Quote of the Week

"As we turned to leave, I noticed that the elves seemed agitated. At the door, I looked back to see several of them trying gently to keep the old man in his bed. Color had temporarily filled his cheeks, and he struggled to his feet. Grinning impishly, he motioned for silence and then bent to elf-ear level. He whispered, 'Boys, we're back.' The little men looked mortified."


-Red Ranger Came Calling by Berkeley Breathed

And a very Merry Christmas to everyone who has bothered to read my humble musings this fall!

UBIK and Inception

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
If you don't want the book UBIK or the movie Inception spoiled, please stop reading now.
But feel free to bookmark this page and read it later!


When I first read Philip K. Dick's UBIK, I thought, "someone should really make a movie out of this." When I saw Inception for the first time last week, I thought, "wow. Somebody did." That somebody being Christopher Nolan.

In the interest of full disclosure, the two are not the same. There are similar themes, though, and some really neat instances of congruent storytelling.

First up is worldbuilding. Both stories take place in realities very similar to our own. (My favorite kind of science fiction; not the sci fi of laser blasters and warp drive, but the kind of sci fi that takes place 20 minutes into the future.) People still go to work. Corporations still make billion-dollar deals. People fall in love. And they die. But both stories have one or two technologies which are no where near their infancies in the universe in which we actually live.

In UBIK, corporations employ people with special abilities: telepaths, precogs, people who have telekinetic powers. And when a person dies, if they have the money, they can have their body frozen in a special kind of mausoleum where they enjoy a "second life." They can still be communicated with, as long as the tissues of the brain remain somewhat intact. The cold helps preserve it longer.

In Inception, it is possible to access the dreams of another. This is done in the name of big business and usually done in order to steal ideas. Sometimes, though, it is necessary to implant an idea. There are rules, of course. Time and space take on different qualities. It is possible to dream within a dream. If you are hurt, you feel it. If you die within a dream, you wake up.

While these aspects of these stories may at first seem similar, the fundamental story behind each is not: UBIK is largely the story of a man, Genn Runciter, who is trying to figure out what the hell went wrong on his last corporate mission. A bomb goes off. Then some of his colleagues mysteriously die off, aging rapidly as if they had drank from the False Grail. His boss' likeness starts showing up on coinage. It is my favorite kind of story: the ontological mystery.

Inception is a story that is part caper, part tragedy; but I dare to say it is, in the end, the simpler story archetype of the two: the story of a man, Dominick Cobb (Leo DiCaprio), trying to overcome his own inner demons. Both stories play with one of my favorite themes: "what is real, and how do we know it is real?"

Both stories also had the one quality I love and hate about unique fiction: I love it so much, I can't wait for it to be over, even though I know when it is over, I'll be sad about it because I know I'll never be able to read it again for the first time.

The end of both stories is very satisfyingly left ambiguous, and I won't spoil that for you here. The bottom line, though, is that if you liked Inception, you will probably like UBIK. If you liked UBIK, you will probably like Inception. And if you don't like sci fi in general, thanks for reading this far. You are probably lost.

A Quote from UBIK: "It was a tranquil sight, these faithfuls, coming as they did so regularly to pay homage. They brought messages, news of what took place in the outside world; they cheered the gloomy half-lifers in these intervals of cerebral activity. And they paid Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang. It was a profitable business, operating a moratorium."

A Quote from Inception: "Well dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange. Let me ask you a question, you, you never really remember the beginning of a dream do you? You always wind up right in the middle of what's going on."

Just Finished: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

First off, let me say up front that I understand Huck Finn's importance in the history of literature, and respect it as the achievement it is. Written in 1885, it was a "novel" in the modern (21st Century) sense of the word. It dealt with themes of coming of age, understaning morality, and coming to terms with slavery in America, a mere 20 years after slavery had ended; many, if not most people who read Huck Finn when it first came out had lived through the Civil War, and so the story was relatable on a very human level.

That being said, I didn't really like it. For all of its merits, it is on some level, the story of a redneck boy, an unfair racial stereotype and a couple con men. The con men subplot is resolved off the page, and there are significant portions of the book when I had no idea where Jim had gone. There were other parts that weren't clearly written, and I had no idea what was going on. Other parts tended to drag. The closer I got to the end, the more effort it took to finish it.

In the end, I'm glad I finally read it. If you are in high school now and reading this blog, I urge you to read it now. Get it over with. It's not that great, even though it is a classic.

UPDATE/December 23, 2010, 3:30 pm: I haven't decided what I will be reading next. Probably Iain Banks' Transition, but I haven't made a final decision yet.

Reading and Writing Goals 2011

Every year I try my hand at some ambitious laundry list of goals for the coming year. This year, I've decided to come up with some more moderate goals for the next year. These are my reading and writing goals for 2011.

1.) Write six short stories. That's right, one every other month. I know it doesn't sound moderate, but that is 50% of my original proposal of one every month. Possibly even using one or more of Max Barry's suggestions.

2.) Read one short story a week, from January until May.  Frequent readers know I've been stockpiling short story collections for this very purpose. I've found even more collections since my last post. Hello, Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger. One a week is certainly do-able, and I'm not going to freak out if I don't.

3.) Read one novel or book every month from June until December. This is where I got in trouble in the past. You should see my reading goals for 2009. I identified no less than a dozen books to read and left plenty of wriggle room to read more. In some alternate universe, I'm still reading in 2009. Realistically, for 2011, I figure this means one book by Ian Fleming (probably Thunderball, which was on the 2009 list!), one by Stanislaw Lem (probably Solaris), and one from my ongoing "read everything I was supposed to but didn't" project (to be determined).

4.) Finish The Stand. If I keep to my projected pace, that shouldn't be a problem.

5.) Use Amazon less and my local library more. 'Nuff said.

6.) Keep up with the Reader. I've enjoyed writing it, and hope to do so for the forseeable future, trying to keep to a M-W-F schedule, with a QOTW every Saturday.

That's pretty much it. I want to read, but I also want to be realistic about it.

And a very happy (early) New Year, everyone!

Lunar Eclipse

There was a total lunar eclipse last night. It was cloudy here, so I missed it.

It is exceedingly rare for an eclipse to fall on the solstice, or so I'm told, the last time being about 370 years ago.

That fact reminded me of the short story "All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury. OK, not exactly, but you get the idea. Follow the links to find a copy of the short story. (I used to hate the short film in grade school, but now that I'm older, I find the deeper meaning in both the film and the short story.)

Patron Saint

I've looked into it, and there is, apparently, no patron saint of reading.

There is a patron saint for writers, St. Francis de Sales. Which kind of makes sense if you think about it; there would be no reason to venerate the act of reading when the upper castes completely controlled the dissemination of information up until the invention of moveable print in about 1440. Technology changed all that, right up to the 1960's and Catholic Mass being allowed to be held in languages other than Latin. That continuum continues to change, with consequences up to this very day.

I therefore have no choice but to proclaim a patron saint for this very website.

Meet Mr. Henry Bemis.

He loved to read. Dickens. George Bernard Shaw. Browning, Shelley, Keats. Shakespeare. You name it.

It was his love, and it was his undoing.

You can read the original here.

Good day, fellow readers.