Creepy, eerily modern masterpieces of short 19th century horror

Can Such Things Be? Tales of Horror and the Supernatural
Ambrose Bierce
Citadel Press, 1990 (Originally published 1893)

[H]e can and will be read with interest in an age which is getting ready to renounce compromise, kindness, and Christianity. (p.9)

This is as much of Clifton Fadiman's introduction as anyone needs to read. After Fadiman (the embodiment of 1940s patrician intellectual snobbery) slights Bierce for his lack of a formal education, he then dismisses most of his journalistic work as "writing badly, doubtless writing too much." He opines that Bierce's writing is only considered interesting because of Bierce's legend and describes Bierce's nihilism as "brutal and simple as a blow, and by the same token not too convincing" and, "if taken in overdoses, a trifle tedious." Bierce's prose is "old-fashioned," "flawed with the bad taste of the period," and melodramatic.

Fadiman's extensive criticisms may or may not be true about the larger part of Bierce's oeuvre (I have, for example, seen Bierce described online as "ponderous Victorian melodrama"), but they definitely do not apply to the unsettling stories in this volume. Bierce's meticulous grammar (meticulous from the perspective of my relatively grammatically-impoverished ass, at least) and sentences (so typical of 19th-century American prose) chock full of prepositional phrases took me a story or two until I got into the rhythm of his language and storytelling. Once I did, though, each story read better than the one before. I find it hard to believe that he was mocked during his life by many critics for his rough writing, poor grammar, and lack of an education. If only today's university students could write this well.

Many of the stories struck me as strikingly contemporary, perhaps because irony is so central to his writing. As well, Bierce loves to mix the comic (the absurd?) and the horrific in a way that doesn't come through in other classic horror writers like Poe or Lovecraft. One commentator has noted that his "style and journalistic background gave his stories of war and strange disappearances such an uneasy realism that many mistook them for being true." That this realism is often tempered with a Dickian uncertainty about what is real and what illusory is perhaps why many of these stories are ahead of their time while also being of a piece with it.

The fact is, that of your own sanity you have no evidence that's any better than some lunatic who thinks he's Ulysses S. Grant or Jesus H. Christ. I certainly have no evidence of mine. For all I know you don't exist. Everything around me may be fictions of my disordered imagination. - Ambrose Bierce

This fusion of realism and radical skepticism has earned him the almost-postmodern accolade of "the master of magical cynicism," and this mastery is definitely on display in many, if not all, of Bierce's work in this collection.

• "One Summer Night" -- A scant story, merely a page and a half, about a man apparently buried alive, revived by grave diggers, and killed by the black spadesman. Chilling in its ruthless efficiency.
  

• "The Moonlit Road" -- Prefiguring Kurosawa's Rashomon, B,ierce tells the story of a murdered wife and her ghost from three different perspectives (son, husband/killer, wife/ghost).

• "A Tough Tussle" -- In this account of the horrors of war and the veil between lucidity and lunacy, a Union officer ends up sitting next to a Confederate corpse. When shots are fired, the two end up in a tussle from which neither emerges alive.

• "A Jug of Sirup" -- A morality play about how to behave in a store run, even after he's been buried, by a model citizen.
  

• "Staley Fleming's Hallucination" -- In which a man is killed by a hallucinatory dog, the phantom of the dog of the man whom he murdered.
  

• "A Resumed Identity" -- Think The Sixth Sense, or perhaps a less overwrought version of Lovecraft's "The Outsider," except that it was written in the late 1800s. The ghost discovers his lamentable status much to his sorrow.

• "A Baby Tramp" -- A genuinely heartbreaking story about an orphaned toddler who makes his way across the country to die on his mother's grave. Where was "Bitter Bierce" in this story, unless he was bitter against a God and Natural Order that would permit such horrors?
  

• "The Damned Thing" -- Was he killed by a mountain lion? Or was it something stranger? Shades of HP Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space."
  

• "The Stranger" -- A classic ghost story with a genuinely hair-rising ending.

Magical cynicism indeed. Lots of pointed satire and yet also such spooky stories. Another phrase I like that describes the voice which runs through these collected stories is "courageous despair" (most explicitly expressed in "The Baby Tramp.")

There are voices from the Past that can help us in our travail, and eloquent among them is that of the courageous despair of Ambrose Bierce. Behind all the bitterness and the thunderous nay-saying, one can detect a profound interest in, and fascination with, the human adventure. One of the surest signs of this is the vigour and precision of Bierce's language; he could not have created such excellences out of despair, no matter how vividly that despair served as his subject, for the language of despair is silence. There is a secret joyousness in such hatred, and it's a part of what appeals to me in all that I've read of Ambrose Bierce. -- Jack Matthews

I like that. The publishers should use that as this book's introduction in the next edition.

"Most haunted" maybe, but by dull ghosts

The Most Haunted House in England (Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown)
Harry Price
Longmans, Green and Co., 1940 (Time-Life Books Reprint)

After watching The World's Scariest Ghosts Caught on Tape one Friday eveninga few weeks ago, my interest in "true ghost stories" was peaked and so I scared up this volume.

Harry Price's The Most Haunted House in England is the book about a classic haunted house, Borley Rectory, which is a staple of many of the ghost and supernatural books I read when I was younger. It is well-written in that competent British school boy fashion, with impeccable grammar, restrained wit, and conservative style.

Price explains how he was invited to explore Borley Rectory, which was built in 1863 by the Rev. Henry Bull and which had allegedly been visited by the ghost of a nun and by a spectral coach drawn by two headless men. Price details the history of the village of Borley and the tales of the haunted rectory; the legend of a nun who was buried alive at the site that would become the rectory for her illicit liaison with a monk; and spooky stories from various sources---those who lived in the house, their guests, and those invited specifically for the task of research into the hauntings.

Sadly, for its status as a classic in the genre of supernatural literature, the book is not really scary. Almost all of the activities described were of the nature of a poltergeist (or Poltergeister, as Price would have it) in the form of mysterious sounds, teleportation of small objects, movement of small objects, and, over a period of several years, the writing of messages and small marks on the walls of the house. There was surprisingly little about the spectral coach and ghostly nun, particularly seeing how these alleged phenomena were what drew Price to the house initially.

The book serves as a documentary history of the alleged haunting, and the author leaves it up to the reader to decide as to the veracity of the stories of Borley Rectory in light of all the documentary "evidence" presented. Many contemporary critics feel that Price and one of the couples who lived in the house (those to whom the mysterious messages were addressed) established this entire story as a hoax. It wouldn't surprise me.

In short, this is a high-quality reprint of a classic, if unconvincing and not very scary, early 20th century monograph on ghosts. The Time-Life Collector's Library of the Unknown is a classy series for those who are interested in the literature of the unexplained, even if only in fun, and this volume is no exception.

Superb title, uneven stories

How to Save the World
Charles Sheffield, editor
Tor Books, 1995

We have no friendly advisor looking over our shoulder. We will have to make do with the next best thing: humans who are close observers of the actions of our species, but who are not directly involved in trying to run the affairs of humanity.

This of course is exactly what writers are and have been through recorded history.... Even among writers, I argue that the writers of science fiction form a special sub-group. They tend to be interested in global problems, in the impact of science and technology, and in the long-term future of humanity. They are observers of events at the largest scale. (pp. 12-13)

This then is a collection of these observations, examining themes as far ranging as the failure of public education in the US to the breakthrough in space exploration to the cure for patriarchy to an ugly dilemma inherent in the feminist rhetoric of "reproductive choice." For those of us who (often) feel motivated to save the world, this book provides an entertaining meditation on the shadow side of the utopian and of the unknowable consequences of our wholly benevolent intentions.

Sheffield writes, "Some of the stories in this book may offend. I certainly hope so." (p. 14). None of the stories offended this reader, but disappointingly most didn't make much of an impression either way. The unevenness of the stories was a definite let-down, particularly considering the devastatingly understated (or, as Sheffield puts it, "unduly modest") title. After all, what self-respecting Christian anarchist bodhisattva utopian would pass up the manual on how to save the world?

So here are some thoughts on the stories that impressed a little SF wisdom on me, providing visions of possible futures and of some pitfalls that might face us along the way. They also all rocked as stories.

• "Zap Thy Neighbor" by James P. Hogan. I'd read this one almost a decade ago in an anthology of Hogan's stories and science writing called Rockets, Redheads, and Revolution, and enjoyed rereading it. Hogan has envisioned a world in which everyone has a listing in a big directory, and that anyone with a grudge or grievance, if she can find two willing accomplices, can "call your number." It's a simple system with a twist that ensures that it really works as promised---in creating a more civil society.
  

• "Choice" by Lawrence Watt-Evans. In college anthropology I was first introduced to the dilemma faced by many feminists in Asia (and other locales) regarding abortion. It is, in short, that the rhetoric of "reproductive choice" that has dominated liberal discourse on the issue for almost two generations (i.e., that a woman's choice to terminate a pregnancy is absolute and absolutely hers) stands in uncomfortable company with third-world cultural realities which lead most women with free access to contemporary reproductive technologies to abort only female fetuses. Watt-Evans presents a "culturally pure" (read: third world) society, presumably in the Middle East, where poverty, disease, overpopulation, etc. have been become things of the past. How? By allowing women to make their free choices, aborting females and keeping males until the ratio of men to women is over 10 to 1. This, as we see in the story, poses its own interesting problems.
  

• "The Meetings of the Secret World Masters" by Geoffrey A. Landis. This story reminded me of the film The Last Supper except that instead of serving individuals poisoned meals, a handful of scientists genetically engineer myriad changes to the human race. A pretty chilling story about way too much power being in the wrong hands--or in any hands.
  

• "The Invasion of Space" by James Kirkwood. Reminisces about the crucial "Big Bang" moment in deep space exploration and how it was a poet (and an inadvertent martyr), and not a scientist, who was needed to get humanity's mythological juices flowing in the direction of outer space. Because without that, you can only get so far off the earth.
  

• "Buyer's Remorse" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg. Why is this story here? I absolutely hated, hated, hated, hated this story. Completely pretentious short story told in the form of letters to an advice columnist about life in the far future and the columnist's responses. Confusing and didn't say much to me, which means I probably need to re-read it a couple of times until I finally get it. (That or simply forget about it).
  

• "My Soul to Keep" by Jerry Oltion. In the near-future US, religion is seen as a dangerous, infectious neurological disorder and so free exercise of said infection is therefore no longer enshrined in the US Constitution. When the Pope is injured while on a clandestine trip to the US, and the contagion is released, all hell (ahem) breaks lose. One scientist begins to regain her faith, and so her fellows protect her from the illness. For her own benefit, of course.

The Lord of the Rings: A masterpiece of myth-making

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien
Houghton Mifflin, 1994

I first received The Lord of the Rings as part of a boxed set, complete with The Hobbit, for Christmas in 1985. I also received a boxed set of the first four Dune books. I was 13 and in 8th grade.

Like many 13-year olds, I loved The Hobbit but I thought The Lord of the Rings was simply awful. For one thing, the plot was not immediately obvious to me. (Keep in mind that at the time my enjoyment reading primarily comprised Doctor Who novelizations and Choose Your Own Adventure books.) Instead of the short chapters of plot and dialogue to which I was accustomed, Tolkien provided page after page of exposition, describing the local color and history with any "action" provided almost as an afterthought. And then there is what may have been the biggest problem of all with The Lord of the Rings, the scores of strangely named characters and places, some of whom are central to the story and others of whom are purely peripheral and which is which is unclear. I mean, sheesh, who names their two main villains Sauron and Saruman, names that differ by only one syllable?

It should be here noted that while I loved reading at age 13, I was also not the best reader. Memories of reading what I managed to of the trilogy consist mainly of reading a single page over and over and over again just to follow the main thread of the story. Somehow I managed to finish The Fellowship of the Ring and made it a few dozen pages into The Two Towers before I threw up my hands and abandoned Tolkien to the realm of "authors I think are overrated." I still have a vague recollection of giving a a pretty worthless presentation on the first book in front of Mrs. Fox's English class, the same class I was in when the Challenger exploded. (I also have an even vaguer memory of reviewing some disposable piece of genre SF called Dushau, but that's another story.) In short, I never thought I would ever read this book again, and considered all those folks who worshiped Tolkien to be little short of fools.

Fast-forward sixteen years. It's Christmas time in Champaign, and I'm attending The Two Towers with my coworkers, mainly because the bosses gave us cinema tickets for the holidays. As the movie begins to unfold, I remember those few dozen pages that I read at 13, and I slowly begin the journey of reappraising Tolkien. While I agree with those who urge reading the book as well as simply seeing the movie, I think that in this case I could not have done the former if I had not done the latter. Peter Jackson's trilogy allowed me to familiarize myself with the overall story arch (something that was hard for me to do from within the perspective of the novel, at least at first) and also helped me to handle the enormous cast of strangely named characters. (Finally Saruman and Sauron were decidedly distinct characters in my mind's eye, and the logic behind their naming, based as it is on Tolkien's invented languages, became more apparent.) So in fall of 2007 I finally decided to give the damned book another chance, mooched the one-volume "trilogy" (apparently Tolkien always considered it one big novel) through BookMooch, chose it over the New Testament for 2008's "big book" (sorry Mom), and devoured it in January, 2008.

In short, I loved it, particularly the exposition and the bizarre names for characters and places. Strange, huh, how the passage of time will do that to one's sensibilities? The very features of the novel that I found off-putting in 1985, I found absolutely ingenious in 2008. The names and locations in The Lord of the Rings all figure into a much-vaster cosmology and narrative history, and this becomes more apparent when the reader peruses the voluminous appendices. All the details that seemed arbitrary and distracting from "the action" were in fact anything but arbitrary, deriving as they did from a comprehensive mythology (of a world that did not exist until Tolkien wrote it into existence!). Take for example the appendix on the "translation" of the text explaining why Tolkien chose English words like "elf" and "dwarf" and "halfling" to "translate" the "original" Elvish words. Apart from the implication that there is really an original manuscript written in Elvish, this appendix also implies that the "elves" in this story aren't really elves, the "dwarves" aren't really dwarves, etc., but that these are the closest analogs that the translator could find in fantastic literature.

That these 1,000+ pages, with all their hyper-detailed exposition, are merely the tip of the iceberg of Tolkien's invented world, makes the novel all the more amazing. This really is a masterpiece of storytelling and myth-making. I can understand now why so many people love this book. I think I'm now one of them.

Straight Man: "For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it's always wrong."

Straight Man
Richard Russo
Vintage Books, 1997

Russo's gaspingly funny Straight Man affords a knowing look at midlife crisis, parent-child dynamics, marriage, and tenured life in small-town academia. The novel's humor is leavened with mystery regarding various political machinations on the narrator's campus, including which of his colleagues (or is it the narrator himself?) is to be thrown under the bus. That narrator, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., known to his friends and enemies alike as Hank, is an anarchist by nature who finds himself in the unenviable position of chairman of his English department. Along with the typical struggles of academic life (I've heard it said that "never have the stakes been so low"), Hank is plagued with worries. He is concerned that he might have kidney stones (an ailment that plagued his highly successful novelist-academic father, a father who abandoned Hank and his mother when Hank was still a kid); he wants to sleep with several of the women with whom he works (including his secretary who ends every sentence with an upwards inflection, as if she is permanently uncertain about everything); and he is haunted by the fact that he wrote his only novel as a young man and has contributed nothing subsequently to American letters.

Needless to say the book is a very funny read. At one point the reader finds the narrator hiding in the ceiling whilst spying on the meeting which decides on his status as department chair. On another occasion and completely on the spur of the moment, Hank threatens (on live television, no less) to kill a duck (or is it a goose?) unless the state legislature and university administration resolve the school's funding situation. The cast of characters will be all-too-familiar to anyone fortunate (or is that unfortunate?) enough to work in academe. It includes the violent poet whose poetry isn't all that great, the aforementioned uncertain secretary?, and the young professor ("Orshee") whose sole academic specialty seems to be contradicting everyone else (a good obstructionist/deconstructionist, if nothing else) while posing as an uber-feminist at every opportunity.

Throughout the novel Hank repeatedly returns to his favorite philosopher, the medieval William of Occam (after whom his dog Occam is named), to find the simplest possible explanation for all the craziness that seems to be filling his life. Through the novel's wry twists and turns, Hank comes to the conclusion that life is a little more complicated, coincidental, mysterious, and perhaps even magical than he'd like to believe.

Because the truth is, we never know for sure about ourselves. Who we'll sleep with if given the opportunity, who we'll betray in the right circumstances, whose faith and love we will reward with our own...Only after we've done a thing do we know what we'll do, and by then whatever we've done has already begun to sever itself from clear significance, at least for the doer.

Which is why we have spouses and children and parents and colleagues and friends, because someone has to know us better than we know ourselves. We need them to tell us. We need them to say, "I know you, Al. You're not the kind of man who." (373-4)

A special thanks goes out to Bruce Clark, who recommended that I read this book over the Christmas break, and to his lovely wife Caryn Clark, whose copy I borrowed and devoured.

Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition: Jumping Snake River Canyon on a motorcycle might be one of the saner ideas in this book

Great Mambo Chicken and The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge
Ed Regis
Perseus Books, 1990

I got depressed to tears reading Bill McKibben's Enough as part of my second brief and aborted post/transhumanism kick. I was frustrated with McKibben for not being radical enough in his criticisms of posthumanism, and also because, ironically, I'm intrigued by the posthuman ideas and ideals that McKibben derides. (I'm an SF fan, what can I say?) Another aspect of my funk was my reaction to the knee-jerk adulation and condemnation the book received on Amazon and elsewhere. In the interest of saving what remains of my sanity I put McKibben's book down---with the intention to finish it another day (see my forthcoming review on The Lord of the Rings to understand that sometimes "another day" is a long way from today)---and went in for something that approached post/trans-humanism with what I hoped was a lighter touch.

Luckily for me, Ed Regis' Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over the Edge fit the bill. It approaches fin-de-millennium technoscientific hubris with tongue well in cheek. The book begins with a vignette about the late Evel Knievel (!) and somehow manages to connect this famous exemplar of not-thinking -the-consequences-through---deftly, I should add---with contemporary (as of 1990) explorations of nanotechology, space colonization, artificial intelligence, uploading human consciousness, germline genetic engineering, and cosmic conquest. Regis exposes something maddeningly similar between Knievel's failed attempt to jump Snake River Canyon with a "Skycycle" and all the converging technoscientific innovations that threaten/promise to remake fundamentally the world we inhabit and which comprise the core of what is called "transhuman."

According to Regis, the "forward-looking" scientists discussed in this book want

"nothing less than reinventing Man and Nature. They wanted to re-create Creation. They wanted to make human beings immortal--or failing that, they wanted to convert humans into abstract spirits that were by nature deathless. They wanted to gain complete control over matter, and they wanted to extend mankind's rightful sovereignty out across the solar system, into the Galaxy, and out into the rest of the cosmos."(p.7)

Some of the thinkers described in this book "envisioned...a vast interstellar culture, a population of superintelligent robots and disembodied postbiological minds spread out across the stars and galaxies" (p. 7). Superintelligent robots? Disembodied postbiological minds? Spread out across the stars and galaxies? I leave it to you to decide whether this is aptly described as hubris.

And then we have Keith and Carolyn Henson, "a couple of extremely intelligent engineering types" who talk about life on earth as if it were passé:

"There isn't really much left to do here," said Keith. "The highest mountains and the lowest valleys have all been explored on earth. The opportunities are rather limited."

"In other words," Carolyn said, "we were worried about things getting very, very BORING if we stuck around on this planet for too long." (p. 58)

There isn't much left to do here?! Life on earth is boring?! I think the best response to this terrestrial ennui is found in Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle. Berry discusses the infinitesimal beauty of the living world and talks about being able to explore almost infinitely the details of a single tree in our own back yard. He advocates this sort of attention to particularity and to detail as an antidote to the depression and boredom of our contemporary late-capitalist, technoscientific worldview. I also wondered as I read this quote what type of pathological boredom afflicts one to the point where LIFE ON EARTH (the only type of life with which any of us is familiar) is boring? What is the psychology behind that? I know that I occasionally get bored with my current life circumstances, but to be bored with terrestrial existence itself seems a wee bit mental. Aren't there always more books to read, movies to see, conversations to have, foods to eat, beers to drink, friends to make? What's truly crazy is that these same people are talking about scientifically engineered immortality! Why?? If three-score-and-ten years leave you breathless with boredom, why shoot for a millennium-long lifespan? Hubris isn't a strong-enough word for this lunacy.

Of course, some of these thinkers aren't just possessed of hubris. Some also seem terminally clueless. Take for instance an author named Tom Heppenheimer who wrote in the book Colonies in Space that Native Americans would find in space colonies a new homeland to replace the one that white folks stole from them:

"We may see the return of the Cherokee or Arapaho nation, not necessarily with a revival of the culture of prairie, horse, and buffalo, but in the founding of self-governing communities which reflect the distinctly Arapaho or Cherokee customs and attitudes toward man and nature." (73)

This is possibly the most transparent attempt on the part of technoscience to appeal to "liberal guilt" and utopian desires. Thankfully Dartmouth psychology prof Jack Baird pointed out the patent absurdity of this proposal:

"To the Native Americans, land is especially sacred...and today it is the particular land of their ancestors they would dearly love to recover and preserve for future generations. Circling the earth in a mammoth space station would hardly qualify as a promising spot from which to revive and pay homage to the traditions of their forebears." (73-4)

By viewing particulars, whether particular geographical locations or particular embodied minds, as interchangeable generals, a living world of singularities is reduced to an inventory of parts. Thus nothing untoward is seen about proposals to REPLACE these organic particulars with mass-manufactured simulations.

And then there's other talk in this book that frightens me, in part I guess because it is so TOTAL in its scope. Regis calls this type of talk the "Bashful Confession of Omnipotence." It is the belief among some of these forward thinkers that we humans will soon be able to "make anything that is physically possible" (120, emphasis in text) by having "complete control over the structure of matter" (p. 123). This is, after all, the fundamental premise of nanotechnology which seeks to replicate nature's means of building stuff atom by atom. And of course, there are the concomitant appeals to utopianism : this sort of power will mean no more poverty, no more human labor, no more centralized control, no more disease, no more death. The problem with these utopian appeals is that, like all utopian appeals, they suffer from naïveté. Will we transform human greed and selfishness nanotechnologically? After all, poverty and labor stem more from the need for some humans to be billionaires and to live off the sweat of others than from some fundamental lack of food and natural resources.

Futurist Hans Moravec comes on the scene with his notions of uploading human consciousness and of making back-ups of people. While I certainly understand the appeal of "saving copies" of those I love, at precisely the same time the implications horrify me. Don't I love my wife, daughter, family, and friends precisely because they are singular, irreplaceable, once-in-a-lifetime individuals? But for Moravec these issues are moot, since it is impossible for us to really determine whether or not we are live or Memorex (i.e., living in a simulation). I guess this is what happens when those midnight hookah circle discussions of being a brain in a jar go horribly awry. So is this hubris or solipsism?

Just when we think these scientists can get no more bizarre, we come to the ultimate example of hubris, in David Criswell's proposal to use the sun as a natural resource. Not a natural resource in terms of the light, warmth, and energy it supplies to the earth, but as raw material for absurd construction projects needed to support the trillions of people inhabiting the inside of the inevitable bubble around the solar system. And some folks are even wondering how on earth we humans will survive the heat death of the universe 10+ billions of years from now. Uh-huh. We can't even figure out how to live in peace with one another on the earth we share and how to feed every mouth with the food we already grow. Worrying about how we'll survive the end of the universe seems a bit premature if you ask me.

So do the ideas discussed herein constitute hubris or are they merely the inevitable march of technoscientific progress? That is the question left me by this book. Maybe the answer, chilling as it is, is both. Or maybe, just maybe, the seemingly imminent collapse of industrial society (read global warming + peak oil + peak water + peak population) will actually be a blessing in disguise, saving us from the futures outlined in books like this. That's a scary thought.

There are weird things about Ohio, believe it or not

Weird Ohio
James A. Willis, Andrew Henderson, and Loren Coleman
Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2005

Despite having hack writer and former Decaturian Troy Taylor at the helm, Weird Illinois--a companion to this volume--makes for great bathroom reading. The production values and colorful images more than compensate for Taylor's leaden prose and inane editorializing. I love this book so much that every time I visit my best friend's Chicago apartment, I make time to secrete myself away in the john and hunch over it. I got to wondering what I would think of the book if the writing were as good as the production, and so I decided to check out another book in the series to see.

Luckily, I picked an absolute winner with Haunted Ohio. The writing is great, and not just because I'm comparing it with Taylor's ham-fisted oeuvre. The three co-authors balance a love of a good scare story with a desire to know the available facts about any site they describe; it constantly amazed me how they could debunk a particular legend with one or two salient, documented facts without ever abandoning the joy of repeating the original legend."Who cares if it isn't exactly true?" they seem to suggest, "If you're reading a book of weird stories, you're probably into it more for the chill it send down your spine than for any empirically verifiable facts it may reveal." As mentioned before in the context of Haunted Illinois, the production values are superb, and the addition of stories supplied by readers and locals really capture something uniquely Midwestern about these weird people and places.

The sections of the book deal with various weird topics like local legends, ancient mysteries (e.g., the Serpent Mound), fabled people and places, unexplained phenomena (e.g., UFO sightings, Hangar 18, and the ever-popular pancakes from space!), bizarre beasts (including the Mothman), local heroes and villains, personalized properties, roadside distractions (like the Longaberger Basket HQ featured on the cover---it's the building shaped like the giant basket, complete with handles), haunted places, cemeteries, and abandoned buildings and roller coasters.

A very fun, entertaining, and even (gasp) informative book.

"Certainly the prospect for 'normal' humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories." Amen to that assessment.

Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
Gardner Dozois, editor
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002
0312275692

“Would we ordinary, garden-variety human beings like the Posthuman Future if we were somehow suddenly catapulted into it? Or would we find it a terrifying, hostile, and incomprehensible place, a place we were no more equipped to understand and deal with successfully than an Australopithecus would be equipped to deal with Times Square? Are human beings, as we understand the term, as the term has been understood for thousand upon thousands of years, on the way out? Doomed to extinction, or at the very least to enforced obsolescence in some future equivalent of a game reserve or a zoo? Certainly the prospect for “normal” humans sometimes seems bleak in these stories, with author after author postulating the inevitability of a constantly widening gap between the human and the posthuman condition… with the humans left ever father behind, unable to cope.” (Preface, pp. xii-xiii)

As with almost every book I read, this one fits into a larger context. A few years ago, one web search or another introduced me to this idea called "the Singularity." It seems that science fiction writer Vernor Vinge came up with this term to describe that point in the near-future where developments in germline genetic engineering, computer science, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and associated disciplines will accelerate and converge in such a way as to create a scientific analog to the fundamentalist Christian "Rapture." Those of us who came into existence before this singular convergence will be radically different from those whose lives are defined by the terms of a post-Singularity world. The latter, deemed "posthumans" (or "transhumans") by various commentators on this vision, will be in control of the the fundamental constituents of the human universe---matter, life, and mind---to such a degree that they will effectively be as gods to the mere humans who preceded them.

I was fascinated by this idea, in part because these developments do seem to presage a variety of unprecedented social, cultural, and other realities. After all, just consider the impact that computer and mobile phone technologies have had on all aspects of global society in the last twenty years, and envision those changes compounded and sped up. I read a few novels that I've previously reviewed here (i.e., Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Rudy Rucker's Moldies and Meatbops and Realware, and The Engines of Light trilogy by Ken MacLeod) and sort of burned through the most intense phase of the interest before I moved on to more pessimistic appraisals of our collective future (mainly dealing with the issue of Peak Oil, a prospect thatjust might put the kibosh on the whole transhumanist project).

This series of pessimistic appraisals then led me back to the topic of transhumanism in the form of Bill McKibben's book Enough. In this well-written but not entirely convincing book (more about which when I actually finish it), he argues against the posthuman/transhuman future implicit in these technologies on the grounds that it will be devoid of meaning, since meaning is grounded in our limitations, defects, and finitude. His book got too preachy too quickly, and so I put it down and picked up a variety of other relevant books, including Jeremy Rifkin’s The Biotech Century, Rapture, The Future and Its Enemies, and a bunch of SF, including this volume. So that's all by way of an explanation as to why I picked this book up.

Regarding this collection of short SF itself, editor Gardner Dozois provides a rough sketch of a "superhuman" posthumanity in his outline of the criteria used in selecting these stories. Science fiction, once dominated by stories of space conquest and interstellar adventure, had by the early 1970s begun to yield to the fundamentally unsettling discoveries of modern cosmologists and space researchers. Solar system changed into galaxy, which in turn had gave way to galactic clusters, galactic superclusters, and ultimately to a universe of such analogy-defying proportions that the space conquest fantasies of the 1950s came to be regarded as impossible. So SF writers and some scientists began to develop new scenarios and strategies for space colonization; after all, if the crux of the problem is a dearth of nearby earthlike planets, then two possible solutions are to make planets earthlike (i.e., terraforming) or to change the nature of human beings and adapt them to a wide variety of habitats. It is this latter notion, changing the very nature of what it has meant thus far to be a human being, that is the subject of this collection.

But it is not just any change of what it means to be human. Dozois invokes various filters in his anthology: the stories contained don't deal with "accidental" posthumanity brought about through mutation or post-apocalyptic scenarios, nor do they deal with posthumans who are angels, machines, or gods in disguise (it is SF after all and not fantasy), nor do they deal with virtual realities and downloaded posthuman consciousness. In this collection, all the posthuman situations are the direct result of deliberate change, often for the purposes of space colonization and conquest, and occur primarily in the "meat" world, as opposed to that of disembodied cyberspace.

Alas the stories in this collection did not, for the most part, live up to the promise of Dozois' introduction. While many of the tales were quite good in terms of craft, not many very meaningful or memorable. Too often I found myself shaking my head at the glibness of the authors and at how far they hadn't come from the Wild West, Manifest Destiny, cowboys in space mentality that characterized much of so-called Golden Age SF. A few stories do stand out, though, and so merit special mention.

• In “The Chapter Ends,” by Poul Anderson, the Earth has become a rustic backwater that has been traded to an alien civilization in a cosmic territorial exchange. The posthuman descendents of Earth, who have absolutely no connection to this obscure planet in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, move the few thousand remaining human beings off of the homeworld. They leave behind one Wendell Berry-esque holdout who realizes what it like to be the last person on earth--after the last flight out has gone.
  

• “Aye, and Gomorrah,” by Samuel R. Delany, is the sort of sexy science fiction I'd expect from Phillip Jose Farmer. The story centers on spacers, "modified" posthumans whose exotic asexuality makes them the target of fetishists called frelks.
  

• "Understand,” by Ted Chiang, features a patient who is resuscitated from a vegetative state through the use of an experimental new synthetic hormone. Of course, the vegetable becomes an uber-genius, escapes from the hospital as a fugitive from CIA, begins meddling in the affairs of humanity in pursuit of his posthuman aesthetic agenda, and finally discovers another pharmaceutically engendered uber-genius out to save the world.
  

• “None So Blind” finds Joe Haldeman (one of my favorite authors) telling a love story of sorts about an odd couple whose love begets an experimental surgery that turns regular folks into geniuses. And all they need to do is give up their eyes.
  

• “Border Guards,” by Greg Egan (another author I've always liked), poses a good challenge to the McKibbenses of the world with their argument that death gives our lives meaning and dignity. Egan asks the simple question, "is that true?" If we could find a way to get rid of death once and for all, would it be fair to our children not to do so?
  

• “A History of the Human and Post-Human Species,” by Geoffrey A. Landis, was my favorite story, I think. It is found in the epilogue, and constitutes a "scientific" abstract covering all the speciation and evolution, engineered and naturally selected, that facing the human race in the next few million years. Intelligent species arise after humans, but none achieve spaceflight, and in a final twist reminiscent of Dougal Dixon's Man After Man, posthuman descendants of Terrestrial colonists on Mars return to Earth in the far future, with no memory of their original connection.
  

Makes for fascinating reading on multiple levels

DMT: The Spirit Molecule: A Doctor's Revolutionary Research into the Biology of Near-Death and Mystical Experiences
Rick Strassman, MD
Park Street Press, 2000


What feature do mystical experience, near-death experience, and alien abduction share? According to this fascinating book, all of these disparate experiences may be accompanied by a release of dimethyltryptamine (DMT, a potent psychedelic compound related to serotonin, melatonin, and psilocybin) from the pineal gland. Interestingly, this substance is also found in scores of different New World plants and has been used in many indigenous South American cultures as a pharmaceutical adjunct to shamanic practices. Intrepid psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Rick Strassman navigated the byzantine bureaucracies of the FDA and the DEA in order to conduct the first psychedelic research on human beings in two decades and lived to tell the tale, much to the satisfaction of psychonauts like yours truly.

This book serves multiple functions: it provides an introduction to the chemical DMT and to the anatomy and physiology of the pineal gland, an overview of the literature on human psychedelic research and an outline for future instances of the same, a template for the process of human psychedelic research design, a database of first-person experiences of large doses of intravenous DMT, speculations on the nature of consciousness and reality, and caveats about future research with psychedelic substances. As noted in the title for this review, the book provides fascinating reading on all these levels. It is rare that I've read a nonfiction book that held my attention so easily; the fact that I devoured a book that covered so much intellectual ground in such a brief time speaks volumes as to the quality of Strassman's writing. He follows the tried and true method of writers past---summarize what you plan to say, say it, and summarize what you've said. For some reviewers his prose was too pedantic or workmanlike, but for me it was perfect. He managed to convey a sense of scientific detachment while at the same time exhibiting a profound sensitivity both to the needs of his subjects and also to the needs of his readers, even as he described the saline flush used to clean out the IV lines. Strassman does not approach the subject matter glibly and avoids coming to any easy conclusions; in fact, his own sense of discomfort with the direction the research takes (i.e., the repeat encounters of test subjects with "other beings" that don't seem hallucinatory in the least) cemented my respect for him as a researcher and an author.

Anyone interested in altered states of consciousness, whether natural or substance-induced, would do well to read this book. Dr. Strassman should be thanked for returning a sense of respectability to an area of scientific research that was effectively "lost" for a generation.

(This review was originally posted on December 6, 2007.)

Well la dee da, it's Adi Da!

Adi Da and Adidam: The Divine Self-Revelation of the Avataric Way of the "Bright" and the "Thumbs"
Carolyn Lee
The Dawn Horse Press, 2004


In my sojourns through the religion, philosophy, and New Age sections of various bookshops, I've repeatedly come across the name and face of Adi Da (previously known as Bubba Free John, among other monikers). It was only when I found this pocket-sized introductory book, though, that I decided to read a bit more about this enigmatic and controversial guru and his teachings. Having devoured the entire thing last night, I'm still trying to figure out whether or not Adi Da means for us to take everything written here seriously. My assumption is that this booklet is an accurate, if brief, look at Adidam, because it is published by the Dawn Horse Press (the publisher of all of Adi Da's other works) and was written under the direction of the Ruchira Sannyasin Order of Adidam Ruchiradam (a impressive-sounding group about which the reader is told nothing). If this is the case, then Adi Da is either: (1) God incarnate, (2) a legitimate spiritual teacher with delusions of grandeur, (3) seriously mentally ill, (4) a charlatan of epic proportions, or (5) some combination thereof. For the record, my money is not on option #1.

Adi Da is, according to this book, "Real God, or Truth, or Reality, Manifesting in human form" (p.6). He claims that at his birth as Franklin Jones (in Jamaica, NY, no less), the Divine Reality became a human being for the first time, and that the millennia-long struggle for human beings to attain enlightenment under their own steam, as it were, came to an end. This claim must come as a surprise to the billion-plus Christians worldwide who assert that God became a human being in 1st century Palestine, and to the hundreds of millions of Hindus who believe that the divine Vishnu has taken human form on at least nine occasions.

As for Adidam, "the Path of the Heart," it boils down to guru-devotion or bhakti-yoga. What this means is that the devotee, by surrendering the heart and giving complete attention and devotion to Adi Da, allows the divine essence that is incarnate in Adi Da to break through the knot of self-concern and ego-contraction which is the source of all suffering. Again, this is not unique, at least from the perspective of comparative religion. Bhakti yoga is probably the most practiced form of Hindu spirituality, and many other religious traditions, Christianity and Shin Buddhism among them, see divine grace as the only "means" to salvation. For the devotees of Adidam, however, the salvific response to this devotion isn't simply taken on faith; rather, it takes the form of palpable energetic responses, called the "Bright" and the "Thumbs" by Adi Da, that transform the mind, soul, and body of the devotee. At least, that's what the book says.

Apart from the actual content, the book's style posed many problems. Hagiography isn't a genre popular with too many moderns, yours truly included, and the praise-filled prose becomes cloying just a few pages into the book. Adi Da's own commentary, quoted at length throughout the slender volume, is rife with arbitrary capitalization, underlining, and other annoying stylistic and typographic idiosyncrasies. Those features, combined with fairly impenetrable philosophy and a sense of inflated ego (which is to be expected, I guess, from the "promised God-man"), made for a less-than-thrilling read.

(This review was originally written on November 27, 2007.)

These authors need a crash course in discerning speculation from fact

The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince
Touchstone, 1998


Claiming on the front cover to be an expose about the "true identity of Christ," the book comes to this conclusion on page 352-3: "Jesus was not the Son of God, and neither was he of the Jewish religion--although he may have been ethnically a Jew...John did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. He may well have baptized him, because Jesus was one of *his* disciples, perhaps even rising through the ranks to become his second-in-command. Something went wrong, however: John changed his mind and nominated Simon Magus as his successor. Shortly afterwards John was killed. Mary Magdalene was a priestess who was Jesus' partner in a sacred marriage..."

After reaching this point in the book, I put it down in disgust, something I am not wont to do (particularly after I've spent hour after hour plowing through a text), and decided to write this review.

This book is offensive, not necessarily because of its radical and unsubstantiated claims about Jesus, but because it, like so many others of its ilk, confuses a constellation of conjecture, speculation, supposition, and allegation with EVIDENCE as it seeks to support a very unconventional hypothesis.

From its first chapter, in which authors Picknett and Prince discuss the secret symbolism of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings (symbolism that most professional art historians consider spurious, by the way), the following pattern is established:

• Explain away the fact that reputable and knowledgeable parties don't agree with your observations by linking these parties with the "conspiracy" you're attempting to expose.
• Ask a question like, "what other possible explanation could there be?" and then refuse to seek explanations different from your own pet theory.
• Use qualifiers like "perhaps," "could," "suppose," or "might" when establishing a speculative data point, and then forget about that qualifier when you bring up that same data point, as an established fact, in the next chapter to bolster the next data point.
• Connect all your dots and claim that the picture you've just drawn is the REAL DEAL, all the while ignoring the fact that the dots you connected were all of your own design.
  

I can't honestly say that the book was worthless; it was occasionally a fun read and the authors' ruminations contain lots of interesting, if unsupported, speculations about varied topics. The first half of the book does a fair job of showing possible connections between various esoteric and occult groups in Western history, such as the Knights Templar, the Hermeticists, and the Freemasons. As well, the second half of the book, which focuses on the "true identity of Christ," is also interesting, if only because it offers a challenge to those whose knowledge of Christian origins and history is sorely wanting. (Didn't know that the New Testament was put together by a committee of bishops and their representatives? Well now you do.) And the chapter on the Mandaeans of Iraq was also very interesting and made me want to read more about this vanishing remnant of Gnostic religion. Having said that, the authors' tendency to conflate speculation with fact and their lack of hesitancy in passing the former off as the latter ruined this book for me as anything other than a work of fiction.

Read it if you must, enjoy it if you can, but please remember that speculation and fact are two different animals. Just because Picknett and Prince have written it, doesn't make it so.

(This review was originally written on November 20, 2007.)

Some of these stories have haunted me for decades

Across the Universe: The DC Universe Stories of Alan Moore
Alan Moore
DC Comics, 2003


V for Vendetta and From Hell are two of my favorite graphic novels, due in no small part to the brilliant ideas and prose of Alan Moore. Because I first read both books in the `00s, I'd just assumed that Moore was only a contemporary comic book writer. Imagine my surprise, then, that upon picking up this volume at the local library, I discovered not one but three stories that affected me so profoundly when I read them as a kid that they still stick with me twenty-plus years later.

Two of these stories, both of which involve the Green Lantern Corps, still come up in my comparative religions class when I am reflecting on perception and frames of reference. In "Mogo Doesn't Socialize," Bolphunga the Unrelenting has come to a remote planet in search of the great Green Lantern Mogo. Suffice it to say that Bolphunga and the reader both discover precisely why Mogo can't be found anywhere on that remote world in a perceptual shift worthy of the Twilight Zone. "In Blackest Night" challenges a Green Lantern to communicate with a blind being from a dark planet who knows (and, more importantly, can know) nothing of "green" or "lanterns." This story drove home the point that you need a common frame of reference in order for ideas to translate.

The third story, "Brief Lives," filled a single page spread and came from something called Vega. As with the latter of the GL stories, this one was all about perspective. Two giants, whose lives encompass epochs of geological time, encounter---in the form of an almost imperceptible little cloud of dust---the futile attacks of a race of militant insectoids. The punchline, delivered by one of these eons-old creatures to his colleague, is that he shouldn't worry too much about the dust cloud because "life is too short." Wonderful!

All the other stories collected in this volume are strong, and most of them explore the nuances of interpersonal relationships, hardly the standard fare of superhero comic books. In "For the Man Who Has Everything," Superman is attacked by an alien plant-thing that renders him comatose while allowing him to live out an idealized virtual life on a Krypton-that-never-exploded with his wife and children. "The Jungle Line" finds the Swamp Thing gently, almost tenderly, rescuing Superman from the feverish grip of a lethal Kryptonian fungus. "Night Olympics" follows an evening out with socially conscious crime fighter couple Green Arrow and Black Widow as they encounter drug freaks, stereo thieves, and a would-be assassin. "Father's Day" is a troubling, if overlong, Vigilante story about a child-abusing, wife-murdering ex-con, and the complex, unfathomable relationship he has with his daughter. The closing story, "Mortal Clay," finds Batman dueling with the third incarnation of Clayface over the affections of an, um, woman.

Alan Moore has demonstrated time and again that he is a writer to be reckoned with. The implications of some stories in this collection took me by surprise decades ago, and their effects have still not worn off. I recommend the stories in this collection very highly.

(This review was originally written on November 19, 2007.)

Great introduction to Jodo Shinshu Buddhism

Buddha of Infinite Light
Daisetz T. Suzuki
Shambhala Publications, 1998

Ever since the first Englishman translated the final words of the Buddha as "work out your own salvations with diligence," the English-speaking West has associated Buddhism almost exclusively with the cool, detached path of self-power and the attainment of enlightenment through the individual cultivation of wisdom, ethics, and meditation. Perhaps it is due to this limited understanding of the Buddhadharma, perhaps it is because so many Westerners have come to Buddhism in order to escape from a theistically oriented religion; whatever the reason, out of the millions of Westerners who now find themselves attracted to the Buddhadharma, few are familiar with the Buddhist path of Other-power, a path which finds its clearest expression in the Jodo Shinshu Buddhism of Japan.

Thankfully the folks at Shambhala Publications have decided to fill this gap in knowledge by updating and republishing a classic work by D.T. Suzuki, perhaps most well known in the West for his work on the Zen traditions of Japanese Buddhism. The result is this short, clearly written work which attempts to explain the essential teachings of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism (aka Shin Buddhism) in a way that situates them squarely within a more familiar Buddhist worldview.

Suzuki admits up front that his presentation of Shin Buddhism, stripped of what he calls "accretions," will go directly against more traditional interpretations, and so obviously this book is not an exhaustive treatment of its subject. Instead the book sketches the basic premise of Shin Buddhism (i.e., Amida Buddha has vowed that anyone who calls out to him with sincere faith will be reborn in the Pure Land, a stainless realm whence anyone can attain enlightenment) and discusses its essential practice of reciting the nembutsu ("Namu-Amida-Butsu") in the context of standard Buddhist philosophical concepts (e.g., selflessness, emptiness, compassion, etc.).

So for Suzuki, the practice of reciting the nembutsu is not about calling out to a god for salvation, although that is certainly how it first appears. Instead "Namu" symbolizes self-power, "Amida Butsu" Other-power, and the conjunction of the two in the nembutsu is emblematic of the essential nonduality of oneself and the enlightened mind of the Buddha. Likewise, Suzuki explains that we cannot practice the sincerity necessary to call out to Amida because sincerity is the "perfect forgetting of oneself." In other words, what initially seems "too easy" is seen on closer analysis to be nigh impossible. This is why Shinran's modification of existing Pure Land Buddhist doctrines was, and is, so radical; for him, the nembutsu isn't a prayer or mantra to be put into practice (after all, what good would such practice be given our hopeless self-centeredness?) but an expression of gratitude for having already been swept up into the Pure Land through the absolute grace of Amida's compassion. For Shinran, the Pure Land itself is not merely understood as a post-mortem destination but is a radical re-envisioning and sanctification of the present moment. The strict separation between what is self and what is not-self, between what is samsara and what is nirvana, blurs; "When sincerity and insincerity are transcended, then Amida comes into our inner self and identifies himself with this inner self. Or, we can say, this self find itself in Amida. And when we find this self in Amida, we are in the Pure Land" (p. 41).

This is a great introduction to an often-overlooked school of Buddhist thought and practice.

(This review was originally written on October 26, 2007.)