Good collection partially ruined by honkies trying to be as “Japanese” as possible. Some of these stories read like a blizzard of Japanese buzzwords…calligraphy, mecha robots, kamikaze, tea ceremonies, etc. I suppose they were trying to retain the essence of Japan, but the effect is one of contrivance, and artifice. It’s a bit like the joke that in the movies, you can see the Eiffel Tower out of every window in France.
Catherynne M Valente’s “One Breath, One Stroke” left me feeling bored and toyed with. Bruce Sterling’s “Goddess of Mercy” is stronger, and has an interesting sociopolitical tilt, but the story ends up not going anywhere. “The Indifference Engine”, by contrast, is a Japanese author trying to be as American as possible. A tragic tale of an African soldier trying to adjust to life at the end of a war, this is the kind of story that wants to be up on a Hollywood movie billboard with the words “HEARTBREAKING” and “POWERFUL” I found it heavy-handed, unpleasant, and emotionally manipulative.
The remaining stories are good or excellent. Ken Liu’s “Mono no Aware” is an obvious standout – exciting, fresh, and accessible, like a Studio Ghibli movie. After the wreck of the Earth, humanity’s remnants are escaping into space and trying to hang on to the flying pieces of civilisation. Felicity Savage’s “The Sound of Breaking Up” was a clever story about online relationships, like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash evolved to the next logical iteration.
Toh EnJoe’s “Endoastronomy” is about a future where the constellations seem to be changing in the night sky, and it reminds of the surreality and wit of older writers like Morio Kita and Ryo Hanmura. Ekaterina Sedia’s “Whale Meat” draws comparisons to Murakami. It’s slow moving and not entirely sure of where it’s going, but it holds the reader’s interest.
But the greatest moment of the collection is Tobi Hirotaka’s “Autogenic Dreaming”, which astonished and shocked me. A revolutionary – and nearly godlike – internet search engine called GEB (a reference to Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, I presume) has turned rogue, and a long-dead serial killer is digitally reconstructed to help save the world from death via Google.
The premise is otherworldly and bizarre, but the story never loses its sinewy power, blurring vignettes and flashbacks and technical exposition. From my quick searching, it seems this is Hirotaka’s first publication credit in English. I hope it will not be the last. On the strength of “Autogenic Dreaming”, it’s possible we’re dealing with a true master of science fiction.
Future falls short of consistent greatness, but the good stories more or less patch over the bad ones, and there’s a couple of incredible standouts that almost sell the collection on their own. I hope we get a The Future is Weeaboo 2 at some point.
This nasty story from future could only have been written by a nasty man from the past, 1980s Stephen King. This was back in the day when he didn’t care, when he broke rules, when he threw “faggot” and “nigger” around liberally, and when he wasn’t pants-wettingly anxious about being a remembered as a Great American Author. He was already something far better than that: a good writer.
He was considered trash at the time. But even if he was, he was a unique kind of trash that defies obvious and easy comparison. Ray Bradbury wishes he was this pissed off. Harlan Ellison wishes he was this coherent. Dean Koontz wishes he was this misanthropic. Apparently the entire book was written over the course of a week, which works just fine – he doesn’t have the chance to get snarky and arch and clever-clever.
The plot is familiar to all, and honestly, not all that sensible. At one point, he moves the story to its next junction by giving the main character a supernatural vision. Then at the end, King can’t figure out what to do, so he blows everyone up. But the story always seemed secondary to The Running Man. The real star is King’s gritty, quasi-cyberpunk world, which he shows off through flashbacks, monologues, and those unexpected shots across the bow King is so good at. A good example of the latter is when the main character meets a woman with full breasts, and concludes she must be corrupt or criminal (because she’s eating well.)
The pace is breakneck. You’re afraid to stop reading because you might get whiplash. The book simply doesn’t have a dull or boring moment, from the man’s run-in with gangsters with hearts full of gold (and lungs full of cancer), to the incredible high-stakes bluffing game at the airport, to the final catastrophic flight to the FreeVee offices. It’s impossible that an out of work every-man could be this good at outshooting and outwitting trained killers, but the relentless pace of the book quashes these objections in your mind. You can’t smell a fart when they’re travelling at Mach 3.
This is one of those “look at me” books that does anything for your attention, and tries to be bigger and louder than a movie. A comparison to Ellison seems appropriate here, because he’s also known for doing anything in his stories for the sake of holding a punter’s attention. But unlike Ellison, King doesn’t seem to have Narcissistic personality disorder, so I don’t know what his excuse is.
This is the best Bachman book (although Misery would have edged it out, had it been released under that name), and probably the darkest and grittiest of King’s novels. 1984 pastiches are dull and overfamiliar these days, and so are cautionary tales about couch potatoes and reality TV, but The Running Man still scorches and sizzles on the page. This isn’t a maudlin, sentimental old man who writes with his literary reputation first and foremost in mind. This is 1980s Stephen King. Don’t walk, run.
Filed under the bookstore section called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Blameless”, this is the KISS drummer’s attempt to set the record crooked. The KISS breakup soap opera has no shortage of pointing fingers, but Peter Criss adds all eight of his own, plus two (non-opposable?) pointing thumbs, and a pointing toe. Gene’s an asshole, Paul’s an asshole, Ace is an asshole, his grandma’s an asshole, the IRS together comprises an asshole…nothing’s ever Criss’s fault, is it? At its best, the book is revealing and honest. Sometimes it’s shallow and manipulative, 384 pages of PR management. And it was ghost-written, which adds another obfuscating layer between the reader and the truth.
It opens in 1994. Criss is in a filthy bedroom in LA, down to his last hundred thousand dollars, and getting ready to shoot himself. The barrel of the gun is in his mouth when he looks at a picture of his daughter, and he hears God telling him not to do it. The scene is overcooked and not entirely convincing. Then we go back to the beginning, when a young man called Peter Criscoula joined a band called Wicked Lester, which changed its name to KISS, recruiting Bill Aucoin, and emerged as the hottest act in rock (figuratively and otherwise. The time when Gene Simmons set himself on fire is described with some glee)
There’s some big laughs in this part of the book: like when the band discovered that their live show had finally received a positive review…from a gay lifestyle magazine. But ultimately you can’t say that Peter “Catman” Criss ever fell out of character, for Makeup to Breakup is indeed catty: proof of this comes early in the book, where he slams Paul and Gene for their “revisionist KISStory”. This is the start of a lot of ripping on his erstwhile bandmates, which starts out funny and then becomes less so.
Makeup to Breakup is certified masturbatory material if you hate “Gaul Stimmons” (Paul is described as semi-gay, with a fixation for men’s dicks. Gene is presented as a power-tripping megalomaniac who belongs in a room with padded walls), but for heaven’s sake, at least those guys wrote music. What did Criss ever do? “Beth”? That was someone else’s song. He didn’t vibe with the band musically (he recalls hearing a tape from Wicked Lester and thinking it was too heavy for his taste), and his personality clashed with everyone. Add in his well-documented substance issues and you have a hors de combat member of the KISS Army.
Criss’s problem is that he was boring – and that is the one thing rock stars can never be. They can suck at their instruments. They can be narcissists and egomaniacs. They can be brazen criminals. But they can not be boring. Criss was smaller than life, the dullest member of the band, possessed of a fragile, neotenous face and quintessentially inadequate drumming skills. His career highlight was really someone else’s highlight. He even had the most boring character.
Criss wasn’t a rock star, he was more of a rock meteor…a brief flash in the night sky, and then an anticlimactic cooling lump displayed in a museum for the next forty years. Say what you will about Gene and Paul, but THEY are KISS. All Peter Criss did was keep the drummer’s stool warm for a while, and this memoir exposes it totally.
