I Just Published a New Piece on Multiverse, TSR’s Blog!

Back in college, I used to keep a sticky note attached to my laptop titled “Things Chris Mahon Believes In”. In order, they were:

Ursula LeGuin’s “Wizard of Earthsea”
Princess Mononoke
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Milk

The sticky note was there to anchor me, and remind me why I do what I do. I used to read and write a lot about moral philosophy, and a lot of my writing is still informed by that, but day-to-day, I always found myself returning to stories for inspiration and a reason to get out of bed.

Thanks to Outer Places (the sci-fi website where I work), I got to write a piece on my seven favorite sci-fi/fantasy movies and books for TSR’s blog, Multiverse! You can read the article here, but here’s the list:

Wizard of Earthsea
Dune by Frank Herbert
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Princess Mononoke
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L. Howard
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett
End of Evangelion

This list isn’t definitive, but it’s a good chunk of what I love. There’s no H.P. Lovecraft on there (because most of his work is short stories and novellas) or Paranoia Agent or Serial Experiments: Lain (both TV shows), nor is there any manga/graphic novels (Vagabond or Uzumaki or V For Vendetta or Prophecy), and I couldn’t include things like The Seventh Seal or Man of LaMancha because those films aren’t technically fantasy.

Still, it’s a good shortlist and amazingly cool that it’s been published. It’s now “ON THE RECORD.” Woop woop!

September 29, 2016September 28, 2016

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: Ubik by Phillip K. Dick

ubik occult triangle lab chris mahon I first heard about this book when reading through Philip K. Dick’s biography, I Am Alive and You Are Dead, which took its title from one of the more chilling lines in Ubik. It seemed to have everything I could ever want: existential crises, meditations on eternity, entropy, and the human spirit, and a mind-bending journey through an illusory world created in the dying psyches of twelve people.

But Ubik reads more like a rushed draft and a splatter chart than “One of Time’s 100 Best English-language Novels,” as my edition claims. So many different rules and plot strands are set up (including Pat Conley’s time-reversion ability, Runciter’s manifestations, and the eponymous Ubik) that seem to hint at a single, mind-blowing explanation, but everything that is built up falls apart about 50 pages later. The effect isn’t, as The Guardian claims, a “squishy” novel that defies explanation and evokes the malleability of reality; the result is book that fails to function as a story, or even a comment on stories.

The front cover blurb from Rolling Stone sums up the disconnect, I think, between the people who see Ubik as an avant-garde masterpiece and people like me, who think it’s a goddamn mess: Phillip K. Dick is “The most brilliant SF mind on any planet.” It doesn’t say anything about being a good writer or storyteller. Books like Ubik can get away with being absolutely incoherent by claiming to deal with big ideas. For all its foibles and shortcomings, Ubik can still claim that its telling a sci-fi story that deals with telepathy, eternity, reality, and the nature of life and death, counting on the sheer weight of those ideas to make it worthwhile.

This is a tough claim to assault because a lot of really brilliant experiments in literature and art fail. You can argue hypertext fiction and House of Leaves failed at their attempts at revolutionizing the format of the novel, but their attempt inspired other writers and maybe some readers to reassess what a story can do. The ideas and concepts they brought to the table, like non-linearity, ergodic literature, and multi-media storytelling, have value, just as Ubik has value in exploring the concepts of reality, life, and entropy. Some passages really stuck out to me:

“One invisible puff-puff whisk of economically priced Ubik banishes compulsive obsessive fears that the entire world is turning into clotted milk, worn-out tape recorders and obsolete iron-cage elevators, plus other, further, as-yet-unglimpsed manifestations of decay.

This is the same looming horror at entropy that was embodied in “kipple” in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. This passage sums up the apocalyptic, reality-destroying horror that waits for Joe Chip and his friends, evoked in the material decay of everything around them: milk, tape recorders, even elevators.

“But the old theory–didn’t Plato think that something survived the decline, something inner not able to decay? Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says…Because in that case, we all can meet again. In, as in Winnie the Pooh, another part of the forest, where a boy and his bear will always be playing…a category, he though, imperishable. Like all of us. We will all wind up with Pooh, in a clearer, more durable new place.”

This reminds me of the poem Heaven by Patrick Phillips. It’s a surprisingly tender image of an afterlife, apart from all decay and the reality we know. It’s transcendental in the deepest sense of the word.

But none of it counterbalances the seemingly haphazard, half-baked, and frustrating plotting in the book. Good ideas might be able to salvage a badly written book in the eyes of critics and literary theorists, but no amount of avant-garde cred can make Ubik a passable read. The best experimental writers, the ones that deserve the highest praise, learn how to violate the rules of narrative and meaning within their stories and create a piece of fiction that has its own logic and its own intuitive way of reading it, like a dream.

Phillip K. Dick doesn’t accomplish this in Ubik. He sets up a world with a number of rules, but discards them one after another, until he discards everything. So there’s nothing to talk about and nothing to read in Ubik except its profound ideas and its profound failures. There’s no “vivid and continuous dream,” as John Gardner called it. So ironically enough, Ubik, a book about being immersed in a dream world that can’t be distinguished from reality, never tricked me into forgetting, even for a moment, that it was anything more than a bunch of words on a page, written by a man named Philip K. Dick.

September 11, 2016

THE OCCULT READING LIST VOL. 3: Three Body Problem, Language as Magic, and New Retro Wave

This is Vol. 3 of the Occult Reading list, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week.

Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.

Disclaimer: There’s no conspiracy between me and New Retro Wave–I just listen to their songs all the goddamn time. But if they want to talk sponsorship deals, I’m down to sell out and get some of that sweet 80’s merch.

Trevor Something, give me a call. We’ll work something out.

“It’s like people only do things because they get paid. And that’s just really sad.”

THE Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

This is the Hugo Award-winning sci-fi book by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu. It’s garnered some unreal praise, and I finally got around to reading it. So far, I’m 200 pages in and I’m not a fan. Putting aside the difficulties of translation, the plot and pacing are where the book comes up seriously short. So far, the plot has been a very choppy clockwork affair, with the main character essentially shuttling himself from place to place, listening to exposition, then periodically popping in to the VR world of Three Body. Every exposition scene happens almost back-to-back, with Wang Miao acting as a plot-automaton who decides, “hey, let’s give this person a call,” followed immediately by “let’s visit this person,” and then “they told me to visit this person, so let’s go here and speak to this person.” Rather than Jack Bauer in 24, who is propelled from place to place by desperation, gunfire, and a constant stream of new discoveries, the countdown Wang faces doesn’t drive the action, and the only thing Wang needs to do is go to places so people can talk at him. There’s no tension or challenge to ferreting out the information he needs, and the plot comes off as a series of mechanical scenes strung together without much attempt at subtlety or tension. The scene in which Wang discovers the murder of Shen Yufei and listens to the revelations of her husband are the worst perpetrators of this.

On top of the lackluster plotting, the video game world of Three Body ends up being a bizarre, pseudo-metaphorical dream sequence. Unlike Neal Stephenson’s Metaverse in Snow Crash or William Gibson’s Grid in Neuromancer, the rules and logic of the virtual world are opaque and confusing. Characters can randomly speed up the passage of time as it suits them, the logic and mechanics behind player dehydration are completely unexplained (do they go into spectator mode? Log out?), and it’s not even clear if the entities Wang is encountering are NPCs or players. The most baffling question is about advancement: the game revolves around trying to predict the movements of the sun, but a succession of players (if they’re indeed human players) seem to put forth antiquated versions of the solar system. No human player but the protagonist seems to contribute to the game or its advancement but the protagonist, who always arrives at exactly the right time to see the key developments.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but already I’m feeling like The Three Body Problem is going to be a monumental disappointment.

7 Different Ways Fantasy Has Used Language as Magic

This is a nice survey of how different fantasy series have used language as the basis for magic systems (a topic I’ve written about in relation to both binary and poetry). It deals with the big-name franchises, including LoTR and Harry Potter, but also The Spellwright Trilogy and video games like Skyrim and Treasure of the Rudras.

I still remember opening up a book in Morrowind after clearing out a den of necromancers and reading about the Nords shouting down their enemies’ walls with the magic of their voices, and how the most powerful had to be gagged to keep their voices from destroying everything around them. At the time, I thought “They could never turn that into a real magic system. It’s cool flavor, though.”

So it was an awe-inspiring bash to the head to find out that that little, innocuous passage from the early 2000s was kept in mind across the development of Oblivion and brought to glorious fruition in a fully realized magical language and system in Skyrim. Next, I want to see the snake people from that one hidden continent!

No Mother Tongue: Language in the world of Magic

This is a cool little post from V.E. Schwab, author of A Darker Shade of Magic and A Gathering of Shadows, both of which I own (thanks, publishing friends!). Schwab touches on the difficulty of composing languages for a fantasy world, as well as the promise: she explains how the poetry and sound of language can reveal something about the nature of the world and its speakers, and how it can immerse a reader in the world of the story by forcing them “to learn as they go, just as travelers would, when passing through a foreign land.”

Schwab also touches on the dangers of fantasy languages: “Used poorly, fictional languages can feel like a wall, preventing all but the well-versed from feeling included in a world.” I’ve seen this pretty often, and it comes from the tricky management of a learning curve within the narrative, by which a reader learns about the world, the culture, and the events of the book. Introducing too much foreign information leads to alienation and frustration, like a mother spelling out words so she can speak over the head of a toddler. “Don’t you know what a ba’aleth is, reader? No? It’s very important.”

Fuck that noise.

Thoughts on Nomenclature in Fictional Worlds

This is just a couple thoughts from Eric Honour, who has a page on Medium. It’s mostly some criticism on the simplicity and lack of verisimilitude that characterizes language and naming in fantasy. One thing he touches on is how monolithic language and names become when the creator just sits down and pushes two words together like a caveman, like “Iron Walker” or (my personal pet peeve term from Dune) “lasgun”. But one particular insight from Eric struck me:

“This is something that turns me off about a lot of fantasy. It’s also something that I can see is difficult to navigate — having multiple names for things is more realistic, but also can feel like it’s overwhelming the reader. Real-life historical names are full of metonymy and misapplication and the shifting sands of living language, and that’s a level of complexity that might not even be advantageous to a fictional world. But not even making the attempt feels sort of lazy.”

Something that the articles from Tor and V.E. Schwab also touch on is that language shifts and changes to reflect its culture and its world. To create a language, or even naming conventions for armies, you have to think about how words and people use and abuse terminology. A great example is military slang and acronyms like FUBAR, SNAFU, BDU, and MOPP, or the backronyms of gang culture. There’s something more than the denotative meaning of words, a kind of vitality to them, and that’s what a lot of fantasy writers gloss over.

“Just Like You (Hazy Mountains Remix)” by Chromatics

One of my top three favorites from the world of New Retro Wave, Just Like You is one of those haunting love songs that evokes the kind of otherworldly, illusory lover that ELO sang about in Yours Truly, 2095, or even the twisted virtual love in Bad Religion’s I Love My Computer. It’s a song wrapped up in nostalgia and ethereal, lovesick illusions, and the reverb clings to your mind like cobwebs. Most disturbing (or enticing) of all is the idea of a doppleganger, a lover who “looks just like you/he even says the same things/he even wears the same clothes,” who ultimately “loves like you used to.”

“The Glory” by Reapers

The Glory is another of my top three favorites from the good folks over at New Retro Wave (THERE IS NO SPONSORSHIP DEAL), and one of my favorite songs, period. The contrast between the low, dirge-like like chanting and the full-throated, almost plaintive rock-and-roll yelling of the chorus gives the whole song a sense of loss and bitterness. The lyrics, which seem to be an ode to death, end up making it the perfect song for people interested in the dark side of the 80’s.

Like me.

hellraiserbox

August 28, 2016

The Occult Reading List Vol. 2: Quantum Computing, Alchemy, and Cicada 3301

This is Vol. 2 of the Occult Reading list, where I collect all the interesting stories and strange pieces of trivia I’ve picked up over the past week from books, articles, and webpages. Also included are the songs that have been on repeat for me this week.

Guaranteed to make you more interesting at parties.

The Elements of Murder by John EmsLEY

If you look carefully at the entrances to university chemistry buildings, you’ll sometimes see strange symbols above the doors. These are alchemical symbols, and they come from the mystical pursuit of gold, enlightenment, and the secrets of existence. Despite being primarily historical true crime, The Elements of Murder delves into the connection between alchemy and science, showing how mercury, sulfur, and salt became the basis for a tradition of mysticism that transformed into what we call chemistry.

Each chapter is devoted to a different deadly element or poison and collects the most famous cases involving each. My favorite is the story of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China, who died from ingesting copious amounts of mercury, thinking that he had found the elixir of life (Huang’s city-sized mausoleum is the famous one filled with the life-size terra cotta soliders). According to legend, a miniature model of China’s river systems was constructed in the tomb, using mercury instead of water.

An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin By Rohan Kriawaczek

This books is an account of the lost Romantic musical genre called “funerary violin,” practiced in early modern England after the Protestant Reformation. The art was almost wholly improvisational and unwritten, and performed solely at funerals for the family of the deceased. According to the author, funerary violin was almost totally wiped out by the Church, which wanted sole influence over matters of life and death. Banned as heretics and struck from the records, their names, compositions, and guild fell from public eye, though famous composers of the day liberally borrowed (or even plagiarized) their sorrowful melodies. The author tries to reconstruct the lives and music of these violinists in order to keep the tradition alive. Only one problem:

The whole thing is a hoax.

There was never a musical tradition called funerary violin, and the Guild and names the author lists are all fictional. The New York Times ran a great piece on how the whole thing turned out to be a fraud, despite being “a sprawling 208-page volume complete with detailed biographies, black-and-white photographs and elaborate musical scores.”

The Revolutionary Computer That Might Not Be Quantum At All, Wired Magazine

I read this article in Wired Magazine back in 2014, but now that China has launched a satellite into orbit with the goal of uncrackable quantum communication, I went back and re-read it. It’s still a fascinating piece, partly because it explains (at least superficially) how quantum physics is meant to work. But most fascinating of all were the two central problems of the quantum computer featured in the article (called D-Wave).

First, the insane physical conditions that must be met to enable quantum computing: temperatures “1500 times colder than the depths of space,” insulation from all interference, including light and air molecules, and a chip made from tiny niobium loops. I’ve spoken in the past about how the tiny chaotic elements can result in imperfections in origami, and that no matter how good you get, there’s always a margin of error. In the case of the D-Wave, conditions must be perfect in order for quantum computing to work. This is where the practical, physical world meets the absolute, ideal world of physics and mathematics, and the boundary is fascinating to me.

Second is the whole idea of the qubit, the basic unit of quantum computing. Instead of a regular bit, which is either 0 or 1, a qubit can attain a state called “superposition,” something that is both a 0 and a 1. This goes back to my piece on using binary as magic and Leibniz’s fascination with the I-Ching: if the world is just a series of 1’s and 0’s, a whole system could be construed to express the world using just logic. And we did: computers. But now that superposition has been shown to be real, all of that is obsolete. In fact, the world starts to look more like the philosophy described by Zen, which attempts to transcend dualism by finding “the higher third,” which transcends dualism.

The Beatles Acid Test: How LSD Opened the Door to Revolver, Rolling Stone Magazine

This was a great article in Rolling Stone about how LSD led directly to the Beatles’ creation of Revolver, one of their most experimental albums. It describes how the drugs got George Harrison and John Lennon interested in Hinduism, which led them to read The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert. The ideas from that book were expressed in Tomorrow Never Knows, which was meant to be a sonic representation of an acid trip.

The Bardo Thodol (the Tibetan Book of the Dead) has been a long-time fascination of mine, so it was cool to see how it tied in with drugs, the counterculture, and this unique music that ended up breaking a lot of barriers.

Cicada 3301

cicada 3301 occult triangle lab chris mahon Cicada 3301 is my new obsession. Combining cryptography, anonymity, and strange ARG puzzles with mysticism and occult trappings, these bastards are probably the real-life Knights of the Eastern Calculus. I haven’t read too deeply yet, but once I do I’ll write a post just about them. If you’re not familiar with the work I did on The Rats in the Walls ARG, you should check that out here.

Here are the Cicada’s webpages:

Wikipedia Page

Homepage

Liber Primus

By this River by Yoshida Brothers

There are a couple guys in the New York Subway system that play shamisen on the platforms, especially Union Square and Canal Street. They’re all very old Asian guys, and they sing very sorrowfully. This song has a different kind of melancholy to it, one that’s soaked in nostalgia. It’s a beautiful piece, and the vocalizations are so haunting.

Eclipse by Perturbator

Besides being one of my favorite musical artists, Perturbator has an aesthetic that hits all my favorite shit: cyberpunk, horror, the occult, and sweet, sweet retro 80’s visuals . One of my favorite songs of his is Eclipse, partly for this monologue at the end:

“We live in a era where our cities are armed with steel and concrete. Computers and electronics barricade our minds. It doesn’t change the fact that there exists a lot of strange phenomena, bizarre beyond reason or logic. Most folks just don’t see them. That’s because we cling to order, to any tiny happiness that comes our way, and we bust our humps to blind ourselves with our desires and our pleasures. There’s a world of darkness out there. Beyond time or space. A world filled with evil that is undeniably real, and in that world there are things that run wild.”

This is essentially H.P. Lovecraft’s thesis in “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” updated for the modern era and delivered in a voice like Rod Serling’s. Tenouttaten.

August 14, 2016

The Occult Reading List: Zen, Martial Arts, Annie Lennox, and Tickets to the Moon

I have a bad habit of reading, listening, and watching too many things at once, and at the end of every week I end up with a new list of fascinating things to check out. I thought it would be fun to share some of the stuff I’ve read and listened to in the past week, including some of the books and articles I’ve come across. I’ve also included the songs that have been on repeat in my head.

Reading this list is guaranteed to make you fun at parties.

Books

zen buddhism d.t. suzuki occult triangle lab NON-FICTION: Zen Buddhism, Selected Writing of D.T. Suzuki, Edited by William Barrett

An interesting look at Zen Buddhism by one of the foremost writers and translators on the topic. So far, the introduction has drawn connections between Zen and Kierkegaard’s Knight of Infinite Resignation, which is really interesting. It’s also got some fun stories about Bodidharma, the founder of Chinese Buddhism, and his shenanigans. I spoke a bit about Bodidharma before, in my post about Terry Pratchett’s Rule One.

burglars guide to the city occult triangle lab NON-FICTION: A Burglar’s Guide to The City, by Geoff Manaugh

This book started out with an interesting premise: burglars, by their nature, have an arcane knowledge and a unique mastery of their surroundings. With this knowledge, they can pull off seemingly impossible, or even supernatural, feats. Liminality is a key idea in this book, which mirrors a lot of studies in magic and the occult. However, like a lot of non-fiction topics written by academics, it ends up losing track of its thesis and instead indulges in whatever the author finds kind of neat. DNF

FICTION: Clarkesworld Year Six Anthology, Clarkesworld Magazine

Clarkesworld Magazine, one of my top three favorite short fiction markets. These are the same folks that published both my essays on fantasy (you can read them here and here). I just started reading their Year Six anthology, and I’m excited to see what kind of insane stuff they’ve got in store. I also sponsor these guys on Patreon, along with Menton3. JOIN THE CULT.

opus satoshi kon occult triangle lab MANGA: Opus, Satoshi Kon

Despite the most disappointing ending of all time, I highly recommend OPUS by Satoshi Kon. It’s the INCEPTION of manga, with a manga artist, Chikara, getting pulled into his own manga, called Resonance. He meets his own main character, Satoko, and ends up breaking the news that her whole life is a manga, and he’s essentially God. At the heart of the meta-story is the quest to resolve the ending of the manga, which is yet unwritten. It’s a great piece of metafiction, and it pulled at my goddamn heartstrings more than I expected.

Articles and webpages:

Wikipedia: Bagua
The heart of the I-Ching, the same book of Chinese divination that fascinated Phillip K. Dick, is the bagua, or trigram. There are eight trigrams: earth, water, fire, water, thunder, mountain, lake, sky. Combined into 64 pairs, the I-Ching uses them to supposedly provide a map to all creation. In fact, Leibniz, the famous mathematician, thought the I-Ching’s use of binaries in the trigrams (each bagua is made of three broken or unbroken lines) could provide a way to express everything. And he was right: binary became the basis of all computing, with 1’s and 0’s expressing things as insanely complicated as weather patterns or the show Neon Genesis Evangelion. You can read my article about using binary in magic systems here.

The Five Animals in Martial Arts

I’m trying to figure out the basis of a system of magic that would use movement, rather than written symbols or spoken words, as its main component. Sort of like interpretive dance, or the bending in Avatar: The Last Airbender. The Five Animals is what I’m turning to for inspiration, as well as the Shaolin Luohan martial arts.

luohan shaolin fist occult triangle lab Luohan (Martial Arts)

This is just really fucking cool: a martial arts discipline given by the aforementioned Zen founder, Bodidharma, to the legendary Shaolin monks. The Luohan forms would become the basis for all Shaolin martial arts, and have strong connections to Buddhism and enlightenment–the 18 skills are called the “arhat skills,” with “arhat” being the name for an enlightened person.

Songs:

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Annie Lennox

This is a beautiful, melancholy song. I came across it when I was reading V FOR VENDETTA: during one of the last chapters, when V is giving Evey a final tour of the Shadow Gallery just before his death, Evey plays a couple notes on the piano in the piano room, saying”‘How strange the change…from ma-jor to mi-nor’….no, I still can’t get that part right.” I finally googled those lyrics and found that they came from this song, which is fitting since the whole sequence in the book is essentially an extended goodbye from V.

Ticket to the Moon by ELO

This is another melancholy song. I came across it after listening for “Yours Truly, 2097”, also by ELO. I had an especially weird moment of synchronicity while walking to work one day–I was listening to this song when I came across a piece of graffiti on the sidewalk, saying “TO THE MOON.” This guy is a graffiti artist who tags in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I’d see the tag before, but it was surreal to hear the song and see the marker pointing down the sidewalk. Even more surreal is that the phrase may be a reference to a famous Zen teaching, expressed below pretty succinctly in the picture below (right).

graffiti moon occult triangle lab
graffiti occult triangle lab moon

What is Real by Trevor Something

I love Trevor Something. I have two of his albums, including TREVOR SOMETHING DOES NOT EXIST, which has this song as its last track. The song opens with a piece of dialogue from the 1974 comic sci-fi film, DARK STAR: a scientist is speaking to a sentient bomb about the question of “what is real,” which culminates in the problem of the intellect and Cartesian doubt. Sprinkled in are quotes from The Matrix (“What is real? How do you define real?” etc.), which is actually just a verbatim quote of Alan Watts, the lecturer on Zen Buddhism, and haunting last piece of dialogue from the bomb in which it quotes Genesis. All of this is sandwiched in some really amazing 80’s synths.

July 17, 2016July 17, 2016

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: I Am Alive and You Are Dead by Emmanuel Carrere

occult-triangle-lab-chris-mahon-fantasy-sci-fi-philip-k-dick-review This past week I finished I Am Alive and You Are Dead, a biography of Philip K. Dick, the author of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (the inspiration for Blade Runner) and The Man in the High Castle. Dick won the Hugo Award in 1963, and ended up being the namesake of his own sci-fi award. I’d read Do Androids years ago, and it’s one of the few sci-fi novels whose ending made me cry.

With Dick’s reputation, I expected a biography soaked in the zeitgeist of the 60’s, with all the drugs, revolutionary fervor, and avant-garde intellectual chops that characterized Hunter S. Thompson, Timothy Leary, and the rest. Dick is part of the sci-fi canon, and canonical authors exist in a special limbo between our world and the Great Conversation of literature. So I expected a bloodless account of the ideas and influences of a great man.

But the book is not that.

The closest thing I can compare I Am Alive and You Are Dead to is a “walk-in,” where you are a co-inhabitant of Philip K. Dick’s mind. And the mind of Philip K. Dick is an existential and epistemological nightmare, a turbulent, labyrinthine house of mirrors where nothing is real. The most terrifying thing is that, as the book goes on, you learn that this is Dick’s normal operating procedure, from cradle to grave.

Madman or Mystic?

There have been all kinds of articles about Dick’s madness and eccentricities, hailing him as a mad mystic and visionary (including the recent follow-up article in PW for Kyle Arnold’s new 2016 biography), but the image of Dick portrayed in I Am Alive is perhaps closer to the human who lived and wrote and not the legend he became. It lays bear his self-indulgences, his immaturity, and his toxic string of relationships, where the casualties of his lust and boredom were often young women and his own children.

And as the book illustrates, Dick’s forays into “madness” and mysticism were always self-aware and self-reflexive–as he was experiencing hallucinations or alleged religious epiphanies, he was inspecting and analyzing them as someone who is aware that they might be products of chemicals or his own biases. No one was more skeptical of Dick’s legend and genius than Dick himself. While looking back on “Faith of Our Fathers,” his contribution to the self-professed cutting edge sci-fi anthology assembled by Harlan Ellison, Carrere describes his reaction as follows:

“‘Faith of Our Fathers’ is a horrific tale. While writing it, Phil felt a surge of pride. Reading it a year later, after the deaths of Jim Pike Jr. and Maren, he saw it differently. It was still horrific, but in a new and even more distressing way. All his tricks and hobbyhorses were on display: totalitarianism, the idios kosmo and the koinos kosmos, psychedelic drugs, Ultimate Reality, God. Here was the little world of Phillip K. Dick in one package.”

Dick was plagued with such Cartesian doubt that one of his chief anxieties was that he was not himself, but rather a doppleganger or someone who had replaced the real Dick, complete with false memories like Rachael in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Nothing was as it seemed. The Ultimate Reality, Dick’s ultimate object of contemplation, was always behind another layer of illusions, and there was no way to ever know if he had found it. For anyone else, these kinds of purely philosophical problems would be navel-gazing, something to ponder for an hour while looking out a window and then put aside to get down to the business to living. But according to Carrere, matters of reality, metaphysics, and perception were the operating questions of Phil’s life, forming the lens through which he viewed every aspect of his day-to-day life.

So you can see where the dueling claims of mystic and madman come from. But in truth (at least according to the book), both were stage roles that Dick played for the benefit of his observers, his ego, and his career. The “real” Dick, if there ever was such a thing, never found the inner tranquility or blissful ignorance that insanity or religious experience supposedly granted. He never transcended anything, never settled any of the questions that haunted him, and at the end of his life he realized that maybe all of his questioning and searching had led to less than nothing. Carrere characterizes Phil’s thoughts while working on one of his last projects:

“There’s nothing more pathetic than the mistrust of immediate reality by people who never stop splitting hairs over Ultimate Reality. They always think they’re getting to the bottom of things, whose surfaces they turn away from as unworthy of their attention; they end up never knowing the flesh of the world, the softness and resistance it offers to the touch. They manage to bypass their own lives.“

The dialectic conversation between Phil and his own alter ego, Horselover Fat, provides an even more (to me) horrifying image of Phil’s life: solipsism.

“Since the day you were born you’ve been confined to the labyrinth of your brain. What you’re hearing now, all you’ve ever heard, and you’ll ever hear are the magnetic tapes of your own voice being played back to you in closed-circuit transmission. Don’t kid yourself: that is exactly what you are hearing at this very moment. It’s your own voice that’s telling you this. You sometimes let yourself be fooled by it, because the voice wouldn’t have been able to stand itself all these years without learning how to fake other voices, to echo them, to ventriloquize so that you think you’re speaking with other people. The truth is that you’re alone in there, just as Palmer Eldritch is alone in the world that he has emptied of its substance whose inhabitants all bear his stigmata.”

Someone (including Kyle Arnold) might be tempted to sort through Phil’s chaotic, ouroboros-like life and attempt to relegate everything to symptoms. Dick was suffering from schizophrenia, Dick was suffering from anxiety, Dick was suffering from paranoia. From an early age he met with a psychiatrist regularly (I believe it was weekly), and one of the key drivers of his fiction was the abuse of prescription drugs. He experienced hallucinations and amnesia. All of the symptoms of any number of diagnoses are there.

But the key question for me is this: if Dick was mentally ill, where was the line between himself and his disease? Did his schizophrenia give birth to his fascination with the ideas of idios kosmos and koinos kosmos (the difference between personal reality and shared reality, which Phil delineates in stories like Time Out of Joint)? Did his paranoia cause his obsession with ultimate reality and truth? Was mental illness the unconscious wellspring for Philip K. Dick’s stories and the source of his unhappiness, or was it his own thinking? I don’t know. It’s a Phildickian question. Maybe that’s the ‘genius’ of it all, the kernel at the heart of what makes him such an interesting person to read about: the most important questions about PKD’s nature are the ones he helped to define. Selfhood, simulacra, reality, truth…it reminds me of a quote from another android: “Who are you? Who slips into my robot body and whispers to my ghost?”

I recommend I Am Alive And You Are Dead. I don’t know if it’s the truth, or even the seminal portrait of Phillip K. Dick and his writing, but I think it’s worth reading as a cautionary tale for writers who romanticize the hermit-genius and the madman, and as a window into one of the most interesting, infuriating minds in sci-fi.

January 25, 2016March 13, 2016

Ergodica: House of Leaves, Puzzle Boxes, and Experimental Literature

When I first heard about House of Leaves, I was excited. People told me it was maddening, mind-bending, the kind of thing meant to unhinge you from reality, using everything from metanarratives to typography to convey the insanity of its eponymous house. The book was meant to be a labyrinthine book about labyrinths, a story whose format was part of the narrative. That idea, that the form of a story could be part of the story, a kind of origami flower that opened as you read it, opened up new horizons in my imagination.

Then I sat down and read House of Leaves.

I couldn’t finish it. There was typographical trickery galore and some really tremendous pieces of metanarrative, but Johnny Truant’s invasive footnotes, evocative of someone else’s mind invading the story, had no substance to them, nothing that fit together with the dry scholarly passages about the Navidson Record and the drama of the expeditions into the heart of the house. And that’s my main critique of most of the book: these fantastic, inventive typographical tricks didn’t come together as a cohesive whole to evoke the story it was telling. Instead, it ended up as mostly white noise, a bunch of jigsaw pieces glued onto a very compelling nucleus, the house, whose borders and boundaries can’t be contained in space, time, or (potentially) the book itself.

In the end, what made me put down the book was sheer disinterest. It hurts the narrative flow to include the kind of ergodic lit puzzles that House of Leaves throws out: reading upside-down and slantways, combing through footnotes and inlaid text boxes, reading pages with only one word on them, following margin-notes (ala Ship of Theseus). But I would gladly read a book that uses all the same tricks as long as I felt like it was all adding up to something. I didn’t give a fuck about Johnny Truant and his drug-fueled casual sex episodes. About halfway through the book, I realized that all these strands were a mess, not a tapestry, and it sucked my resolve to keep navigating all the puzzles.

A good counterexample of a piece of experimental literature that did its job well is Trillium, the graphic novel with Jeff Lemire. It takes a lot of skill to make a reader just flip a book upside down, but Trillium gave an amazing narrative reason to do just that: at one point in the book, the narrative splits into two parallel universes, and so the panels are actually running parallel to one another, but flipped so you don’t read both timelines at once. This makes you focus on one at a time while also getting little peripheral glimpses of what’s to come. It’s genius, and it works because it’s coherent, intuitive to navigate, and grounded in the narrative. You know why it’s happening, how to read it, and what it means for the story.

House of Leaves may read like Harry Plinkett’s jigsaw puzzle challenge, but it still did something original and tremendously thought-provoking by giving an idea of what ergodic literature could do and be. The very idea of it inspires me, and despite the frustrations and disillusionment, I wanted to do something like it. But there were three things to keep in mind if I was going to fool around with ergodic literature:

The structure and format of the story would have to be grounded in the story
The way the reader navigates or decodes the text would have to be intuitive and immersive, meaning that it was easy to grasp and brought people deeper into the story
The structure and format needed to have a good flow, making it easy to jump in and out of

I came up with the idea of a “corpse” book, a story that was physically split into six separate books, like a torso with the limbs severed off. It would be, in practice, a constellation of short stories that illuminate a central novel, all united by invisible threads. You would start with all of the books, beginning by reading the central book, the torso, but periodically follow the narrative into one of the other limb books, then return. Each of the limbs would shed more light on the central book, but would be its own contained story and narrative.

The idea? Create a story about immortality, truth, and godhood whose structure and interconnections would mirror the Kabbalah Tree of Life and the Sephiroth, and whose story has to be unlocked like Hellraiser’s puzzle box, one piece at a time.

occult triangle lab sketches — Corpse book: central book in center, limb books in periphery

To be continued…

December 13, 2015

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Let me put something in perspective.

If you read Neuromancer, you remember the surreal paradise of Straylight, the space station Case and the crew travel to. You remember McCoy Pauley, the “Flatline,” his accent, and his bizarre dead man’s laugh. You remember the sequence when Case jacks into the matrix to take on the T.A. AI. And if you’re like me, you remember the last line, “He never saw Molly again.”

The entire story of Neuromancer took place in 270 pages. All of its minutely detailed worldbuilding, its revelations about Riviera and Wintermute, and Case’s struggles to get over Linda Lee are encapsulated in those 270 pages.

Page 270 is where I stopped reading The Eye of the World from sheer disinterest. There were no characters I cared about, no aspects of the world that captured my imagination, and nothing in the plot that made me keep turning pages. In the space of 270 pages, the same length that entire masterpieces of fantasy/sci-fi have been written, nothing of substance had even appeared to give me a reason to finish the book.

Let’s go deeper here.

Wizard of Earthsea. If you read the first book in the Earthsea series, you know Ged becomes Ogion’s apprentice, travels to Roke, stays a year in Kurremkarmerruk’s tower learning runes, builds a rivalry with Jasper, unleashes a gebbeth on the world, fights a clan of dragons to a stand-still, finds the Ring of Erreth Akbe on an abandoned sandbar, and travels to the end of the world to confront his own death in 183 pages.

The Fellowship of the Ring. By page 200 in The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and his friends have already made it through the Old Forest, the Barrow-Downs, and the encounter with the Ringwraith on the road. They’ve encountered Elves on their travels, watched Bilbo disappear, and Frodo has learned about the diabolical nature of the Ring and the stakes of destroying it.

In 270 pages or less, each of these stories accomplished what Eye of the World did not: present an engaging cast of characters, the beginnings of an interesting, well-paced plot, and a reason to care about any of it. You could say everyone’s tastes are different, and that if I didn’t like it, that has everything to do with me and little to do with the story. As a writer, I disagree.

To borrow from Harry Plinkett’s Star Wars prequel reviews, a litmus test that every character in fiction should be able to pass is to have someone describe them without explaining their appearance, their job, or role in the plot of the story. What’s their personality, their character? What do they want, and what drives them as a person? Taking a step beyond that, are the character’s desires or goals driving the story and their actions in it? What will they get at the end of it all, what’s their “payoff”? All of these are roundabout ways of saying “Why should I care about this story and what happens in it?”

I couldn’t answer any of these questions about the characters or the plot of The Eye of the World because, as in most D&D campaigns, the story lurches forward because The Plot requires it to. This isn’t a story about people struggling for something, this is a puppet show. Set on a pair of rails, the characters have to play along with no agency and no motivation beyond staying alive, nothing personal at stake.

I’ll make a note here about Egwene, who develops the desire to become an Aes Sedai after Moraine reveals her ability to channel. Egwene has a personal stake in getting to Tar Valon: she wants to become special and learn the extent of her abilities. But Egwene’s presence on the journey to Tar Valon is so incidental, so badly rationalized as “a part of the Pattern,” that it renders her whole role in the plot moot.

But what frustrates me almost as much as the characters and plot is the insistence on the part of fans that The Eye of the World represents good, even great worldbuilding. As I’ve said before, good worldbuilding has very little to do with depth or complexity and everything to do with how it immerses readers in the story at hand. Looking at H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the overwhelming detail of the expedition’s gear and supplies ends up grounding you a scientific mindset that makes everything afterward, from the frozen city to the ice to the shoggoths, all the more credulous and frightening. Instead, The Eye of the World alternates between spending page after page describing mind-numbing, mundane medieval farming life and reeling off long expositions about this world’s history and lore, the most egregious example being Moraine’s recounting of the heritage of Edmond’s Field. There is nothing immediate and applicable about these details, like Neuromancer’s complex descriptions of the technology Case is using, and nothing vivid and interesting that reminds me I’m in a fantasy world, like Case’s wanderings through Night City.

Someone might argue that Jordan’s writing, the prose of the book, is what makes everything hang together. I read 1100 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon almost on the strength of the writing alone. If anyone sits down and compares the writing in Eye of the World to a random chapter in Cryptonomicon (even the one with the Captain Crunch), the difference in sheer vividness will be immediately clear.

So, to sum it all up: I don’t think The Eye of the World is a good fantasy book. I don’t think it represents what fantasy should be, or what a book should do. If it can’t give me one good reason to keep reading it in the span of pages that other books have told entire stories, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not a good book overall.

[Stands up, pushes chair back]

I’m going to go back to my triangles now. Let me know what you think below in the comments.

December 5, 2015

The Occult Triangle Lab Review: Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Nobody needs me to say that Cryptonomicon is relentlessly witty, written with wonderful, vivid prose, immersed in layers of fascinating concepts and technology, and absolutely vertigo-inducing in scope. These are all the elements that kept me coming back, despite the book having a page count higher than War and Peace. I just wish that there had been a plot to hold all of it up and make it into a coherent story, rather than a series of interesting digressions.

60% of the way through the book, I found myself aggressively skimming chapters, looking for keywords: The Crypt, Arethusa, Waterhouse, The Dentist, Root, Wing, anything that signaled that something significant was happening. But the book is directionless in the most essential way, with all of the beautifully rendered subplots either tapering off or limply hanging together on a single nail, which ends up being the cache of gold. Bobby Shaftoe is a notable exception here, but his death just begs the question: what does all this add up to? How do all these characters, all these lives, all these small stories, add up to something significant? And the answer ends up being a shrug.

So the loving detail given to elements like Ordo and Pontifex ends up feeling like indulgence. I put a lot of thought into the mechanics and minutiae behind the magic systems and worlds in my stories—I wrote an entire article on this blog about data compression, binary code, and metaphysics to help flesh out the idea of “true names” when used in magic, so I’m familiar with the thrill of discovering the depths of nerdy esoterica. But at the end of every one of those esoterica-based articles, I feel compelled to write a disclaimer: this is not what makes a story good. Well-written characters, emotional stakes, and strong plotting make a story good.

Compare that to Cryptonomicon, where there’s an appendix that explains the modulo 26 Pontifex encoding system in detail. It’s a story element whose only function was to confirm what Randy already knew: that his computer was under surveillance. But damn it if we don’t follow Randy’s entire decoding process, and then get a special primer at the end of the book on how it’s the coolest, most practical way anyone can encode messages with a deck of cards. This is what frustrates me most about Cryptonomicon.

But I’ll say this again: I wish I could write half as well as Neal Stephenson. Every sentence has something to admire, respect, even drool over. The dialogue is fantastic, and the characterization is vivid enough for me to write psych evaluations and Christmas lists for the characters. But when it comes to a final judgment on Cryptonomicon, as a story, I just have to shrug.

RATING: 66.66666/100.00