I recently finished reading William Faulkner’s The Reivers. It was an excellent book, highly recommended. Some great passages stood out in my mind:

“…if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state…” (193)

The book also has a long passage where he rates the animals of the world based on intelligence, starting on page 121 of my edition (First Vintage International Edition). It is too long to post it all here (and you should be reading the book anyway) – but the comments on cats, who rank third behind rats and mules, were particularly poignant:

“There is the fable … of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality – famine, plague, war injustice, folly, greed – in a word, civilised government – convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better.” (121-122)

That is why your cat lives with you, is dependent on you, and yet lifts no paw in assistance or love. That’s “why your cat looks at you the way [he] does.”

I, like so many others in the reading public, went through a Stephen King phase. It was in junior high for me, when I bought his books by the yard and read one after the other, from Christine to Firestarter to all of The Bachman Books.

It gave me a certain reputation in school – I was, for lack of a better label, the weird one. It is an odd social phenomenon that you can get branded as the creepy outcast by reading one of the most popular writers in the history of English – but that’s for another discussion.

Naturally, once I came out on the other end of my Stephen King phase, I bared my pimply, teenaged ass to him, disparaging such drivel in favor of more erudite works by Tolkien and Melville (yes, those two can go together). The dizzying juices of teenage rebellion pushed me to turn against King – because he is The Man – and I use that term with all the heavy connotations it can carry. He sells millions of books, so he’s a sellout, right? He has scored the mass appeal that should be possible only with a giant compromise in one’s artistic integrity.

And he makes it all look so easy. He is easy to read, easy to digest, even when he goes on a bit too long – see It and Needful Things, for example. And that, I have to admit, is a great skill, one not possessed by many in this world.

Given that, plus his prolific career, King can cast a long and oppressive shadow on other writers – one that darkened my recent addition “Year of the Turtle.” This story is part of the Highway Virus series, and it and its companion piece “Little Things” are about two brothers trying reconcile their relationship and their own places in the world amid the chaos of a civilization in decline. Also, water is one of the themes, as you might expect from a story with “Turtle” in the title.

Then I read King’s story “The End of the Whole Mess” in the collection Wastelands. It was the first King work I had read in a long, long time. The story, in keeping with the theme of the collection, is about the end of the world. It focuses on two brothers – the narrator is the older brother and the younger brother contributes mightily to our end. And the active agent that ends it all moves through the water.

Damn, that all sounds really familiar. Given my ambivalence to King’s work in general, I can’t help but feel the same about these parallels. It is flattering that I share at least some of the same creative juices with such a successful writer. I have talked about the Noosphere before – and it should be at least a partial boost to my confidence that I might have bumped into him within that rarefied space.

On the one hand, I feel like I am a few more feet underground, on the bottom of the literary dumping ground, pelted by concepts eerily similar to my own work. I have done something that seems derivative – even though I wasn’t aware of the “progenitor” until after it was done. I guess that will always be the risk in any apocalypse fiction. In the end, you are always chasing The Road Warrior.

(Doomsday may not have been all that good, but at least Neil Marshall had no illusions about the type of movie he was making.)

Of course one reason why I may not be too psyched about the comparison to King’s story is that “The End of the Whole Mess” isn’t the strongest in the collection. I don’t say that to be snarky or vindictive. I honestly feel that the best story so far (and I’ve read only about half the book) is Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The People of Sand and Slag.” Great story – and a really unique look at a possible future for “humanity.”

I do not remember a time when the words “Skywalker” or “Alderaan” sounded nonsensical and silly. In fact, I don’t know if that time ever existed. They seem like perfectly natural names – a future surname and the name of a planet, celestial in theme but seemingly normal in the natural evolution of language. They were what we would call things, once we ventured into outer space. The name “Chewbacca” was so perfect, he already had his own nickname.

Now, “Starkiller” – that doesn’t sound right. It sounds crude, immature, like the caption, written in pencil, under a comic filled with bulging muscles and bouncing breasts and scrawled in a junior high notebook.

Lucas should get an award for the Star Wars nomenclature (although he damaged his rep with later names like “Dooku”). The names in his universe – at least his first trilogy – are equally iconic and natural. Even with the Ewoks. I remember both times – pre-Ewoks and post-Ewoks – and there was never a time in between when I had to get used to that word. It fit.

The challenge in properly naming things in a sci-fi or “speculative” universe cannot be underestimated. A bad name is like a bad special effect – it takes the reader or viewer right out of the world. Margaret Atwood, for all her diffidence to the label “sci-fi,” should take a lesson from that. For that unabashedly sci-fi epic Star Wars accomplished something she could not. In her book The Year of the Flood, she has a variety of hybrid animals running around, the products of gene splicing, with names like “rakunk” (the combination of a raccoon and a skunk, get it?). One of her characters eats something called a “Joltbar” – seriously. Did she come up with that name in the cab on her way to her publisher’s office?

I am not one to criticize – and I am still reading the book, which is entertaining for the most part (and the Website for the book is a great example of cross-platform marketing). It has some big ideas, expressed well, but as a reader, those names bother me. They strike me as lazy – or the crass attempts by an amateur with paparazzi sensibilities newly introduced to the joys of portmanteau. Maybe she should venture out from the protective shell of “speculative fiction” and see how real sci-fi writers do it.

I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded – and I have to say, Bears was an excellent read, highly recommended, and not just because it has words like “sphingine” (resembling a sphinx).

Still, for me, Burgess falls into a certain category of writers – they are, despite an extensive bibliography, known mainly for one novel, and for whatever reason, I have a difficult time reading outside their one famous work.  This group includes Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, John Wain, Muriel Spark, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) George Orwell. I have started and failed to finish the Enderby novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Anti-Death League. Sometimes the beginning is slow or ungripping – it was a bit of work for me to get through the first few chapters of Honey for the Bears, for example. Other times, the middle parts start to drag. A few middle chapters in One Fat Englishman were a slog.

I am not sure how to classify this phenomenon. Maybe it is just a British thing – could it be I am an insufficient Anglophile? I do recall one of my English professors, the great Dr. Phillip Parotti, once saying he had similar difficulties at first getting through Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but that American doorstop didn’t give me any problems. Perhaps I am that annoying fanboy who knows Sir Alec only as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Could that be true, even though I watched the whole of the original The Ladykillers (over the course of a few days)?

I have posted the story “The Ring,” which is actually an old story from many years back, conceived in the nineties and picked at like a corpse that refuses to decompose. Not completely, anyway.

The ending has a sort of Magic Christian flavor, meant to comment on the limits of human tolerance for their own waste when balanced against their greed or self-indulgence, although I would say that Artie, the main character in “The Ring,” definitely underestimates human willingness to endure their own filth, whereas Guy Grand knows that everyone has their price.

When you’re way way way way down at the bottom of the writing world, it seems every time you look up, there’s a luminary (or at least someone with better connections than you) making a success with one of your ideas.

It happened to me in the Nineties, when I was working on a comic series called the “Faerie Police,” about a division in the police department that handled supernatural offenders. Granted, it had its predecessors, namely The X-Files, but once I got a few stories cranked out, I started seeing that conceit everywhere – Men in Black, G vs. E, and countless indie comics.

Now, more recently, Margaret Atwood has published The Year of the Flood, a work of “speculative fiction” where a future world is beset by viruses, genetically engineered animal hybrids, and groups of religious zealots. Gee, I could almost cut that description, whole cloth, and used it for my Highway Virus series. It’s always a bit depressing, mixed with a sense of impotence, to see the upward trajectory of someone else’s work, while you are stuck with a small, unvisited Website carrying stories with similar themes, which came to you independently (from the Noosphere) and now look completely unoriginal.

I will say this, though – in her interview with the NewsHour, Margaret Atwood sounded a bit supercilious toward the sci-fi genre, glomming onto the phrase “speculative fiction” as if it were dipping in gold and glazed with cherub tears, whereas something with the label “science fiction” is low art, with stories about talking hamburgers and lizard men.

I haven’t read her book, although I am sure it is entertaining, if not outright good. But I find this attitude toward “genre fiction” to be a bit tiresome, especially with more and more great authors (for example, Cormac McCarthy with The Road) dipping into traditionally sci-fi themes.

What else would be worthy of this rarefied label of “speculative fiction”? Red Dawn, of course. Granted, there are people who think it is a documentary, sent as a warning from the future, but (for now) it lives in the speculative fiction camp – it is post-apocalyptic, and there are no robots or multi-limbed aliens. Atwood must have seen this gun-loving, right-wing stroke fest and thought – Gee, I’d much rather be associated with that as opposed to trifles such as Foundation or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I may be at the bottom of the literary world, but at least I readily embrace the true nature of my work.

After reading Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, I was struck by how the plot plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the  main sequence of events in the book is a fear of communism – or more specifically, fear of unionization. The fear that workers will start asking for their rights with one, unified voice.

(One could question whether this is a real fear of communism or a ploy of the wealthy and powerful in order to guard against threats to their power – but that is another discussion.)

In Red Harvest, to avoid such a catastrophe of worker rights, the big guys enlist strongmen to break the unions and the workers – and it quickly becomes a case where the cure is worse than the disease. The empowered thugs now want a piece (or more) of the power they cleared for the big guys.

It seems we are always finding new devils for deals. For example – and stay with me on this – the U.S. pardons General Shiro Ishii and other physicians at Unit 731, where the Japanese tested deadly biological agents on living human subjects before and during WWII,  because we were afraid the communists would get ahead of us in developing bioweaponry. Ishii should have never seen sunshine again – but we gave him immunity because we wanted that forbidden knowledge.

History is replete with such examples where our fear of communism has overcome reason, morality, and human decency and led us to support goons, thugs, and dictators. And the town in Red Harvest comes to embody the moral corruption of its leaders – and to the extent that it infects visitors – and make them all “blood-simple.” (I like that “town as a character” theme, one I have tried to develop in Martin Garvin – and one I keep coming back to in some of my other writing.)

For Red Harvest, it speaks to the strength of the book that you can go all “English professor” in its analysis. For society in general, it’s amazing what a little fear of communism and socialism will motivate people to do – and how it can convince some to abandon what few scruples they might have left in their character. And it’s a great way to excuse any behavior. I guess that’s why it has never left the playbook of the world’s fearmongers.

I recently finished reading The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler. It was a good book, definitely worth the read. The work focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The personal disputes that formed the core of the book’s narrative stirred feelings of ambivalence for me. On the one hand, it is a little comforting that scientists, even the most brilliant, engage in the same petty squabbles and petulant exchanges you would associate with guests on the Jerry Springer show. In other words – them scientists is just like us.

But the details of this exchange are also troubling – these feuds among scientists create the holes where ideologues (i.e., creationists, antienvironment activists) hammer in their wedges, pumping up technical debates to create the illusion of a shaky foundation and uncertainty on fundamental issues. And then they drive their own beliefs through these gaps.

Hence, a scientific debate on the effects of global warming on wildfires and hurricane activity becomes grounds for a very nonscientific pundit like Glenn Beck to dispute the whole phenomenon of climate change.

Science is vulnerable to attack from systems that deal in currency outside its own value system. Science deals in doubt, skepticism, and likelihood, while religion and politics traffic in certitude, complete certainty, the absence of doubt (to the point that they cannot see their hypocrisy from one day to the next).

So ideological groups are able to exploit a quality of science – plus our tendency to error on the side of excess – in order to promote their agenda, as faulty as it may be. As long as scientists engage in petty spats like what was detailed in The Case of the Midwife Toad, then they will remain at risk of being railroaded in public forums – and losing on the larger issues of public policy.

Palahniuk takes an expansive approach to the culling song in his book Lullaby. For those who have not read the book, it features a bedtime poem, the recitation of which kills the listener. If word got out that this poem can kill, it would  create mass panic, leading to restrictions on sound and limits on anything that could carry this killer spell. Things would get very quiet.

That puts him within the thematic legacy of annihilation. Gilgamesh and Noah are part of that tradition – one could say they are its progenitors, at least in the scope of Western Literature – while Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine in Cat’s Cradle is a 20th-century take on the classic end-of-the-world conceit. What would you expect of literature from a century of nuclear technology, catastrophic wars,  and environmental decline, when we perfect our ability to blow up the world?

For Palahniuk, the annihilation is numbing. Big Brother controls through noise, something that winnows its way into your head like the Ceti eels in Star Trek II, and there is no big explosion, no gore … people just drop. Sort of like the people who watched the movie An Echo of Wolves in my serial Martin Garvin. Except I had not yet reached such broad societal implications as Palahniuk.

So, from the first time time we’ve put writing implement to writing recipient, we have been trying to imagine and predict the cause of our annihilation. And we generally imagine it to be our fault. From the early days – when rampant sin prompted the powers in the sky to cleanse the earth – to now, when rampant consumption threatens to make the world uninhabitable. The Bible even warned us that the end of the world is coming (expedited by the flaws in our human natures).

This literary legacy of annihilation makes for an interesting companion to the Socratic tradition on the limits of our knowledge – or if you prefer Shakespeare – “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” (As You Like It, Act V, Scene I). Truth is, we probably won’t see the killing blow until it is too late. Take, for example, the species disappearing from our planet today. Conservationists have fought for years against hunting and poaching, only to see species, even the most protected species (apes, tigers, cheetahs, rhinos), on the brink due to habitat loss and deforestation. The end is not as dramatic as once envisioned, it is much more gradual, a cancer that is slower, more internal, but just as ugly and arguably more difficult to avert. And one we did not see until, in many cases, we were past the tipping point. Seriously, did anyone expect a bedtime poem to cause the end of the world?

Chuck Palahniuk can do things that elude us lesser writers. There is a quality to his writing that is prima facie absurd. It shouldn’t work. Kurt Vonnegut was the same way. It is absurd to think you can end multiple paragraphs and sections with the refrain “So it goes.” But Vonnegut does it, and it works. If anyone else tries the same thing (or at least a similar convention), the work falls apart. They read like a poor copy of Kurt Vonnegut.

Regarding Palahniuk, who else could offer up the refrain, “I am Jack’s Raging Bile Duct” without sounding like a boob? That struck me as I was reading Lullaby the other day (and yes, I know that previous quote is from Fight Club). He has that same Vonnegut-like quality – he does things on the printed page that should not work. And I know. I’ve written lots of things that haven’t worked. And I’ve read a few short stories from the bizarro genre, which has tried to associate itself with Palahniuk, but (to me, at least) most of the “bizarro” stories come across as self-indulgent, with a Mad Libs approach to the profane. In contrast, Palahniuk’s work is complete, organic, where lesser writers sound trite and derivative.

And speaking of derivative, Lullaby has that same theme of “deadly art” that I was using in Martin Garvin, except he has a killer poem (or culling song) and mine was a movie. Damn you, Noosphere! Not that I ever thought that plot point was original.

Monty Python has a classic skit with “the deadliest joke in the world,” which the allies used as a weapon of mass destruction (and that was the motivation for the government agents in Martin Garvin Part 2).

Lovecraft imagined a world of ancient tomes where reading the words of certain ancient texts would drive one mad.

Del Close and John Ostrander told the story of a root that gives the ultimate high before killing you, in the unfortunately named “Foo Goo,” from the comic-book anthology series Wasteland #1. (How’s that for an obscure reference?)

The Ring had a killer videotape. In keeping with the limitations of that analog world, one has to wait a few days after watching the videotape to meet one’s demise.

Original ideas are hard to come by, so says Ecclesiastes. I don’t think that should be a deterrant to creating. But still, I also noticed some similarities between Palahniuk’s character Oyster (in Lullaby) and a character in one of my short stories. No wonder that damn story keeps getting rejected…