If you ever talk to someone who’s read The Lord of the Rings books, it’s inevitable that you get to that question: Did you read the songs?
For me the answer was not a straightforward “no” because I did read some of them, then I read fewer as I worked my way through the story, then I just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading The Lord of the Rings.
The same can be said of Neil Gaiman’s latest collection, Trigger Warning, which intersperses a few poems–the equivalent to Tolkien’s songs–in among the short stories. In his second collection, Fragile Things, he describes the poems as “bonuses for the kind of people who do not need to worry about sneaky and occasional poems lurking inside their short-story collections.”
I read some of the poems, then read fewer of them, the just plain stopped. But I still had a great time reading Trigger Warning.
This is a hodgepodge of stories, covering everything from modern horror to high fantasy, all of it presented with Gaiman’s usual dry wit and depiction of the world as a place both dark and beautiful.
I enjoyed all of the stories but being who I am, the ones I enjoyed most were the Twilight Zone-esque “The Thing About Cassandra” in which imagined loves are perhaps not so imaginary, “Orange,” which uses a question and answer format to show the transformation of a young, tanning-obsessed woman into something rather more cosmic and “The Man Who Forgot Ray Bradbury,” which paints a chilling portrait of a man who forgets words, with more impact than one might expect. Stories based on Dr. Who and Sherlock Holmes are well-executed and the final and original piece, “Black Dog” features Shadow from American Gods, in a story about murder, ghosts and the power of the mind to both protect and destroy.
This is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys Gaiman’s writing, but I feel there is enough variety here to entice those unfamiliar with his work.
Brother Odd is #3 in the Odd Thomas series and finds the titular character hanging out at an abbey in the California Sierras. When a few bodachs appear (smoky entities that only Odd can see that are harbingers of death) Odd knows trouble is a-coming and he works to protect the mentally and physically handicapped children under the care of the abbey’s monks and nuns.
While Odd remains a wonderfully self-deprecating character that Koontz could probably write in his sleep, the story this time is more out there, dealing with the quest to scientifically prove the existence of God and what happens when you start messing around with life on a quantum level (bad things, as it turns out). This may sound a bit odd (ahem) given the setting of the book, but it’s explained early when one of the monks in residence is revealed to be a former physicist who has bequeathed a fortune to the abbey and secretly continued his work while praying and meditating with his fellow monks.
As the number of bodachs grows, a blizzard sweeps over the mountain, effectively trapping everyone as the potential hour of doom nears. While it serves to increase tension, I was left with a feeling that the story has holes in it you could probably drive a monk-filled SUV outfitted with a snowplow through. Ultimately this only minimally detracts as Brother Odd is, despite its subject matter, not the kind of story you will ponder deeply afterward. It’s an entertaining popcorn read, exactly as I expected.
Some spoilers ahead, in as much as you can spoil a novel published in 1974.
King’s first published novel is in a way the ultimate teenage tale of revenge. Dowdy, introverted Carrie White, a 16 year old girl raised by an extreme Christian fundamentalist mother, is taunted and bullied through high school and does her best to ignore it all while bearing the incessant, borderline insane ravings of her mother. Things seem to be turning around when good boy Tommy Ross invites her to the prom but if you’ve seen the movie, you know how that turns out.
Carrie uses her telekinetic powers to take revenge on those who have humiliated and teased her, eventually spreading her wrath to the entire small town of Chamberlain. Basically, everyone dies.
King writes the story as an epistolary, inserting interviews, book excerpts, commission reports and newspaper stories between the more conventional narrative scenes. Two things I found interesting were how King tips his hand early–less than halfway through you learn that a lot of people are going to die, often which specific people. The story, bracketed by the interviews and reports, becomes less about what will happen and more about what did happen. There is still a slow-burning dread that builds as prom night approaches, a kind of Doom That Came To Chamberlain, if you will.
King also approaches telekinesis as something worthy of scientific study, showing experts speculating on its likely genetic origin and whether more “taunt me and watch me destroy the world” Carries might be out there. Perhaps this was meant as a way of making Carrie seem more sympathetic, a victim of both a brutal upbringing, and a terrible, albeit, natural ability she could not control (or could control all too well, perhaps).
Unlike many of King’s later novels, Carrie is fairly brief and some of the characters feel a bit thinly drawn as a result. There’s just enough meat on the bones here but only just. One of King’s affectations is in full force, though. This is where he’ll break a paragraph abruptly
(and put something in parentheses to emphasize a specific mood or line of thought)
and then continue on with the narrative only to
(switch back to the parenthetical interjection, often making liberal use of exclamation points! italics and word repetition word repetition o the words o the interjections over and over)
While it can certainly emphasize a particular mood or thought pattern, it looks a bit hamfisted now.
Still, any fan of King’s work would be remiss to not read Carrie. King’s skills are still being refined here and not every character or turn feels true (Carrie’s mother especially seems way over the top, something Piper Laurie took to heart in the 1976 film adaptation), but even at this early stage he shows an effortless ability to get a narrative rolling and keep it moving.
A second volume in a themed horror collection might seem like a good candidate for more experimental work that may not be entirely successful and such is the case with Wastelands 2, although I enjoyed the majority of the stories.
Post-apocalypse tales are one of the enduring favorites in horror fiction. Some of the classic boogeymen like nuclear war have faded as threats to all humanity while others like global warming have risen–Wastelands 2 delivers on both of these, along with biological terrors, Lovecraftian beasts from the sea, really mean flowers and, of course, Kevin Costner. Sort of.
While the stories are bound by the theme of apocalypse, style and tone is all over the place. There is little in the way of humor (as one might expect), though Keffy R. M. Kehrli’s “Advertising at the End of the World” with its androids-as-literal-walking-advertisements still searching for buyers after a super-virus decimates humanity, is quietly absurd. Most are dark or darker and the majority betray little hope regarding humankind’s ability to come back from the brink of extinction. You’ll also put down the book thinking most people are jerks.
This is not exactly feel-good material is what I’m saying.
A few standouts for me include Jack McDevitt’s “Ellie,” which presents a nice twist on a story about caretakers keeping things running at a massive particle collider in the hope of staving off further disaster. The aforementioned “Advertising at the End of the World” is a relatively original take on post-apocalypse, with the sensible protagonist Marie trying to deal with an army of annoying androids as humanely as possible. George R. R. Martin’s hippie-fest “…For a Single Yesterday” reminded me a bit of the novel Station Eleven, with entertainers providing a focal point in surviving communities, with a bit of time-travelly drugs tossed in.
“Monstro” is a deliciously weird story about a virus inducing strange and dangerous groupthink among the infected quarantined in Haiti. Author Junot Díaz steeps the story in local culture while slowly unwinding an ever-widening apocalypse that may or may not be contained on the island state.
Jake Kerr’s “Biological Fragments of the Life of Julian Prince” is an epistemological accounting of how an author survives, writes about and in a way is consumed by a meteor impact that devastates North America in the first half of the 21st century. I feel this format–excerpts from Wikipedia, interviews, news reports and so on–is trickier to pull off than it looks but Kerr handles it expertly, lending an authentic feel to these glimpses of Prince’s life and the apocalyptic event that sits at its core.
On the negative side, I found David Brin’s “The Postman” (a novella version of the novel) was fine but oddly undercuts the whole enterprise on the very last page with the protagonist turning weirdly flippant and derisive. I have no idea if the book (or the Costner movie) are the same, but I found it jarring.
But while “The Postman” was still a pleasant enough read overall, I only managed a few pages of Maria Dahvana Headley’s “The Traditional.” The story features an unlikable and uninteresting protagonist and is written in the second person: “You’ve always been the kind of liar who leans back and lets boys fall into you while you see if you can make them fall all the way out the other side. You want them to feel like they’ve hit Narnia. You traffic in interdimensional fucking, during which they transcend space and time, and you go nowhere.” I’ve always been the kind of person who finds the second person point of view a very tough sell. I was not sold. I didn’t even rent.
There are more than enough stories in Wastelands 2, however, to recommend it to anyone looking for some post-apocalyptic fun.
This one is kind of bonkers if you think the world and the universe around it are pretty much known things. If you’re less certain (just what is dark matter, anyway, and why is there so much of it?) then the you may find the ideas presented to be intriguing, even as the authors make no absolute claims on any of the evidence they bring forward.
The premise of The Super Natural is that the various unknown phenomena reported around the world–everything from UFOs to alien abductions, apparitions, implants, strange lights and more–are real and explainable, and point to a larger reality that most people lack the perception and skill to interact with in a meaningful way, or even at all. Further, they suggest the possibility of parallel universes that may intersect with ours at times. On top of that, there’s a lot of theory on what happens after you die and whether or not the soul exists. Finally, there is a common belief between the authors that some kind of intelligent plasma energy may be behind most of this.
Pretty bonkers, right?
Whitley Strieber is well-known for his books about what he calls the visitors, starting with Communion. His experiences have been largely ignored by mainstream media or openly mocked (he expresses regret for coming up with the phrase “rectal probe”, two words that have launched a thousand jokes over the past thirty years). His chapters largely consist of him recalling and expanding on experiences he has previously described, as well as bringing in some new ones. He offers theories but is very careful to commit to none of them, keeping his mind open to other possibilities. He doesn’t think the visitors are aliens from another planet, a common misconception people have with his experiences.
Jeff Kripal is a historian of religions and his chapters focus more specifically on the theories behind what may be going on, with different techniques offered as part of a “toolbox” for examining and cataloguing the unknown.
In a few instances the authors disagree on specifics but overall they present a united front in believing the likeliest explanations of all this weird stuff lies in intelligent plasma energy that exists perhaps in a dimension outside of ours and may be trying to teach those who are receptive what lies beyond our physical form and physical dimension. There are suggestions that these other beings live outside of normal space and time and to them we seem pretty primitive with our living and dying and not being able to fly around as spooky balls of energy. But the good news is they consider us teachable.
There are no good explanations on why these more advanced forms of life want to teach us or why they are being relatively coy about it (I say relatively because there are thousands of UFO sightings, for example, and even well-documented cases rarely get reported by conventional media, so while these various phenomena may be unknown, they are not exactly rare). Perhaps we’re just really slow learners. Maybe our nukes scare them. They still kind of scare me.
Kripal in particular also goes into detail about what is real versus fictional or imagined and how we may essentially make our own reality. One example he recounts is about an academic colleague who was making blueberry muffins (mmm). He finished mixing the wet ingredients then rinsed out and set the empty honey jar on the sink counter to dry. He went to get a tin of flour off a shelf and, surprised by how unusually heavy it felt, dropped it on the floor. He sifted through the spilled flour and found the honey jar, caked in the flour. He looked at the counter. The jar was no longer there. It had moved on its own. Neat! And weird.
Kripal explains:
Apparently, that is what the human mind-brain does when it is participating in a dimension of reality that is quite beyond our primitive “mental” and “material” categories of thinking (and our primitive science, which assumes the same division to work at all). It tells itself a story that involves otherwise impossible things and then acts out that story with physical objects. If those objects are available in the immediate environment, it uses them as props, like Dan’s honey jar. If they are not, it creates them “out of nowhere.”
He goes on to say these odd events happen to “mess with us” (that is a direct quote), to shake up our view of the world as one in which the mental and physical are separate things. It’s all very trippy, like trying to count to infinity.
In the end a skeptic is unlikely to be convinced by the evidence presented by Strieber and Kripal, but their ideas are interesting and entertainingly presented. The way they both hold back from making absolute claims seems less a dodge and more a genuine admission that they–and us–really don’t know for sure what it happening out there. But something certainly seems to be.
Meanwhile, I can’t even get the TV remote to teleport into my hand. If the mental and physical are really one, I wouldn’t mind at least a few perks before evolving into a super-intelligent ball of light.
Victor LaValle takes one of H.P. Lovecraft’s most clumsily racist stories, “The Horror at Red Hook” and expands it into a novella that both builds on the original while dealing head-on with Lovecraft’s ill-informed and offensive take on race. The author does this by dividing the story into two parts, one from the perspective of police detective Malone, as in the original, and the other from the viewpoint of the titular Black Tom, also known as Charles “Tommy” Tester, a 20 year old living with his father in Harlem of 1924.
Tommy is both hero and villain, an agent of despair and a victim of senseless violence and racism. He and Malone cross paths when both encounter the enigmatic Robert Suydam, a man trying to unleash Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones on the world so that the oppressors may be wiped away while the oppressed are justly rewarded for awakening these elder gods.
The world LaValle depicts is one of easy cruelty and racial division, where hope is tamped down and then crushed, and songs play not to soothe souls but to help speed them along to a certain hell. He does this while effortlessly weaving in Lovecraft’s original characters and story and it is there that The Ballad of Black Tom is perhaps at its weakest, as the original material was rather thin to begin with.
Still, LaValle elevates the original far beyond what Lovecraft had achieved, creating a tragic tale that trades melodrama for something more human, even as the world is threatened by cosmic horrors.
If you enjoy Lovecraft’s work you’ll almost certainly enjoy this. LaValle’s prose is concise, sometimes wry and always on point. His expansion of the original simply works in every way you would expect. If you enjoy Lovecraft but have always been troubled by the racism weaved throughout so many of his stories, The Ballad of Black Tom comes even more highly recommended. LaValle has managed the difficult trick of both paying respect to and being scornful of a very flawed author.
While not a direct sequel to Lotz’s previous novel The Three, Day Four does take place in the same timeline, one where the mysterious crash of four airliners on the same day and the decidedly weird doings of the three (or was it four?) child survivors leads to talk of the Apocalypse being on its way and the election of a deeply religious President in the U.S., one who oversees an extremely conservative federal government that seems to be doomsday preppers writ large. And official.
Day Four references the plane crashes, survivors and spookier stuff while sidestepping talk of the political landscape. The main story is largely self-contained, though, so reading The Three is not a prerequisite.
One might glibly describe Day Four as The Love Boat from Hell–and you would actually not be far off. As the story begins, the first three days of a cruise on The Beautiful Dreamer, of the fictitious Foveros Cruise Line, encounters nothing out of the ordinary after leaving Miami. On the fourth day it runs into mechanical problems. Then virus problems, rapist/murder problems, why-isn’t-anyone-coming-to-help problems and finally, possible ghost and maybe worse-than-that problems.
Lotz does an excellent job of ramping up the tension as conditions on the ship deteriorate, switching between a large cast of characters with the same ease she demonstrated in The Three. The crew of the ship is split into cabals and cliques, divided along lines of rank as well as ethnicity, each group typically speaking in their native tongue to better exclude others from the conversation. Even with the cruise running optimally it’s clear a lot of the people on board are never going to get along. And there are enough skeletons to fill a walk-in closet.
The passengers are a quirky mix of gossip bloggers, psychics, tourists and suicides-in-waiting. As things go sideways (literally, as the days without rescue go on) clashes among the passengers and crew increase. The power goes out. Toilets stop working. Ghosts start working.
To say more would be to enter into major spoiler territory but suffice to say the ending seems very much to set up another book, though whether it will follow the characters of Day Four or not is unclear (though I lean toward no). What is clear is that the people that inhabit this alternate present-day timeline are likely in for a bumpy few years.
If you approach Day Four on its own, the references to The Three may feel a bit oblique and the ending may be less satisfying but I still feel it works well on its own. As a companion to The Three, Lotz has crafted a nightmare cruise that neatly sets up even worse things to come. Recommended.
Sorry, had to get the inevitable and terrible pun out of the way.
11/22/63 is one of King’s best post-accident (post-1999) works, a long and adventurous novel that jumps feet-first into the time travel paradox. As expected, giving much thought to the logistics of time travel only reveals the gaps and flaws common to this particular sub-genre of science fiction. King knows this, too, and steers clear of trying to provide plausible scientific reasoning, leaving it up to the butterfly effect and what the main character of school teacher Jake Epping calls “harmonics.”
Saving Kennedy is a favorite time-travel trope, probably the most popular after killing Hitler, and King neatly lays out the scenario where Epping goes back to September 1958 and adapts to living for five years in an era before he was born, all the while tracking his prey, Lee Harvey Oswald. Along the way Epping falls in love with both the past and another school teacher, the tough if clumsy Sadie Dunhill.
Typically, King does a terrific job in fleshing out the many characters, while the sounds and sights of late 50s and early 60s America feel authentic. The story sprawls but never drags as Epping faces obstacle after obstacle while moving closer to his target. As the repeated refrain goes, the past is obdurate and doesn’t want to be changed.
To say more would venture into spoiler territory and although the book has what amounts to two endings, both are fine. There are no giant spiders here. 😛
Unlike King’s horror fare, 11/22/63 has broader appeal, to fans of time travel stories, to those who enjoy the whole “fish out of water” thing and finally, to anyone who enjoys watching characters whose actions and complexities drive the action, rather than the other way around.
This is a funny, nerdy book that answers some very silly science questions with actual science. There’s also a lot of math, including numbers that are so big you probably don’t want to think much about them. I hate math (or rather, it seems math hates me) but enjoyed the book all the same. Don’t let any math aversion turn you away.
Randall Munroe is the author of XKCD, a stick figure comic that also features a lot of math (and science and technology and stuff). In What If? he answers questions like “What would happen if every person on Earth jumped up and down at the same time?” (answer: not much of anything) As with XKCD, the writing is brainy but accessible and the tone remains light, as one might expect when answering something like “What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?” (answer: basically you get the equivalent of a nuclear bomb and would not advance to first base as first base would be vaporized along with everything else in the park)
The questions are regularly interspersed with just-a-little-too-weird “I’m not going to answer that” examples. I can only imagine how many of these types of questions Munroe has received.
The book contains a lot of illustrations to go with the scientific theory, all done in Munroe’s stick figure style. He occasionally teases more complex drawings, suggesting he is not just a one-stick pony, as it were.
What If? is one of those books that’s just plain fun to read. If you think you might enjoy some random answers to random and weird science questions, jump in.
One caution, though. Due to the large number of illustrations, this is a book you may find reads better on a tablet vs. an ereader. The images are black and white, though, so most modern ereaders should handle them decently.
Another of my “on sale, looks interesting” reads, Talking to Crazy focuses on dealing with irrational (“crazy”) people, running a range from annoying co-workers to potential mass murderers. Yes, there is a chapter on dealing with people who may be thinking of getting a gun and doing some people huntin’.
Talking to Crazy is not a book for people who like lots of data, studies and stats to back up the claims and advice on offer. Goulston has many years of experience as a psychiatrist and draws on anecdotes from that experience to illustrate the strategies he lays out. He also admits that mental health can be at times a lot trickier to diagnose and treat than physical ailments and frequently cautions that some of his advise should be used with caution or not used at all without the assistance of a mental health professional.
Most of the strategies revolve around empathy–listening to the irrational person, letting them know you understand they are upset, not judging, not offering solutions (at least not immediately). Much of this is common sense but Goulston provides detailed steps and often explicit phrases or wordings to use.
The book turns increasingly darker as it moves from dealing with people you may not need to interact with (his advice on those is: don’t) to co-workers and then family. He covers how to handle those with genuine mental disorders like schizophrenia (mostly by sensibly letting mental health care workers do the heavy lifting) and ends with strategies on handling people who may be thinking of suicide (yikes) or those who may be primed to follow in the steps of the many mass murderers of late. Here he chillingly warns parents of potential killers that if they are worried about saying something lest they become a target that they are already targets before they say a single word.
It’s hard to refute the advice given, as so much of it is both common sense and comes from a solid core of providing empathy and withholding judgment. In essence, Goulston is saying that the best way to deal with irrational people is to keep yourself in check, so you don’t join in on the accusations, fear and anger. He emphasizes this by spending a section of the book with a series of exercises that force the reader to reflect and self-assess, to look for their own weaknesses and learn to manage or overcome them.
Much of the advice will be difficult for people to act on. Goulston comes across as outgoing and forthright. The timid will find it challenging to say most of the things he thinks is necessary to defuse irrational people and begin the process of turning their behavior toward the positive. But just rehearsing the steps alone may help bolster someone’s confidence and push them that much closer to trying.
Talking to Crazy is written in a highly accessible style and the heavy use of anecdotes gives the book the feel of a conversation, rather than a checklist of things to do. I fortunately don’t have to deal with anyone I’d flat-out call irrational, so I’m unlikely to use the advice anytime soon. The advice is solid and presented well, though. I would have preferred more data to back up the strategies but this is a more of a nitpick. Talking to Crazy is not a data-driven book and the advice remains useful and at times thought-provoking all the same.
In 2015 I read 36 books and one short story. Actually, I read a lot of short stories but only one that was purchased standalone (“In the Tall Grass”).
I once again saved a tree by reading 100% digitally, primarily via a Kobo H20 ereader, an iPad mini (which unceremoniously died midway through the year) and my iPad Air (which did not unceremoniously die but is used primarily for reading in bed, as it’s a bit too big for me to enjoy carrying around for book reading). The iPad reading was done via the Marvin ereader app. Kobo and Amazon’s Kindle apps are both seriously lacking in features vs. their ereader counterparts, possibly to drive sales of said ereaders.
I reviewed the majority of books on Goodreads and the reviews break down as follows on their one to four star scale (Goodreads does not allow half stars):
Five stars: 1
Four stars: 15
Three stars: 8
Two stars: 2
One star: 1
For the most part I enjoyed the books I read last year, with 23 of 27 reviewed netting at least three stars. Even the pair of two-star novels (Swan Song and The Gate at Lake Drive) both had their strengths and I don’t regret reading them.
The five-star was a re-read, Stephen King’s On Writing. As I wrote in my review, it’s the seamless fusion of writing primer and memoir that lifts this book from being very good to great.
The one-star review is for The Store, Bentley Little’s semi-satirical take on a Walmart-like store chain that takes over small towns for nefarious and profitable purposes. I’d never read Little before and have no idea how representative The Store is of his style, but it left me unwilling to investigate any of his numerous other The _____ books. The utter banality and formulaic writing made this the most eye-rolling read of 2015 (Swan Song would be the runner-up, see my review for a few examples).
I’ve settled into a bit of a pattern with my book-reading over the past few years, with my selections falling into these groups:
a couple of Stephen King novels, typically a mix of a current title and an older one or two I haven’t read. I read five this year, so I went a bit King-crazy. I have no regrets. I say that even having read Dreamcatcher.
a couple of science fiction, fantasy or horror classics dating back to the 19th or early-to-mid 20th centuries. Only two this year: Lord of the Flies and Alice Through the Looking Glass.
a smattering of current novels or books spanning my usual interests: science fiction, horror, weird stuff (UFOs, etc.). This was the bulk of my reading.
books by established authors that were on sale. These are usually old or lesser-known titles, like Arthur C. Clarke’s (excellent) The City and the Stars, an outrageously ambitious first novel.
a handful of books by new authors (or at least new to me) that were on sale, typically published by small presses or self-published. I’m always hoping that I’ll find a new author to follow but usually end up either disappointed or ambivalent. The best of these was probably Sarah Lotz’s The Three.
a few re-reads. I re-read Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency again and did not regret it.
And now here are a few of my 2015 Reading Awards:
Favorite book of 2015: Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel) Favorite re-read of 2015: On Writing (Stephen King) Most depressing book of 2015: Idiot America (Charles P. Pierce) Best Stephen King book I read in 2015 (not counting On Writing): From a Buick 8 (yes, you heard me–the story is simple but is strangely charming) Most disappointing classic: Swan Song (Robert McCammon). I don’t understand why this book is rated so highly. It’s not bad, it’s just very average. I would say I’m a picky reader but I love enough junk to know that’s not true. The “Well, that was…interesting” Award: Given the Circumstances (Brad Vance). I figured it was time to read a gay romance. For the first half of the book the two main characters dance around each other (they are massive/studly NFL and MLB players, of course) then when they finally have sex it’s rendered in enough detail to qualify as a medical dissertation. It felt weird (that’s what he said). It was essentially story story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story story EXPLICIT HARDCORE SEX story fin. Maybe all romances are written this way and I never knew because I’d never read any. Now I know and well, it was interesting.
I suspect many if not most people who first encounter Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea think the title refers to how deep the Nautilus dives. Going by the conservative measure of a league being four km, that would equal 80,000 km and put the Nautilus in outer space, which is indeed a long way down.
But even when considered correctly as distance traveled, twenty thousand leagues is a lot of ocean to cover. And in Jules Verne’s classic novel, the protagonist and narrator Pierre Aronnax provides an episodic recollection of the many months he and two others spend as captors aboard the submarine Nautilus, held there by the mysterious and perhaps mad Captain Nemo.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this nearly 150 year old novel is how well the science holds up. Unlike his more fanciful efforts such as Journey to the Center of the Earth, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea depicts an eerily realistic electric-powered submarine. The story is a curious blend of exploration and travelogue, with odd dashes of humor mixed in with bursts of action or violence. More harrowing than the squid attack made famous in the 1954 Disney film is the depiction of the Nautilus becoming trapped under ice while in the Antarctic, with the crew struggling to break the vessel free before their supply of oxygen runs out. You may never want to step foot in a submarine if afforded the opportunity.
Despite the occasional action, most of the story is presented in a deliberate fashion that may feel slow or even ponderous to those accustomed to our information-overload culture. This is a tale to be savored for the sights, sounds and other sensations presented. The arc of Nemo would no doubt be handled more forcefully in a modern telling, as he begins and ends as an enigma here, but other than the “I hit my head and suddenly it was all over” ending (perhaps due to the novel originally being a magazine serial), I enjoyed the more leisurely pace. Considering the dual facts that the novel relies so much on science and was published in 1870, it is all the more amazing how sturdy it still stands.
For anyone interested in the history of science fiction, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an essential read.
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
