Little Green Men by Peter Cawdron

Little Green Men is a great, page turner of a story. It's a not a long story, more a novella than a novel, detailing the experiences of the crew of space ship Dei Gracia on a frozen, distant world. The writing is brisk and the tension of the story is perfect. Halfway through the book there was a spot where I stopped and said "Holy Crap, I never saw that coming!" It's a great puzzle of a story that in the end fits together with a very elegant and satisfying logic.

Peter Cawdron says that he wrote Little Green Men as a tribute to the works of Philip K. Dick and the classic science fiction stories of the 1950s. He's certainly succeeded, the story manages to mix the pulse-pounding fear of the Alien movies with some of the big questions of perception and existence that one normally associates with authors like Dick, Asimov or Clarke. The interactions of the crew reminded me of the best of the old Star Trek episodes.

I don't want to give away any of the story, this is a book to be read and enjoyed, not explained. The book was free when I downloaded it to my Kindle, but the story is well worth the regular price of 99 cents. Such deals exist to introduce the reader to a new writer. Little Green Men certainly worked on that level for me, I've already downloaded some of Peter Cawdron's other stories.

The novels of Daniel Pinkwater

I heard Daniel Pinkwater before I ever read any of his books. He was a goofy, friendly voice on the radio, talking to Click and Clack about some car problem or discussing children's books with Scott Simon. Sometimes, when NPR had an odd couple of minutes to fill, they'd have Daniel Pinkwater talk about whatever he wanted to talk about that day. And that was enough to get me dig through the children's section of bookstores (or maybe the young adult section, bookstores have a hard time figuring out where to put Pinkwater) and even though I'm not a child anymore (or even a young adult) when I'd find his books, I'd start reading and then, because I liked what I found, I'd buy the book.

Here's the thing about Pinkwater: he tells good stories. His characters are interesting, they're folks you'd probably want to hang out with for the most part. The great thing is that they may be young or old, fat or thin, boys or girls, moose, cat-whiskered girls, space aliens, talking lizards, whatever. They do interesting stuff. The books aren't too dark or scary for children but certainly not too boring for adults (or children for that matter).

You don't have to take my word for this. Go here:

http://www.pinkwater.com/podcast/audioarchive.php

And you can grab, for free, audio versions of his various books. I'm fond of Borgel and Lizard Music but there are a whole bunch of good ones there. Then send him some money or buy some of his real books. They're real good.

I like reading and when I got to looking at my shelves and the contents of my Kindle, I concluded that Daniel Pinkwater is my favorite author. That kind of snuck up on me, but the more I think about it, the more I see that it's true.

You'll learn things reading Pinkwater books. Here's a nice nugget from The Neddiad:

...my father said. "Don't fall in a tar pit." It isn't tar. Everyone calls it tar, but it's really natural asphalt. The Indians used it to waterproof their canoes, and the Spanish settlers used it to seal their roofs. "La Brea" in Spanish means "the tar," so "The La Brea Tar Pits" means "the the tar tar pits."

Pinkwater makes normal things strange and strange things normal in a way that makes you feel that he really knows how things work and that the way things work is really OK. Here are a few bits from Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl:

Here, they are setting out in a boat.

"Oh, hell," I said. "It's a coracle." 

"What's a coracle?" Molly said, looking at it. 

"A coracle," I told Molly, "is the most primitive, and also worst, boat in the world. As you see, it is shaped like a bowl. It's made of branches with skins stretched over it, and it's waterproofed with a coating of tar." 

"Why is it round like that?" Molly asked. 

"As far as I know, it is because the people who invented it were not quite smart enough to figure out that a boat-shaped boat would work a lot better."

There guide leaves them on an island with monsters who want to play cards.

"Wait!" I called to Harold. "Are we safe here?" 

"As long as you don't play for money, you're safe," Harold said, and the coracle disappeared into the darkness. 

"We would never play for money against children," one of the monsters mumbled. "Do you have any money, girls?" 

"Not a cent," Molly said. 

"Me neither," I lied. I had twenty-six dollars pinned to my underwear.

As I noted earlier, Pinkwater is goofy, but as near as I can tell, the world is pretty goofy. I'm old enough to be sure I don't have it all figured out and Mr. Pinkwater would probably tell you he doesn't have it all figured out either. But his novels tell truths worth telling and they're a whole lot of fun.

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Bleeding Edge, is set in 2001 in New York City. Pynchon is a careful observer, a wizard of wordplay, who is justly revered for crafting paranoid parables. The critics have all been waiting for this, his 9/11 novel, which is also promised to be his take on the early days of this, our internet age.

While 9/11 looms in the background of every reader's mind, the monster we all know is in the closet, Pynchon's people wander and wisecrack their way through a NYC that is not so much doomed as destined to be something that none of us can ever stop or really hope to understand. Pynchon is not telling us a story, he's telling us stories, hundreds of them. Perhaps they're pixels, part of something larger that we'll see when we draw our focus back, or perhaps we're only paranoid minds finding patterns were none exist.

Pynchon's people dwell in doubt and he does interesting things with time in conversations. Phrases trigger recollection and we're taken from a coffee shop to a scene a thousand miles and five years away before we close the paragraph. It is disorienting and enlightening at the same time. And Pynchon packs his books with casual references to obscure facts (both real and fictitious) which he'll delightfully deploy with equal zeal in the making of a key plot points or terrible puns. Even the most nimble of minds is apt to find both delight and befuddlement in pages penned by Pynchon.

Pynchon opens his book with this quote from Donald Westlake:

"New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn’t going to tell it." 

Pynchon's heroine, Maxine Tarnow, is a decertified Certified Fraud Examiner, a sort-of-divorced mom with a couple of kids and just enough disconnection from the structures of power to be completely delightful and dangerous. Like the best private eyes, Maxine is less beholden to the law than she is to her own sense of justice. She investigates crimes, both commercial and karmic. Minor infractions are given as much, or often, greater weight, than major felonies.

In an early scene, Maxine's kids are playing with a prototype of a new computer game, a shooter where the targets are not criminals, but the criminally rude on the streets of New York:

“Come on,” sez Otis, “let’s just cruise around.” 

Off they go on a tour of the inexhaustible galleries of New York annoyance, zapping loudmouths on cellular phones, morally self-elevated bicycle riders, moms wheeling twins old enough to walk lounging in twin strollers, “One behind the other, we let them off with a warning, but not this one, look, side by side so nobody can get past? forget it.” 

Pow! Pow! The twins go flying, all smiles, above New York and into the Kiddy Bin. Passersby are largely oblivious to the sudden disappearances except for Christers, who think it’s the Rapture.

“Guys,” Maxine astonished, “I had no idea— Wait, what’s this?” 

She has spotted a line jumper at a bus stop. Nobody paying attention. H&K woman to the rescue! 

“All right, how do I do this?” 

Otis is happy to instruct, and before you can say “Be more considerate,” the pushy bitch has been despatched and her children dragged to safety. 

“Way to go Mom, that’s a thousand points.”

Bleeding Edge takes place in both the virtual and the real world, although the reality and virtuality of each comes into serious question as things progress. Maxine's investigations attract some attention, leading to a questionable conversation with a fellow named Windust.  Some of the key questions Maxine has are "who is this guy?" and "who is he working for?" Even paranoids have enemies.

"Not to mention there’s a couple of Israeli chips, highly sophisticated, which Mossad have been known to install at the same time, without necessarily informing the client. What these chips do is scavenge information even while the computer’s turned off, hold it till the Ofeq satellite comes over, then transmit everything out to it in a single data burst.” 

“Oh, devious, these Jews.” 

“Israel doesn’t spy on us? Remember the Pollard case back in 1985? Even left-wing papers like the New York Times carried that story, Ms. Tarnow.” 

How right-wing, Maxine wonders, does a person have to be to think of the New York Times as a left-wing newspaper?

Maxine also wonders how Windust knows what he knows:

“These are all public, the sites I use, nothing illegal, how do you know what I’m researching anyway?” 

“Child’s play,” sez Windust, “we like to think of it as ‘No keystroke left behind.’”

In Pynchon's writing words and ideas snap into focus and his city teams with so many people that despite their odd names and odder proclivities that even the most careful reader will at some points be befuddled. Is Pynchon a genius or just nuts? And why are these folks having sex?

And then there is DeepArcher, a virtual reality that is not a game, but very gamelike, a private beta of something like a digital haven or heaven or something else. It's all very bleeding edge.

When 9/11 happens there is no grand revelation or even great turning of the wheels of the world.

Everybody is still walking around stunned, having spent the previous day sitting or standing in front of television screens, at home, in bars, at work, staring like zombies, unable in any case to process what they were seeing. A viewing population brought back to its default state, dumbstruck, undefended, scared shitless.

Like any good New Yorker, Maxine talks things over with her therapist, a laid back Californian whose mental pressure gauge Maxine suspects may be reading low by a few PSI.

Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is . . . ?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs... planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or . . .”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

Pynchon's description of a post 9/11 New York is both insightful and funny as Maxine's trip to get a Thanksgiving turkey illustrates:

AS THANKSGIVING APPROACHES, the neighborhood, terrorist atrocities or whatever, reverts to its usual insufferable self, reaching a peak the night before Thanksgiving, when the streets and sidewalks are jammed solid with people who have come in to town to view The Blowing Up Of The Balloons for the Macy’s parade. Cops are everywhere, security is heavy. In front of every eatery, there are lines out the door. Places you can usually step inside, order a pizza to go, and wait no more than the time it takes to bake it are running at least an hour behind. Everybody out on the sidewalk is a pedestrian Mercedes, wallowing in entitlement—colliding, snarling, shoving ahead without even the hollow-to-begin-with local euphemism “Excuse me.”

...

A serial line jumper has been making his way forward along the turkey line, a large white alpha male whose social skills, if any, are still in beta, intimidating people one by one out of his way. 

“Excuse me?” Shoving ahead of an elderly lady waiting in line just behind Maxine. 

“Line jumper here,” the lady yells, unslinging her shoulder bag and preparing to deploy it. 

“You must be from out of town,” Maxine addressing the offender, “here in New York, see, the way you’re acting? It’s considered a felony.” 

“I’m in a hurry, bitch, so back off, unless you want to settle this outside?” 

“Aw. After all your hard work getting this far? Tell you what, you go out and wait for me, OK? I won’t be too long, promise.”

Shifting to indignation, “I have a houseful of children to feed—” but he’s interrupted by a voice someplace over by the loading dock hollering, “Hey asshole!” and here cannonballing over the heads of the crowd comes a frozen turkey, hits the bothersome yup square in the head, knocking him flat and bouncing off his head into the hands of Maxine, who stands blinking at it like Bette Davis at some baby with whom she must unexpectedly share the frame. She hands the object to the lady behind her. 

“This is yours, I guess.” 

“What, after it touched him? thanks anyway.” 

“I’ll take it,” sez the guy behind her. 

As the line creeps forward, everybody makes sure to step on, not over, the fallen line jumper. 

“Nice to see the ol’ town gettin back to normal, ain’t it.”

There is much more to this novel than a single review (or even a single reading) can adequately consider, but that is the appeal of Pynchon. He jokes and plays with ideas and one is never sure if he's serious or kidding. If asked, one suspects his answer would be "yes."

For all the technology and intrigue, this novel revolves around family and friendship. Maxine seeks a bit of guidance from her father:

Here in the capital of insomnia, it is hours yet from dawn, and this is what innocent father-daughter conversations can drift into. Beneath these windows they can hear the lawless soundscape of the midnight street, breakage, screaming, vehicle exhaust, New York laughter, too loud, too trivial, brakes applied too late before some gut-wrenching thud. When Maxine was little, she thought of this nightly uproar as trouble too far away to matter, like sirens. Now it’s always too close, part of the deal.

...

“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”

“Call it freedom, it’s based on control. Everybody connected together, impossible anybody should get lost, ever again. Take the next step, connect it to these cell phones, you’ve got a total Web of surveillance, inescapable. You remember the comics in the Daily News? Dick Tracy’s wrist radio? it’ll be everywhere, the rubes’ll all be begging to wear one, handcuffs of the future. Terrific. What they dream about at the Pentagon, worldwide martial law.”

“So this is where I get my paranoia from.”

Pynchon's normal world is paranoid, wise-cracking and wise.  It moves fast and we're not sure what is real and what is virtual, what is coincidence and what is conspiracy. It's funny and frightening and ultimately comforting in an odd way, like an all night diner in the first light of dawn. Pynchon's brewed up something fine here. There may be more than just coffee in that cup. It might be just what you need.

Skulk by Rosie Best

Skulk is an urban fantasy set in contemporary London. While a casual bookstore browser might be inclined to dismiss this novel, which features a teen protagonist and a cast of characters who can shape-shift into various creatures, as a bit of Twilight-inspired trash, such a judgement would be very wrong. Skulk is a fine mix of the familiar and the strange.

Skulk opens with Meg Banks sneaking out of her room in the middle of the night. Meg's mother is a Thatcher-esque British politician (Meg is named after Margaret Thatcher) and her father is real estate financier. Meg lives in a big house with servants and goes to a fancy school but she longs for more than shallow friends, conservative politics and always presenting the image of perfection. Meg goes out at night and expresses herself through graffiti.

On this particular night Meg's mission goes awry when she encounters an injured fox who, while dying shapeshifts into a man. The dying man gives Meg a mysterious gemstone and, unbeknownst to her, the ability to shift into the form of a fox.

As the story progresses, Meg learns of her ability to shift and the existence of other shifters, clans known as the Skulk, the Rabble, the Conspiracy, the Horde, and the Cluster. Each shifter group has its own gem and unique creature, so there are shapeshifting ravens, spiders, rats and butterflies as well as foxes. And there is also someone evil trying to merge all the shifting power into one super weapon.

What makes Skulk work as a novel is the character of Meg. She's not super-human or perfect. She's snarky at times, scared at others, and always human even when she happens to be a fox. The other people and creatures she meets in the novel are complicated and much more than props or gimmicks but it's through Meg's eyes that we discover this weird and wonder-filled world.

The book has flavor like that of Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, a rich layer underneath the day-to-day that we think of as all that there is. Skulk opens the reader to a richer world.

Ironically, the strongest scenes are the least fantastic ones. Meg at her mother's "Party party", forced to make small talk with horrid boys and trying not to split the seams of her too-tight dress, will be achingly familiar to anyone who has ever been, or can remember, what it's like to be 16 years old and not what your parents want you to be. And while deadly fog and pecking zombie-pigeons are certainly creepy, I found Meg's tyrannical mother and her iron lady expectations to be the scariest of all.

Blood Drama by Christopher Meeks

Christopher Meeks knows how to engage a reader and tell a story. His collection of short stories, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea showcases Meeks' mastery of small moments and was the book that made me a huge fan of his work. The great joy I found in those stories compelled me to buy every other book he's written.

In this book, Blood Drama, tells a longer story. It begins with Ian Nash, a drama school grad student who is having a bad day. After being dropped from his Ph.D. program, Ian stops for coffee and manages to wind up as a hostage in a bank robbery gone wrong. It's a classic case of a bad day gone much worse.

Meeks takes all the cliches of a thriller, the desperate criminal, the wise-cracking cops, the beautiful FBI agent and the hapless every man caught in the middle and takes them mostly in the ways you'd expect. But there are enough "wait, he did what?" moments in the tale to keep you turning the pages and the dialog sparkles and cracks with wit. I found, as I turned the pages, that while I certainly didn't like every character (indeed, I found Ian pretty annoying at times) I cared what happened. I bought into the story and the characters.

Meeks is not afraid to be outrageous and while the book comes dangerously close to collapsing under the "writer's fantasy problem" (Do you think the beautiful FBI agent is going to fall for the annoying, self-absorbed, Mamet-obsessed writer-type? Is said writerly guy going to grow as a person and save the day? Well, what do you think!) Meeks manages to both play by the cliche, poke fun at it and hit a layer of truth underneath it all. When I've described some of the more outrageous scenes to friends they've said "that sounds awful." And you'd think it would be, but somehow under Meeks' watchful eye and wise pen, it's not.

Meeks writes about people trying to solve problem of making it through the day. Blood Drama sees just how bad a day can get. Meeks takes the thriller and gives it a heart. A dopey, exasperating heart, but one that beats true.

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead by Joe Hill

I'm a big Joe Hill fan. I've reviewed his three novels (Heart-Shaped Box, Horns, and NOS4A2) here and last month I got to meet Joe at the Seattle Public Library. Joe is a great guy and not that scary in real life. He gave a great reading, answered numerous questions, posed for pictures with fans, and signed books and Kindles.

I was thrilled yesterday to find that a new Joe Hill story was published as a $0.99 Kindle single. I clicked the buy button in a heartbeat and plowed through Twittering from the Circus of the Dead in one sitting.

Joe Hill is a terrific (and terrifying) writer and he proves it here by telling a story entirely in tweets. His bored teenage protagonist thinks she is on the worst vacation ever. When things get more interesting, she finds things much worse than boredom.

Twittering from the Circus of the Dead is a quick read and quite scary. I love Joe's novels and and now I'm loving his short stories. I'm still dipping into his short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts. Twittering from the Circus of the Dead is well worth the buck I paid for it.

Keep those stories coming, Joe!

Crux by Ramez Naam

In his first novel, Nexus, Ramez Naam burst onto the science fiction stage with a terrific book filled with credible augmented humans set in a fascinating future. Nexus was a thoughtful thrill-ride that came to a very satisfying, action-packed conclusion. In his latest novel, Crux, Naam takes his readers further into a world changed by Nexux, the mind-linking, mind-enhancing technology combining nano-technology, pharmacology and software.

Crux is a thoughtful thriller. While the book is filled with gunfire, assassinations, fist fights, carbon fiber and nano drones, once again it is the very human struggles that propel the story. Crux is fundamentally a story about power, the powers of the government and the powers of the individual.

The events in Crux take place six months after the events that made up the story in Nexus. Naam vividly describes both great good and great evil made possible by Nexus enhancement. Some people are empowered, some are addicted, some are enslaved. Naam is very good at writing conflicted characters, showing how evil can come from good intentions, how good people can fail and how hard choices can be.

Naam never lets philosophy get in the way of a good story. While his characters do battle with their consciences, they are mostly busy trying to stay alive and the story zips right along. Naam does manage to find the time to add small bits of humor to his tale, including a great scene where an enhanced Chinese clone and a grizzled CIA operative compare battle scars. Another great running joke are the repeated scenes where the reader is shown that running Bruce Lee software in your head doesn't make you Bruce Lee.

Crux does the work of great science fiction, it makes the reader look closely and critically at what kind of world we are building here and now. In Crux, Naam doesn't let the reader off with easy answers. Instead he gives them fascinating questions, compelling characters and one hell of a story.

(Note: I was fortunate enough to receive an Advance Reader Copy for this review. Crux will be published later this month.)