Books

Zooey wrote:

I read Dune for the first (and only) time about two years before volume one of the recent film version came out. I also found it better than I expected. Never heard of Station Eleven. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything I would call Post-apocalyptic. I don’t think that describes Dune.

Yeah Dune is not post-apocalyptic.

Post-apocalyptic is a very particular thing. It’s not so much a branch of sci fi as it is a branch of the must bigger category, ie. speculative fiction.

The current gem in post-apocalyptic fiction is McCarthy’s The Road, though it is much darker than most.

Fwiw, I like Station Eleven much more than WV does.

wv wrote:

The Road was great. But it was published around 2006. I cant seem to find anything even remotely as good in the last decade.

Station 11 altered the entire genre. Previously, post-apocalyptic fiction and film tended to depict “human nature” in stark terms drawn from social darwinism (like The Road Warrior). Doing it that way made it an overlap genre with action adventure or horror or both. If you think about it, you cannot write post-acopalyptic stories without basically claiming that you are reducing “universal human nature” to its essence, and mostly that (imagined/imaginary) “essence” was as I said more or less social darwinism. In Station 11, the survivors are heavily defined by cultural traces and memories and practices.

Though of course what makes a post-apocalyptic fiction what it is has to do with whether we see the global collapse of civilization, the collapse and then the after, or if it is set many generations after the collapse. Station 11 by its very nature is set in “the collapse and then the after.” That way the main story is about those who actively try to preserve cultural traces of the recently dead civilization.

There aren’t many great post-apocalyptic novels. If you go back 100 years there are a few more. Actually there may be more good short stories than novels, and then also some films. In the last 20 years, the big 3 novels (IMO) are The Road, Station 11, and Oryx and Crake (though strictly speaking the the 3rd one is a post-apocalyptic/dystopian overlap)

I should add something about The Road. It is so utterly stark partly because it’s set up so that the natural world is completely dead or dying. It sort of hints at a catastrophe that causes that, and the hints tend to point to an asteroid strike like the one that wiped out dinosauts 66 million years ago. However, you can’t take the science of that book seriously. I mean, the 66 million years ago asteroid strike did not wipe out everything. The surviors were small dinosaurs (like birds) or small mammals that could live off of seeds, which were plentiful, or off of the insects that could live off of dead wood. In The Road, it’s all gone. That just means to me that the book is really about setting up the darkest possible end times, and the kind of horrors that would come from that (a world where there’s nothing to eat). So I don’t need The Road to be scientifically realistic–that was never what it was doing. It just deliberately set up a world where there is nothing to eat and no chance of every finding it. I mean the book doesn’t even think about the fact that after many years the sky would clear of ash, and at that point, dormant seeds would grow. That’s because its story is just deliberately set up to be about an utterly dead world that will never be resurrected, and then shows us an innocent boy in that world who keeps the light (or fire) anyway. So really it’s a moral fable.

None of which matters compared to the fact that it’s brilliantly written.

…

wv wrote:

I ordered some dystopian-ish books. Perhaps one will be good.

The History Of Bees, by Maja Lunde.
Juice by Tim Winton.
Terra Nullius, by Claire Coleman.
Anna, by Niccolo Ammaniti

I don’t know those books personally but I know about them. “Juice” and “Anna” are post-apocalyptic, of the Hobbesian “without civilization it’s just everyone against everyone” variety. “Bees” is dystopian. “Anna” is sci-fi though with heavy dystopian overlap.

A book I reccomend very highly is “Song for Night” by Chris Abani. I’m not going to describe it, though it doesn’t really fit any of the genres we’ve been discussing. The less you know about this novel the better–if you’re interested, just grab it and read it cold.

I forgot about The Road. It’s a very good book, and I’m tempted to read more McCarthy. Many of his books have a strong reputation. But, you know, he’s kinda grim.

I watched Paradise, the postapocalyptic tv show and liked it. I’m sure I’ll at least start season 2 when it comes out, but sometimes these things start off well, and the peter out. Like The Matrix series. And Dune, you know, I’ve never been tempted to read the other books because everybody says the same thing about the original Dune being the best.

wv wrote:

Its kindof a reality-based West African war-genocidal-dystopian story, told by a child-soldier who turns out to be…a mystery.

He’s a ghost. It’s a new trend in ghost stories, where we see the world from the ghost’s perspective, and in the process ghosts become an entirely different kind of metaphor.

wv wrote:

zn wrote:

He’s a ghost. It’s a new trend in ghost stories, where we see the world from the ghost’s perspective, and in the process ghosts become an entirely different kind of metaphor.

I know he’s a ghost. I did not want to give it away.

w
v

Oh, great. I was going to read it, but what’s the point now? It’s obviously just a work of fiction.

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Oh, great. I was going to read it, but what’s the point now? It’s obviously just a work of fiction.

Corpses in the river. Floating corpses. Corpses in the jungle. Flies on all of them.

There you go. Now you know the whole plot.

…i recently read Frankenstein. The 1818 version. Did you know, there is zero explanation of exactly HOW the Doctor brought the ‘monster’ to life? I just assumed that all those machines and electrical currents and lightning etc, that are part of the movies — came from the book. But no. There is zero info in the story about how it was done.

Also, there are truly idiotic parts of the book. Like, at one point the monster essentially tells Frankenstein he’s gonna kill everyone Frankenstein loves, unless the Doctor makes him a bride. The doc eventually decides he aint doin it. One is too many monsters.
So then, comes the stupid part — the monster kills the people Frankenstein loves. And the good Doctor ACTS ALL SURPRISED. And Sad.

Well…duh.

w
v

Hence all the “Bride of Frankenstein” movies.

It’s been a long time since I read that book, probably over 40 years, but I liked it a lot at the time, and was just amazed it was written by a woman.

I MEAN 19-YEAR OLD! 19-YEAR OLD! That’s what I MEANT, SWEARTOGOD!!!

wv wrote:

Zooey wrote:

Hence all the “Bride of Frankenstein” movies.

It’s been a long time since I read that book, probably over 40 years, but I liked it a lot at the time, and was just amazed it was written by a woman.

I MEAN 19-YEAR OLD! 19-YEAR OLD! That’s what I MEANT, SWEARTOGOD!!!

I always heard the theme of the book was human’s shouldnt play god and too much faith in technology is bad, etc.

But i didnt get any of that from the actual writing. Seemed to me it was a story about parenthood. Frankenstein was a REALLY bad parent. Abandoned the creation, like, five minutes after he made it. And so, the child became bitter and monstrous.

The book was incredibly ‘repetitive’. Internal dialogue was: page 50. “i regret making the monster”. page 51. “I regret making the monster.” page 52. “I regret making the monster.” And on and on until the very end. I mean, no growth, no change…just that. Over and over. Until the end.

Read it again sometime. Tell me what ‘you’ think.

I cant speak about the second or third version though. Percy edited a version, and Mary edited one…or somethin.

w
v

My own 22 cents.

In a lot of ways the novel is 2 things at once that are very tied to the time it was written. First, it is both a homage to and a critical/revisionist re-write of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Not many people read PL anymore but if you do, the fact that Shelley’s novel is sparring with Milton’s epic is apparent on every single page. (The reigning “great English written work” in the early 19th century was PL, it was without competition as what you had to read if you were to be considered literate.) What the novel does in particular is turn Milton’s essentialist ideas of women completely upside down. So it is about domestic space and women’s morally, socially, and culturally significant grounding of it. Basically, the novel is about Victor completely ignoring and trampling on that. His ambition makes him blind to domestic space so he destroys it, not through his own direct actions, but through ignoring it and disregarding what the novel sets up as its centrality to a moral and grounded life.

Victor is therefore constantly presented as being blindly ignorant. For example, when the creature says I will be with you on your wedding night, he assumes the creature will be coming for him. It doesn’t even occur to him it will be coming for Elizabeth. An even deeper reveal of this terrible ignorant blindness is when he is making a female creature for his male creation as he had promised, and decides he cannot stand the idea of them reproducing. So instead of just making the female so it cannot reproduce–simple enough, right?–he tears the unfinished thing to pieces. It takes a long time and a lot of violent emotional energy to tear a body to pieces when all you have to do is not give it a uterus (and yes female anatomy was understood well enough at the time so that a trained doctor familar with human physiology ought to know that).

This is one of the places where the novel echoes Milton instead of revising/critiquing PL. There is a moment in PL where Adam, disraught over having eaten the fruit and now fallen, blames everything but himself. For example he blames God–did I solicit you to make me? He also blames Eve, and does so in a way that is deeply misogynist. He basically says, why did God create women? Couldn’t he think of a better way to reproduce than to create “this fair defect of nature” (yes female anatomy is here called a “defect”). The whole passage:

“Oh why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven/ With Spirits masculine, create at last/ This novelty on Earth, this fair defect/ Of Nature, and not fill the world at once/ With men as Angels, without feminine?”

Victor unconsciously echoes this in his actions–why do we need women to reproduce? This, written by a woman whose mother died from giving birth to her and who had already lost her first child to what was then the common blight of infant mortality.

And then of course there’s the fact that to make the work of creating the creature easier on him, he makes it hugely disproportionate and therefore monstrous. It never occurs to him that the creature will have to live with that as a sentient and emotional being. He only cares about accomplishing his goal. The equivalent today are the rich guys who want to manufacture more AI data centers without giving a damn about what they do to the environment, which is beyond awful (data centers are also hard to live near since they make constant whining noises because of their immense cooling systems).

So the entire key to Victor’s character is that he is presented as being massively blind, and the main thing he is blind to is (according to the novel) the grounded, moral centrality of the domestic sphere, that is the sphere of women. This story btw is reproduced by the fact that the narrator, Walton, gives up his ambitious quest to find a passage through the artic, and returns to his sister.

BTW the novel hints at how Victor brings the creature to life. It’s galvanism, or the belief that life was tied to the influence of electric pulses. People actually believed at the time that that was true. The novel doesn;t dwell on it, but galvinism is the only hint offered, and we know from Mary Shelley’s correspondance that she discussed galvanism with Percy Shelley and Byron before writing the novel. Obviously the movies have all picked up on this so that they show lightning being used.

Mary Shelley wrote it young but she was the daughter of 2 of the most significant reformist writers of her era, Mary Wollstonecraft (who as we know died giving birth to her), and William Godwin, the leading voice of philosophical anarchism (of the kind we know from Chomsky). Godwin was also a novelist, and you can see very heavy echoes of his most important novel, Caleb Williams, in Shelley’s novel. Caleb Williams is an old heavy 3-decker and is not read today, it’s too much work, but it was one of the most important novels in its time that set out to critique English social structure and its built in injustices.

…

wv wrote:

Why do you think the whole Frankenstein story has been so popular, for so many generations?

Just a simple little theory…but it manages to rise above its own occassional klutziness to be a story of monstrosity that is open to constant re-configuring. Monsters don’t work if they are obviously just one limited possible meaning. The creature is a particular vivid thing, but it’s also open-ended–you can keep re-framing it to have an array of mythical resonances. Science as transgression, deformity, social injustice, the madness of ambition, the abject and outcast, the articulate and sympathetic soul in monstrous form, the compulsive vengeance of the hurt and wronged, the irrationality of misogyny, birth and physicality as a workshop of filthy creation but bound to soulful longings–lots of anxieties, dark wishes, and the instability of Othering all in one. Jekyll/Hyde and Dracula are the same thing. Very specific, detailed things in very specific situations but open to multiple resonances, some of which haven’t even been invented yet.

So it can affect you but then it just don’t come all wrapped up with one simple “moral.”

…

wv wrote:

Well…some creative-writing-reconfigure-er needs to complexify The Mummy.

Mummies as monsters are a 19th century invention too. They have a strange history. It was a fad among Victorian elites to buy mummies and hold unwrapping parties, yes unwrapping the mummies. They would then take photos of themselves posing with the unwrapped mummy corpses. They would also grind mummies into a powder that was then popularly consumed in drinks as a health benefit. The powders were also used to make a special brand of paint.

Arthur Conan Doyle has a mummy story. It’s really a story about how the true manly English gentleman would never go native in the imperial world. Here: Lot No. 249 — https://www.dfw-sherlock.org/uploads/3/7/3/8/37380505/1892_september_lot_no_249.pdf

Here’s an article about Victorian mummy fascination: Why Were the Victorians So Obsessed With Mummies? — https://www.history.com/articles/mummy-unwrapping-parties-egyptomania