For Us, The Living
by Robert A.Heinlein

When SF Was Young

It’s wonderful to hear that voice again.

The unmistakable authorial tones in question belong to Robert A. Heinlein, and surface in For Us, the Living (Scribners, hardcover, $25.00, 263 pages, ISBN 0-7432-5998-X). Anyone not immured in a Mars simulation dome in the Antarctic has by now probably heard of this book. It’s the first sustained piece of writing Heinlein ever attempted, in the year 1938, during a turbulent period in both his life and the life of the nation. The novel never sold, and was retired. Heinlein’s own copies were lost or destroyed over the decades, and the manuscript surfaced only recently in the hands of a researcher who had obtained it from a longtime friend of Heinlein’s. (This whole story is told more dramatically and entertainingly in an afterword by RAH scholar Robert James.).

The first thing that must be admitted about this book is that it is not a full-blown dramatization of the many, many ideas Heinlein was cogitating upon during this period, not a fully fleshed-out, hypnotically realistic tale of the kind he came to write, but rather a didactic, utopian lecture novel along the lines of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 (1888). As such, it features long monologues on economics, politics, and cultural customs. Not disregarding the drawbacks of that format, however, I should go on to say that all the concepts and speculations offered by Heinlein are fascinating, provocative, and still relevant, nearly seventy years after their composition. And what plot movement and characterization does exist is deft and assured. All in all this is a remarkable achievement for a thirty-one-year-old amateur, displaying the nascent gifts and genius that Heinlein would fully develop at a furious pace in the subsequent years.

Our protagonist is one Perry Nelson, who dies in the year 1939 and awakens reincarnated in the temporarily soul-less body of a citizen of the year 2086. (The future man had committed a kind of approved psychic suicide.) Found wandering by Diana, a beautiful dancer, Perry becomes her houseguest and later her lover. After his initial shock of adjustment, he immediately embarks on a virtual and physical educational tour of the future. Midway through the book, he exhibits some shocking atavistic behavior that nets him a stay in a rehabilitative facility, where his accommodation to the new mores and ethics of 2086 is somewhat painfully completed. By book’s end, he’s become the first rocket pilot to dare a trip to the Moon. And that’s pretty much the whole narrative arc.

But of course, the allure of this novel lies in seeing a titan of the field in his formative years. In his introduction, Spider Robinson finds this book to contain in embryo nearly all of the themes and tropes that would power Heinlein’s whole career. It’s true that the reader will encounter many familiar items: rolling roads, theocratic dictatorships, unconventional sexual arrangements, contrarian thinking, and reverence for the military (although on the latter topic, Heinlein’s pacifist leanings might surprise you). But it’s also fun to play the game of cataloguing Heinlein’s failed predictions versus his correct speculations. He envisions a communications and knowledge-based system very similar in function to the Internet–yet it functions with live switchboard operators and pneumatic tubes. This lack of speculative daring concerning cybernetics–the entire genre’s biggest predictive failure–would also explain why slide rules rule in 2086. Heinlein more or less invents memes when Diana is told: "You are suffering from a slight touch of atavism . . . which you contracted from him. The layman doesn’t realize that these non-lesional [i.e., without a somatic basis] mental disorders can be as contagious as diphtheria or whooping cough." But we have yet to see the toga become popular garb outside of frat parties, although countless SF writers of the Thirties besides Heinlein liked to insist it would.

From H.G. Wells right up to Ken MacLeod, SF has long mixed its preachiness with melodrama, at best completely fusing novel ideas with enthralling action. Heinlein soon learned to adjust the ratio between the components of his fiction, and the field was never the same. Now you can witness where it all began.

Buddha Boy
by Kathe Koja

Farrar
Straus and Giroux
hardcover
$16.00
117 pages
ISBN: 0374309981

Karma Kids

The last time I had occasion to yoke together the work of Kathe Koja and Leander Watts (the pen-name of a well-known SF avant-garde writer), it was due to the near-simultaneous publication of their first YA novels, Koja’s straydog and Watts’s Stonecutter, both 2002. In tandem again, both writers have new books out that will reward all readers, including the adventurous genre habitué. Koja’s has less of a fantastical vibe around it than Watts’s, but nonetheless speaks to the outcast in every sensitive soul, of which there are many among SF fans.

Kathe Koja’s Buddha Boy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, hardcover, $16.00, 117 pages, ISBN 0-374-30998-1) is narrated–in a hypnotic, almost stream-of-consciousness style–by a teen named Justin, possessed of some small artistic talents and a keen sense of right and wrong that is only partially tamped down by the conventional, thoughtlessly accepted culture of his high school. One day the eponymous Buddha Boy shows up as a transfer student. Dressed weirdly, practicing odd behaviors, Michael Martin, or Jinsen as he prefers to be called, is a prime target for jock hostility and cliquish, snobbish disdain. Justin is at first put off by Jinsen’s oddness, but when a class assignment tosses them together, and Justin discovers Jinsen’s awesome art skills, a halting friendship blooms. Soon, Justin has to confront all the prejudices of his peers in the face of their persecution of Jinsen. When matters escalate toward violence, what Justin learns of Jinsen’s past will both shock and enlighten him.

Koja is working on the fringes of a grand tradition of demi-fantastical literature that focuses on the introduction of a holy innocent or naïve savior figure into mortal affairs. Books like Jerzy Kosinski’s Being There (1970) or even Mel-ville’s Billy Budd (1924) spring to mind. Buddha Boy himself is not as allegorical or otherworldly as his literary predecessors. Koja is too smart for that. The vibrant immediacy and tangibility of her school and home settings and the practical realities of the day-to-day lives of the teens keeps the novel grounded. Jinsen never preaches or lectures, nor does he utter stereo-typical Zen koans. Rather, his responses to his torments are grounded in his own harsh experiences and hard-fought wisdom. Justin, likewise, is no stereotypical apostle in thrall to the numinous, but rather a conflicted, well-rounded witness and participant in Jinsen’s karma.

The whole mystical issue of karma, brilliantly illustrated by the events of the book, is in fact the ethereal thread that knits the mundane events of the novel together in a supra-natural fashion. By the end of the book, we are left with Justin’s observation: "You want to see karma coming? Go look in the mirror, right now." And we understand just what he means.

In Wild Ride to Heaven (Hough-ton Mifflin, hardcover, $16.00, 169 pages, ISBN 0-618-26805-7) Leander Watts returns to the place and period of his earlier book, the Gen-esee Valley of the middle 1800s. This archaic, hardscrabble milieu, shatteringly tangible and sensual, serves perfectly for another of his dark fairy tales. This is YA as filtered through David Lynch’s sensibilities.

Hannah Renner is an adolescent girl living alone with her father, a charcoal burner. Literate and fanciful, yet possessing a hard-edged practicality borne of privation and hardships, Hannah is also singled out from the other inhabitants of the nearby town of Black Stick by her mismatched eyes, one milky white, the other a startling green. Besides her few books, Hannah’s lov?e of music, of singing, helps keep her sane amidst the travails of her harsh existence. In fact, sometimes she feels transported when singing, surging on "a wild ride to heaven." Papa Renner may be a charcoal burner, but he is also an impractical dreamer. He fantasizes continually about finding buried treasure in the surrounding primeval forests. And his greed is about to deliver Hannah into a nightmare.

Nearby live the Barrow brothers, Noel and Leon, twin surly, slovenly giants. Desperate for cash to fund his treasure-quest, Hannah’s father indentures her to the brothers for a year’s servitude. (Stonecutter also featured this theme, a powerful one.) She is immediately plunged into a grim bondage with overtones of potential sexual assault. All that makes her life tolerable is the strange midnight appearance of a waif from the forest, a kind of Pan-like nature figure who calls himself Brother Boy. Accompanied by two enormous wild boars, Brother Boy befriends Hannah, and she finds relief in his nightly presence. So when Noel and Leon announce their plan to make Hannah their wife, she has no place to flee except to Brother Boy’s refuge. But can the whimsical albino youth offer her the protection she will need from the lust of the Barrows?

Watts has an uncanny way with limning the daily life of two centuries past, and embodying it in genuinely frontierish prose. Such scenes as the slaughtering and rendering of a pig and the struggle to turn lumber into charcoal carry with them an uncanny verisimilitude, almost as if we were watching some film captured through time-travel, but with an emotional "soundtrack" as well. Plainly, Watts has learned to inhabit this spooky nighted past of America with great insight. His mastery of folktale archetypes–the poor charcoal burner, the ogreish Barrows, the Peter-Pan-like Brother Boy, the strange-eyed girl touched by faerie–is compelling as well. All these elements together make for a story that moves down twisted, unpredictable paths and drags the reader ineluctably along, until the resonant climax and heartening coda.

Both Koja and Watts have third novels already in the pipeline. You’ll be certain to learn of them here.

The Upholstered Apocalypse

Millennium People (Harper Collins Flamingo, hardcover, £16.99, 294 pages, ISBN 0-00-225848-X) chronicles a few months out of the life of psychologist David Markham, narrated in his own fevered voice. But what a few months they are! Markham’s staid, middle-class, professionally boring life is turned inside-out, as is the collective life of London, which is soon subject to a variety of bewildering terrorist acts that seem to have no point, as well as a consumerist revolt by the inhabitants of an upscale housing development on the banks of the Thames known as Chelsea Marina.

The whole affair begins when a bomb in Heathrow airport kills Markham’s first wife, Laura. Oddly energized by her death, Mark-ham resolves to learn what he can of her killers. He plunges into the world of protesters, and is soon led to Chelsea Marina. Here, a motley assortment of varyingly obsessed individuals are intent on fomenting a middle-class rebellion. We meet Dr. Richard Gould, a pediatrician who is the conspirators’ master theorist. Kay Churchill, film critic and sexual predator. Stephen Dexter, defrocked priest, and his girlfriend, Joan Chang. And perhaps most dangerous of all, Vera Blackburn, bomb-maker. Markham soon becomes intimate with all these plotters on one level or another, and begins to suspect that one or more of them might have been responsible for his wife’s death. But the heady allure of their nebulous revolution, which promises to supplant boredom with a meaningless violence that threatens to burst the confining parameters of space-time itself, soon begins to overwhelm Markham, and he becomes more and more complicit with their schemes.

Of course, these themes and stock players and narrative tactics are perennial with Ballard. You’ll find much the same cast and plot in Super-Cannes, for instance. But like all geniuses, with every iteration of his manias, Ballard brings new undersurfaces into view, polishes new facets of his weird gems, and moves ahead incrementally. His whole career is not so much beads on a string as it is different movements in some baroque symphony, whose totality will only be known when he stops writing, for whatever cause.

Ballard’s main literary brainstorm way back in the New Wave was to establish an identification between inner and outer geographies. In this book the complex machine that postmodern London has become is absolutely contiguous with the psyches of the characters. Moving down the flyovers to Heathrow and through the claustrophobic streets of Chelsea Marina, we are navigating the neuroses of the characters. Such acts as the bombing of the Tate Museum and the burning of the National Film Theater are like mini-lobotomies or surgical excisions. The steady piling-up of startling metaphors that invest ordinary things with great significance abets this strategy.

Yet if this were all Ballard provided, his texts would soon become unanchored from reality. It’s his sharp vision as a satirist and social critic that anchors his metaphysics, as well as his transgressive stance. (Ask yourself how many authors today actually offer any spark of rebellion against the status quo.) He has an uncanny eye for the way people actually live, a kind of Dickensian flair for the telling observation. For instance, when a high-living inhabitant of Chelsea Marina decides to create Molotov cocktails, here’s what they look like: "burgundy bottles filled with petrol into which he had stuffed his regimental ties."

As usual, Ballard’s brilliant non-sequitur dialogue–much of it quite funny by intention, as well as surreally cruel and revelatory–is a prime attraction. The book’s structure–we open with a chapter set in the post-revolution Chelsea Marina, then go into the extended flashback that forms the bulk of the book, before finally returning to the present and the surprising denouement–is very effective. And Markham represents a new development in Ballard’s typical protagonists, in that he manages to emerge from the fire instead of being totally consumed by it. If I had one complaint, it’s that Richard Gould, the psychotic doctor, is not onstage often enough.

Consult the headlines in any day’s newspaper, and you’ll see why Bruce Sterling once called Ballard the truest, most prescient bard of the irrational world we’ve fashioned for ourselves.

The Silver Age of Comic Book Art,
by Arlen Schumer

Raptors IV,
by Jean Dufaux

The Life Eaters,
by David Brin

Eye Candy

Arlen Schumer has produced a very enjoyable book with a lot of visual flair, a testament to his intelligent love affair with his chosen topic and to his skills as a graphics designer. But his success also owes much to the subject matter, which lends itself to extravagant display. The Silver Age of Comic Book Art (Collectors Press, trade paper, $29.95, 176 pages, ISBN 1-888054-85-9) focuses on the ground-breaking work of several creators active in the period from 1956 to 1970. Schumer has reproduced in grand collages many choice bits from the DC and Marvel comics of Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, Joe Kubert, Gene Colan, Jim Steranko, and Neal Adams. To this he’s added insightful critical text on the period, as well as snippets of artist interviews. The whole assemblage conveys with verve and zest the excitement to be found in the comics of the sixties, when pop culture was at its zenith. One might argue with one or two of his focal choices–Colan over John Romita or Curt Swan, say–but on the whole Schumer makes a convincing case for the excellence of his selected artists. I was enlightened by such comparisons as that between Will Eisner and Steranko, a passing of the torch I had not noticed before. Anyone who lived through this period, or younger aficionados looking for an introduction to the Silver Age, will relish this book.

Ranging from the dawn of the cinema to last year’s post-apocalyptic hit, 28 Days Later, Science Fiction Poster Art (Aurum, trade paper, $29.95, 192 pages, ISBN 1-85410-946-4) collects a stunning array of theater-lobby illustration. Editors Tony Nourmand and Graham Marsh have plainly gone to great lengths to scour the historical archives of film posters for both familiar and unfamiliar examples of this mostly unheralded artform. They organize their posters thematically–aliens, after the bomb, spaceflight, serials, and so on–and often present multiple versions for the same film from different countries, allowing us to creatively contrast and compare styles and marketing tactics and esthetics. Their useful text brings to light such lost luminaries as Reynold Brown (think Creature from the Black Lagoon [1954] and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman [1958]) and Karoly Grosz (The Invisible Man [1933]). They seem quite knowledgeable in their field, even allowing for one massive flub: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) was not derived from a Harry Bates story titled "Farewell to Arms," but rather "Farewell to the Master." This British book is being distributed here in the USA by Trafalgar Square, which may be contacted at www.trafalgarsquarebooks.com.

Raptors IV (NBM, trade paper, $10.95, 64 pages, ISBN 1-56163-371-2) resonantly and resolutely brings to a close the saga of vampiric factions battling each other beneath the surface of human affairs, while still leaving open an outlet for further adventures, as the torch of morally restrained bloodsucking is passed to a new generation of protagonists. The artwork by Enrico Marini continues to offer stunning architectural perspectives, Matrix-worthy fashion chic, and kinky erotic thrills, while Jean Dufaux’s terse and biting (sorry!) text conveys the inner lives of his characters as successfully as it presents the exciting action. "Once again, the children will be able to play in the streets," thanks to the self-sacrifice of certain members of the undead. But the next volume will certainly show us that no peace lasts forever.

Two well-known SF authors venture into graphic-novel territory with excellent results. Both have found a home at Wildstorm, an imprint of DC Comics. Kevin J. Anderson presents a prequel to his recent series of novels with The Saga of Seven Suns: Veiled Alliances (hardcover, $24.95, 96 pages, ISBN 1-56389-902-7). This tale depicts the first contact between a somewhat decadent Earth and the Ildiran Empire, whose members exhibit a variety of caste-like appearances, from human to bestial. We witness the division of humanity into several specialized factions under the pressures of interstellar colonization, and the introduction of the gas-giant-dwelling aliens who will launch a war against both humans and Ildirans. The characterization is necessarily light in such a panoramic tale spread among numerous worlds and beings, but Anderson succeeds in conveying some Asimovian and Herbertian space-opera thrills. The artwork by Robert Teranishi is exemplary, with convincing otherworldly landscapes, empathetic human faces and glittering technology. My one objection is that the little robots named "comps" that aid humans look like nothing so much as the justly maligned Twiki from the television version of Buck Rogers.

David Brin expands his award-nominated story "Thor Meets Captain America" into The Life Eaters (hardcover, $29.95, 144 pages, ISBN 1-4012-0098-2), with the aid of artist Scott Hampton, whose harsh-edged, yet graceful painted art is the perfect match for a grim tale. Hampton’s palette is appropriately subdued as well, but it allows for such bright contrasting flashes as the blue of a Hindu deity. History as we know it has been shattered by the arrival of real Norse gods on the side of the Nazis in 1944. Some twenty years later, WWII still rages, and the Allies are doing poorly. But as other gods from other pantheons arise to contest the Aesir’s victories, the forces of goodness learn that heavenly help may be worse than no help at all. Divided into three segments, the tale focuses on several pivotal individuals, allowing us to get to know them well. The story’s conclusion is open-ended yet hopeful, and certainly a sequel would be welcomed, if only to offer more vistas on the order of this volume’s space-elevator that is also Yggdrasil the World Tree.

Further illustrating the permeability of the membrane between SF and comics, Neil Gaiman returns to the universe that first made him famous, that which harbors the deities known as the Endless. The Sandman: Endless Nights (Vertigo/DC, hardcover, $24.95, 160 pages, ISBN 1-4012-0089-3) is a lush and lavish showcase for both Gaiman’s writing and the heterogeneous artwork of his collaborators: Glenn Fabry, Milo Manara, Miguelanxo Prado, Frank Quitely, P. Craig Russell, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Barron Storey. In addition, Dave McKean contributes the cover and overall book design. The seven stories herein range from the narratively straightforward to the highly experimental, but all revolve around the intersection of such godlings as Death, Dream, Desire, and Despair with various mortal characters. I particularly enjoyed "The Heart of a Star," which tracks a love affair amidst an exotic alien setting–and ties in to the Green Lantern mythos as lagniappe. Gaiman and his cohorts prove that it is indeed possible to recapture past glories.

From Narnia to a Space Odessey,
Edited by
Ryder W. Miller

A Galaxy in a Jar,
by Laurel Winter

The Other Side
of the Lens,
by G.O. Clark

Dream Factories and Radio Pictures,
by Howard Waldrop

Small Press Titles

A more unlikely pairing of authors than Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis is hard to imagine. Yet these two men did indeed once cross swords, on the occasion of young Clarke’s objection to a passage from Lewis’s Perelandra (1943), a passage highly critical of humanity’s "conquest" of space. This clash and its subsequent fallout are the subjects of From Narnia to a Space Odyssey (iBooks, hardcover, $21.00, 175 pages, ISBN 0-7434-7518-6), edited and with critical text by Ryder W. Miller. The book opens with Miller setting the stage and introducing the players: Lewis a respected Oxford don in 1944, and Clarke a twenty-seven-year-old member of the British Interplanetary Society. The essence of their respective positions and backgrounds is laid out by Miller with economy over the first thirty pages. The reprinting of the actual correspondence of the two men fills the next twenty. And the bulk of the book consists of a sampling of Clarke and Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction.

Miller’s portion of the book reveals him to be the kind of genial, enthusiastic amateur who has always poked about in the history of SF, turning up nuggets in a pseudo-scholarly way. Miller’s heart is in the right place, and we certainly owe him for assembling this fascinating bit of SF history. But I’m still puzzling over some of his sentences. Characterizing Lewis as "a modern man who was responsible for millions and millions of people who refuse to admit that they evolved from early hominids like the rest of us" (page 19) makes the erudite Inkling sound like Jimmy Swaggart. And even interpolating "with whom" in place of "who" cannot aid the parsing of this sentence: "Clarke has been another Columbus who we have journeyed out into the stars to explore science beliefs." (page 29) The letters themselves, brief as they are, succeed in creating dynamic portraits of the interlocutors, and it’s always good to have an excuse to read again such stories as "Ministering Angels" and "The Nine Billion Names of God." All in all, then, despite some minor infelicities, this book will repay both the historian and casual reader.

Readers might recognize the name of Henry Wessells as belonging to the brilliant fellow who has shepherded much of Avram Davidson’s work back into posthumous existence. Now Wessells–in real life, a rare-book expert–steps out from Davidson’s shadow with a collection of his own fiction (in an edition limited to 200 copies), Another Green World (Temporary Culture, hardcover, $65.00, 160 pages, ISBN unavailable). As befits a Davidson aficionado, Wessells fills his oblique, fascinating stories with much erudition and literary sleight-of-hand. (Wessells is also a partisan of Don Webb, John Crowley, and Jorge Luis Borges, to name just another trio of influences.) Yet there’s nothing precious or shriveled about these nine fictions. They are all robust and fully engaged with the marvels of the world. Two linked ones–"The Polynesian History of the Kerguêlen Islands" and "The Institute of Antarctic Archeology and Protolinguistics"–exhibit a pulpish HPL vibe elevated to art by the subtle language and plotting. And there’s even a hardnosed cyberpunk strain in two tales, "Another Green World" and "Virtual Wisdom." Wessells tantalizingly mentions a novel he’s finished in one of his endnotes. I hope to see it in print soon.

Like his earlier volume, Common Ectoids of Arizona (2001), Stepan Chapman’s new burst of whimsy, Life on Earth (Four Sep Publications, chapbook, $5.00, 36 pages, ISBN unavailable) consists of some truly amusing and eerie cartoons by the author, accompanied by running captions that tell a mordant little story. In this instance, "life on earth" is personified as a protean individual in the midst of some serious soul-searching. "Life on earth saw itself as a stale and pointless exercise." In its quest for meaning and relief, the monstrous, mutable composite being that represents all creation moves from one absurdity to another, riding "metal stick insects" and "standing in line with itself." With blithe despair and exuberant ennui, Chapman tells an episodic fable that should make us all reconsider our own moments of self-pity in a new and humorous light.

You have to love a poet who titles one of her verses "why goldfish shouldn’t use power tools," as Laurel Winter does in A Galaxy in a Jar (Dark Regions Press, trade paper, $6.95, 55 pages, ISBN 1-888993-39-1), But Winter offers a lot more than Gary-Larson-style humor in her poems. There’s the technical prowess that finds her pastiching Robert Frost ("Stopping by World on a Snowy Eon") and E.A. Robinson ("Richard Cory 2"). There’s the pathos of "Judy Resnick Brushes Her Teeth," inspired by the Challenger astronaut of that name. And there’s the metaphysical hijinks of "weighing the soul." All in all, Laurel Winter proves herself to be one of the unpredictable goddesses who also inhabit this fine book.

There seems to me to be a subtle arrangement to the poems in G.O. Clark’s The Other Side of the Lens (Dark Regions Press, trade paper, $6.95, 43 pages, ISBN 1-888993-38-3). We open with several astronomically themed verses: outward looking, focused on stars, satellites and vast vistas (from "The Dark" comes "Slow death/is traveling through/a quadrant of space/where no stars/shine"). Then we move to lighter, more terrestrial poems that center on such topics as "Instructions to the Advance Scouts" (invasions of Earth), "Rod Serling’s Eyes" and "A Visit to the Surreal Poet’s House" (dedicated to Bruce Boston). But the last four or five poems are full of entropic images, as if both the universe and man-kind’s small, homey planet have been exhausted. It’s a bracing progression, and typical of the wit and intelligence and feeling which Clark infuses into his plain-spoken yet affecting poetry.

Imagine a world run by victims of Alzheimer’s disease, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of the black-humored premise of Daniel Pearlman’s brash and sardonic novel Memini (Prime Books, hardcover, $29.95, 326 pages, ISBN 1-894815-69-6). Thanks to the widespread use of drugs that enhance intelligence while they simultaneously eradicate short-term memory retention and even long-term memory traces, the upper echelons of Pearlman’s future are all addled savants whose lives stay on track only thanks to Meminet. Meminet is an AI that coordinates a system of "flappers" and "skeeters," individual units that continually whisper necessary data into the ears of the "frags." Reminding them of their very identities and histories, updating them on interpersonal relationships, Meminet insures that the world continues to function. But President Lester Barton, head of the Memini "conglobulate," is slipping out of control into paranoid delusions, and will soon trigger global disaster. Unless a low-level non-frag, Stewart Bridges, can maneuver his way through the labyrinth of frag politics and restore some stability to the Rube-Goldberg system. Pearlman’s inventiveness with language and his fecund, ultra-logical extrapolations of his initial premise call to mind the classic early work of Philip Dick and the biting satires of Fritz Leiber. His ability to inhabit the viewpoints of the "swiss-cheese brain" executives is impressive, as are his depictions of such everyday people as Stewart’s parents. All in all, this novel is a rousing parody of our own screwball society, where handlers and spin doctors guide our elected officials, celebrities, and experts through minefields of shattered discourse.

Howard Waldrop’s stories are shimmering nets woven out of allusions, might-have-beens, never-weres, and beloved cultural flotsam and jetsam. The power in such a mix is undeniably on display in his latest collection, Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (Wheatland Press, trade paper, $19.95, 278 pages, ISBN 0-9720547-4-X). What Waldrop has done is to take all his stories centering around movies and television from his four previous collections, slather them with tasty new introductions, add in a never-before-seen novelette– "Major Spacer in the 21st Century"–and serve it up like a tub of hot buttered popcorn. It’s a treat and an education to encounter back-to-back such classics as "Fin de Cycle," which conflates the history of surrealism and the early history of film, and "Flatfeet!," which tracks the Keystone Kops as they deal with some serious crimes in their unique fashion. Waldrop summons real pathos out of the absurd, such as in "Heirs of the Perisphere," wherein three Disney icons survive into a post-apocalyptic time. And for those who imagine Waldrop does only one thing well, check out "French Scenes," with its pure cyberpunk vibe. We get new books from Waldrop seldom enough that you should pounce on this one.

Publisher Addresses

Dark Regions Press, POB 1558, Brentwood, CA 94513. Four Sep Publications, POB 86, Friendship, IN 47021. iBooks, 24 West 25th St., NY, NY 10010. Prime Books, POB 301, Holicong, PA 18928. Temporary Culture, POB 43072, Upper Montclair, NJ 07043. Wheatland Press, POB 1818, Wilsonville, OR 97070.