Fiction, Reviews

‘Flashback,’ by Dan Simmons

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It was a spooky experience, reading this book. Not because of its inherent scariness (though there’s plenty of that), but because I started reading Flashback just about the time President Obama signed his nuclear arms deal with Iran, and finished it in the aftermath of the Chattanooga terrorist killings.

Both events resonated with this story.

In the world of Flashback (which might be compared to the world I envision at the end of my novel Death’s Doors, but more fully realized), the United States still exists, but barely. Texas has seceded, and the Nuevo Mexican Reconquista has torn away other southwestern states. Order in the US is maintained by several Japanese corporations, and American soldiers fight as mercenaries in various world conflicts, the major source of what’s left of US federal revenue. Israel no longer exists, and the Islamic Caliphate is on the march world-wide.

Most Americans don’t even care. They are addicted to a new drug called Flashback, which enables its users to experience their happiest memories in full detail.

Nick Bottom (same name as the character in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), is a Flashback addict. He will lie, steal, and betray his friends in order to get a little more of the drug, so he can spend time again with his beloved wife.

He used to be a top detective with the Denver police department, but after his wife’s death he descended into addiction, sending his young son to live with a grandfather in Los Angeles.

Then one day he gets an offer too good to refuse. The Japanese “protector” of Denver promises to pay him well to learn who murdered his own son several years ago. At first Nick, junky that he is, tries to take the money, buy Flashback, and hide away, but these people are smarter than he is. Eventually he begins to take a real interest in the mystery. Then he discovers the puzzle is closer to home than he imagined. Then he begins to care about other people, including the son he abandoned.

Flashback is a long book, but it sucked me in. It’s splendidly crafted, with artful allusions and foreshadowings. It provides a frightening picture of the near future that’s all the more disturbing for its plausibility. And there’s a twist at the end that genuinely scared me.

Cautions are in order, mostly for language and violence. It’s a peculiarity of this book that Christianity seems hardly to exist anymore. I sometimes wondered if the Rapture had happened, but I saw no hint that author Simmons had that in mind.

Goofing, Publishing

Boy Wakes from Near-Death Experience

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An eight-year-old boy emerged from a medically induced coma with a remarkable story of visiting heaven and meeting a wide variety of people, including a literary agent who encouraged him to sell his story to a major publisher. Seems legit.

Fiction

The Vicious Satire of Lolita

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abandoned dollPeter Leithart quotes from an Ira Wells piece on how we’ve forgotten who Lolita originally was, the 12-year-old victim of a monster.

Forgetting Lolita is also a problem because the book has never been as relevant: “the novel itself constitutes a vicious satire of a culture that fetishizes young girls . . . while simultaneously loathing pedophilia as an absolute moral evil on par with genocide.” We are that culture.

Goofing, Publishing

Newly Discovered Literary Sequels

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Harper Lee’s Watchman has captured the hopes of many readers, and now the author’s lawyer has announced the discovery of papers that may be yet another manuscript. Yes. That part’s true. Not even the lawyer appears to know what those papers hold, but The Onion has gotten hold of the title, “My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune.”

Electric Lit reports that several publishers are now announcing newly discovered sequels to many of your favorite classics:

  • Lunch at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote
  • The Cul-De-Sac by Cormac McCarthy
  • The Raisins of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  • Moby-Dick 2: The College Years by Herman Melville

These look good, but when are publisher going find real blockbusters like these:

  • The Big Bang Theory: A Personal View by Eccentrica Gallumbits
  • Dreams Don’t Mean Anything by Richard Tull
  • How I Survived an Hour with a Sprained Finger
  • Highly Unpleasant Things It Is Sometimes Good To Know, a compilation
  • Frank Recollections of a Long Life by Lady Bablockhythe
  • Finding Love and Yeti, a memoir
  • Keep the Home Fires Burning, by Nero Caesar
  • When Mildew Awakens and Shouts, by Culdugger Smith-Smyth

 

Goofing

Programming notes

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Channeling Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine:

Programming notes: Tonight, on NPC, 8:00 pm Eastern: MR. CHIEF EXECUTIVE MAN (Superhero Drama): Tonight’s episode: “The Legitimate Grievance of the Ant People” (Repeat). Following a string of minuscule acts of terrorism, Mr. Chief Executive Man employs his superhuman interpersonal skills to make contact with the Queen of the Ant People. Learning that the Ant People object to humans stepping on them on sidewalks, he assures the Queen that he will draft an executive order forbidding all humans from ever leaving their houses again. Peace is restored. (Reminder: Viewing of this episode is mandatory for all citizens.)

Bookselling, Reading

Is Germany a Nation of Readers?

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readingAnnual research into German media consumption reveals a steady decline in readers.

“A solid quarter (25.1%) of Germans don’t buy books at all,” Ingrid Süßmann reports. “Book buying in general seems to be correlated to age: the older you get, the less likely you will buy a book; 28% of Germans over 60 years of age didn’t buy any books in 2015.”

Fiction, Non-fiction

Rediscovering Pluto

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Clyde Tombaugh had only graduated from Burdett High School in Burdett, Kansas, when we applied for a position at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. His family didn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studied on his own, assembled a portfolio, and presented himself to the observatory director, V. M. Slipher. While working there as a photographic assistant, he discovered two comets and variety of other stellar objects including Pluto.

We haven’t had a good look at the once-and-future-planet until today. NASA’s New Horizons probe is passing by Pluto, carrying Tombaugh’s ashes and sending photos back to us. Will we discover the truth of what many sci-fi authors have written about this place over the last 85 years? Gregory Benford describes some of those details.

In his first novel, World of Ptavvs, Larry Niven depicted an astronaut landing in the Plutonian atmosphere, his vessel’s hot exhaust releasing the frozen methane and oxygen and causing the entire planet to burst into flames. In a later story, Niven imagined an even odder fate. A stranded astronaut freezes, only to find that his nervous system has become superconducting and that he can still think, frozen solid. . . . My own 2006 novel, The Sunborn, has small, smart creatures thriving along the shore of Pluto’s supposed nitrogen sea.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Gutshot Straight,’ by Lou Berney

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Shake wondered how long before they opened a Vegas-themed hotel and casino that was an exact replica of the city around it, including a replica of the Vegas-themed hotel itself, and so on down to microscopic infinity.

Impressed as I was by Lou Berney’s The Long and Faraway Gone, which I reviewed a few inches below, I wondered how much I’d like Gutshot Straight, his first novel, which was advertised as a comic crime story.

I liked it enough to laugh out loud more than once while reading it – in a restaurant – something that hasn’t happened to me in years.

Charles “Shake” Bouchon, the main character of the novels, is just finishing up a prison stretch for Grand Theft auto when we first meet him. He’s an accomplished “wheel man,” a getaway driver. But he’s decided he’s getting too old for that sort of thing. It’s a sucker’s game. He wants to go straight. Open a restaurant, if he can.

But when an old friend, the beautiful head of the Los Angeles Armenian mob, asks him to do an “easy” job for her, he figures what can it hurt? He can use the money. All he has to do is drive a car to a particular address in Las Vegas, and deliver a briefcase to the man who’ll meet him there.

You won’t be surprised to learn that it turns out a lot more complicated than that. Shake finds himself in a situation where he has the choice of looking the other way, or saving a life. He saves the life, and then the fun begins.

The action centers around a bogus religious relic (I won’t spoil the fun by telling you what it is), which is no less precious, thanks to its mere age, for being a fraud (I assumed author Berney had invented it, but apparently it actually exists, or did exist). All kinds of bad people are hunting for it, and they covet it enough to torture and kill to get it.

Doesn’t sound like a comic novel? Well, it’s all in the presentation. Years ago people recommended the author Elmore Leonard to me, based largely on his sharp dialogue. But I never warmed to Leonard. He’s a cold-blooded writer (or so I perceive him). I don’t care about his characters.

Gutshot Straight is kind of like Elmore Leonard by way of P. G. Wodehouse. I don’t mean the inimitable Wodehouse diction, which wouldn’t work here, but the Wodehouse kind of story. Where some dim young man is pressured or blackmailed into kidnapping a pig or stealing a silver cow creamer, and only manages to carry the job through because he’s surrounded by idiots and lunatics, running around like characters in a French farce. The chief female character and love interest in this book is right out of Wodehouse – a spunky, fearless, utterly amoral female dynamo who knocks Shake for a loop. And one character in the second book, Whiplash River (which I’m still enjoying reading), “Harry” the retired Cold War spook, is essentially Uncle Fred with a gun.

And the presentation is in no way cold-blooded. Berney excels at treating characters, even sociopathic ones, in three-dimensional ways.

I never wanted this book to end. The publisher charges too much for it, even in the Kindle edition, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

Cautions for language and violence.

Fiction

S.D. Smith’s Warrior Rabbits

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S. D. Smith’s second book of rabbits with swords is being released on Monday. The Black Star of Kingston promises to be as stirring as The Green Ember, as this review states, “It’s a heroic story, demonstrating what happens when an ordinary individual (Like Fleck the miner) follows his convictions and rises to what can only be called heroism.”

Another reader says it’s “jam-packed with harrowing adventure, startling courage, and the luscious vocabulary we all love in Smith’s stories.”

Of The Green Ember, Smith says, “Personified animals make big, dangerous themes easier to digest for younger kids. This story is a bit of a throwback to a time when storytellers were more eager to ennoble virtue, while at the same time it’s just a fun tale.”

I’m sure it is.

Authors, Religion

When Preaching the Gospel Was Considered Trouble-making

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John MacArthur was talking about forty years of ministry back in 2009 and he shared some details about his ministry after seminary. From the transcript:

Well in the purposes of God [Dr. John M. Perkins] returned to Mississippi to a little town called Mendenhall, and Mendenhall, Mississippi, south of Jackson, and he started a ministry there. He started a school there. He started a church. Started a little co-op for people to buy things and really helped that little community of Mendenhall. This was right at the time when the Civil Rights Movement really exploded, and John asked me if I would come to Mississippi and if I would preach, if I would go out to the black high schools which were totally segregated and always on the other side of town, and if I would preach and do some gospel ministry in these high schools around Mississippi. So I said, “Absolutely, I’d love to do that.”

Got a few friends, in those days I used to sing a little. And we would do a little bit of singing together. And then I would preach and I had an absolutely wonderful time. I can’t remember how many years, I think I went down there for a period of about five years, going down and spending a pro-longed period of time. I lived with John and Vera Mae in their house, very interesting to live at that time in the home of black people in the south and to be treated the way they were treated, to be refused meals at a restaurant that I would go to because they knew who I was associating with.

It was so tense there. There was a friend of John’s who was a custodian in the First Baptist Church in Mendenhall which is a white church. This custodian loved Christ and he built a friendship with the pastor at the church, even though he couldn’t attend the church. The pastor started a Bible study with him on a regular basis and the church leaders told him he had to stop that. He said, “I can’t.” And the circumstances became so overbearing on him, he had problems in the community, in the town and getting gas and things like that. He had a nervous breakdown. They took him to Jackson. Put him in a hospital room and he dove out of the window, the third floor, and killed himself. That’s how intense that was.

Later on, he said he was arrested for fomenting trouble by preaching the gospel in high schools. That wasn’t nearly as bad as what Dr. Perkins’ suffered.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dr. Perkins, he spoke at the 2015 ERLC Leadership Summit in April on “The Gospel and Racial Reconciliation” on the Civil Rights Movement after 50 Years. He’s a good man. I’ve heard him many times on a radio program with Michael Card, musician and Bible teacher, and I recently listened to a seminar series from Covenant Theological Seminary which led with a couple sermons by Dr. Perkins.

The trouble-making is still here, but the church must not continue to hold to a politicized view of the gospel that ridicules the black experience in America and justifies past sins. The gospel is reconciliation across all barriers. “Segregation and discrimination are almost witchcraft,” Dr. Perkins says in the video below. It’s forbidden in the Bible we hold dear.

“We’re at a pivot place in the history of the church,” Dr. Perkins says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. . . . This is a conversation we need. We’re going to leave here and go to our homes and talk about the past, but forgiveness takes care of that.”

Book Reviews, Creative Culture