Book Review: Zodiac

Book Review: 'Zodiac' by Neal Stephenson

3 / 5 Stars

'Zodiac' (308 pp.) was issued by Bantam Books / Spectra in July, 1995, with cover art by Bruce Jensen. The novel first was published in 1988 (making author Stephenson a 'first generation' cyberpunk) by the highbrow Atlantic Monthly Press. Later, after Stephenson's 1992 novel 'Snow Crash' and his 1995 novel 'The Diamond Age' broke big, Bantam prudently acquired the mass-market paperback rights to 'Zodiac' and got it into print to capitalize on the wave for all things Stephenson.

I should state at the outset that 'Zodiac' is very much a 'Boston' book. Most of the action takes place in that city, both on land, and on the water (the title refers to the rubber boat beloved by commando teams). I'm not at all familiar with Boston so I imagine I'm missing out on the way in which the novel ties into that city with mingled affection and annoyance.......

The novel is set in the late 1980s or so, and features as its protagonist one Sangamon Taylor, a 27 year-old environmental activist and (in Stephenson's own words) an utter asshole.

Taylor works for a nonprofit called GEE International (the CEO or founder of GEE never is disclosed, but presumably he or she is an altruistic capitalist). The organization has a handsome budget, one that allows its employees to purse environmental causes full-time, often from the decks of various watercraft. In between campaigns to identify and expose polluters, the GEE staff enjoy recreational drugs, bouts of fornication, meals in the better restaurants in the Boston area, and the knowledge that they are just too hip, to even be hip (i.e., they do things like order Singha beer when in Thai restaurants).

Taylor specializes in benign vandalism of polluter's discharge pipelines and toxic waster dumps, and in bringing these acts of vandalism to the attention of the media. Chemical corporations in the wider Boston area, indeed, in the USA proper, don't like Taylor. 

The main plot of 'Zodiac' doesn't arrive until page 93, and it involves Spectacle Island, and a legacy of the dumping of PCBs in Boston Harbor. Taylor is interested in seeing if the legacy PCBs can be detected in the muck under Spectacle, but soon he's running into some peculiarities in his sampling scheme. The PCBs are there, but only for a brief time, something unlikely with a persistent organic pollutant. Could the strange distribution of PCBs have something to do with the actions of the newly founded biotech firm Biotronics ? Laughlin, the CEO of the firm, would like to co-opt Taylor into endorsing Biotronic's plan for the future: eliminate toxic waste via biological processes. But Taylor isn't so sure Laughlin is the nice guy he makes himself out to be.

Complicating things is that the dumping of PCBs likely was done by the Basco chemical company, whose former Senior Engineer, Alvin Pleshy, now is running for the Presidency, as a standard-issue, white liberal male with (at least on the surface) a deep concern for the welfare of the environment.

As the novel progresses, Taylor discovers he has made enemies of some very powerful and avaricious people. People whose adversaries tend to die in 'accidents.' So, it's up to Taylor, Boone, a renegade environmental justice warrior, and Jim Grandfather, a down-at-home Native American, to risk their lives to discover the truth behind the poisoning of Boston Harbor..........

'Zodiac' advertises itself as an 'Eco-thriller,' and it is indeed ecological, but as a thriller, well.....I can understand the need for a thriller to have some improbable plot developments, but in 'Zodiac', these improbabilities come so fast and so furious in the last 100 pages that they undermine the narrative's credibility. All sorts of fortuitous coincidences pop up, with such regularity that I felt there was no way for Taylor and his brave Eco-warriors to lose. In its favor, 'Zodiac' has an easygoing prose style, a sort of breathless hipster stream-of-consciousness that flows smoothly all the way to the end page.

Summing up, 'Zodiac' is (arguably) one of Stephenson's more accessible novels; it's relatively brief, and goes light on the pedantic discourses that occupy his more recent works (like 2008's 'Anathem,' where he devotes something like two and one-half pages to describing the mechanism of a timekeeping device in a monastery, presumably an allusion to the real-world 'Clock of the Long Now' project......). If you are willing to overlook the frantic pacing of the final third of the novel, you may find 'Zodiac' rewarding.

Video Jack

Video Jack

by Cary Bates (script) and Keith Giffen (art)

Epic Comics (Marvel) 1987

 

'Video Jack' is a six-issue series, published by Marvel Comic's Epic imprint, over the interval from September, 1987, to September, 1988.

'Video' is set in the small Midwestern town of Hickory Haven. Normally a quiet place, as the story opens, Hickory Haven is in something of an uproar, for the corpse of a young woman has been found stuffed in the branches of a tree. Is a serial killer at work in the area ?!

The eponymous Jack is a teen-aged boy named Jack Swift. Jack's father walked out on Jack and his mom years ago, and Jack was raised as much by TV, as by his overburdened mother. 

 

Indeed, Jack lives to watch TV, whether it's live, or on VHS. There's nothing Jack would like better than to be the owner of a top-of-the-line, 27-inch, cable-ready color TV, but at $800, it's out of his league, price-wise.

 

 

Girls in Jack's High School class just don't appreciate his love for the art and technology of video:

 

Jack's best friend is a juvenile delinquent named Damon Xarnett. Xarnett's Uncle Zach is a strange man, from Romania, who likes to mutter to himself. Uncle Zach has a remarkable, high-tech video studio nestled inside his gothic mansion. 

As the first issue's plot unfolds, Uncle Zach's plan to use his video setup to bring a 'cleansing' of 'vice....depravity...filth....perversion' from Hickory Haven. Damon and Jack decide to mess around with Uncle Zach's setup at the worst possible time.....

Subsequent issues reveal that Jack and Damon can be teleported into alternate realities, each reality derived from a different TV show, simply by clicking the channel selector on Uncle Zach's strange, otherworldly remote control. Things can be hazardous in these realities, especially if it's a reality based on a well-known science fiction film.........

Will Jack and Damon ever find the means to return to their own reality ? And if they do, what evil of Uncle Zach's design will they have to confront ?

 

 

I picked up the six-issue run of 'Video Jack' hoping it was one of those underappreciated gems that came from the Epic imprint in the 1980s. Sadly, 'Video Jack' is really, really bad.

 

The writing is too ad-libbed to be very engaging: Bates and Giffen can't seem to decide if the narrative is to be comedic, an action-adventure, or some crazed amalgamation of both. This gives 'Video Jack' a cobbled-together sensibility. Efforts by these writers to satirize Hollywood and its video culture more often are lame and contrived. It doesn't help matters when Archie Goodwin, editor of the Epic imprint, shows up in the pages of the comic to lend some humorous asides. The result is nothing but severe cringe.....

The final issue of 'Video Jack' is so bad I struggled to get through it. Marvel evidently decided to draft some of its artists to contribute one- or two-page segments, evidently to rescue Giffen from imminent deadline problems. The result is cheesy and inane, falling far short of what I would expect even from a 'Little Archie,' or 'Richie Rich,' or 'Casper the Friendly Ghost,' comic.

Summing up, while Epic's holy mission of promoting 'creator-owned content' may have been meritorious, the truth is much of that creator-owned content was pretty shitty. 'Video Jack' can be passed by without penalty ! 

 

P.S. you can get another take on 'Video Jack' at this link. 

DAW Books Betsy Wollheim Interview at 'The Black Gate'

Over at the Black Gate website, a lengthy, two-part interview with DAW Books editor Betsy Wollheim. The interview, conducted by Darrell Schweitzer, was done via Zoom at the  Philadelphia Science Fiction Society on June 14, 2024.

Lots of interesting stuff in the interview:

Schweitzer: Another story I have always heard about DAW: Is it true that as soon as you took over, you and Sheila Gilbert killed the Gor books? Because they stank up the place.

Wollheim: I alone killed the Gor books. I am personally responsible for rejecting John Norman.

At the tail end of part II of the interview, there is a reference to the scene at Casa Susana ! I have to say, not many Editor interviews can range this far and wide............

Book Review: Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life

Book Review: 'Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life' by Philip Jose Farmer

5 / 5 Stars

'Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life' first was published in 1973 as a hardcover from Doubleday. Subsequent paperback editions were published by Bantam Books in 1975, and Playboy Press in July, 1981 (269 pp., above, cover illustration by Ken Barr). All editions of DS:HAL are out of print, and used copies in good condition increasingly are quite expensive (e.g., $100 for the 1973 hardback). 

 

The nostalgia craze that swept American popular culture from the 1960s to the early 1980s arguably started with Doc Savage, when, in the fall of 1964, Bantam Books issued the paperback reprint of the very first novel in the franchise, 'The Man of Bronze.' 

 

The series sold very well and sparked a revival of interest in prewar media; just a year later, Jules Feiffer published 'The Great Comic Book Heroes,' and in 1970, Tony Goodstone published 'The Pulps.' Other paperback reprints of 1930s heroes, such as G-8 and his Battle Aces, the Avenger, Conan the Barbarian, and the Shadow, followed in the footsteps of the Savage franchise.

 

DS:HAL therefore is very much a product of the nostalgia craze, and at the time it was published, Philip Jose Farmer was the biggest fanboy of the pulp heroes.

 

The term 'fanboy' didn't exist in 1973, but if it had, it certainly would have applied to Farmer. His 1972 book, 'Tarzan Alive: A Definitive Biography of Lord Greystroke' was the ultimate paean to Tarzan and by extension, other heroic figures in what Farmer termed 'poplit' (i.e., popular literature). 

 

To write DS:HAL, Famer contacted Jack Cordes, who had a collection of every issue of the 181 original Street and Smith magazines published from 1933 to 1949. Farmer sat down with the Cordes collection and read each issue, taking notes and framing a narrative as he went. 

 

For additional insights into Lester Dent and his writing career, Farmer also interviewed Dent's widow, Norma Gerling Dent, at her home in La Plata, Missouri. 

 

DS:HAL presents its nostalgia component in its very first chapter, 'The Fourfold Vision,' in which Farmer reminisces about buying the very first issue of 'Doc Savage' magazine on a cold February day in 1933 in Peoria, Illinois. Farmer's love for Doc and the Fabulous Five was sparked that day, and stayed with him the rest of his life.

 

The narrative then moves into an in depth-analysis of all aspects of the Doc Savage franchise. There is a chapter on the mysterious origins of Doc, and his kinship with other poplit heroes. Analyses also are provided of the office and laboratory space atop the Empire State Building; each member of the Fabulous Five, and Pat Savage. There are chapters on the most prominent villains, and Doc's gadgets and technologies. 

In 'Tarzan Alive' Farmer introduced a quintessential fanboy product: the 'Wold Newton' universe, a sort of genealogical chart / family tree of prominent poplit characters. The Wold Newton universe suffuses Farmer's treatment of Doc Savage in the pages of DS:HAL. Indeed, the longest chapter in the book, 'The Fabulous Family Tree of Doc Savage,' is a lengthy recitation of the individuals comprising the said tree, from Natty Bumpo, to Sam Spade, to Kilgore Trout. The esoteric nature of Farmer's Wold Newton universe prefigures the essays Alan Moore published in his 'League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' comic books, essays in which myriad characters and places from imaginative literature are incorporated in a complicated 'metaverse.'

The main 'literary' messaging in DS:HAL is interesting. Farmer argues that the Doc Savage franchise, E. E. Smith and his 'Lensmen' stories, and William Burroughs's 1964 novel 'Nova Express,' share kinship as sci-fi works reliant on confrontation with apocalyptic events. Doc Savage is the epitome of the apocalyptic hero; his adventures involve all manner of strange and terrifying threats to the world order, and only a hero of Doc's skill and stature can prevent extinction. In this regard, Savage and the Fabulous Five are counterparts to Burroughs's Nova Police. In presenting this argument, Farmer even adopts the 'cut-up' prose used by Burroughs. 

 

This is a bit contrived, but then again, in 1973 everyone involved in science fiction was adamant that Burroughs was, in fact, a sci-fi writer and thus an example of the genre transcending its pulp lineage and manifesting as the much more reputable entity of 'speculative fiction.'

 

Who will want a copy of DS:HAL ? Likely the same (dwindling) cohort of Baby Boomers who would be interested in other titles dealing with the pulp heroes and the nostalgia boom of 50 years ago. I see few indications in 2025 of people (especially young men) interested in reading pulp hero fiction, much less reading any fiction at all. However disappointing the idea may be, sixty years after it began, the pulp hero revival has run its course and is fading from memory.....

National Lampoon July 1976

National Lampoon

July, 1976

July, 1976, and listening to Top 40 FM radio is all about exposure to some classics of the decade. At number one, the Starland Vocal Band with 'Afternoon Delight,' and we've got the funk powerhouse 'I'll Be Good to You,' by the Brothers Johnson, and then there's 'More, More, More' by the Andrea True Connection, and who can live without 'Moonlight Feels Right,' by Starbuck ?! Too much goodness for the mortal soul to bear..........

 

The July issue of the Lampoon takes satirical aim at the rise of the Sun Belt, a rise made concrete by the advent of Presidential candidate Jimmy Carter of Plains, Georgia. In '76, the rise of Democrats from the South sent the party into turmoil; Ted Kennedy was expecting to be the party nominee, but he could only garner support from northeastern liberals, a weakness that was evident well before the Convention took place in Madison Square Garden in July, 1976.

In the summer of '76 the Rolling Stones released their latest album, Black and Blue, which had an advertising campaign that outraged feminists.........

Elsewhere in the July issue is an ad for the latest LP from the Charlie Daniels Band, pure Southern Rock, undiluted and unashamed.

This cartoon is one of the more benign ones in this issue......

In satirizing the south, the Lampoon is crude and offensive. There are several black-and-white cartoons from Michael Leonard, 'Favorite Jokes of the Southland,' that play upon racial stereotypes:

 

 

A portfolio of paintings depicting 'Portraits of the New South' revels in rendering a white, Jewish liberal driver being stopped for a traffic offense.......not by the dreaded white, redneck, Klan-friendly, small-town Sheriff, but - this being the 'new' South - his black counterpart !

 

 

The portrait of George Wallace is particularly cruel; Wallace was wheelchair-bound since an attempted assassination in May, 1972 (he was shot four times by a psychopath named Arthur Bremer).

There's a spoof advertisement promoting the Klan of the new South: friendly, and multicultural !

 

Some Lampoon staffers pose for a photoessay that takes a different look at the movie Easy Rider, which, since its release in 1969, had defined the way the counterculture viewed the South: 

 

 

 

The magazine 'Pickers and Kickers' spoofs the country music scene, taking a rather vicious aim at the hairstyles, clothing, and mores of the foremost country artists.

 

 

 

 

 

And you can't get any cruder than the magazine's final pages, devoted to a 'Special Paid Afro-American Gift Section,' where a presumed fond fantasy of black men, involving Southern Belles, is rendered......

 

 

 

Yep, back in the Summer of '76 they didn't just talk Transgressive, they lived it, at the National Lampoon..... 

Book Review: A Fire in the Sun

Book Review: 'A Fire in the Sun' by George Alec Effinger

5 / 5 Stars

'A Fire in the Sun' (290 pp.) was published by Bantam Spectra in April 1990, and features cover art by Steve and Paul Youll.

 

This is the second volume in the so-called 'Marid Audran' or 'Budayeen' franchise. My review of the first volume 'When Gravity Fails,' is here. ‘‘The Exile Kiss’ is the concluding volume. (1991). A collection of related short stories, titled ‘Budayeen Nights’, was released in 2003.

 

 

'Fire' picks up where 'Gravity' left off. In what is likely a near-future Alexandria, Egypt, our hero Marid Audran is acquiescing to life as the lieutenant of Friedlander Bey, the boss of the Budayeen district. Marid would much prefer to return to his dissolute life as a go-between for the various unsavory personages doing business in the Budayeen, a line of work that supports his drug habit, if not much else. But Friedlander not only has co-opted Marid into being a permanent member of the household, but he has arranged for Marid to become a policeman, no less.

 

Marid's friends and acquaintances are less than pleased to learn that Marid has 'sold out,' but for his part, Marid is slowly coming to an awareness that his life is trending to more important things than self-indulgence. Friedlander is old and ill, and more and more reliant on Marid to be a troublehshooter. And Friedlander has his troubles, indeed; an uneasy peace with the other boss man in the city, one Reda Abu Adil, is showing strains, with clandestine operations and treacheries coming to light with each passing week.

 

For Marid, things get complicated with the discovery that people in the Budayeen are being murdered, not for money or spite, but for reasons quite sinister. Marid suspects that Friedlander and Abu Adil know more than they are saying about these murders. A gunman loose in the city may be a source of information, but tracking him down will be dangerous, and Marid isn't cut out to be a hero. But as events close in on him, Marid is going to have to think about being a hero, whether he likes it or not.........

 

'A Fire in the Sun' is a better novel than its predecessor (to which I gave a Four Star Rating). 'Fire' has better pacing, livelier characterization, and a little less contrivance in terms of the denouement, which settles some questions about Marid's ancestry and the consequences of his alliances with the movers and shakers in the Budayeen. The setting of a cyberpunk North Africa retains its novelty, a place where poverty sits side-by-side with wealth and privilege, and prayers to Allah alternate with jacking in 'mods' that impart skills directly to a user's brain.

 

At the finish of 'A Fire in the Sun,' I was comfortable with a Five Star Rating, and looking forward to the next volume in this interesting first-generation cyberpunk series.

'Where the Summer Ends' by Karl Edward Wagner

(repost)

Here in Central Virginia we're in the deepest and most humid part of the long, long season of summer. The atmosphere is sweltering and steamy and there is a thunderstorm every afternoon. And every vacant lot or untended piece of turf gets swamped with vegetation.

At these times, I readily think of the story ‘Where the Summer Ends’ (1980) by Karl Edward Wagner.

While Wagner is best known for his novels about Kane, the red-haired sword and sorcery adventurer, Wagner could also be a competent writer of short stories. And among the best of these short stories is ‘Summer’, which first appeared in the 1980 anthology 'Dark Forces,' edited by Kirby McCauley.

The story also is printed in the anthology of southern ghost and supernatural stories 'Nightmares in Dixie' (1987), edited by McSherry, Waugh and Greenberg; and in 'The American Fantasy Tradition' (2002), edited by Brian M. Thomsen. And it's among the stories collected in Valancourt Books' 2023 reissue of Wagner's anthology, 'In A Lonely Place.'

“Where the Summer Ends’ is set in Knoxville, Tennessee in the summer of 1977. Mercer, the protagonist of the story, is an older college student who is rehabbing a house in a seedy, gentrifying neighborhood. He furnishes his house with items salvaged from the abandoned homes littering the area, or, when the opportunity presents itself, with better-quality purchases from Grady, an elderly, cantankerous ‘antiques’ dealer who lives nearby. Grady has a fine mantelpiece that Mercer covets; with the strategic application of the right amount of liquor, maybe Grady will sell it for a price Mercer can afford.

The summer is hot and sticky and there are thunderstorms nearly every night. The entire ghetto has been overrun with kudzu, the fast-growing shrub originally imported from Japan. It overgrows the deserted homes and parking lots and playgrounds, and it’s even encroaching on Grady’s house.

Mercer’s cat has gone missing.

Winos and vagrants from the neighborhood are turning up dead; old Morny’s corpse, mutilated and missing most of its skin, was discovered within a stand of kudzu.

And Mercer, when he stands very still on the sidewalk on a sweltering afternoon, hears rustling and skittering noises coming from under the thick clumps of kudzu….