Henry Kuttner’s Fury is one of those golden age SF books full of egomaniacal supermen and the form-fitting ballgown-wearing bombshells who love them. It’s overwrought and dopey, but also wonderful and deliriously entertaining.

Here’s your sentence of world building:

“The Earth is long dead, blasted apart, and the human survivors who settled on Venus live in huge citadels beneath the Venusian seas in an atrophying, class-ridden society ruled by the Immortals – genetic mutations who live a thousand years or more.”

Sam Reed’s an immortal too but he’s raised as a short-termer because his father’s insane and disowned him. So Sam lives on the wrong side of the tracks and gets involved with various criminals such as the Slider and the Sheffield Gang. Oh yeah, everyone has names like they might have worked at a 1950s Madison Avenue ad agencies, despite it being the 27^th century. Sam finds himself at odds with the immortal Harker family (which he’s a member of but doesn’t know it) and the stage gets set for a confrontation. There’s a lot of yelling at each other over skype televisor and weird drugs get tossed around. Sam winds up losing the first round and put on ice for forty years. When he wakes up he’s pissed, but also surprised to realize he’s an immortal too.

A new battle of wits ensues played out with propaganda and the manipulation of the mentally unstable. Sorry, cuz. Sam swindles his way to temporary victory, and soon he’s backing terrorism and manipulating the masses with fear and false promises in order to achieve his ends. But all of it’s too much and the remaining immortals hatch a plan to breed an infiltrator assassin to take Sam down in a couple of decades. There’s more yelling. Sam gets needle-pistoled by his secretary and right when it looks bad, Mr. Ages shows up and says, “Well Sam, you’re a great Machiavellian dictator and humanity needs people like you from time to time to keep itself from stagnation. But you’re too unstable and prone to violence. So, I’m just going to keep you on ice until the species needs you again.” THE END.

Then there’s the epilogue where Sam wakes up again, and the book stops right there mid-sentence.

It’s a dizzy ride, full of fun stuff that you could probably make a great RPG setting out of: a hostile environment full of monsters, strange drugs and devices, mercenaries and criminals, bomb-shelter Keeps, immortals, and ruined settlements. It’s a quick read, by turns jaw-droppingly good and jaw-droppingly dopey like a soap opera. You can probably find it (either as Fury or by its alternate title Destination: Infinity!) for a buck or two in a cardboard box at your local nerd-emporium.

It’d certainly be better-spent money than the admission price to any half-dozen recent sci-fi movies.

Dan McPharlin’s “Year One”

It’s been almost a year and a half since the Vaults of Ur game began and it’s now looking like it’s winding down. The core players mostly want a break to play other games, not to mention the one player who’s been emotionally traumatized by what the ruins did to his character. I kid. I kid. But only sorta.

It was a fun year and change, and a good time getting back into the groove of running a game. I still don’t know what I’m doing and could certainly do it better, but some moments were pretty wonderful. Thanks Dennis, Dean, Jeremy, and Alexei, plus all the other folks who joined in. The Vaults remain.

A strange bit of epic fantasy that’s ambitious in style but lacks a certain cohesion, so there are parts I enjoyed but other parts that didn’t quite click together. That said, it was certainly refreshing to read secondary world epic fantasy that wasn’t simply one damn thing after another for six hundred plus pages. This reminded me a bit of Peter Beagle’s Innkeeper’s Song. That didn’t in any way attempt to be epic. This did and suffered for it, but still was a curious and enjoyable read.

War Fever – J.G. Ballard

A much more varied and better collection (IMO) than Vermillion Sands, Ballard’s work in the 1980s had all the joy of a buzzard tearing into the rotting guts of wildebeest. My favorite story would definitely be “A Secret History of World War 3”, but there are plenty of others to enjoy.

The Best of All Possible Worlds – Karen Lord

An advanced interstellar civilization must survive and adapt on one of their colony/client planet’s after a disaster destroys their home world. Classic Space Opera that reads like a season of Star Trek where Ursula K. LeGuin served as head writer. I enjoyed it.

The Werewolf of Paris – Guy Endore

A mélange of scandal and horror (S&M, rape, incest, cannibalism, etc.) mixed with the scolding tone of propriety, set amid some bastardized Victor Hugo meets the Marquis De Sade French backdrop.

This book is pretty terrible, but it’s Fantomas terrible (if you read it fast enough, it’ll give you a contact high) so there’s something to be said for that.

Long considered the werewolf novel, Guy Endore’s The Werewolf of Paris reads like a mash-up of Les Miserables with the works of the Marquis De Sade. The novel centers on the plight of one Bertrand, afflicted from birth with lycanthropy. His step-uncle knows what Bertrand is and tries to curb B’s worse tendencies. But to no avail. Bertrand escapes and makes for Paris where he gets embroiled in the Commune.

Reading this was a bit like the weekend I spent at my grandmother’s house alternating my reading of the Monster Manual with her back issue stack of National Enquirers. It’s lid-off-the-id stuff, but the id of your grandparent’s generation, which makes it a bit sleazier, weirder, and unexpected. Murder, rape, torture, incest, and S&M abound, but the book succeeds in being both sleazy and prudish, tut-tutting at its own excesses. Read it for you want a piece of Gothic fiction ramped up to 11 and don’t mind how clunky the prose is.

On a side note, what exactly is tumblr for? I mean besides teaching me about contemporary TV through the medium of animated GIFs?

What a crazy week – my family was all worried about me getting caught up in some Korea crisis, when actually the crisis was back with them in Boston.

It’s always spooky when events happen because you know statistically the chances of people you know being involved are slim, but at the same time you want to just make sure. But when I think about folks I’ve known who have been involved in events I can easily count five off the top of my head (three in the WTC, one of whom died, a neighbor killed on Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and a cousin involved in a mass-shooting that has its own wikipedia entry .)

So I feel justified checking in and making sure.

My piece is a dandied up version of this blog post. For the record I’m no longer reading slush in any fashion.  

The US Embassy sent out an email yesterday that opened with:

“The U.S. Embassy informs U.S. citizens that despite current political tensions with North Korea there is no specific information to suggest there are imminent threats to U.S. citizens or facilities in the Republic of Korea (ROK).  The Embassy has not changed its security posture and we have not recommended that U.S. citizens who reside in, or plan to visit, the Republic of Korea take special security precautions at this time.”

I forwarded that on to my family.

And while my morbid nature is curious what the “Get the fuck out now!” email will read like (I imagine its tone will resemble the Tony-voice from The Shining: REDRUM! REDRUM!), I’ve been in South Korea long enough to have witnessed other instances of saber rattling, and this one appears to be more of the same. None of my coworkers are behaving like this is anything out of the ordinary. There are no tanks in the streets and the USMC hasn’t evacuated service-member families from the base here in town.

I told my mom that we bought a couch and the thing Jin and I are most worried about right now is where to put it: against the wall nearest the window or the one with the 60s space-age wallpaper. My aunt, being an interior decorator, after hearing the couch was beige, said to put it against the 60s space-age wallpaper and then get some throw pillows that’ll match the colors in the wallpaper. Being open to the advice of sages, this is what we will do.

And that’s one way to react to all this saber rattling, and how we are choosing to.

But…

Of course there’s a “but”, because I can’t discount all my fears. I know what a “black swan” is and lived in Jersey City and worked in NYC on 9/11. Horrible shit happens when you least expect it. A stable system built atop dynamic forces can collapse into complete chaos. And that’s where this gets tricky. How long do I want to spend thinking about worst-case scenarios? Give me an hour and I could spin you several dozen. Do I prepare for each one, only one, or none? How paranoid do I want to let myself be about this?

Most of the expats in town aren’t worried and are quick to dismiss fears that this is anything different. To suggest taking steps to prepare is met with hostility of a veiled sort, and it’ll be funny if my last thoughts in the .00000005 seconds before a North Korean nuke’s detonation and my vaporization is “I told you so” – at least it’ll be funny to my forcibly disassociated atoms in a cosmically ironic way. But I’m a big fan of brief focused bouts of productive paranoia.

If you’re constantly worried about something, it’s often best to set aside a proscribed time to obsess about it. Think of what steps you can take to prepare, do them, and then once they’re done and the time limit’s over, stop thinking about it.

So that’s what we’ve done. We’ve done all the minor things we can like register with the embassy, put together an emergency bag, and talked about meeting places. Both Jin and I are children of the 1980s and the late Cold War. The prospect of Nuclear Annihilation is something we remember from being kids. The city where we live now is an early target in any sort of open conflict. The city where Jin’s parents live is similar. In that situation all the bottled water in our emergency bag means doodley-squat. In any one of the baker’s dozen of alternative clusterfucks that might result, who knows, maybe those extra water bottles will come in handy.

But what we both really expect is that the bottled water, the folded-up map to the Marine base, the emergency bag, will all gather dust in the gap between the wall and our washing machine, and whether we can find blue, green, and orangish throw pillows here in town is what we’re really worried about.

Here’s the book list for last month:

Alchemy and Alchemists – C.J.S. Thompson

Interesting and esoteric the best chapters are full of anecdotes from the lives of various alchemists.

Trafalgar – Angelica Gorodischer

Reads a bit like sitting in a cafe with your grandmother’s youngest brother, the great uncle that traveled everywhere and never seems to stop smoking, drinking coffee, or holding your interest with the accounts of his adventures.

Fremder – Russell Hoban

This book is a beautiful sloppy mess of Science Fiction. It’s one of those books I can crack open at random and just get hit by the prose all over again all. Dig:

 “Maybe for some people the business of knowing who and what and when and where they are is simple; not for me. The past and the present flicker together in my mind and it isn’t easy to sort through the different strands of story to find one that is only mine.”

And:

“A373 and Badr al-Budur are two of the quiet places in my head. I like sometimes to think of Pearl speaking in my mother’s voice under the red Isis moon and I like to think of the robot sweepers humming through the silence of the spaceport under the noctolux lamps of Badru.”

The Company – K.J. Parker

Ugh. A hard slog. There are parts of Parker’s fiction I really like, and parts I hate. Everyone ends up having a secret and whichever secret winds up being important to the plot hardly matters (or I could care less). In between the whole story is shown in a matter-of-fact fashion where everything, past, future, interior, exterior has the same emotional weight and the whole novel loses its intensity. Maybe if it were 100 pages shorter, it would actually read like a novel.

Cogan’s Trade – George V. Higgins

An obliquely plotted crime novel with well-observed details and crackling dialogue. The ability for so many people to say so little while saying so much is amazing. Especially interesting of your family is like mine and enjoys playing six degrees of Whitey Bulger.

Ammonite – Nicola Griffith.

Loved it. The book’s a “classic” SF adventure story mixed with interesting world building of the LeGuin sort. A fun read.

The Queen, The Cambion, and Seven Others – Richard Bowes

A great collection of modern fantasy stories and warped fairy tales with Arthur and his Knights, Merlin and Queen Victoria, animal helpers, and the Kingdom Under the Hill – all are here and familiar, but subverted in interesting and refreshing ways. Definitely recommended.

The Enemy Within: A Short History of Witch-Hunting – John Demos

A decent overview of “witch-hunting” from Roman times up to the 1980s with a focus on Europe and America and lots of details on the Colonial era “witch-hunts”. Demos uses the term “witch-hunt” in a particular way, so brings up the various Red Scares in US history and the day care scandals of the 1980s. An enjoyable read if you’re into that sort of thing.