Books Acquired:
The Undying Fire, H.G. Wells

Books Offloaded:

Progress Made:
A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick
Fogtown, Peter Plate
The Wonder Effect, C.M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
A Soviet Heretic, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Books Finished:
Out on Blue Six, Ian McDonald
Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

By coincidence, the two books that I finished this month were both disowned by their authors. Vonnegut was never happy with Breakfast of Champions; after much rewriting, he eventually decided to just be done with it and let it be published anyway. And Ian McDonald said of Out on Blue Six, “I wish I hadn’t written the damn thing… [it is] too forced, it tries too hard, everything is too artificial.”

I find myself thinking of the word “disenchantment.” Usually we think of it as a bad thing — to become disenchanted is to lose your love for something. But it can also mean that the scales fall from your eyes and you see things as they really are. This can hurt, but if you believe in the importance of truth, you’ll see it as progress.

When I first read Breakfast of Champions back in high school, all I saw was the comedy and irreverence, not to mention the drawings of wide-open beavers. Every time I’ve revisited it since, I’ve enjoyed it a little less. Underneath the jokes is a deep, bitter cynicism bordering on nihilism. At times Vonnegut seems to go out of his way to inflict pain on his reader; in particular the constant use of the n-word — though I’m sure intended to make a point about American racism — ends up feeling abusive.

At this time Kurt’s pessimism was coming more and more to the fore. According to Charles Shields’ biography,

To his daughter Nanny, [Vonnegut] tried to explain that this darkness falling on him wasn’t [ex-wife] Jane’s fault; it wasn’t [future wife] Jill’s fault — she had been very good to him — and it wasn’t the fault of money and success. The whole nature of his life seemed to be cooling like igneous rock into an unbearable heaviness.

As for Out on Blue Six, I don’t disagree with its author’s estimation, though I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say it shouldn’t exist — it is wildly creative, but totally out of control, cramming in a hundred half-baked ideas where one good one would do. Which is why I gave up on it 5/7 of the way through some time ago — before I started writing these reports even. I’m not sure what prompted me to pick it up again; I just saw the book sitting there, and suddenly it seemed Important that I finish it. Maybe I will find out why later.

Other than those two checkmarks it was a scattershot month, little of this and little of that.

The Wonder Effect is a book of sci-fi stories that begins with one called “Critical Mass,” which is well-written, suspenseful, cynically funny, and even a little romantic. The only false note is that the plot’s MacGuffin event, a baseball game during which the whole U.S.A. will be dangerously distracted, is referred to — dozens of times — as “The All-Star Game.” Apparently these fucking nerds don’t know that no one cares about the ASG; what you mean is the World Series, Poindexter.

Sorry to be That Guy. I just think it’s funny how one little misplaced detail can kill the suspension of disbelief necessary to good fiction.

A Soviet Heretic is one of those books you feel pretty smart carrying around — I mean, how many people have even heard of Yevgeny Zamyatin, much less read him? I hadn’t until three years ago, when I saw that Margaret Atwood had called his novel We “the best single work of science fiction yet written.” I didn’t experience it to be quite that, but it was certainly a worthwhile read; I wrote a thing about it, then started to seek out his other work.

Zamyatin was a true freethinker — an early Bolshevik who quickly soured on the Soviet Union and spent the rest of his life fighting it. His writing is always refined, maybe too much for the likes of me, as well as acerbic and uncompromising. I wish I could read it in Russian.

ASH is a collection of essays, some of which are pretty impenetrable to a 21st-century American, and some of which are more accessible. Yesterday I finally gave up on a longish piece about Russian prose writers of the 1920s. The next one, entitled “On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters,” felt very relatable and rather inspiring; I will quote from it here at some length, then leave you to the rest of your day.

Ask point blank: What is revolution?

Some people will answer, paraphrasing Louis XIV: We are the revolution. Others will answer by the calendar, naming the month and the day. Still others will give you an ABC answer. But if we are to go on from the ABC to syllables, the answer will be this:

Two dead, dark stars collide with an inaudible, deafening crash and light a new star: this is revolution. A molecule breaks away from its orbit and, bursting into a neighboring atomic universe, gives birth to a new chemical element: this is revolution….

Revolution is everywhere, in everything. It is infinite. There is no final revolution, no final number….

The law of revolution is red, fiery, deadly; but this death means the birth of new life, a new star. And the law of entropy is cold, ice blue, like the icy interplanetary infinities. The flame turns from red to an even, warm pink, no longer deadly, but comfortable. The sun ages into a planet, convenient for highways, stores, beds, prostitutes, prisons: this is the law. And if the planet is to be kindled into youth again, it must be set on fire, it must be thrown off the smooth highway of evolution: this is the law.

The flame will cool tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow (in the Book of Genesis, days are equal to years, ages). But someone must see this already today, and speak heretically today about tomorrow. Heretics are the only (bitter) remedy against the entropy of human thought.