Astral Weeks Archive: Past reviews
November 1, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Astral Weeks: A 'guide' that perplexes
The late Douglas Adams' unstoppably popular 1979 novel, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (HG2G), is about, among other things, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "one of the most remarkable books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor," an idiosyncratic interstellar how-to for those interested in hitching rides on spaceships and generally surviving on 30 Altairian dollars a day. What does it mean when a book about an extraordinary book itself becomes an extraordinary book?
September 6, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Astral Weeks: Fangs of New York
" Vampires have quite the pop culture cachet," says the excellently named Cubby Freeze in Charlie Huston's blood-soaked "My Dead Body" (Del Rey: 302 pp., $14 paper), itself the last in a series of books that can be shoehorned -- along with the "Sookie Stackhouse" novels (the basis of HBO's "True Blood"), "Twilight" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" -- into Exhibit A in the case of the Entire Rest of the World vs. Things Having to Do With Vampires. Cubby's remark verges on cute, but as someone says later on, "Why shouldn't the signifieds define the signifiers?"
August 9, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Astral Weeks: Welcome to weird America
"My country is my family," writes Ricky Rice as he concludes his apologia pro vita sua -- a.k.a Victor LaValle's massive, heroically strange new novel, "Big Machine" (Spiegel & Grau: 378 pp., $25). "I like America."
July 19, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Manhattan in the near future
In "100%" (Vertigo: 256 pp., $39.99), Paul Pope depicts a New York punctuated with bits of technological wizardry but still wholly recognizable -- a city in which characters cower in fear from what might be lurking in the shadows, fall in love, eat sushi, drink too much and watch bad performance art. ("A naked woman smashing eggs," one character observes. "What is the world coming to?") The Gotham of this graphic novel, published serially in 2002 and 2003, is nestled somewhere between its incarnations in Thomas M. Disch's beaten-down "334" and Martin Scorsese's antic nightmare "After Hours." With a palette dominated by stark black and white, "100%" would be your typical round-the-corner dystopia if everything didn't feel so weirdly alive.
May 17, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Is it a book, puzzle or both?
Paul Di Filippo's short novel "Cosmocopia" (Payseur & Schmidt: 106 pp., $65) is an art book, in multiple senses of the phrase. There is an artist at its center: Frank Lazorg, whose career describes a trajectory from commercial to fine art, beginning in the 1950s with comics, focusing on "hyper-real yet fantastical book covers for paperback-original novels" during the next two decades ("a gallery of demons and brawny warriors, luscious-bottomed maidens and brawling barbarians, aliens and otherworldly explorers") and concluding -- or so it seems -- with vivid depictions of "mental landscapes, surreal collages, visions of dimensions beyond." A stroke has left him physically weak and creatively impotent. "Cosmocopia" is the story of his artistic redemption, a tried-and-true mode, which Di Filippo transforms into a fable at once ludicrous and heartfelt.
April 19, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Shades of Philip K. Dick
If you're a Philip K. Dick fan, and even if you're not, the best way to start reading Christopher Miller's second novel, "The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank" (Harper Perennial: 522 pp., $14.99 paper), might be to open the thing at random and plunge right in. (Arranged alphabetically, generously and whimsically cross-referenced, it invites leapfrogging and courts the infinite.) At first blush, the frontmatter feels too cute, a little fussy, as if Miller is trying too hard to make his Dank -- a shlubby science fiction writer who shares a biographical outline (shifted a few decades forward) and aesthetic with Dick -- into a one-note joke about Dick's life and art.
March 22, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Eyes on you
Back in high school, a friend buried his paperback of Stephen King's "Night Shift" out in the yard: The mere presence of the eye-studded hand on the cover was enough to bother his sleep. I've recently had a similarly violent reaction to Miles J. Breuer's "The Man With the Strange Head and Other Early Science Fiction Stories" (University of Nebraska: 430 pp., $21.95 paper), whose cover shot gives us eyes without a face: the back of a bald head, pink and intimate, punctuated by a pair of startled peepers. (Turning the book over, as I have now done, is a halfway measure at best: For some cruel reason, the designer has slapped the image onto the back as well, at about a quarter the size.) Such a stomach-turning cover will pretty much insure that few readers pick up this book, a diverting, often fascinating grab-bag of fiction (and some nonfiction) by Breuer (1889-1945).
February 22, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
In "Couch," they bear a mysterious load
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald's " The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Donald Antrim's seamless absurdities, Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees" or David Lynch's "The Straight Story," Benjamin Parzybok's debut novel, "Couch" (Small Beer Press 280 pp., $16), hits on an improbable, even fantastic premise, and then rigorously hews to the logic that it generates, keeping it afloat (at times literally) to the end.
January 25, 2009
ASTRAL WEEKS
Joan Aiken's Armitage family is charming - and magical
The White Queen in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" says she believes as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In the title tale from Joan Aiken's "The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories" (Big Mouth House: 330 pp., $20), the impossible things happen after breakfast, and the proof of our belief is the pang at the end, when beautifully sustained fantasy crashes into the everyday.
December 28, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
Welcome to the Invisible Library
Earlier this year, with a like-minded bibliophile, I started yet another blog. The blog, called Invisible Library, would list books by fictional authors -- that is, titles that don't exist outside the pages of fiction.
November 30, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
Eyes of the beholders
In last month's column, I pointed out some recent short stories that shine a light on their own construction. This month, we begin with David Marusek's clever epistolary yarn, "Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz, Yurek Rutz," in which the whole motivation behind the writing is tied up in the odd, repetitive title.
October 5, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
Master of allusions
It is probably inadvisable to consume Howard Waldrop's "Other Worlds, Better Lives: Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003" (Old Earth: 280 pp., $15 paper) in one gulp. Waldrop has a pleasing style and wears his learning lightly; he pokes fun at those books "full of two-dollar words," in which "the sentences were a mile long, and the verb was way down at the bottom of the page." But the works gathered here make hay with so many ultraspecific cultural moments that the unwary reader might contemplate suing for whiplash.
September 7, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
Music of the mind
Astral Weeks Pop Quiz: Name the piece of music responsible for these flights of fancy:
August 10, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
'The Last Theorem' by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl
The most exciting part of "The Last Theorem" (Del Rey: 304 pp., $27), the novel by the late Arthur C. Clarke and fellow science fiction veteran Frederik Pohl, has nothing to do with the titular titillation of finding a proof for Fermat's famous marginal musing, nor with a secret weapon called Silent Thunder that instantly renders all of North Korea a demilitarized zone, nor with the umpteenth invocation of Clarke's famous "space elevator" concept, which substitutes traditional rocket launchers with a giant ladder to the heavens. (For these, you need look no further than Clarke's other 2008 collaboration, "Firstborn," with Stephen Baxter.) Rather, "The Last Theorem" involves a part of the Clarke legend that has long been acknowledged but rarely discussed.
June 15, 2008
ASTRAL WEEKS
Master of metaphors and metaphysics
The holy grail of the author's own collector's quest is the 1961 1s 3d Parliamentary Conference stamp, which he recalls as being "the most beautiful small object I had ever seen" as a boy. On this stamp, the head of the queen, which should by rights have occupied the top half of the stamp, was missing -- leaving an enchanting and suggestive blank space.
August 12, 2007
Garden of gears
In Jay Lake's novel "Mainspring" (Tor: 320 pp., $24.95), the Lord's Prayer gets a strange edit:
October 7, 2007
ASTRAL WEEKS
A word-magus gets his due
I admired [Robert Louis] Stevenson; I did more than that. I did what we are not supposed to do with the characters we encounter in books -- I identified with him.
July 13, 2008
Astral Weeks
A familiar story in a new universe
REWRITING a famous story from a different character's point of view has become common enough that the results constitute a genre of their own. John Gardner saw "Beowulf" through the monster's eyes in "Grendel"; Jean Rhys' "Wide Sargasso Sea" excavated the life of Jane Eyre's "madwoman in the attic"; while Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" infused life into a pair of tertiary players in "Hamlet." It's the literary equivalent of those particularly potent cover versions that forever change the way you hear the original. (Think of Kirsty MacColl giving us the woman's side of the story when she takes on Billy Bragg's song "A New England.")
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
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