use of David Arquette as the police chief was unintentionally hilarious, though, given that he was a easy-going and slightly bumbling sheriff’s deputy in Scream. 

The Seven Samurai, 1954. A very influential Japanese film in which a village frequently raided by bandits hires seven samurai to defend them. The  version I saw was the full, close to four hour edition.   It’s a very memorable film – visually striking, well acted,  and well directed. Lots of strong characters.

Fallen Leaves (  Kuolleet lehde, 2023), a Finnish film about two depressed people who meet and decide to become an item despite being repeatedly fired and demoralized by the Russo-Ukrainian war. Interesting visuals  and storytelling, especially the nature of time– -costumes and props make this seem like a film Out of Time, with antique clocks, jukeboxes, and films in use, and a deliberate contradiction between the official calendar date and the news broadcasts, which varied by two years –  but it was not exactly exciting and inspiring.  I have never seen a Finnish film before. 

National Lampoon’s European Vacation, 1985. Entertaining enough.  Will remember it chiefly for the guest stars like Eric Idle, The Major from Fawlty Towers, and Gladhand from West Side Story. 

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, 1963.   A dying man tells some people where he buried some money. Absolute insanity ensues with cameos from the Three Stooges, Jerry Lewis, and Don Knotts.   

Wall Street. Charlie Sheen is a young broker who wants to make it big, and discovers opportunity by working with the ruthless Gordan Gekko, played expertly by Michael Douglas. Charlie’s faith in Gordan is shattered when he realizes that Gordan is playing him and will destroy the lives of the working men he grew up with by liquidating their company for a quick buck.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976. A night club owner celebrates his final mortgage payment by a night on the town in which he incurs significant gambling debts that the mob makes him clear by knocking off  some high-ranking Chinese bookie.  

Red Heat, 1988. Ahhhnold is a Soviet cop sent to America to chase a Russian who has been selling cocaine in the Soviet Union. He teams up with John Belushi’s brother and a lot of people are shot.  (They were going to use John Belushi himself, but nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!)

Red, 2010. Bruce Willis is a retired CIA agent who is targeted for lethal retirement but survives. After discovering that several of his former colleagues have also been retired by bullet,  he and a few of the old guard team up to figure out what the hell is going on and return fire.  Turns out the CIA is being used to knock off people who could shed light on the vice president’s participation in a wee massacre down in Guatamala a few years back. Refreshingly cynical, with the CIA and FBI goonie boys being the villain for almost the entirety of the film.  In addition to the main cast (Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman),   Richard Dreyfuss appears as a corrupt defense contractor.  Quite funny, too. 


Tokyo Drifter, 1966.   A crime/action movie about a yakuza hitman who, with his boss, is trying to go legitimate. Unfortunately, their former yakuza rivals won’t let them retire so easily, and the former hitman Tetsu is forced to roam from city to city singing his own theme song. The camera work & visuals are very interesting, especially at the beginning where saturation and contrast are played with for artistic effect.

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Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops

Posted on January 31, 2024 by smellincoffee

This book is exactly what it says on the tin: a collection of odd remarks overheard in bookstores, numbering a little over a hundred pages. If you are familiar with the Overheard in New York / Overheard in the Office / etc series of webpages, it’s like that but entirely PG-rated. The overwhelming majority of the quotes are from British bookshops, with a few more from other Commonwealth countries and one or two from American stores. There’s not much to review here: it’s a very casual kind of book, the sort one picks up for a few laughs now and again, with no need to sit and focus on reading it. There are some consistencies in the books chosen: wholly irrational customers, people confuse the bookstore with a library or a garden shop or a cafe or anything other than a bookstore, and my favorite — authors who come into the bookstore to look for or market their books. Some of the humor is directly book related (customers who struggle with remembering titles/plots), some of it is the kind of insanity one encounters from customers in any public-facing job, and some it is just assorted human randomness/goofiness/weirdness

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January 2024 in Review

Posted on January 31, 2024 by smellincoffee

Welcome to the first monthly wrapup of the New Year. My preference in January is to do a grab-bag of topics, a kind of teaser for the year to come. I was….slightly successful in that, since we touched on little politics, a little science, a little southern lit, etc, but the month was mostly marked by fiction of all things: first, a series of short novels about human connection, each one more charming than the other, and then a silly series about the Republic of Texas getting involved in World War 2 in 1940. 

Science Survey:
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore, John Seay Brown Jr (Wildcard, I suppose — a mix!)

Reading Dixie:
Distracted by Alabama: Tangled Threads of Natural History, Local History, and Folklore, John Seay Brown Jr
My Selma, Willie Mae Brown

TBR Cleanup
In Search of Zarathrustra, Paul Kriwaczek
Human Scale Revisited, Kirkpatrick Sale

Coming up in February…

I’m currently working on two bits of SF and one of Jane Jacob’s last books, and there’s another book I’d lost interest in that I will probably return to just because the title amuses me. You’ll know it when you see it it, trust me. February 14 will mark Ash Wednesday, so don’t be surprised to see Lenten reading starting to appear.

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