Book Review: Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute

The final entry in Lem's pseudoepigraphy trilogy, One Human Minute collects the title review and two other writings relating to non-existent books together. While it's still no A Perfect Vacuum, this volume has clearer ideas and a more pleasant writing style than Imaginary Magnitude. It's hard to tell how much difference the translation makes; perhaps Catherine Leach was simply working with stronger material than Marc Heine was given for Imaginary Magnitude, while Michael Kandel somehow always gets the good Lem volumes to rework into English. At the very least, there are no drudgerous pieces like "Golem XIV", or much of Summa Technologiae, so even though these essays might seem a bit dry and could benefit from being placed in a narrative, even second-tier Lem is still good stuff.

• "One Human Minute". Imagine the Guinness Book of Records, but the "records" part is literal - the eponymous chronicle is a statistical abstract of various measures of the sum total of the human condition during a single minute of one day. Interestingly, we are not told exactly when the select minute occurred, so presumably it was a representative day in 1988, when the fictitious volume was published. From births to deaths to sexual encounters, the review explores how encountering data presented like changes the experience, as Stalin's line about how "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" is turned on its head. It's like an extended riff on that scene in the movie Amélie when she wonders how many couples in Paris are having an orgasm at that moment, and it's striking how different seeing the full measure of a single life is from seeing a lifespan's worth of minute slices from the equivalent number of different individuals.
• "The Upside-Down Revolution". In the 21st century, advances in military hardware will transform warfare yet again; stockpiles of overwhelming nuclear force have rendered the prospect of great clashes of tanks and planes and warships obsolete, and so the strategic deployment of great swarms of computerized insects, which have far more subtle effects, will be paramount, as will encouraging their evolution to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Lem is really good at working out of the complex game-theoretic logic of war strategy, and this reminded me a lot of his novel Fiasco, so much so that I wish he had turned this book review into a narrative short story. Some ideas work well on the page but don't work in movie form (the philosophical ruminations on the impossibility of truly knowing alien life in Solaris is a great example), but sometimes you see the opposite idea: instead of dryly describing the likely effects of autonomous swarms of nanobots on warfare, why not have Pirx the Pilot try to fight off an attack of one?
• "The World As Cataclysm". Lem argues with our framing of the Fermi Paradox (which he does not explicitly name) for 30 pages, insisting that our understanding of many of the variables involved is so poor that instead of trying to figure out why intelligent life did happen on Earth, it would be more edifying to figure out which disasters caused it to not happen everywhere else we see. Lem is basically arguing that we should import the distinction between risk and uncertainty from finance (the former is quantifiable whereas the latter is not) into models of the probability of intelligent life, so that we don't waste our time searching in parts of the galaxy out in the fringes or too near to the core, or elsewhere afflicted with catastrophe. Lem writes with his typical bubble-bursting remorselessness (again keeping Solaris in mind, I always get the impression that he would really hate optimistic shows like Star Trek that blithely depict humanity palling around with friendly alien life), yet I found myself wishing for the humor of Roger Lowenstein, who memorably summed up the crucial risk vs uncertainty distinction for me in When Genius Failed, his history of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management:

The problem with the math is that it adorned with certitude events that were inherently uncertain. "You take Monica Lewinsky, who walks into Clinton's office with a pizza. You have no idea where that's going to go," Conseco's Max Bublitz, who had declined to invest in Long-Term noted. "Yet if you apply math to it, you come up with a thirty-eight percent chance she's going to go down on him. It looks great, but it's all a guess".

Lem is constantly reminding the reader how much of science fiction is just a guess, and it's a valuable service.

Book Review: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone - This Is How You Lose the Time War

Time-travel stories are generally fun to read as long as you don't demand perfect conceptual rigor, but sometimes you find one that fully commits to the logical weirdness that the genre requires and makes it work. This is one of those stories, essentially a lesbian Romeo and Juliet crossed with the hit 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Timecop that's both well-written and rewards rereading. Red and Blue are temporal assassins fighting a war back and forth in time. The actual causes of the war are obscure, but the technology-obsessed society that sent Red is implacably opposed to Blue's own nature-worshipping culture. The two start leaving taunting messages to each other after each timeline-shifting operation, one professional to another, which then gradually grow more fond as they begin to bond over their shared isolation, until their correspondence becomes so intimate that they decide to betray their respective factions and abscond together. There's a pleasing ouroborus structure lying behind their decisions, and the contrasting styles of the two protagonists' letters (El-Mohtar wrote Blue and Gladstone wrote Red) make their eventual infatuation all the better.

Book Review: Donald Palumbo - Chaos Theory, Asimov's Foundation and Robots, and Herbert's Dune

Probably the best close reading of these two titanic series you could ask for, Palumbo's thesis here is that in addition to being entertaining reads, one of the reasons that the Foundation and Dune series have endured for so long is due to their fractal nature: the structures of the novels recapitulate their main plots, which are themselves illustrations of their main themes. The nuances of psychohistory in Foundation and ecology in Dune are demonstrated not just by the characters talking about them, and not just by the actions they take, but also how the books in the series relate to each other, since each novel is a mostly self-contained story but each series builds and expands on the main themes in subtly brilliant fractal patterns. Even better, Palumbo made my own vague notions of how the two series' overlapping but distinct and even opposed ways of viewing the universe relate to each other much more clear - can the future be known, planned for, and managed, or will there always be elements of chance, volition, and surprise? Asimov's careful unification of short stories, novellas, novels, and entire trilogies into the Foundation "metaseries" (i.e. the initially separate Robot, Empire, and Foundation series) is itself an example of the psychohistorical vision of finding order in chaos, whereas Herbert's more shambling efforts in the Dune novels to set up and then knock down successively grander iterations of monomythical hero archetypes are themselves demonstrations of inescapable disorder in a seemingly perfectly ordered society and natural world. Debates over whether genre fiction can be as good as "real literature" are invariably as tedious as they are pointless, and as this literary analysis of two of the greatest science fiction series of all time shows, utterly wrongheaded.

Like a lot of other sci-fi nerds, both of these series made a huge impression on me as an adolescent. I read the Foundation novels in middle school, then the Empire novels, then the Robot novels and short stories, and then the Dune books afterwards. At the time, and even upon rereading, my appreciation was mainly for the ideas, since Herbert and especially Asimov have never been renowned as prose stylists (I continue to believe that this was not a weakness, and that Asimov's decision to listen to his critics and sex up his later works was a mistake that dilutes their impact). As economists like Paul Krugman have noted, Foundation is perhaps the best novel ever written about macroeconomics, and Dune is still one of the all-time great deconstructions of the hero myth. But where the two series separate themselves from other more typical epic sci-fi or fantasy, and rise head and shoulders above their own ancillary literature - the disjointed Benford/Bear/Brin "Second Foundation trilogy", and the fanfiction-y Dune prequels cobbled together by Herbert's son - to enter the realm of more purely literary novel cycles like Balzac's La Comédie humaine or especially Zola's Les Rougon-Macquart series is in how Asimov and Herbert's grand themes are echoed in each level of their work (I was also reminded of Richard Powers' similar attempt in his Poe/Bach tribute novel The Gold Bug Variations). Palumbo's goal is to explain how each series repeats certain plot devices or character actions as a way of illustrating the main theme within each installment and also between them, so that the search quests and preservation of knowledge in Foundation build up to humanity's ultimate survival and unification, while the steady accumulations and dispersals of power in Dune eventually lead to the guarantee that humanity will eternally evolve, never again prisoner to a single narrative.

Foundation

The first section recounts how the Foundation series was constructed and then expanded on over the half-century in between the 1942 publication of "The Encyclopedists", the short story seed of the first Foundation novel, and Forward the Foundation in 1993, and how, despite the very different motivations Asimov had for writing each series and even each book, eventually the series' architecture came to reflect the concepts of psychohistory at multiple levels. As readers of the series know, psychohistory is the idea that history can be made understandable and predictable by treating the billions of disparate individuals as an aggregated mass within a sufficiently sophisticated nonlinear mathematical framework. Asimov was a chemist in real life, and found the idea of a social scientific equivalent of the ideal gas law quite compelling, especially given the seeming slide backwards into barbarism that World War 2 represented. He didn't decide to unify his magnum opus until many years later, but he had left himself plenty of material to work with even before the discovery and popularization of fractal mathematics, because with the partial exception of the mostly standalone Empire novels, the Foundation and Robot series show a profound understanding of the way that dynamic systems operate, even on unpredictable human beings.

Within the Foundation universe, Seldon's theoretical science of psychohistory requires a complex feedback setup of a visible First Foundation and invisible Second Foundation in order to actually apply its insights to prevent tens of millennia of chaotic barbarism. Eventually it's discovered that this "visible actor with shadow motivator" extends even beyond the Foundations to Earth and Gaia, and has been present in-universe since the era of the Robot stories (I have always felt that the treatment of the invisible global stewardship of the economic control computers in "The Evitable Conflict" remains profoundly under-appreciated as a piece of prognostication, especially with so much fearmongering about "runaway AI"). I wish Palumbo had discussed how the "individual action supports inevitable destiny" idea behind psychohistory relates to the Marxist-Leninist theory that an inevitable class conflict somehow requires a determined revolutionary vanguard party to take conscious action, but it's easy to get lost in the swamps of dialectical materialism. The repeated crises that the First Foundation suffers within each of the individual Foundation series novellas can only be resolved by the use of cunning to bring the system back on track, and even when the Seldon Plan is temporarily disrupted, such as with the appearance of the Mule in Foundation and Empire, Asimov uses the "fractal motifs" of backup plans, guardianship, and disguise to reveal how the individual character actions, for example the Tazenda gambit against the Mule in Second Foundation, fit into the larger plan. There's a great example of these fractal motifs in one scene in Prelude to Foundation where two robots are trying to shepherd Seldon to safety:

Daneel, however, is the guardian who at one point in Prelude assumes the most intricate disguise-within-a-disguise-within-a-disguise-within-a-disguise in the entire metaseries. Soon after arriving in Trantor's Mycogen Sector - where they come under the protection of Sunmaster 14, yet another guardian - Dors and Seldon don skullcaps and robes to pass as hairless, appropriately attired Mycogenians. Dors then insists on further disguising herself as a Mycogenian male, through a change of robes, so that she can accompany and continue to protect Seldon during his thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate the Mycogenian Sacratorium, which only male Mycogenians can enter. Yet her three levels of disguise - a robot posing as a human female masquerading as a Mycogenian female disguised as a Mycogenian male - are exceeded by the four levels of disguise that Daneel must then assume in order to rescue both Dors and Seldon. As he, too, must pose as a Mycogenian to follow them into the Sacratorium yet must rescue them as Hummin, Daneel is in this instance a robot pretending to be human assuming the persona of Demerzel disguising himself as Hummin masquerading as a Mycogenian.

The second section discusses further evidence of this multi-level plotting in the Robot series, as well as how they additionally incorporate Asimov's ethical concerns. Asimov's plotting can get quite complex, which is why readers forgive him his often weak characterization, merely functional dialogue, and aversion to action scenes. The Robot novels are essentially detective stories, which gave Asimov plenty of opportunities to construct the whodunits that he loved so much, but they also served as deep meditations on moral philosophy; since cooperation, intelligence, and tolerance are required to solve each murder mystery, the resolutions of which gradually help Earth get its act together and escape its terrestrial trap. The prejudice of Earthmen against robots and Spacers against Earthmen, are the backdrop that the main characters have to solve their crimes against, but with each successful resolution, Earth gets closer to breaking the negative equilibrium of its colonial shackles, and the eventual colonization of the galaxy becomes inevitable, which after the series unification can be seen as a profound statement of what it would take to get humans to stop fighting each other. I had always thought that the Three Laws were a great theoretical framework to discuss ethical conundrums as trolley problems, but the way Asimov unified early stories of individual robots trying not to lie to individual people in I, Robot with the robots' ultimate solution in Foundation and Earth to eliminate human cruelty and bigotry by simply amalgamating all living matter into a galactic superorganism is staggering when looked at in its entirety.

Palumbo's outline of the 7 Foundation novels (not including the Robot or Empire works).

Dune

The third section is devoted to a similar analysis of Dune, both comparing it to Foundation and as its own entity. Dune is actually more amenable to this kind of fractal analysis, because Herbert explicitly told the reader that that's what he was doing:

Like a fractal image, Herbert's "patterns within patterns" metaphor is reiterated through numerous variations to describe the complex schemes, frequently working at cross-purposes, of the Harkonnens, the Atreides, the Emperor, the Bene Gesserit, Princess Irulan, the Tleilaxu, the Spacing Guild, the Fremen, and, finally, the Honored Matres. Pardot Kynes defines ecology as a system of "relationships within relationships within relationships" (Dune, 493), and Herbert's many variations on this metaphor also include the "blue within blue within blue" of Fremen eyes and Feyd's "tricks within tricks within tricks" and "treachery within treachery within treachery" (Dune, 125, 485, 486); "vision-within-vision" and "meanings within meanings" (Messiah, 39, 136); "trickery within trickery" (Children, 207); "wheels within wheels" (Children, 209, Emperor, 245); "hidden shells within hidden shells" (Emperor, 375); "a cage within a cage," "a box within their box," and "contingencies on contingencies" (Chapterhouse, 94, 197, 349); and numerous repetitions of the ubiquitous "feint within a feint within a feint" (Dune, 43, 332, 372; Children, 140, 322). Each variation, like the motif of schemes nested within schemes that most signify, underscores the series' fractal plot structure as this echoes its ecological theme. Leto tells Paul, early in Dune, that politics "is like single combat... only on a larger scale - a feint within a feint within a feint... seemingly without end" (43), a variation that is also a perfectly apt description of the archetypal fractal image's levels of scale descending infinitely.

But even if Dune has a more openly complex plotting than Foundation, I think many readers develop a stronger emotional attachment to Dune because of its bildungsroman/coming-of-age skeleton, particularly in the first novel. Herbert then goes on to criticize essentially every element of that myth, but that's what's so great about a well-done deconstruction - it can be perfectly enjoyable on its own even as it shows why the thing it's critiquing is ultimately unsatisfactory (see also Norman Spinrad's essay "The Emperor of Everything" which also comments on the kind of adolescent wish-fulfillment that Dune is responding to). Palumbo spends a lot of time discussing Dune's use of the "monomyth", as in Joseph Campbell's work. I thought I had had my fill of Campbell due to reading one too many essays on the hero's journey in Star Wars, but Palumbo makes it all seem fresh. Dune's more openly religious/mystical/spiritual aspects make it easily as fruitful as subject for this type of analysis, especially because Herbert sets up a succession of monomyths (Paul's journey in the first novel, his journey continued and ended in the next two novels, Leto's journey in the fourth novel, etc) that interact with each other in a really satisfying way. Alongside his incredibly interesting analysis of the monomyth itself as a fractal pattern is a discussion of the monomyth in extant world religions; Herbert had a lot of fun mashing up religions in the Dune series (the Orange Catholic Bible, Zensunni mysticism, the Bene Gesserit's Panoplia Propheticus, etc), and this kind of syncretic analysis gives a lot of context on why that strikes us as so plausible.

One area I did wish for was a bit more discussion of relevant details from Herbert's other non-Dune works like the anti-AI stuff in Destination: Void, human evolution in Hellstrom's Hive, or social structure in the ConSentiency novels. One reason why I like the (unjustly) maligned God-Emperor of Dune so much is that even though it's essentially one long monologue, it collects just about every neat little idea Herbert ever had in one or another of Leto II's declamations, but I think it would have been helpful to have some more background on Herbert's mindset because some of his artistic decisions, particularly in the later books, make more sense once you know where he's coming from. He infamously wrote Dune as a partial commentary on the idea of "war as a collective orgasm" after having read Norman Walter's 1950 book The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare, hence seemingly odd ideas like the Honored Matres' sex magic tucked into the later two novels. Likewise, one of Asimov's main predecessors for Foundation was L. Sprague De Camp's Lest Darkness Fall, where a time-traveling archaeologist attempts to prevent the Dark Ages by reducing the physical and social damage done by the Byzantine invasion of Italy during the Gothic Wars; this conceit recalls the main character's time-travel in Pebble In the Sky, the only time in the Foundation metaseries where that contrivance appears. Palumbo has a great line that "Like the Foundation series, the Dune series is like a time-travel story without any time travel in that its protagonists also attempt to use knowledge of possible futures (gained through prescience, rather than psychohistory) to alter the future."

That relationship between knowledge and control is featured prominently in the comparisons of the two great epic cycles that Palumbo includes, which are generally fantastic, especially because Herbert had complex feelings about Asimov's work. In his "Men On Other Planets" essay in The Craft of Science Fiction, not cited here, he complained that in Foundation:

History... is manipulated for larger ends and for the greater good as determined by a scientific aristocracy. It is assumed, then, that the scientist-shamans know best which course humankind should take... While surprises may appear in these stories (e.g., the Mule mutant), it is assumed that no surprise will be too great or too unexpected to overcome the firm grasp of science upon human destiny. This is essentially the assumption that science can produce a surprise-free future for humankind.

I think this is a fair criticism of overly deterministic scientism as far as it goes, though of course one could make similar criticisms of Herbert's work as well (is it really more reasonable to assume that humanity will be permanently liberated from tyranny by "surprise" in the form of a nearly immortal psychic god-worm-man who's gotten bored of ruling the galaxy?). But the critique of a cloistered ruling elite as a possibly suboptimal long-run strategy is well-taken; I have often thought about the hidden, unaccountable Second Foundation whenever I've read something about the way that central banks are structured to be insulated from direct public influence. Foundation does anticipate most of the themes and motifs of Dune, but as Herbert pointed out, from the opposite perspective. As Palumbo elaborates:

Foundation's Edge in particular provides "repeated examples of motivations within motivations, wheels within wheels" (193), yet Asimov's plots often seem to be more linear (and his universe, therefore, less multidimensional) than Herbert's because they also frequently feature only one feedback loop at a time, as in the Trilogy, while Herbert's numerous subplots, all interacting simultaneously, mimic more precisely the operation of feedback in a real ecology or dynamical system. The metaseries and Dune series exhibit a clearer distinction in presenting the "essential tension between order and chaos" from diametrical perspectives. Asimov's metaseries champions a chaos-to-order perspective: its protagonists promote the Empire, Foundations, and Gaia, which are all negative or regulatory feedback mechanisms, while the Mule, the pivotal antagonist, embodies the positive or destabilizing feedback that disrupts the system....

Conversely, the Dune series champions an order-to-chaos perspective. Paul and Leto II, its principal protagonists, embody positive or destabilizing feedback, while such antagonists as the Emperor, the Harkonnens, and the Guild are part of the negative or regulatory feedback mechanisms that maintain the status quo. Like the Mule, Paul is a "mutation" who "shifted the old balance" and "amplified disorder"; and so is Leto II, who Paul calls "the ultimate feedback on which our species depends" and who enforces a rigid order expressly to provoke chaos (Children, 143, 345, 373)....

Among other frames of reference, Asimov couples a view of the history of Western civilization with the notion of feedback loops with the fantastic ideas of a future galactic empire and a science that predicts the future to generate "The Foundation Trilogy," then solves the problem of merging this series with his robot stories and novels by associating both these narrative frames with that of dynamical systems analysis to produce the metaseries. Among other frames of reference, Herbert couples the notion of manufactured religions with ecology (and its chaos theory overtones) with the monomyth (which inherently resonates with both these other frames) with the fantastic ideas of a future interstellar empire and protagonists who can foresee the future by accessing higher-order dimensions (yet another concept that resonates with chaos theory) to create the Dune series.

Palumbo's outline of the 6 Dune novels.

Needless to say this is much more thought-out and insightful than most fan theories like, say, the Star Wars Ring Theory. This is the kind of very high-level analysis that I was hoping for. I read Foundation first, and prefer it to Dune because there's more stuff in it, but the question of which series' treatment of growth and change is more accurate (or desirable) is profound. This is the kind of careful, thoughtful, insightful treatment that is all too rare in literary criticism, whether of science fiction or of any genre. For the most part literary awards are fairly irrelevant to the average reader no matter the genre, except as a rough recommendation guide. In the case of the Foundation and Dune series, however, all the hype is justified: they really are that good, and perhaps even better than you remember.

Book Review: David Forbes - The Old Iron Dream

I first encountered Forbes as a guest on Radio War Nerd episode #64, discussing the recurring strains of right-wing thought inherent to science fiction dating back to the Golden Age. That sci-fi isn't immune from fascism should be obvious, but it's surprisingly underappreciated, especially if, like me, you don't follow the contemporary science fiction scene very closely. Despite the genre's often-promoted public image as an inclusive outpost of forward thinking, many of its most famous practitioners have used it to advocate for hard-right viewpoints that wouldn't be out of place in the 1930s (or now, come to think of it). This short work is an extension of Forbes' argument in that episode which adds a bit more historical context, particularly around major figures like Robert Heinlein and John Campbell, explaining how a theoretically progressive genre can so comfortably accommodate extremely reactionary views. Science fiction is less a vessel for delivering a specific point of view than a vocabulary for expressing any point of view you could think of, so while it's unfortunate that an aspirationally utopian genre is still saddled with all the anxieties, resentments, and hangups of the present day, it's worth exploring what right-wing science fiction says about right-wingers, as well as the rest of us.

I grew up reading Golden Age authors like Clarke, Heinlein, and especially Asimov, but as a politically naive child I wasn't really aware enough pick up on most political subtext other than as a "neutral" grounding for the immediate story being told. Truth be told, I'm still not always aware of what's lurking behind the pages - I just read John Betancourt's publication of the extended edition of John Campbell's "Who Goes There?" earlier this year without thinking much about Campbell as a person other than "man, what a great suspense writer". I also don't follow contemporary debates over the politics of science fiction very closely, like the Sad Puppies vs N. K. Jemisin controversy that Forbes opens the book with (it's the tiresomely familiar outrage from conservatives that women and minorities expect their viewpoints to be treated fairly). Forbes explains that there's nothing really new about these debates, and that this is just the latest iteration of a very old battle with people who want to express in science fiction the worldview that Corey Robin so aptly chronicled in his book The Reactionary Mind:

From its beginnings, science fiction has harbored a powerful far-right constituency, not as a fringe element, not as a cultural offshoot, but as some of its most revered figures, who have incorporated right-wing ideas and assumptions into some of its classic works. Advocates for everything from eugenics to poll taxes to militaristic authoritarianism have found a home in science fiction, where such ideas have enjoyed a far longer political life than they have in the country's mainstream (not lacking in bigotry itself). Nor has this faction limited its espousal of these beliefs to fiction; many have engaged in political activism over the decades, playing a surprisingly influential role in the larger culture.... Its dream, increasingly archaic and made of brittle iron, is of a world where the social hierarchies of the past are preserved and extended out into the stars, forever.

To be overly simplistic, you might say that this debate is Star Trek versus Starship Troopers. The former posits that, in the absence of economic scarcity, humanity will no longer need many of the zero-sum, us-vs-them, competitive instincts that have played such a huge role in human cultural evolution; the latter posits that this is an illusion, and human societies will always need the whole complex of warlike hierarchical authoritarianism no matter how far in the future you extend our species' lifespan. Is it a mistake to think that we can ever leave our conditioned hatred of the outgroup behind, or is the real mistake in thinking that that hatred was ever truly necessary to begin with? Anyone who's seen Paul Verhoeven's brilliant film adaptation of Starship Troopers knows how easy it is to satirize, but the vast reach of Heinlein's novel should give a non-fascist reader pause. It's one thing to find Heinlein's reduction of humanity's potential down to the level of brute animals (competing strains of bacteria, really) depressing and wonder what would even be the point of recapitulating the endless genocides in our history on alien worlds; it's another to ponder where exactly the line between objectionable and non-objectionable content should be drawn. There's an important line in Starship Troopers that "All correct moral rules derive from the instinct to survive; moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level, as in a father who dies to save his children." How should a liberal respond to that?

Heinlein the person is also a perfect case study for this investigation, since he was ideologically eclectic even in his mature phase: Starship Troopers might be an endorsement of the logic of fascism, but it's hard to argue that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress or Stranger In a Strange Land, among many of his other novels, share its politics at all, even at the most abstract level. I would have liked to see more about Heinlein's political evolution, since, as Forbes says, "In his early stories, he doesn't come across as the most obvious candidate for a far-right writer. He was fascinated by New Deal social engineering and the Social Credit movement, and helped organize Upton Sinclair's EPIC campaign for a more left-wing government in California." But Forbes discusses "Coventry", one of his earlier short stories I haven't read, that's essentially a refutation of libertarianism, and makes an intriguing comparison:

It's interesting then, to note a similarity between 'Coventry' and Starship Troopers, tales that at first seem very different. Even though the society in Starship Troopers was founded in a coup d'état and does not allow citizens to vote, it is otherwise pretty similar to the sane state of Coventry: 'Many complain but none rebel; personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.' But now, rather than societal progress occurring by democratic means, only veterans, who have 'demonstrated that [they place] the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage,' get a role in decision-making.

It's that part about group welfare that got me thinking. Fascism is of course a famously complicated cluster of concepts, like Umberto Eco pointed out 25 years ago, and it's not possible, especially in a book review, to define once and for all a bright line between "good" sacrifice for the collective and "bad". But it's uncomfortable to look at Forbes' description of Heinlein as a New Deal enthusiast and then criticize Starship Troopers, because most other contemporary New Deal enthusiasts probably would not have found much to object to about it, and in fact in many ways Starship Troopers is actually more progressive than the world around it (especially the movie, with its seamless racial and gender equality). Even today many 21st century liberals have an idealized vision of the Roosevelt administration, and I at least have a tough time accommodating the nobler parts of the New Deal with its extensive reliance on Starship Troopers-style rhetoric and even worse policy (Japanese internment is one example, but see also Ira Katznelson's excellent Fear Itself for a fuller treatment of how Southern racism shaped the foundations of the New Deal). Ideologies are often at their most interesting and revealing when they're in flux, so perhaps there isn't much point in demanding consistency between ideologies over the centuries, but Heinlein is only one of many liberals/progressives/leftists who veered right later in life, so it's worth wondering what the trigger points were for him and others.

Because, as Forbes shows, some of Heinlein's fellow right-wingers like Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle had the trigger points of the Great Society. I read The Mote In God's Eye and The Gripping Hand, and younger me thought it was merely "an interesting thought experiment" about humanity dealing with an alien race which went through explosive demographic cycles. Then I read about their politics, and it's depressing to read these talented writers arguing obliquely in novels like Lucifer's Hammer that liberals trying to give black people the vote will demographically destroy American civilization. If we think of conservatism as responding to liberalism rather than the other way around, then it's easier to fit anti-New Deal right-wingers and anti-Great Society right-wingers into the same reactionary continuum, but for me the anti-communism of the 40s is less troubling than the anti-civil rights movement of the 60s. Forbes has a very revealing quote from Norman Spinrad, author of the excellent anti-fascist satire The Iron Dream, who "considers Pournelle a friend despite their drastically different politics. 'Jerry's a complicated guy,' he says, with a chuckle. 'He once described himself as a 14th-century liberal.'" Whatever that means, while it might be comforting to recognize in Pournelle's statement the implicit admission that he's knowingly backward, it doesn't make his ideology less objectionable.

I wish that Forbes had spent more time discussing how or if the non-fascist contemporaries of these authors responded to reactionary ideas in their own works. To name only two, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Frank Herbert's Dune series were able to handle feudalism, theocracies, militarism, progress, freedom, demographics, social change, and so on without ever delivering even an implicit hint of conservatism (the first 3 books of Dune are essentially a total rejection of the masturbatory teenage power trip fantasy that Spinrad's anti-fascism essay "The Emperor of Everything" describes as critical to the young proto-reactionary's embrace of right-wing ideas). What was their approach, and is there anything that modern authors can learn from it when they face what Jemisin did? Is it a good strategy to just read, say, the better of Orson Scott Card's novels and then ignore everything else about him? Since Asimov etc were just as unable to finally exorcise the fascist ghosts of science fiction as authors in every other genre at the time were, it's probably wrong to think that the problem lies with the genre itself instead of with what ideologies people find attractive, but it's good to be reminded all the same that modern authors seem to be fighting back, and perhaps that at least some of the individualist, progressive, emancipatory elements of Star Trek could come to pass, bit by bit.

Book Review: Hugh Ferriss - The Metropolis of Tomorrow

Nothing ages faster than yesterday's vision of the future, as the saying goes, and this Roaring Twenties-vintage gallery of skyscraper sketches and design philosophy makes for a neat time capsule of what people deep in the neo-gothic era thought cities would look like if you extended the trendlines of Art Deco out into the future. Ferris' many drawings of real and imaginary buildings are the highlight - very ghostly and nebulous, suggestive of vast Coruscant/Metropolis/Blade Runner-type grandeur even alongside his always poetic and thought-provoking essays about the importance of the human scale. He's perhaps too enamored of the automobile, but he was hardly alone in his Robert Moses-like enthusiasm for the science fictional possibilities they would bring; arguably this car-centric philosophy has permanently shifted the debate in America and should therefore be studied as science fact whether you agree with it or not. Alongside his discussions of then-new concepts like zoning and setbacks are some enjoyably dated prognostications on how tomorrow's cities would be organized; one can only imagine Jane Jacobs' horror over Ferriss rhapsodizing over monolithic pyramidal structures like the Power Plant, the Religious Tower, and the Business Center studding endless plains of lesser anthills. Here is his poem about the aesthetics of the Science Zone:

Buildings like crystals.
Walls of translucent glass.
Sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill.
No Gothic branch: no Acanthus leaf: no recollection of the plant world.
A mineral kingdom.
Gleaming stalagmites.
Forms as cold as ice.
Mathematics.
Night in the Science Zone.

This is both a horrible plan for a city and an excellent setting for a series of cyperpunk thriller novels. It's too short to be more than a glorified picture book, but recommended if you're a fan of historic architecture in New York, Chicago, St Louis, Detroit, etc, or of how modern urbanism inherits elements of the intellectual lineage of both these pharaonic megaliths and, say, Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City proposals.

Book Review: Philip K Dick - Our Friends From Frolix 8

I began reading this book just as the "Operation Varsity Blues" college admissions scandal story broke, and in confirmation of the unspoken rule that "all politics is in Philip K Dick somewhere", the very first chapter involves the main character's son having his score on an admissions test invalidated so that the rule of the elite can continue unabated. Fittingly, this is one of his more political novels, and yet one of the few with a happy ending. I liked it, but with the caveats appropriate to its minor-tier status.

The basic setup of the novel involves a future Earth with 3 types of people: the Old Men, who are normal humans; the New Men, who have much higher IQ; and the Unusuals, who have mutations like telepathy. The latter two groups, though vastly outnumbered by ten thousand to several billion, rule society via a combination of natural superiority and outright fraud, such as changing test scores to lock even promising Old Men out of the upper echelons of power. Protagonist Nick Appleton, a more-or-less typical PKD stand-in, is an Old Man with the almost Onion-esque crap job of "tire regroover"; when the tires of flying cars get low on tread, he etches new grooves on them, which also cuts them dangerously thin. Life sucks in this class-stratified society with omnipresent government surveillance where both alcohol and subversive literature are banned, but there is hope - one dual New Man/Unusual, Thors Provoni, stole a prototype FTL spaceship 10 years ago and is rumored to be returning to Earth in the company of an alien power who will upend the corrupt social order.

I hadn't read any PKD in a while, so it was striking to see the relative absence of reality-questioning and simultaneous increase in politics here, especially against such a relevant backdrop as the college scam stuff. Anti-government themes are to PKD as murders are to Agatha Christie, of course, but there's an uneasy model of politics here, as developed in the plot: both an alien and a renegade Unusual/New Man were required to break up the oligarchic tyranny of the New Men and the Unusuals (who are so entitled that one government official spends an inordinate amount of time trying to steal the protagonist's side chick), but the alien itself, the titular Friend from Frolix 8, is a pure MacGuffin, a sideshow who doesn't even show up until the second half of the book, and vanishes almost immediately after landing on Earth and shifting the balance of power by psychically removing the powers of the elites (excepting Provoni?). The book ends with the Old Men establishing rehabilitation camps for the newly depowered and infantilized Unusuals and New Men, but it's not a very satisfying ending, since we don't see what the new future is actually like. Is the alien going to swallow up all independent life on Earth or not? Childhood's End this isn't. I won't torture the novel to produce allegories for the real world, but I was struck by the helplessness of the majority to change anything about their world, and subsequent reliance on the mutant and the alien.

Also notable for me were PKD's trademark issues with pacing (major life decisions are made almost instantly for odd and seemingly implausible reasons, meanwhile important backstory is delivered in expository chapters while nothing is happening) and his equally signature idiosyncrasies with women. There's an unintentionally revealing internal monologue late in the book delivered by Police Commissioner Gram, the aforementioned official trying to steal Nick's side chick Charlotte, who Nick suddenly abandoned his wife Kleo and several children for after having known her for several minutes:

You brought Charlotte to your apartment, made up a lie as to how you got involved with her, and then Kleo found the Cordonite tract, and blam, that was it. Because it gave her what a wife likes best: a situation in which her husband has to choose between two evils, between two choices neither of which is palatable to him. Wives love that. When you're in court, divorcing one, you get presented with a choice between going back to her or losing all your possessions, your property, stuff you've hung onto since high school. Yeah, wives really like that.

And a few chapters later, Gram reflects further on his sudden lust for this young woman, who like Nick he has known for essentially no time at all:

That's the trouble with being that age, he reflected. You idealize the whole woman, her self, her personality… but at my age it's simply how good a lay they'd make and that's that. I'll enjoy her, use her up, teach her a few things she probably doesn't know about sexual relations – even though she's 'been around' – that she hasn't dreamed up. She can be my little fish, for example. And once she learns them, does them, she'll remember them the rest of her life. They'll haunt her, the memory of them… but on some level she'll be yearning for them again: they were so nice. Let's see what Nick Appleton, or Denny Strong, or whoever gets her after me, will do to gratify that. And she won't be able to force herself to tell him what it is that's the matter.

Hmm. Somewhat redeeming all this is the presence of perhaps the best awful sex scene in all of PKD's oeuvre a few chapters later. Immediately after the police have murdered her ex-boyfriend Denny Strong, Charlotte takes Nick to Central Park in Denny's car and flatly tells him they're going to have sex. She starts removing his clothes at the verbal equivalent of gunpoint, he tells her she has small breasts, and he starts babbling about Yeats, statutory rape, and Denny while trying to put his clothes back on. Didn't he just abandon his entire family for her, and hasn't he been fighting the equivalent of the head of secret police for the entire planet over this girl? Clearly PKD was working through some of his own marriage issues via Charlotte (the very year after this book was published his wife left him), but it's distractingly unsubtle to read. Additionally, the focus on police reminded me of the far superior treatment he would provide 5 years later in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said; this is essentially the last of the amphetamine-fueled pulp novels that he cranked out at unhealthy velocity.

And yet throughout you're reminded constantly why you're reading PKD, who can transform even the roughest pacing, plotting, and characterization into a memorable science-fiction vision of desperate politics and thought-provoking prognostication. The book's recurring conceit that in the future alcohol will be all but outlawed yet pharmaceutical cocktails are eaten like candy and opium is universally consumed is funny, and there's an interesting throwaway reference to J.W. Dunne's An Experiment With Time, a 1927 discussion of precognitive dreams which obviously had a large influence on PKD's own work as well as several other famous sci-fi authors. The horror of the power of the alien is delivered with a nearly Stephen King intensity, yet as the potential of the alien power to transform human society into an equitable, open, and loving world are delightful passages that show his gift for the right imagery at the right time:

Your race is xenophobic. And I am the ultimate foreigner. I love you, Mr. Provoni; I love your people… insofar as I know them through your mind. I will not do what I can do, but I will make them know what I can do. In your mind's memory-section there is a Zen story about the greatest swordsman in Japan. Two men challenge him. They agree to row out to a small island and fight there. The greatest swordsman in Japan, being a student of Zen, sees to it that he is last to leave the boat. The moment the others have leaped out onto the shore of the island he pushes off, rows away, leaving them and their swords there. Thus he proves his claim for what he is: indeed he is the finest swordsman in Japan. Do you see the application to my situation? I can outfight your establishment, but I will do so by not-fighting... if you follow my thought. It will be in fact be my refusal to fight – yet showing my strength – which will frighten them the most, because they cannot imagine such power held but not used.

A hopeful vision of power like that is all too rare in PKD's novels, and so while this is neither his most technically accomplished nor intellectually adventurous novel, it is a worthy entry all the same.

Book Review: John Campbell - Frozen Hell

I vividly remember reading "Who Goes There?" as a child, in a sci-fi short story compilation I checked out from the library whose name I can't recall. I've completely forgotten the other stories, which were of the kind that fellow sci-fi veteran Robert Silverberg fondly but firmly sums up in the Introduction here as "wordy epics in which grim, methodical supermen repeatedly saved the world from menacing aliens by mastering, with the greatest of ease, such things as faster-than-light travel, the fabrication of matter-destroying rays, the release of atomic energy, and the penetration of hyperspace." Campbell's story about an Antarctic expedition's struggle against a shapeshifting alien was incredibly different - intensely-paced, relentless, eerie, and genuinely frightening to young me. It was a great bridge for me between more "literary" short stories like Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and other fantasy horror like H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which coincidentally was also published in serial form in the same Astounding magazine about 2 years before "Who Goes There?", which Campbell of course went on to become the phenomenal editor of.

This extended version, based on a manuscript recently discovered in a Harvard archive, adds 3 intro chapters and a few thousand words of additional verbiage throughout. Campbell was wise to cut the extra material, which is overly didactic and not strictly necessary to the plot. The Preface has a good discussion of the importance of firm editing; as newly-minted editor Campbell would advise Asimov years later, "When you have difficulty with the beginning of the story, that is because you are starting in the wrong place, and almost certainly too soon. Pick out a later point in the story and begin again" However, interestingly I didn't find that the extra baggage diluted the power of the story much for me, although perhaps that was because it still had the force of memory behind it. It's still the immensely influential Ur-sci-fi-horror work that inspired John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Cris Carter, and so many more, and if you had never read the short story I don't think the impact would be much lessened. At the end there is a preview of a "faithful sequel" set in the present day written by John Betancourt, who helped compile this project. I wish that Peter Watts' wonderful tribute "The Things", which retells "Who Goes There?" from the alien's perspective, had been included, but otherwise this is a delight to read, and Betancourt has done the world a real service by raising this 80 year old story out of the ice of obscurity back to the land of the living. May it continue to spread its tentacles of influence!

Book Review: Jo Walton - Necessity

Despite this conclusion to the fantasy trilogy being the most science-fictional, set in the future as it is, in a way it reminds me the most of the ancient Greek dramas it uses for source material. The ideals of the Just City have been translated to humans on other planets, the Worker robots, and even alien species, but the characters spend much of their time debating their relationship to Fate and Necessity in a way familiar to anyone who's read Oedipus. I was a bit frustrated in the middle, because their continuous time traveling to collect plot tokens often felt too much like a recapitulation of the wandering in the previous novel, but like always, Walton manages to address issues with The Republic in an organic way. Way back in the first book, Socrates awoke the sentience of one of the Workers in exactly the same way he taught Meno's slave how to double a square, and throughout this volume Walton sprinkles in the same clever callbacks to other Platonic dialogues - in one funny scene, a character they visit loves the feminist ideals of the Just City but can't imagine how they get along without slaves, which should give anyone skeptical of Sheryl Sandberg-esque corporate feminism a lot to think about, and the way several of the main characters end up in a polyamorous soul-bond with aliens (don't laugh) is a nice update of Plato's musing on how the souls of men and women relate. The closing points about whether the robotic Workers might be the only ones who can actually embody the virtues necessary to implement the Republic mesh nicely with the lessons about virtue, free will, and consent that were set up on the very first page of the first book. 

Book Review: Jo Walton - The Philosopher Kings

The previous book ended with the fracturing of the Just City in a furious debate between Socrates and Athena over the morality of all-powerful gods using feeble humans to settle philosophical questions, and in the way of all dissolutions the exodus from the Just City was both inevitable, because it was founded on premises fundamentally incompatible with free human choice, but also tragic, because 20 years later it's apparent that the new world - multiple competing Just Cities, some with differing interpretations of Plato's plans but some implacably opposed - is still informed by the unhappy knowledge that good intentions, and even good actions, are not enough to run a good society for very long. There's a subtle structural nod to the Odyssey, as the majority of the book consists of the main characters sailing around the Aegean, but this time it's as as an act of vengeance rather than of return, an ironic repudiation of the scene in The Republic where Socrates tries to convince Polemarchus that true justice consists only of helping friends and not harming enemies. That this crusade is instigated by the grief of Apollo, who should know better, is interesting both for his character and as a commentary on how Greek mythology makes mortals the playthings of the gods, and the religious syncretism of the Platonic diaspora they encounter along the way is a good way to approach the conflict between objective truths and subjective understandings. Often this installment felt more like an in-universe exploration of its world than a straight-up philosophical exploration like its predecessor, but Walton has still left plenty of Easter eggs for those who know their Plato, and the way it ends with the translation of the experiment into space was as true to the spirit of the source material as it was to the story.

Book Review: Jo Walton - The Just City

Plato's Republic is one of the most-debated thought experiments of all time, but I'd always seen the critiques/reflections/responses to Plato's speculations on civic virtue in serious academic writing, so it was very refreshing to see someone think about the Republic in narrative form, and as a fantasy novel no less. What would actually living in the ideal city look like? How would you set it up, keep it running, deal with challenges? Karl Popper spent the whole Volume 1 of The Open Society criticizing the Republic as a totalitarian nightmare state (the classes of citizens, the abhorrence of trade, the idea that as long as the rulers are smart and virtuous enough nothing can go wrong), but in Walton's hands, for many of the characters it's much freer than the societies they came from, a practical lesson in applied ethics and the relativity of idealism that couldn't be obtained any other way. Once Walton has set up the premise - Athena has gathered thousands of people from across time in a recreation of Plato's Republic in part to teach Apollo, fresh off of Daphne's escape from his advances via transformation into a laurel tree, important insights about morality and mortality - the characters, including Socrates, have to work within the structures they've chosen and been chosen for to build the lives they want. Utopian societies have a long and honorable place in fiction, such as Francis Spufford's superb evocation of the Soviet 60s in Red Plenty, but it was very satisfying to see the Just City, the ancestor of them all, treated according to its own premises, and as one character says, "Nobody reads Plato and agrees with everything. But nobody reads any of the dialogues without wanting to be there joining in."

Book Review: Zachary Mason - Void Star

Mason's previous book The Lost Books of the Odyssey was spectacular, so I'm unhappy that this sci-fi novel didn't live up to it for me, especially because as a computer scientist this should have been home turf for him. On a prose level, this is great; there are no iconic, standout lines like Neuromancer's "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel", but just about every sentence is beautifully written, well-balanced and full of interesting imagery. There really isn't a wasted sentence in the whole book, so his various scenes and landscapes are always vividly rendered. However, much like in Neuromancer (and a lot of this novel is like in Neuromancer), the plot isn't very emotionally resonant, so the lucid language feels wasted. Characters act, choices are made, and things then happen, but according to a rapid, purely internal logic that doesn't give the reader much opportunity to get invested in the world, especially because the point of view shifts so rapidly and a lot of the various perils come out of nowhere. "Sit back and let the plot take you for a ride!" sounds like cheesy marketing copy on the back of an airport thriller, but it's also pretty apt here, and I didn't like feeling like such a passive reader.

The world is your standard cyberpunk quasi-dystopia that owes much to Snow Crash (itself an affectionate Neuromancer parody/homage), but without the manic humor or invention of Stephenson's work, so instead of people living in self-storage complexes guarded by armed robot dogs, people just live in grungy favelas, and instead of Sumerian technolinguistic mind-viruses, there's just really powerful Hackers-style algorithms (they literally hack the Gibson in one scene). I also found myself questioning why Mason bothered with 3 narrative lines for the main characters - ascetic street boxer Kern, dying political scion Thales, and Johnny Mnemonic-style hacker Irina - since although they do eventually intersect to fight the requisite evil rich guy and super-powerful AI, their individual quests to uh, find the secret of life/upload consciousness into the computer/become a Japanese swordmaker don't feel emotionally connected at all. Maybe the characters could have spent more time together, or there could have been fewer 2-page chapters to let the story breathe a bit; certainly many aspects of the world could have used some more exploration. I hate ragging on a work by an author I respect so much, so perhaps this will improve on a reread, but this feels like a real letdown, especially because he was able to be so creative with almost literally the most played-out material in history in his last book. I hope he takes more risks in his next book.

Book Review: Hugh Howey - Sand

I enjoyed Sand much more than Howey's earlier Wool. Whereas Wool was dense with world-building to the extent that the details only highlighted the shaky underpinnings of his dystopia's social structure, Sand focuses on the characters first, and as a consequence is much more resonant and memorable. While the setting is still not exactly innovative - this time it's a cross between Mad Max and a sand-themed Waterworld - the family drama at the center of Sand is far more moving this time around. Howey's portrayal of a family whose ties have been stretched to the breaking point by their own individual reactions to the cruel environment they live in is very well-done, and because of the vastly improved pacing, you come to feel for these struggling people in their pitiful sand world, caught between dangerous jobs and hopeless lives. There's enough world-building to get you interested in the setting without distracting from the plot, and it's conveyed in appropriate doses at the relevant times. Even the obligatory sci-fi aspects, like the mind-controlled sand suits that the characters use to liquefy sand in order to dive down to scavenge technology from the buried ruins of our own civilization, feel generally more plausible and well-thought out than in Wool, integrated with the character's thoughts and actions nearly seamlessly. I read the whole thing in barely more than a sitting and wanted to read more, which I can't say about a lot of dystopian fiction.

Book Review: Ernest Cline - Ready Player One

I almost could not even make it through the first chapter of this book-length "Only 80s kids will remember this!" listicle that Cline has unleashed upon the world, and at many points I cursed the culture that allowed a novel like this to be written at all. At various points it showed promise of becoming self-aware, and, cynical jerk that I am, I hoped it would reveal itself as a sarcastic commentary on the mindset of its target audience, but no such luck: it always takes the easy way out and sincerely flatters you for being brilliant enough to know what a John Hughes movie is, or that was once such a thing as the Atari 2600, or that Rush lyrics sound like sci-fi novels. Nothing new or even technically creative happens within the book, unless you get into the "is a remix a new work?" debate, and the constant stream of references is actually distracting since every stray detail is yelling at you to track it down. It's a book of Wikipedia lists (which fortunately is still around in the dystopia of 2044 where corporations have debt slaves). Originality isn't really the point here though; the point is pages and pages of fanfiction for Reagan-era childhood delivered via lengthy infodumps until the protagonist works hard and collects enough plot tokens beat the evil megacorp, to get the girl, and grab the powerup and win the game, which, if you think about it, is much like life itself. Could it be a metaphor...?

As usual, The Onion warned us this was coming: "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'". The term "Millennials" has always sounded to me more like members of a religious cult than a birth cohort, and as us individuals of a certain age begin our gradual transmogrification into adulthood, our wistful memories of a halcyon youth are becoming ever more profitable. Cline has wisely decided to go all-in on my Millennial market segment, and honestly good for him. Someone should be making money off our collective yearning to retreat into adolescence, and it might as well be someone who actually enjoys it. I do find it vaguely depressing that this Ouroboros of retro adulation is so popular, but I don't blame Cline for nerding out about the things he loves, I don't blame the publishers, editors, or marketers for helping birth this money-printing nostalgia vampire, and honestly, I don't even blame the people giving this top marks. This is probably the greatest novel about playing video games ever written and the specific obsessive mindset it takes to get really good at them (see the documentary The King of Kong for a hilarious look at what these people are like in real life). His passion is unmistakable, and that in itself is worth something. Besides, you could certainly pick worse things to worship than old video games and pop culture. Everyone is a fan of something, and I'm hardly immune to the lure of recapitulating my childhood for the right price or geeking out in general. Let he who is without sin, etc. A big theme of the book is to do what you love, believe in yourself, and fuck the haters. That's as true here as it is anywhere; it's a timeless message that not even GameFAQs-level writing can ruin.

However, this is inarguably poorly-written, an unapologetic Mary Sue with painful dialogue, zero-dimensional characters, a plot with at least one eye-roll per chapter (just try to count the jams the protagonist gets out of by having been brilliant offscreen), and seemingly endless stretches of fetishized nerd-wankery. It's Fifty Shades of Gray for people who bought a Nintendo Classic. This economium to dorkitude is to literature as putting a Zelda bumper sticker on your car is to being able to get it out of first gear. But, Cline's love letter to the 80s, gaming, and fandom has made roughly a zillion dollars (sorry - has made Scrooge McDuck-tier money), and Spielberg himself directed the film adaptation, so I'm clearly wrong about its merits. If you want homages crammed with references stuffed with in-jokes, you basically can't do better than this; it's "Remember Alf? He's back, in Pog form!": The Novel, and thus I give it five Breakfast Club protagonists out of five.