Books.

I just found this awesome video, linked to at Hugh Howey's website. I've never seen such a high-quality film made to promote a book.

 

Also, there's this: http://books.simonandschuster.com/Wool/Hugh-Howey/9781476733951

At the bottom of the page is a video where Hugh Howey describes "Wool" and what inspired it.

 

I just finished reading "Bully!" by Mike Resnick. It's a novella, not a novel, but it's sold individually in Amazon's Kindle store or part of a collection.

I really enjoy a lot of Mike Resnick's writing. If you are not familiar with him, you may want to start with either "Santiago" or perhaps, his "Galactic Comedy" trilogy ("Paradise", "Purgatory", "Inferno") or maybe "Kirinyaga". A lot of his stories fit within a larger, loosely-connected universe of an overly controlled/civilized central galactic empire with a large, mostly ungovernable frontier (kinda like the wild west).

"Bully!" combines two of Resnick's favorite subjects: Teddy Roosevelt, and Africa. It's a fictional 'what if' story about Roosevelt's trip to Africa after his term as President. In the novella, Roosevelt starts a campaign to 'liberate' the Belgian Congo, and bring democracy and freedom to the natives there. It's pretty interesting and it continues some of Resnicks previous themes about colonialism, as well as cultural differences between Africans and Westerners. It's not one of his best stories, but it's still worth reading.

I used to love attending talks and readings by Resnick at science fiction conventions. He also would occasionally have slide-shows about his latest adventures in Africa. He's spent a lot of time in Africa, and you can tell that he's been having a love/hate relationship with its history.

 

Ok, here's yet another good book recommendation from me.

I just finished reading "Flashback" by Dan Simmons, which I really did enjoy. "Flashback" is a Science Fiction/Mystery hybrid. A disgraced former police detective, and drug addict named Nick Bottom is hired to solve a closed case that he failed to solve seven years earlier -- the murder of a wealthy and extremely powerful Japanese businessman's son and his son's girlfriend. The title refers to a drug which a majority of the American population is addicted to. Flashback is a highly addictive drug which has the effect of bringing back any memory that you can focus on, in great detail and living color. The setting of the novel is the nearly collapsed US, about 40+ years from now, so it's no surprise that Americans would become obsessed with their past.

I love the book, but it's not without a couple of flaws. For one thing, when you write about the semi-near future, you risk having real-world events overtake the events in your book. Even though the book was published in 2011, already a couple of things in it have turned out to not actually be true (since they are partly political, I won't go into them). And the second flaw is that sometimes the book does get too political. That said, as a liberal, I'd probably be the person most taken aback by some of his opinions. And I do think that some of the opinions expressed in the book are flawed. But sometimes I know that it's hard to distinguish between the opinions of the author and those of characters in the book. And it doesn't change the fact that I think that the book is still really well-written, with a pretty good murder mystery at its core.

I've been a fan of Simmons since his Hyperion books (which I do highly recommend). He's a very good writer, but I've only read a handful of his novels. I've picked up a few recently (including this one), so I'm hoping to rectify that.

 

Back in 1987, the first volume of "Wild Cards", a long-running book series, created by George R. R. Martin was published. It is the longest running shared-universe series ever (and is still going strong). Besides Martin, several other authors have been involved in the series, including Melinda Snodgrass, Victor Milan, Lewis Shiner, and the great Roger Zelazny.

Rumors have kept cropping up about either a Wild Cards movie, or television series or mini-series over the years. I was present at a talk a few years ago, given by George R. R. Martin about the series, where he claimed to finally have solid news on the subject (lots of books have media rights sold, but not all of those actually make it into development, much less make it to the small or big screen). He said that Melinda Snodgrass was writing a movie script for SyFy Films.

Ever since then, I've kept my eye out for more news on the subject, and it's been really sparse. The info on IMDB is still blank, although there is an entry for it. But this morning, I found this talk at Boskone (a big Boston-based annual science fiction convention:


Also, I found this brief article from back in 2011: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/28/us-wildcards-idUSTRE79R5Z120111028

/Edit BTW, in the video, Ms. Snodgrass does mention that a few original characters should be in the film, but she never mentions any names. But I remember reading or hearing earlier that Croyd Crenson (aka The Sleeper) should be in it (He's probably in the top 5 of most popular characters, with Doctor Tachyon, and Fortunato being in the top 1 and 2 position (not sure which is #1). It used to be said, though, that most Tachyon fans hated Fortunato, and most Fortunato fans hated Doctor Tachyon. I'm not sure that's true (I'm in the Fortunato camp, btw).

 

Read Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We' after. Shows up 1984 as a bit of a fraud, IMHO.

 

Nineteen Eighty Four... If ever there was a more depressing book... Well I will leave that sentence unfinished.

"Orwellian Rat Masks" all around! (This message brought to you by The Thought Police.)

 

It's not that depressing.

 

I shudder to imagine what you think is depressing. But to each their own. I thought it was quite depressing. Much like "A Clockwork Orange" and "Fahrenheit 451" and other similar books of yesteryear.

 

1984 WAS pretty depressing, but I found "Fahrenheit 451" to be inspiring -- it's really a tribute to literature and freedom in many ways. It certainly did show where our society was heading in many ways, but the irony of people trying to ban it in schools turned a lot of people into 1st amendment advocates. I feel that it was a fairly significant and influential novel. It came out in a time when books were really being burned, after we won a war fighting against a man who himself burned books, during a time when certain governments were imprisoning artists and authors. So I found the novel inspiring. It essentially says that you can burn the book but so long as there are people with memories, those books will continue to live on.

Not all dystopian novels are depressing. Many, if not most, are not. I know I keep recommending it, but the Silo books (The Wool series and Shift Trilogy) are also kind of inspiring. You begin to understand how the system that has been set up serves the purpose of stability and security over freedom. But you also see cracks forming in the system, plans falling apart, people surviving when they should, by all rights, be dead.

I remember having a discussion with someone here about "Cat's Cradle", and that person was saying how depressing it was. But I look at the novel and I say no, look at the ending. It is a cry of defiance. It has this dark humor and I see the hero as having the last laugh over his cruel creator who set the whole mess in motion (I don't think that Vonnegut meant that literally, since he was an atheist -- he was clearly being ironic). I don't feel that kind of dark humor to be depressing in the least.

 

Well, considering I live in England in 2012, 1984 is not far off an everyday thing for me.

That's an exaggeration, certainly. But there's more truth to it and its ideas than is perhaps... comfortable. But I wouldn't say I find it depressing.

 

There are certain movies and books like that, which, on the one hand, are incredibly good, or important, so I'm glad to have seen or read them. But on the other hand, I could not bring myself to experience them again. 1984 is one of those. Another that someone else mentioned, is A Clockwork Orange.

Sometimes a bit of humor, or irony, or optimism, or defiance, or even a hint of improvement or the possibility of change is enough to cut through gloomy stories and make them not only bearable, but actually pleasant. There's a lot of examples of that. I feel that way about a lot of books, dystopian or otherwise.

My brother has been posting pictures of my late Dad from when he was in the military, on his facebook page, in honor of him and in honor of Memorial day. I want to mention my Dad's favorite book, because it really is so good, and it is kind of related to this discussion of dark stories. It's a book that has a lot of dark humor in it, and some scenes that are difficult to read, but on the other hand, it's incredibly funny. The book is Joseph Heller's Catch 22.

It's an appropriate book for Memorial day (yes, I know that Memorial day is over now). I know that it was voted, along with Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, as being one of the two most important World War 2 novels of the 20th Century. My dad loved it because so many things in the book reminded him of his own experiences -- maybe not the specifics, but the general incompetence in the military as depicted in the novel.

One of my favorite concepts out of the book is the proposal that your enemy is anyone who is going to get you killed. In the book, there are just so many people that fit that characterization, at least from the viewpoint of the main character of the novel, Yossarian. Read it -- I guarantee that it will make you laugh in spite of yourself.

 

That's a tiny picture of my Dad when he was a very young man. Technically, he was too small to be an MP, at least according to regulations. But, of course, that didn't stop them from making him one.

 

This book did 1984 better than 1984 did. And it did it before 1984. And Orwell read this book before writing 1984. See where I'm going with this?

 

It's a different story -- yes it influenced Orwell, but so did what was happening in the UK at the time. It's two totally different takes on the Police State.

One of the novels that most influenced Asimov was Frankenstein. And so he wrote his robot stories partly in response to that. Then Jack Williamson came along and he wrote his Humanoids series in response to Asimov. There was no plagiarism, you are allowed to prefer one over the other. But they are three different takes on the same subject. (BTW, Jack Williamson's Humanoid series is ALSO quite dystopian -- it was a response to what he perceived as Asimov's flawed and overly-optimistic view of the place of robots in future society). And before all of those, was the folktale of the Golem -- animated non-living matter. It's the same thing, but in different words.

Then there's Vonnegut's Player Piano, which some people thought was influenced by We, but in actuality, was a response to what Vonnegut saw as H.G. Well's overly optimistic utopian view.

Everything is connected somehow or another. It doesn't mean that everyone is plagiarizing everyone else, just that writers often get ideas from other writers.

There's an old saying -- good writers borrow, great writers steal. And you see it throughout history. Even Shakespeare reused old stories that others had written.

 

But unlike those examples, they didn't happen fairly close together. Not saying Orwell plagiarised, I'm just saying it wasn't the original book everyone thinks it is.

 

I guarantee that when people read 1984 that they are not thinking "Wow, this was the very first story about a dystopian society. What they are thinking is "Wow, what a bleak view", which is probably NOT what they are thinking when they read "We", which has a more optimistic plot.

BTW, Wiliamson published "With Folded Hands" in 1947, Asimov published his first robot short story in 1941, That's pretty close together -- actually a lot closer together than Orwell and Zamyatin's works. 1984 was published in 1949. We was published in 1921. But even before both of those, Karel Capek's R.U.R. was published (it was a play, not a novel, but still...)

Guess what? There was a whole trend of people writing dystopian stories during the first half of the 20th century. The dark side of the industrial revolution was raising it's head, and the optimism of the turn of the century was giving way to greater pessimism. Automation was stealing jobs, you had WW1, WMDs such as poison gas, trench warfare, the rise of Communism, and so on. There was a lot to be pessimistic about.

 

About the enemy being whomever would get you killed. A late friend of mine was an American Veteran in the Vietnam and Korean wars. He was a sniper. His spotter mysteriously died within a day if the spotter smoked. He once said "Better for one to die in a prayer before leaving than both to die due to incompetence." I never asked what exactly he meant. He still morned the tragic losses. But he was skilled and did what he was there to do. He also said "I was a sniper, but without my .22 revolver I would have died every time I left to go do my job." He died years ago of alcohol poisoning.

War is Hell. No questions asked. It leaves pain and turmoil for all sides even if they win. And in most cases, less is gained by winning than walking away.

This thread has a great many books I will attempt to procure in case of any prolonged power outage. Thanks for the references everyone.