Into The Paper Universe The Last Word In Hyper-real Reads by Jim Trombetta
There are those who love deconstruction, who dig more than anything else the feeling of being wised up. Others, howev- er, would rather believe the puppets are real than tear the theater apart to reveal... a nondescript or even shabby person crouching and waving his mitts around. We latter folks love to be fooled: give us a world which is so truly strange, so hypnotically convincing, that when our visit is over we're not exactly sure what is real... a world like that of A.A. Attansio's Radix (Bantam, 1981), a fever dream of Earth bathed in the radiations of a rotating black hole. Here sometime fatso Sumner Kagan improves his muscle tone considerably as he confronts the killer android Nefandi (created to look like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dol- lars), the eerie voors (aliens in human bodies who have taken vodoun to new heights), and, in a bizarre continent that used to be South America, the artificial intelligence Rubeus, the nastiest sorcerer's apprentice in history, past or future...
A Vegas of the Soul, A New Orleans of the Mind
"To those who remember starlight, the spring sky over Charn is one of the most desolate sights in the universe," writes Paul Park in Soldiers Of Paradise (Avon, 1987). Take the elevator to the mountaintop and check out Charn... a Vegas of the soul whose blazing neon signs advertise not gambling but religion... a belief so extreme it provides prisons for babies astrologically judged to have done bad things in their previous incarnations... yet now that the years-long winter is ending, even some of those blessed with the sacred Starbridge tattoo are losing their faith...
What makes Park's world creation here and in Soldiers' sequel Sugar Rain (Avon, 1987) truly fabulous is, paradoxi- cally, the way it includes the mundane: people are driving battered trucks, toting bolt-action rifles, hanging out by the railroad yards...smoking reefer. For more such funky strangeness, look no further than the recently reissued Man in the High Castle (Ace, 1962), by alternate- reality maestro Philip K. Dick. The recent prevalence of the (former) Axis powers gives new bite to this classic about a world in which they won WW II, especially that moment when Mr. Tagomi, the Japanese administrator of San Francisco, falls through a hole in the text into our world...which he experiences as a vision from hell from the Tibetan Book of the Dead...a vision which inspires some courageous acts on his part.
Post-industrial Sex & Galactic George Smiley
One reason to read Michael Swanwick's Stations of the Tide (Morrow, 1991) is a theory of why TV will still be addictive even after more powerful media have been invented. Another reason is the planet Miranda's Tidewater region, a Louisiana bayou/New Orleans of the mind...where the genius mindfucker Gregorian is hiding out from his pursuer -- the nameless "Bureaucrat." This off-kilter hero is a kind of galactic George Smiley whose wits have been honed by office politics conducted through the last word in "virtual reality." The Bureaucrat's deadline is strict -- the Tidewater region will shortly be drowned by tidal waves from the melting polar icecaps. He learns finally that the secrets of Order are more bizarre than those of Chaos --and, along the way, gets to sample some pretty hot post-industrial sex.
Which brings us at last to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (Bantam, 1984) by Samuel R. Delany -- if it isn't the most "politically correct" object in the universe, the light from the others hasn't reached us yet. In a galaxy-wide future of many complex human societies linked through an instantaneous communications "Web," even the pronouns "he" and "she" don't mean what they used to; they don't describe a speaker's sex but his or her perceptual stance...I think. Then there's this one planet where "normal" sex is a menage a trois between humans and certain native...creatures. Delany sets not only gender but eroticism at a distance so we experience them not as facts but as creations of imagina- tion. The mental stretch is worth it because it draws us into the suspenseful tale of one "Rat" Korga, the sole surviuvor of an entire world whose atmosphere has been ignited by the aliens known only as Xlv...who don't communi- cate... who have who-knows-what kind of intentions... and who seem to be following Korga around...Delany doesn't play with your head to give you a lecture or even to tell you about the future -- he wants you to be there.