Night Hawks by Charles Johnson

Published by Scribner on May 1, 2018

Many of the stories in Night Hawks address questions of religion or philosophy. Toshiro Ogami, the “imitation priest” in “Kamadhatu: A Modern Sutra,” left the monastery because he did not have the political or family connections needed to rise in his religion. He translates English books into Japanese while rehabilitating an old, abandoned temple. An African American woman whose book he is translating finds him there. Quite inadvertently, she helps him overcome his self-doubt and find the harmonious unity that has always eluded him.

“Idols of the Cave” is told in the second person, putting the reader in the shoes of a Muslim American soldier who is being court martialed after tumbling into a cave in Afghanistan that had once been occupied by Buddhist monks. A treasure trove of ancient wisdom sparks a discussion between the Muslim soldier and a Christian major and an outcome that Aristotle might categorize as either comedy or tragedy — the court martialed soldier does not know which characterization would be more accurate.

“The Weave” describes the theft of wigs and extensions made from human hair from a salon by a former employee who believes she was unjustly fired for burning a customer. The hair comes from the heads of Buddhist women who are shorn in order to let go of all things cosmetic. The story, narrated by the thief’s boyfriend, is about letting go of the things that turned the former salon employee into a thief, including her pain and “the absurdities of color and caste.”

A student of Socrates, presumably Plato, narrates “The Cynic.” He laments the condition of postwar Athens, the prevalence of people who aspire to power rather than good, who learn from sophists how to disguise truth and perfection, and at the same time challenges the wisdom of Socrates, Aristotle, and particularly Diogenes, who forces Plato to consider the possibility that it is more important to be than to understand.

Other stories are closer to home, but are still informed by philosophy, particularly by Buddhist thought. A Seattle cab driver in “Occupying Arthur Whitfield,” ruminating about the unfair divide between the 1% and the rest of us, burglarizes the home of a wealthy man, only to learn that the differences between the rich and poor are often less significant that the suffering that all human beings share. A similar lesson is learned in “Welcome to Westwood,” when the narrator, irritated by the loud music played by a neighbor, learns to replace his irritation with compassion.

“The Night Belongs to Phoenix Jones” is a fictionalized account of the narrator’s encounter with a real-life black man in Seattle who gained some fame by dressing as a superhero and fighting (or, as the police viewed it, committing) crimes. The point of the story is that people have the power to invent themselves, perhaps the most important superpower of all.

Another real-life African American, the playwright August Wilson, is the subject of “Night Hawks,” a story written as a wide-ranging conversation that touches on the soul of the artist, the difference between tough exteriors and sensitive interiors, “the ambiguous state of black America,” and the tragedy of art that never reaches the audience that most needs to see it. Reality intrudes on intellectualism when the two men observe the night hawks who roost at an IHOP at 3 a.m., a juxtaposition that suggests the importance of art as a refuge from the violence and suffering that surrounds us all.

The remaining inhabitants of Earth in “4189” are immortal, but some of them use a forbidden drug that helps them imagine they might die, which is essential to appreciating a moment of time. But death, the only forbidden fruit, becomes the only taste that Shane and his lover crave. This story is about a society that subordinates individuality for the collective good. With its surprise ending, this is one of the best science fiction short stories I’ve read this year.

A song that contains a map to freedom for runaway slaves is at the center of “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” On the silly side, “Guinea Pig” describes an experiment in which a student briefly inhabits the mind of the researcher’s dog.

All of Charles Johnson’s stories are carefully polished gems. This collection demonstrates Johnson’s versatility, blending philosophy with the reality of modern street life. It is the product of a warm, generous, and thoughtful mind, the kind of enriching fiction that offers a chance to take a break and feel grateful for life and for artists who help us understand the possibilities it offers.

RECOMMENDED

Blood's a Rover by Harlan Ellison (Jason Davis, ed.)

Published by Subterranean Press on June 30, 2018

The introduction of Blood’s a Rover explains how Harlan Ellison’s brilliant novella, “A Boy and His Dog” (eventually filmed as a pretty good movie starring Don Johnson) was followed by some other stories in the same universe, and a treatment for a television show that NBC decided not to pick up, and an eventual full-length novel that Ellison started to write before suffering a stroke. This volume collects much of that material. The series is set in a post-apocalyptic world reduced to “radiation and rubble,” overseen by “the new masters of desolation: vicious roverpaks of parentless young boys … and their telepathic dogs.”

Placed in chronological order (as opposed to the order in which Ellison wrote them), the volume starts with “Eggsucker.” Blood, the dog who narrates the story, has been with Vic for about two years when the story starts. By the end, they’re thinking of splitting up, each blaming the other for an incident that will definitely require them to leave town. But they need each other even if Vic’s refusal to listen to reason (Blood being the reasonable one) sometimes impairs their partnership.

“A Boy and His Dog” sends Vic in search of a girl Blood found for him. After a harrowing experience together, the girl flees, and Vic pursues her over Blood’s objection. She lives in an underground version of Topeka, which Ellison uses to lampoon the notion that Midwestern Christian “values” make their adherents superior to people who are less judgmental and more open to experience (and I say that as someone who lived most of his life in the Midwest). The story is gripping from its inception until Vic makes his way out of Topeka with the girl, but the story saves its best moment for a gut-punch surprise in the very last sentence. One of the story’s themes involves the meaning of loyalty, and how true friendships are those that survive adversity (as opposed to plastic “use you and lose you” friendships). One of the story’s messages — a classic Ellison message — is, if you find security in living a dull and uneventful life, that’s your choice, but don’t force conformity to your social ideals on people who understand that freedom begins with the freedom to disagree. “A Boy and His Dog” might be Ellison’s best story. It’s certainly in the top three.

“Run, Spot, Run” takes place a few days after “A Boy and His Dog.” Vic is having some trouble coping with his actions, and Blood is having some trouble coping with Vic’s dreams. I don’t want to spoil the story so I’ll just say that it comes with the kind of gut-punch ending that was Ellison’s trademark.

“Blood’s a Rover” is the unproduced screenplay. The story brings back Vic and introduces a new character, a girl named Spike. Unsurprisingly, Vic doesn’t like Spike much, but Blood plays peacemaker because a girl and a boy and his dog have a better chance of survival than a boy and his dog — as Blood eventually proves. The screenplay doesn’t have the same bite as the original story, and certainly isn’t as compelling as Ellison’s best teleplays, but it would have been fun to watch.

Scattered throughout the volume are snippets of Blood’s wit and wisdom.

The volume was released shortly before Ellison’s death. It is something a true Ellison fan (in the sense of fanatic) will want to have. Other readers might be better served by picking up Ellison’s The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, an excellent story collection that includes “A Boy and His Dog.”

RECOMMENDED

Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett

Published by Crown on August 21, 2018

I read a fair amount of science fiction but not much fantasy. At the first whiff of dragons or magic, I usually find something else to read, but some writers (J.K. Rowling, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.R.R. Tolkien) wield their own kind of magic by turning fantasy into a reality that the reader readily accepts. Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those writers. Bennett is a master of building worlds that defy our current understanding of physics, while operating in a realm of perfectly ordered rules that seem entirely plausible, even if they aren’t the rules that govern our own universe. His careful world-building makes Bennett one of the best of the current fantasists — that, and his ability to create sympathetic and principled characters who wage epic battles against the kinds of evil that are recognizable in our own universe.

Foundryside shares some similarities with Bennett’s excellent Divine Cities trilogy — primarily in a setting that seems to be drawn from the Middle Ages — but the element of magic in Divine Cities was based on divinities (entities with godlike powers), while Foundryside (the first installment of the Founders trilogy) makes use of industrial magic, or magic that has been harnessed for industrial purposes, to the profit of the four merchant houses that control it.

Bennett sets Foundryside on an Earth-like world in which sigils do the work of technology. The scriving (drawing or inscribing) of sigils onto an object convinces the object to accept a different reality: wood believes it is stone, wheels turn because they believe they are on a downhill slope. Sigils were apparently created by hierophants of the Occidentals, a long-dead civilization thought by some to be equivalent of angels. The merchant houses manufacture the scrived devices, which pretty much belong to the affluent and powerful. The Tevanni empire is based on the power of scriving, which might be the equivalent of machine code in the world of technology.

It is against that background that we meet Sancio Grado, a thief whose particular talent is the ability to touch inanimate objects and to know them — where they’ve been, how they are structured. She can pick a lock or open a safe because locks speak to her. She can touch a hand to the floor and picture the entire building. The power comes with a heavy price, and her goal is to gain enough money to rid herself of the talent, which comes from sigils on a plate that is implanted in her skull.

The story begins with Sancio stealing a small box for a client. Succumbing to her curiosity, she opens the box and finds a key. They key has a consciousness, a snarky personality that it reveals by speaking to her telepathically. The key’s name is Clef.

The man in charge of security, who should have been protecting the stolen key, is Gregor Dandolo. Sancio is the novel’s protagonist, but Gregor is the novel’s selfless hero. Other important character are Gregor’s power-driver mother, a scriving genius for the Dandolo house named Orso Ignacio, his less self-centered assistant Berenice, a few freelance scrivers, and a true force of evil (whose identity the reader must discover). The plot is too complex to summarize, but it essentially involves the reader in Sancio’s perilous adventures as she tries to prevent something really bad from happening while coming to terms with her true nature.

Foundryside might be seen as a cautionary tale of the risks associated with artificial intelligence and transhuman existence. When people build a god (in the sense of a self-aware superior being), and then look for ways to make themselves in their god’s image, they might become as capricious as gods are reputed to be.

Or Foundryside might be seen as taking on the enduring themes that are common in Bennett’s work: the misuse of wealth and power; the importance of freedom and of freeing the subjugated; the internal battles that people wage to find and maintain their better selves. His main theme in Foundryside is: “Any given innovation that empowers the individual will inevitably come to empower the powerful much, much more.” Bennett always stuffs a good mixture of action and contemplation into his novels, and the good news is that there are two more to come. I didn’t love Foundryside quite as much as the Divine Cities trilogy, but I enjoyed every page.

RECOMMENDED

Bring Out the Dog by Will Mackin

Published by Random House on March 6, 2018

Bring Out the Dog is an uneven collection of war stories told by the same narrator and generally featuring the same characters. Some stories take place while the combatants are training; others take place in Iraq or Afghanistan. My impression is that Will Mackin followed the model of other war writers without reflecting deeply on his own experiences, or at least without translating that reflection into soul-searching fiction.

It is a staple of war fiction that fighters in the field believe they know more than commanders who occupy desks. When Mackin writes, “As Seal Team Six . . . [o]ur ideas about the war were the war,” his narrator’s hubris reflects a common mindset in war fiction. The best war stories, as exemplified by The Things They Carried, explore the strengths and weaknesses of combatants and the horror of war without being self-aggrandizing. Macen occasionally reaches that pinnacle, but many of the stories in Bring Out the Dog fall short. Too many strained similes (“Static poured out of its speaker like sugar”) come across as ill-advised attempts to be literary. At his best, Mackin tells his stories in a natural voice. At his worst, he’s pretentious.

The best story, “The Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night,” is about a dog’s funeral, but it is also about two enduring themes of war fiction: fear and futility. Another story that gains strength from its honesty, “Rib Night,” talks about soldiers who become addicted to sleeping pills so they can forget about the people they killed. One soldier in particular makes a point of being a testosterone-driven asshole who clearly joined the service so that he could kill people. He takes the pills for fun and doesn’t seem interested in forgetting the deaths he caused.

One of the better stories isn’t really a war story at all, although it might explain something about the mindset that drives men to volunteer for combat. “Baker’s Strong Point” deals with the narrator’s friend, who hangs out with a stripper when he and the narrator aren’t practicing their skills in the Utah desert. The stripper’s unfortunate boyfriend has an encounter with the soldier and his baseball bat when he wonders whether the stripper might be cheating on him.

Many of Mackin’s themes are common in war fiction, including the boredom that combatants share when they aren’t in combat. “The Lost Troop” is about the things a bored soldier imagines (the war is over and nobody told them, an asteroid is about to wipe out all life on the planet) before he and his troop find a spot to scatter the ashes of a soldier who died. To cope with boredom, the troop pays a visit to their interpreter’s mean grade school teacher and recites the lyrics of Pink Floyd’s The Wall, an act that hardly seems destined to win the hearts and minds of Afghanis. The story is probably the most creative effort in the collection.

On the other hand, boredom is never something that a writer should inflict on a reader. “Welcome Man Will Never Fly” starts out with a former pilot and current Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) who is training a SEAL to be a JTAC, a job the SEAL is clearly incapable of learning. If the story has a point, I missed it. I finished “Kattekoppen,” about a rescue mission for kidnapped soldiers that focuses on whether a Dutch soldier will “fit in,” with a similar sense that I had read a collection of events and thoughts in search of a unifying purpose.

Other stories that didn’t do much for me essentially focused on the rituals of combat without providing any unusual insight into the characters’ lives or the lives of those with whom they interacted. One story involved bombing a fire truck on the practice range, and its only point seemed to be that a fire truck is an odd choice of targets. “Crossing the River No Name” muddles up the usual memes of war fiction (religion, football, camaraderie, risk) but the memes never add up to a coherent point.

“Remain Over Day” is mostly about bickering. “Yankee Two” is about bickering between soldiers who debate their failure to kill a twelve-year-old, apparently accepting as a given that nobody should feel bad about killing a twelve-year-old. “Backmask” explains that the code word for women is “feathers” because, I guess, calling them women would be recognizing that they are human beings — a thought that could have been profitably explored, but the story is mostly about breaking down doors and conversing with wild dogs.

In the end, a few of the stories in this collection show promise, but most come across as “I have war experience so I should write war fiction, even if I don’t know what I want to say.”

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Connect by Julian Gough

First published in Great Britain in 2018; published by Doubleday/Nan A. Talese on August 14, 2018

Without much subtlety, Connect makes the point that different systems (the human body, society, the universe itself) are organized in similar ways, and ponders the connection that results in that commonality. To make sure we get it, Julian Gough quotes the Upanishads and scientists and philosophers and poets and Philip K. Dick, all noting that so many vastly different things in the universe, including its vastly different people, are all fundamentally alike. That’s an interesting premise for a novel, but Connect is only partially successful in conveying it, as opposed to explaining it.

Colt is an autistic 18-year-old boy. He freaks out when he’s touched. He is homeschooled (unconventionally) by his mother Naomi because he can’t be around other kids without fighting them. Colt spends most of his life engrossed in videogame environments. Naomi wants him to live in the moment; he argues that living in the moment is impossible. Naomi wants him to engage with the real world; Colt argues that reality is a matter of perception, and what he perceives online is just as real as anything he perceives when he takes off his visor. On the other hand, Colt meets a damaged girl online named Sasha, for whom he feels the kind of desire that can’t be satisfactorily acquitted online.

Naomi is a scientist who was once a porn star who is into S&M, a character trait that isn’t entirely gratuitous. She’s working on a project to regrow limbs. It isn’t ready for human experimentation but it has shown promise in rats. Colt, who has a genius for coding, steals Naomi’s work and offers it for publication at a conference, forcing Naomi to attend when the paper is accepted. That gets Naomi out of the house, clearing the way for Colt to use the research to enlarge his corpus callosum in the hope that he will become normal, or at least able to understand people, Sasha.

The research has military implications, however, and Naomi finds herself trouble with her ex-husband and the government for publishing the paper without the military’s approval. Fortunately for the government, the next incarnation of the NSA can make information disappear pretty easily by taking control of electronic devices (a trick that is only a small step away from tricks the government already performs).

All of this sets up a plot that involves the military’s (primarily Colt’s father’s) desire to use Colt’s newfound abilities as a human supercomputer to better identify and kill America’s enemies. The plot pits Colt against his father and against an automated defense system that is designed to kill America’s enemies, one of whom (it decides) is Colt. A good chunk of the story consists of Colt using his gaming environment in an attempt to thwart the defense system.

One of the story’s more pedestrian themes involves the power of love, which (surprise, surprise) conquers all. I appreciate the sentiment but Gough’s execution of that theme is a bit heavy-handed. To Gough’s credit, the novel gives a new twist to the romantic comedy formula by digitizing it in an epic battle between Colt’s game world and the immune system (they hate each other, they need each other, they love each other), but the related coming-of-age theme seems artificial because Colt only learns lessons because his mother’s neural experimentation allowed him to overcome his autism — hardly a formula that younger socially-challenged readers will be able to follow as they come of age.

The book isn’t any more successful in addressing the theme of connection. One logical extension of recognizing that we are all fundamentally the same is to stop thinking in terms of “us” and “them” because there is no “them,” there is only an all-encompassing “us.” The novel tries to advance that thought by anticipating the emergence of a new consciousness, something godlike. While other writers projecting the rise of a godlike machine intelligence have done so with dread, Connect speculates that a godlike consciousness making decisions based on reason rather than fear might be just what an angry world needs. It’s an appealing thought, although surrendering autonomy (assuming we have any) to an artificial consciousness might be more crippling than the disease it cures.

While Connect scores points for grappling with big ideas, it becomes excessively preachy at the end. I agree with the message of unity that’s preached and I think the message is well-intentioned, but the final chapters read more like an essay than a work of fiction. They are written from the perspective of a machine intelligence (the System of Systems) that didn’t strike me as the voice of an intelligent machine. It’s constantly “digging deeper” and going to “another level” as it explores dominant themes of religion and philosophy and myth, but the superficial conclusions it draws hardly seem to justify the intellectual effort (e.g., killing a large chunk of the Earth’s inhabitants would be bad for the Earth’s inhabitants; inequitable distribution of resources is unfair and something should be done about that). On the whole, Connect works as an adventure story, but it fizzles out when it tries to become a deep philosophical tome. I can recommend the novel as high tech thriller that might particularly appeal to fans of gaming, but I would suggest skimming through or skipping the mundane pages that are narrated by the godlike System of Systems.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS