A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

After a weird apocalypse called The Storm that seems to have killed most people on Earth, 17-year-old Liz lives alone in the bookshop where she used to work, occasionally trading books for useful items. But when the more hardbitten Maeve shows up, the two girls fall in love. But is the world about to end all over again?

This book sounded so up my alley. Alas, it was not good. In fact it was kind of the bad lesbian version of Erik J. Brown's All That's Left in the World.

Given the title, you'd think the story would involve books and reading and how they matter even after the apocalypse - a kind of bookstore version of Station Eleven. It's not that at all. A lot of books are mentioned in passing, but "books are important" is not a theme, and reading isn't important to the characters. Liz is living in the bookshop out of trauma and inertia, not because it's her passion or a community center or it feels like home.

Liz is so incredibly helpless and useless, it's hard to believe she survived normal life let alone a post-apocalypse setting. When the tap water stops running, she's unsurprised but also has only one day's worth left stored up in bottles - and it's been running for months, with her expecting it would stop running any moment the whole time! She doesn't bother to lock the front door of the bookshop, even when she goes to sleep. There's all sorts of dangerous damage to the shop that she doesn't know how to or doesn't bother to try to repair, AND doesn't ever ask for help with even though a fair number of friendly people come to her shop. I get that she's supposed to be paralyzed by trauma but she also comes off as a passive nitwit.

Even apart from Liz herself, a lot of stuff in the story makes no sense. Liz literally hasn't left the bookstore in months, she only gets a customer every couple days if that, and the customers only give her small items like a couple batteries for a book. How is she getting enough food to stay alive?

When Maeve turns on a small generator and it doesn't come on immediately, Liz leaves it switched on and tries to manually start it by sticking her hand inside it and giving the fan a spin. (Amazingly, she does not precede this by saying, "Hold my beer.") It promptly turns on and starts sucking her entire body into it, like it's a jet engine.

This gives Liz an extremely severe injury - the skin is ripped off her hand, bones and tendons are visible, and she can't move her fingers at all - but she's basically fine two days later after some extremely vaguely described first aid.

Liz realizes Maeve might be dangerous because she has a prized and valuable knife whose blade is caked with blood. If it's that valuable, YOU'D CLEAN IT.

People mostly use knives as weapons instead of guns for no reason. When someone does have a gun, it's not loaded. I guess guns and bullets are super rare in America!

The apocalypse is a one-time rain of acid that melts everyone who was outside at the time. No one ever mentions that this is fucking bizarre, or speculates on why it happened. The set-up in the pre-apocalypse flashbacks is that a climate change catastrophe is ongoing, but that does not include LITERAL ACID RAIN.

Also, the world is way too depopulated for a one-time event that happened at night, when not many people would be outside, and spared everyone who was inside. There's barely anyone left in Liz's entire town, and we meet something like ten survivors max in the entire book.

It also makes no sense that an acid strong enough to completely dissolve a human in 20 minutes did so little apparent damage to anything else. All the structural damage that's described is what you'd expect from a tornado, not a 20 minute downpour of extremely strong acid.

Liz and Maeve's relationship was boring and barely there. Actually, the whole book was boring. I ended up skimming heavily.

There's some interstitial bits where people write one-page first-person accounts of their survival in a notebook Liz keeps. This sort of thing is almost always so much fun, people recall it as their favorite part of the book. All but one of these bits are boring! How do you even do that?! (The one that I liked was a woman whose dogs saved her from the acid rain by refusing to go on their regular night time walk.)

Spoilers for the end. ( Read more... )

Cell phones send out a signal that makes everyone who hears it turn into ravening zombies!

Stephen King often starts out with "ordinary thing X is scary" and then takes that premise in interesting directions. So it didn't put me off that the premise of Cell is "cell phones are scary," because he's done great things with "a car is scary," "a Saint Bernard is scary," "a devoted fan is scary," etc.

The problem with Cell isn't that cell phones aren't scary, or that the book is basically "old man yells at cell phones." It's that though there are individual good scenes and good characters, the premise goes in nonsensical directions, the characters are subpar, and the book as a whole doesn't work.

The opening scene, in which the one guy in a park without a cell phone watches helplessly while everyone who answers or makes a phone call goes berserk, is a grabber. But it also ends up illustrating why King normally doesn't do big action scenes as openers. Everyone's running around attacking each other or trying to escape, and we know nothing about any of them, so it's exciting but in a hollow way. In most King books there'd be more buildup - sometimes a LOT more buildup - so you care about the characters and are biting your nails in anticipation of the phone zombies, rather than the phone zombies attacking on page one.

The no-phone guy is Clay, a comic book artist/writer who's in New York to pitch his comic, while his estranged wife and beloved son are home in Maine. Normally I either love King's protagonists or find them awful but compelling. Very unusually for King, I didn't care about Clay.

There's a lack of specific details on what his wife and son are like as people, so Clay's quest to find them lacks emotion. He also just doesn't have much personality. Clay hooks up with a gay guy, Tom, and a teenage girl, Alice, to avoid phone zombies and find his family. I did like Tom and Alice, but the entire book is from Clay's POV. This book particularly would have benefited from multiple POVs as everything outside of Clay seemed more interesting than Clay.

But mostly I want to rant a bit about how the phone zombie plot is aggressively nonsensical.

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Really bottom-tier King. I rank it with Thinner and The Tommyknockers in my absolute least favorites. (I have not read Dreamcatcher.) If you like King in general, which are your least favorites of his?

Check out the covers. The first is the original, showing a flip-top phone. (Also an overturned cup and a scary shadow, both of which detract from rather than add to the central image. The artist definitely caught the "throw in things randomly" vibe of the book.) The second one shows a modern phone. If you read this book picturing a modern cell phone, you will be very confused as they are only ever used for phone calls, not accessing the internet.

I love Hand's fantasy and mystery/thrillers, but vaguely recalled bouncing off her science fiction and feeling that it was impenetrable and had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like. Having run through most of those genres by her, I thought I'd give her SF another try. I didn't bounce off this one, but though it wasn't impenetrable, it certainly was difficult to penetrate. Also, it had a hallucinatory quality that I didn't like.

Glimmering is near-future SF with an odd history. It was first published in 1997 and was unsettlingly accurate about a number of things that came to pass in the 2000s. Hand then revised it in 2021, apparently to correct some scientific errors and give it a more hopeful ending. (Having read the revised edition, if that's the hopeful ending, then the original one probably ends with everyone dead.)

An environmental accident that I guess is more scientifically plausible than whatever the original cause was creates the Glimmering, a fiery rainbow sky like a permanent aurora. This blocks a lot of sunlight so plants don't grow well. Meanwhile, everything is in a slow slide into dystopia, with pandemics and terrorism and uncertain electricity and so forth.

The main characters are Jack, a gay man who has AIDS (Hand did not predict modern anti-virals, so in the books it's a terminal condition) who is given something that's supposedly a cure, and Trip, a young man of indeterminate but very repressed sexuality who's become a megastar evangelical Christian singer. Their plotlines are completely separate for most of the book, and only intersect at all toward the end. I liked Jack and was pretty engaged with his storyline; he lives with grandmother and a housekeeper, he has friends and relatives, he has relatable problems and desires. I did not care about Trip and his creepy sexual encounter with a weird teenage refugee girl.

For most of the book, Jack takes the drug and finds that most of his symptoms improve, though he sees strange visions and continues to lose weight. Trip has sex, freaks out, takes drugs, freaks out, does other things, freaks out... I did not care about Trip.

The climax and ending go full hallucinatory. I'm cutting for spoilers but maybe what I write won't be spoilery because I'm not sure how much of it actually happened or what it meant.

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I could see what Hand was doing here. The themes are ones I like: a small-scale, slow-moving apocalypse; how people deal with mortality and love in the midst of both a global apocalypse and the small, personal apocalypses of their lives. But the book felt jumbled and incoherent, and it didn't make me terribly enthused about seeking out more of Hand's science fiction. (There's an SF trilogy she wrote a while back, and reviews often use the word "hallucinatory.")

Of her remaining novels I haven't read yet, one is Black Light (dark fantasy or horror) and one is Hokuloa Road, a mystery thriller. These sound much more up my alley.

An intriguing and compelling but borderline parodically grimdark novel about apocalypse by sleep deprivation. It's like a reading a car crash. I couldn't put it down.

Even before the apocalypse, the narrator, Paul, hates literally everything and everyone except his doomed wife Tanya. Even the metaphors are ultra grim. Here's a sample of Paul's pre-apocalypse outlook on life; he writes scholarly books on etymology.

My agent, still unsure about me after seven years of contractual bondage, was always pushing for an Eats Shoots and Leaves sort of mass placebo, the idea being to try to trick the public into consuming something inherently dry and bland by dusting it with MSG. I never delivered that book. I never refused, mind you—just went ahead and wrote other books which, published through unambitious presses, sold just enough copies to shut-ins and fuzzy-sweatered fussbudgets to draw forth more grudging grants, more painful teaching gigs, and to continue the damp seepage of royalties into my checking account.

In a single, typical paragraph, Paul drips contempt and hatred for his agent, having an agent, popular books on language, people who read popular books on language, etymology, his publishers, people who read his books, people who give him grants, teaching, and the money he makes writing.

Another moment which was emblematic of the novel's tone was when the apocalypse has begun and Paul and Tanya decide to have one last hurrah by eating at a restaurant. They choose a restaurant which is kind of a couple in-joke, because it has terrible food and bad service and they hate it.

And then the most people became unable to sleep overnight, became psychotic, and died (after setting up batshit cults because of course they did), but a small minority did continue sleeping. Paul was one of them. The adult Sleepers all dreamed blissfully of a beautiful golden light. The child Sleepers stopped talking and communicating in any way, and seemed weirdly calm.

None of this is ever explained. Possibly it would have been in Nod's planned sequels, Pod and God, but sadly Barnes died of cancer before writing them.

The batshit cult tortures and murders Sleepers and paints things bright yellow, including the heads of murdered Sleepers. Paul reluctantly protects a Sleeper child after Tanya goes insane, witnesses Seattle getting nuked, and prevents the insane last survivor of a nuclear warship from setting off a nuke. He then barricades himself and the child in his apartment from a crazed mob outside, lowers her down from the window on a rope, and lies down to sleep and be torn apart when the mob breaks in.

When he falls asleep/commits suicide, the book ends in mid-sentence.

There was an excellent sequel story this Yuletide, which is dark but not in this particular mode of grimdark, marginalia by StopTalkingAtMe.

Nod

Evan Whitesky is dressing a moose when the power goes out in his small, remote Anishinaabe reserve. He and his wife Nicole joke about it when he returns - without TV, they might actually have to have a conversation!

At first no one in the community is particularly surprised or concerned by the outage; up until very recently, this was a frequent occurrence, and the town has diesel generators. But the power stays off, and the truck that supplies food and diesel doesn't arrive, and there's no word from anyone...

This small-scale apocalypse novel is a meditative study of the rhythms of a community, and what happens when those rhythms are disrupted. Its focus is more on the moment-to-moment how-to of dressing a deer and offering tobacco, keeping kids entertained without electricity, and holding community meetings with refreshments than on starvation and shootouts; the latter does happen, but it's understated and a small piece of the whole. Moon of the Crusted Snow has as much in common with other novels about the atmosphere of a particular community, like Rumer Godden's In This House of Brede, which is set in a nunnery, as it does with the average post-apocalypse novel.

A lot of post-apocalypse novels are about the violent disintegration of community, assuming that the moment there's no electricity, everyone will rush out to murder and rape with impunity. Leaving aside that even with electricity, people in privileged classes can already murder and rape with impunity, this assumes that murder and rape is what most men are only prevented from doing by a veneer of civilization; that exterior forces are the only thing holding communities back from utter chaos.

In Moon of the Crusted Snow, exterior forces aren't a wall of civilization holding back chaos, they're the brutal colonization that tried and tries its hardest to destroy the community.

Here an elder is talking about how the younger people have been saying it's the apocalypse and the end of the world.

“The world isn’t ending,” she went on. “Our world isn’t ending. It already ended. It ended when the Zhaagnaash came into our original home down south on that bay and took it from us. That was our world. When the Zhaagnaash cut down all the trees and fished all the fish and forced us out of there, that’s when our world ended. They made us come all the way up here. This is not our homeland! But we had to adapt and luckily we already knew how to hunt and live on the land. We learned to live here... But then they followed us up here and started taking our children away from us! That’s when our world ended again. And that wasn’t the last time. We’ve seen what this... what’s the word again?”

“Apocalypse.”

"Yes, apocalypse. We’ve had that over and over. But we always survived. We’re still here. And we’ll still be here, even if the power and the radios don’t come back on and we never see any white people ever again.”

Left to its own devices, the community doesn't suddenly revert to barbarity. Nor does it become a perfect haven. Instead, its strengths and weaknesses that were present before the disaster continue, brought into sharper emphasis: people care for each other and make sure everyone's fed, some try to become more self-sufficient while others take the food they're given and complain about it, news travels and stories are told, and they're still vulnerable to invaders.

This is one of those books that's immersive if you like it and stultifying if you don't. It has some very sad parts, but I didn't find it depressing. The apocalypse is never explained because the characters have no idea what happened, though we do eventually learn a bit more about what's going on elsewhere.

I was immersed in it from page one, and found it very moving. It feels like a standalone, but I read that a sequel is in the works. I definitely plan to read that.

I read this because the movie was pretty great. It turns out that almost everything I loved about the movie isn’t in the book. Also, his prose style still bugs me.

What the movie took from the book: A group of female scientists, including a psychologist, venture into a mysterious area from which previous expeditions either didn’t return or came back changed. The protagonist’s husband was on a previous expedition, and returned in bad shape and unable to say what was there. When the women go inside, they find weird shit, a lighthouse, and accounts by previous expeditions, and mostly don’t survive. Nothing is really explained; it’s all about exploring the mystery.

What’s in the movie that isn’t in the book: Virtually all of the specific things they encounter inside the area.

What surprised me about the book: It’s a Cthulu mythos story. That is, Cthulu isn’t namechecked, but the book is very directly inspired by Lovecraft. The movie does have some Lovecraftian elements and themes, but the connection is loose enough that it didn’t even occur to me when I saw it, while it was instantly obvious when I read the book.

I had the same experience with this book as I’ve had with everything else I’ve tried by Jeff Vandermeer: it’s well-crafted, it’s clearly doing what he wants it to be doing, it’s intellectually interesting, and it's not my cup of tea.

The characters are unnamed in the book, by command of the organization that sent them and for unclear reasons; they go along with this partly, I think, because the psychologist has hypnotized them, and partly because they are strange, detached people. In fact they seem to have been selected partly on this basis. In terms of the effect on the reader, the lack of names and the affectless characters adds to the sense of weirdness and makes you read the book as if you too are a detached scientist/explorer; the characters feel like specimens to be studied rather than people to sympathize with.

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I liked the ending and a lot of the scenes were cool and trippy, but overall Vandermeer isn’t for me. I’m really glad I got to see the movie, though, because I think it made me feel the way people who loved the book felt when they read it.

Not the Ben Affleck Armageddon, the Andy Lau Armageddon.

A disjointed, over-stuffed, intermittently coherent movie (or possibly several movies jammed together) made watchable and, if in company, extremely amusing, by the presence of the gorgeous Andy Lau and by its high WTF quotient.

I began watching this by myself. In the first two minutes, a priest spontaneously combusts. Then it cuts to sad computer scientist Andy Lau, moping adorably on his yacht. One of the very best features of this film was Andy Lau curled up sadly in chairs, sofas, etc. Oyce and I kept wanting to hug and cuddle him.

And then something happened that made me fall off my sofa laughing hysterically. I stopped the film, deciding that I needed to watch it with Oyce to watch her reaction to this.

( Dehydrated humans can be reconstituted -- just add water! )

Armageddon

Most Gratuitously Depressing Novel (involving an apocalypse)

( I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman )

Most Gratuitously Depressing Novel (not involving an apocalypse)

( Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Short Fiction (involving an apocalypse)

Most Gratuitously Depressing Short Fiction (not involving an apocalypse)

( A Touch of Lavender, by Megan Lindholm, and The Necklace, by Guy de Maupassant )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Dramatic Work (involving an apocalypse)

( Wolf's Rain )
Most Gratuitously Depressing Dramatic Work (not involving an apocalypse)

( In the Company of Men )

I started printing my memoir last night. I continued at 8:00 am today. I'm still printing the thing. With my advance check I will buy a new printer that isn't slow, evil, and insane. You don't want to know.

Since I'm stuck here apparently indefinitely, I will amuse myself by reprinting my thoughts on this o/v/e/r/r/a/t/e/d controversial anime series.

First report, from about half-way through the show:

As most of you probably know already, the Earth is under attack by giant things called angels, which look like robots, but later developments suggest that they're living, presumably bioengineered things. The first two attacks killed half the population; fourteen years later, everyone's hunkered down in fortified cities.

The only defense against the angels is the Evas-- giant robots (three so far) which can only be piloted by certain kids born nine months after the first attack. The kids are Shinji, a passive boy who's understandably depressed because his asshole father, who runs the program, doesn't love him; Rei, a girl who I suspect is either a clone or an android, because she has no past, no emotions, and no personality; and Asuka, another girl who's an annoying brat.

Despite the almost complete lack of likable characters, the story is gripping enough to keep me watching. Actually, the story per se is only so-so, but the hints of a larger plot occurring out of sight are quite intriguing: What are the angels and what do they want? Is someone sending them? Are the Evas based on angel technology? Are the Evas alive? What's so special about the kid pilots? Who or what is Rei? Is Shinji's horrible father plotting the end of the world, and why? Etc.

It's not uncommon in sf for the background to be more interesting than the foreground, but this show is a particularly notable case.

That being said, and admitting that I'll watch to the end to see how it comes out, I have to ask: what is it that's so special about this show, again?

It's supposed to be a dark, intense classic, but so far it hasn't been all that dark and intense-- angsty, yes, but not as much as a bunch of the other shows I've checked out-- and nowhere near as intense as its obvious comparison, that other story of kids fighting a war against aliens because their abusive-parents-by-proxy don't want to get their hands dirty, Ender's Game.

The animation is OK, nothing more, though some of the character, angel, and Eva designs are pretty good.

The weirdness quotient, so far, is pretty low. Actually, it's nil except for the strange use of Christian imagery and the presence of a penguin (the obligatory cute animal, here totally out of place).

Second report, of the complete show:

At about the halfway mark, the series switched from a somewhat generic sf show about angsty kids piloting giant robots called evangelions for an organization called NERV to save their post-apocalyptic world from invaders to a really interesting and weird sf show in which all the elements noted above are called into doubt, and Christian imagery begins to run amok.

Huge spoilers, including details of the worst ending of anything ever.

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