MONDAY MORNING

SOMETHING OF A RANT AND A CHANCE TO WIN FREE BOOKS

Phyllis as a young woman practicing her trademark shit-eating grin

When I was in the book business I loved dealing with Prometheus Books. They were a tiny company the first time we bought overstocks from them, but they were the publishing branch of the secular humanist movement. I guess I should have changed fonts for the last statement. It should be written in the thick, drippy letters used to advertise horror films. Yes, Secular Humanism, the bete noir of the Christian right, the band of radicals, poison dripping from the mouths, determined to make people think rather than blindly follow superstitions ranging from UFO abductions to creationism to the divinity of Christ.
Over the years they developed different imprints, one of which, Pyr, is devoted to science fiction. They even give the Prometheus Award for libertarian science fiction, an award that goes to both current publications and classics as disparate as Atlas Shrugged and Hans Christian Anderson's The Emperor's New Clothes.
Now they intend to infect the minds of American youth with sf aimed at the YA market. This is your chance to win free copies of their first books. Read them now before their presence in school libraries is challenged by some dried-up old bitch like Phyllis Schlafly and her minions of right-thinking Americans.

Wow, I really got into writing this.


Here's the link to the free book contest


Worlds Without End

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE VOL 10 by Hitosi Iwaaki

It's deja vu all over again in Volume 10. 

Volume 9 ended with the death of Reiko Tamura, and we start here with several textless pages of Shin and policemen in the park, exchanging meaningful and enigmatic glances. Then its time for Shin to go back to high school, and for the police to enlist the aid of psycho-killer Urokami in detecting aliens.

There is an elaborate police sting at city hall that has already taken place many volumes back. (I get these from the library, so I don't have back issues handy for fact checking.) It could be with Tokyo Pop taking over publication of the series, they have established a different timeline. And Shin wows his track coach with his parasyte-assisted running abilities, something he has already done many volumes back.

I'm ready for this whole thing to be over.

Gee, he doesn't look dangerous.

MONDAY MORNING

The Grand Masters of Science Fiction: Harry Harrison

I have not chosen well when it comes to my reading of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction. I have searched out early honorees by whom I had previously neither read nor been inclined to read anything. BIg surprise. I haven't much liked anything I've come across. Some of it I have admired and found historically interesting, but nothing have I been crazy about,

And now I've done it again with Harry Harrison. Years of working with used books made me familiar with Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, novels that i knew instinctively I would not find funny. I still have that instinct without ever having so much as opened one of the books, but I think such complete lack of contact with the material gives my opinion a certain purity. Then there was Make Room Make Room, a novel I never read since Charlton Heston had already told me, "Soylent Green is people!"

The Deathworld Trilogy was new to me when I looked into Harrison again. The idea is hard to beat. Here is a planet where every animal, plant. and microbe is out to destroy human life and the gravity is twice that of earth. Humans live there only because mining operations create such enormous wealth that the high mortality rate seems worth it. The novel opens with planet-hopping professional gambler Jason dinAlt receiving an offer he can't refuse. Kerk, resident of Pyrrus aka Deathworld, want dinAlt to turn a 27 million credit bankroll into three billion credits in one night of gambling. He can keep anything over the three billion. Pyrrus needs ships and weapons.

The opening chapters of Deathworld are full of tough talk and action and are really a lot of fun. dinAlt wins the money, the cassino owners want him dead, and he wants to escape with Kerk to get a look at Pyrrus for himself. Why is never really that clear.

Once the action moves to Pyrrus, things slow down. What should be some pretty funny stuff about dinAlt taking survival classes with ten-year-olds before he is allowed outside never realize their comic potential. And dinAlt, for all his wild past and swashbuckling ways, transforms into a one man NGO on Pyrrus, determined to crack the mystery of why everything on the planet is so darn mean. He does so through a series of encounters that are not particularly exciting and completely lacking the comedy of the novel's opening scenes. 

I confess I started the second novel in the trilogy but couldn't face it. It promised to be more of the same.

MONDAY MORNING

PHILIP K. DICKATHON 21: NOW WAIT FOR LAST YEAR

I hate it when this happens. I try out a brand new hallucinogenic drug only to find out that it is addictive after a single use. Then, while suffering withdrawals, I'm offered help only if I agree to spy on my estranged husband who is now special physician to the ailing Sec. Gen of the United Nations Gino Molinari. I take more of the drug to get me through the trip to the White House in Cheyenne, Wyoming, only to find that the drug messes not only with my sense of time but with time itself. I'm  stuck in a cow pasture in a auto-cab in the year 1935. The cab cannot make it to Cheyenne without refueling, and so we have to wait for the effects of the drug to wear off so we will be returned to the mid 21st century where the super-refined protonex that fuels the cab will once again be available. 

Actually that has never happened to me. But it happens to Kathy Sweetscent in Now Wait for Last Year, and true to the spirit of PKD novels this wild scene is barely a sidebar to what -- or whatever -- the book is about. Kathy will make it to Cheyenne, where the time-traveling aspects of the drug JJ-180 will mess with her life and that of her long-suffering, at least in his own mind, husband, Dr. Eric Sweetscent. He has an obese, hypochondriac despot to keep alive while earth is embroiled in a losing war between 'Starmen and reegs. Earth has teamed with the 'Starmen because they are humanoid. The reegs are six-foot tall bugs who must communicate through boxes that resemble training potties. But they are also winning the war. And 'Starmen are infiltrating earth, and Molinari, known affectionately as The Mole, may actually be at death's doorstep, or he might be yet another of the simulacra he has had made of himself, one of which is his young, vibrant leader self while another is a bullet-riddled corpse lying in a glass coffin. 

Molinari is both a buffoon and shrewd politico. His constantly failing body may only be a ruse to get out of awkward meetings with the overbearing Frenesky, leader of the 'Starmen. I pictured him as a character actor whose name I cannot remember, but PKD  thought of him as a combination of Christ, Abraham Lincoln, and Mussolini. (That was an personality triad PKD attributed to several of his favorite characters.)

The plot starts running out of steam towards the end, but there are classic PKD moments of paranoia, intrigue, and absurdity. Now Wait for Last Year has made it into the three volume set of PKD novels distributed by the Library of America, so its reputation must be pretty good.