Another week, another set of reviews. Remember to check out my archived book reviews here. If you’ve written and published a book and would like me to review it, shoot me an email. Assuming I didn’t already buy your book in a bibliophilic fit and haven’t reviewed it yet because I’m a lazy ass, I’ll happily take a review copy in PDF or another Kindle-friendly e-format (if you send me a dead tree copy, your chances of seeing a timely review drop exponentially unless your book has lots of pretty pictures).
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Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
The sad thing about true geniuses in the literary/art world is that their genius usually isn’t recognized until after they’re dead or otherwise unable to turn a profit on it. Philip K. Dick is the poster boy for this sort of thing, as he labored most of his life in utter poverty and died in his early fifties just months before the first film adapted from his work (Blade Runner) was released to theaters. Now nearly three decades later, Hollywood is rushing to adapt every goddamn thing he ever wrote into a movie – Total Recall, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau, the list goes on. Not to mention all the other films that were inspired by Dick either directly or indirectly (Vanilla Sky, The Matrix, Inception etc.)
Most genre fiction is trash, and the nerd-dominated genres of science fiction and fantasy are the worst of all. The basis of all entertaining fiction is writing what you know and making sure what you know is interesting. The nerds who dominate sci-fi can’t produce anything but garbage because they don’t grasp this, substituting character development and plot for masturbatory exposition and futuristic gimmickry pulled out of their asses. There’s no verisimilitude or ethos, which is why most nerd fiction rings hollow. For instance, I can’t think of a single memorable novel or character by Asimov, Heinlein, or Herbert that stuck with me after I read the last page, and years afterwards, everything those tedious, overpraised failures wrote has slipped down the memory hole for good.
Dick sticks with me. Philip K. Dick stands alone among sci-fi writers as being worth reading, because he doesn’t use sci-fi elements to prop up bad storytelling – he doesn’t need to. His stories and characters stand on their own as being poignant and memorable. Dick’s milieu was the rapidly-changing social landscape of mid-century California, caught between the free-love hippies on the coast and the hateful, miserable Calvinists in the suburbs, Nixon’s “silent majority.” His writing is rooted in this conflict, along with his understanding of the nature of reality and his drug use, with the science fiction element nothing but glorified drapery. Dick saw modern Calvinist CONservatism in its larval stages – its fixation on “law and order,” its willful ignorance, its hatred of beauty and glorification of ugliness – and feared it.
Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is one of his finest works in this vein, and one of my favorite novels. The setting is pure Dick – a futuristic police state America that is slowly liberalizing. Think the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Radical college students are condemned to live in poverty in collective camps. Blacks have been given a ridiculous amount of social status after a eugenics program designed to ethnically cleanse them was reversed; early on, while driving through Los Angeles, a hotel clerk muses about how he would get the death penalty if he ran a black person over:
“They’re like the last flock of whooping cranes,” the clerk said, starting forward now that the old black had reached the far side. “Protected by a thousand laws. You can’t jeer at them; you can’t get into a fistfight with one without risking a felony rap – ten years in prison. Yet we’re making them die out – that’s what Tidman wanted and I guess what the majority of Silencers wanted, but” – he gestured, for the first time taking a hand off the wheel – “I miss the kids. I remember when I was ten and I had a black boy to play with…not far from here as a matter of fact. He’s undoubtedly sterilized by now.”
“But then he’s had one child,” Jason pointed out. “His wife had to surrender their birth coupon when their first and only child came…but they’ve got that child. The law lets them have it. And there’re a million statutes protecting their safety.”
“Two adults, one child,” the clerk said. “So the black population is halved every generation. Ingenious. You have to hand it to Tidman; he solved the race problem, all right.”
Our hero is Jason Taverner, a popular TV talk show host who, after surviving a murder attempt by his mistress, wakes up in a run-down hotel to discover that all evidence of his existence has been wiped from the Earth. His IDs are gone, his friends don’t recognize him, and his name is nowhere to be found in the government’s databases. And in a world where you’re asked “Papers, please,” every other mile, being a nonperson is a one-way trip to the gulag.
On the run from the law, Taverner hooks up with Kathy, an ID forger and police informer with a batshit crazy streak. In the process, he catches the eye of LAPD chief Felix Buckman; thinking that Taverner is some kind of high-level government agent, Buckman has the police track him down. Taverner himself flees to Las Vegas to hide out with Ruth Rae, an Elizabeth Taylor-esque has-been actress with fifty ex-husbands. Cornered by the cops, Taverner is taken back to L.A. to be interrogated by Buckman and subsequently falls under the wing of his sister Alys, a slutty, drug using bisexual who has an incestuous relationship with her brother. Alys also happens to be the only person in the world who knows who Jason Taverner is.
Flow My Tears is one hell of a riveting book, but there’s one chapter that particularly resonated with me, the chapter that most clearly elucidates Dick’s anti-Calvinist sentiments. Near the midway point of the novel, police are ransacking Ruth Rae’s apartment building looking for Taverner when they come across a Mr. Mufi, a fat, pathetic slob with a predilection for pubescent boys. While preparing to cuff him, the corporal on duty discovers that Mufi’s paramour is thirteen years old, and that as part of a campaign to take all victimless crimes off the books, the age of consent has been lowered to twelve. Frustrated that they can’t legally charge him with anything, the police leave the cowardly bastard with this:
“I hope,” the corporal said, “that someday you do commit a statute violation of some kind, and they haul you in, and I’m on duty the day it happens. So I can book you personally.” He hawked, then spat on Mr. Mufi. Spat into his hairy, empty face.
If that paragraph doesn’t sum up mainstream Calvinist CONservatism – unknowing, unthinking, with no higher principles than the desire to be the topper in the cell block of American society, getting off on raping the already weak and despised – I don’t know what does. Dick even makes it clear who he’s talking about when he describes the carpet in Mr. Mufi’s living room as “depict[ing] in gold Richard M. Nixon’s final ascent into heaven amid joyous singing above and wails of misery below.”
If there’s one criticism I’d level at Flow My Tears, the narrative sort-of disintegrates in the final third. The ultimate plot twist is relatively weak by Dickian standards, and the action doesn’t really build to a climax, instead plodding along to its conclusion. The book also never explains the backstory of Felix and Alys’ relationship – they have a son, Barney, who apparently grows up to be a normal man, not suffering the physical and mental retardation you’d expect the child of siblings to have. It’s not important to the story, but I found it a bit odd. Still, I’d recommend Flow My Tears as a great introduction to the only good science fiction writer of the past century.
Click here to buy Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.
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No Man’s Land by Jack Donovan
This one’s a little different – Jack has released this compact little book for free on his website, but he’s politely requested donations for the hard work he put into it. A brief (less than 40 pages) meditation on modern masculinity, No Man’s Land is a nice introduction to manosphere and anti-feminist thought, short enough to knock off while you’re waiting at the dentist’s. And did I mention that it’s FREE?
No Man’s Land consists of three chapters, the first two taking a sledgehammer to the various “man up” arguments coming from femiservatives like Kay Hymowitz, Bill Bennett and Michael Kimmel, among other things. With unpretentious and powerful language, Donovan exposes the emptiness of their message; the Hymowitzes and Kimmels of the world want men to assume their traditional gender roles while letting women take on whatever role they want:
The patriarchal kinship system that demanded paternal investment was dismantled by feminists, technology and the legal system. It was replaced with a system that gave women control over virtually all aspects of reproduction, and where a woman could rest assured that the state would step in and provide for her children in the absence of a husband or father. Divorce, most often initiated by women, offered a way for women to seize control of their families at-will, even when a man had chosen to make a paternal investment. Men had become peripheral players in the lives of their offspring, and they could be cut from the team by coach mom at any time. The managing bureaucrat would then determine what role the father would have in his children’s lives—at best he might be offered a co-parenting role, at worst he could be reduced to a mere paycheck.
America may not yet be a matriarchy, but her family structure has become matrilineal, or at least matrifocal. The practice of giving a child his or her father’s surname is a vestigial gesture, an outdated social norm from an earlier time. If women were to stop doing it altogether, or if they were to insist that their names come first in a mother-hyphen-father configuration, any enduring illusion of patriarchy would be shattered. One has to wonder if, in the absence of that illusion, men would invest in fatherhood at all. The switch to a bonobo culture—where males are mere inseminators and helpers—would at that point be explicit and complete. Why wouldn’t men simply shuffle about alone or in small, impotent groups, playing games and seeking masturbatory short-term gratification? Why would they make the investment or the sacrifices necessary to be good husbands and fathers, when a woman could take it all away on a whim?
None of the scolds have managed to come up with a plan for getting young “guys” to stop drinking, hooking up or playing video games, and start families instead. All they’ve managed to do in exhorting men to “man up” is invoke the “musty script” of a patriarchal system that no longer exists.
The final chapter, “Misrepresenting Masculinity,” deconstructs the attempts of male feminists like Robert Brannon to redefine and muddy the concept of manliness. Buttressing Jack’s arguments are a mountain of citations, providing a great jumping-off point for those writing about feminism or masculinity. In a thoughtful touch, the PDF and Kindle versions of the book are organized differently, with the citations organized as footnotes in the PDF version and as endnotes in the Kindle one.
No Man’s Land could have used tighter editing – for example, Jack misspells “Michael” so many times I started to feel like the annoying pedants who come out of the woodwork every time I use the word “irregardless.” But still, you can’t argue with FREE, so get over to his website and get this book now.
Click here to download No Man’s Land, and don’t forget to kick Jack a few bucks via the PayPal button in the site’s sidebar.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ll check out both. Good reviews.
Yeah, me too.
I’d put The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and about a dozen other Dick books before Flow My Tears.
I’ll give you Asimov and Heinlein, but Herbert has some very memorable Characters.
Good review work. I’ll contest Heinlein, he can’t create characters worth squat, especially his women, all of whom are basically his wife Ginny, but he could write entertaining fiction.
I’m a sci-fi buff, and I love Philip K. Dick stories (I have several collections of them, as well as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), and all the movie adaptations of them I’ve seen, but it must be admitted, they’re as formulaic as James Bond stories. Basically, every Dick story involves a protagonist who’s paranoid that people are out to get him, and he’s right. Nevertheless, each has its own twists, and though, like a McDonald’s cheeseburger, you know what you’re going to be getting, they’re still well worth reading. Dick foresaw the coming dystopia which we now have the misfortune of living through.
Funny thing is, Nixon was raised a Quaker and the Quakers were the one group about whom Dick said he could never find anything bad to say.
I recommend Sutin’s biography of the man, Divine Invasions, for the insight it gives into his work via an examination of his personal life particularly his 4-5 marriages. Dick’s personal troubles (with women) informed his writing in a way one doesn’t normally find among genre works. The twin sister of Tears derives from his own twin sister who died shortly after birth and who haunted him for his whole life.
Dick is an overrated bore. It is also irritating that of all the great science fiction there is, Hollywood only makes movies out of Dick’s crap these days.
It is kind of fashionable to look down on Asimov. But he really was a hugely clever man. As for memorable characters, I still recall Hari Seldon and The Mule from the Foundation series. SF is best for the ideas of course, and stories like “Profession” have stayed in my mind for decades. Also, Asimov’s little spoof on thiotimoline is a gem.
That is because “conservatism” is now a semi-religious veneer on liberalism. Once someone says they believe in family values, but denies the necessity of having a legal system that acts on that basis, they reveal that they are simply a liberal who doesn’t like the excesses of out-of-the-closet liberals.
I’ve horrified many “conservatives” by saying that as a Christian traditionalist, I see no inherent evil in simply executing a cheating spouse. I find modern morality to be a pathetic, hypocritical bore. You dare lecture me on saying that a spouse who serially cheats on their spouse and ruins their family should be severely punished, but defend abortion? Fuck off.
* note for the dense: “see no inherent evil…” means I have no inherent opposition to that idea, not that I find that as a prudential consideration it is wise at this time to even consider such a thing as public policy. Merely that unlike “conservatives,” I don’t regard adultery as a private act inherently unworthy of the state’s inattention as a criminal matter.
Hey Ferd, now that you’ve written about PKD, HST and Celine, are you going to go straight to the source and review Dolan’s Pleasant Hell? You’ll be doing a service to American literature by giving that book some more exposure.