Live! From Planet Earth

There's a lot to unpack in Live! From Planet Earth, (a posthumous anthology of George Alec Effinger stories) but the most interesting ones are the O. Niemand stories (slightly less so their forerunner, "Two Sadnesses.")

The O. Niemand stories are a kind of shared universe story -- they're pastiches of famous American short story writers, set on an asteroid with a dome for life support. The stories have little to no commonality other than that -- they share the same world, but the characters from different stories never touch, or are even glimpsed in the periphery of the others' circles. The Ring Lardner takeoff "Two Bits" and the Twain sendup "The Wisdom of Having Money" are the best of these; the Hemingway bite ("Afternoon Under Glass") is quietly powerful.

Since this is an anthology selected by other writers and editors, we get a blurb at the beginning of each story. Some are more about the writer's connection with Effinger, others are more about the story they're nominally introducing. It's a nice touch, to humanize a man that we wouldn't otherwise know.

There are a few stories in here that aren't strictly science fiction -- "Housebound" is a treatment of agoraphobia, and "Glimmer, Glimmer" works as horror, but it's the same voice throughout. One of Effinger's touches is that even those we would think are the most competent are just as human and scared and fallible as the rest of us -- witness the President in "Solo in the Spotlight."

Not that this is perfect -- "Target: Berlin!" and "At the Bran Foundry" are both farces that don't entirely work for me. "All the Last Wars at Once" is a bit of one, but it absolutely does. "Everything But Honor" is a time travel story with a nice twist, with an ending that's . . .well, not perfect, but in the hands of someone else, it could have been very ugly. 
 
Effinger was a talent who died far too young, and this is absolutely worth picking up.

Conference of the Birds

One of the perils of reading works that are in the public domain is that you wind up with subpar or dated translations. I can't speak to how accurate this translation is, and it's unfortunately incomplete. (Which would explain why some of the points featured in most summaries of the poem are missing here).

What this is is an allegory for the search for meaning and submission to God. I would recommend another translation, if you'd like to pick it up -- I do not love Fitzgerald's work here (AABB tends to numb me, and I have to think he's not exactly totally faithful to the original text)

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is not the Faustian temptation story that I thought it would be. Nor is it the story you'd expect from "Satan appears in modern city, wreaks havoc". It's not a tragic love story, either, even if it hints at veering in that direction.

What we do get is Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem (first as a story a character is telling, then later as excerpts from a novel a different character had written). One of the fascinating things about this is how Bulgakov uses different, more obscure translations than we would expect; it's "Yershalaim" rather than "Jerusalem", "Yeshua Ha-Notsri" rather than "Jesus of Nazareth", and "Judas of Kerioth" rather than "Judas Iscariot." This device signals that this isn't quite the story as represented in the Gospels. Instead, it's a (plausible) accounting of a potential historical Jesus, his disciple (only one in The Master and Margarita), his betrayal, and his eventual execution. This story is interspersed with the contemporary action of the novel, that is the Prince of Darkness himself, and his retinue in 1930s/40s Moscow.

Said action entails the actions of the retinue of Professor Woland (a mysterious foreigner we meet in the first chapter, and who appears to be Satan): a man-sized cat, a fanged assassin, a freakishly tall fop, and a witch in and around Muscovite society. In short order, they take over an apartment (of a man who Woland corrects on the historicity of Jesus), organize a magic show which ends with half the audience in a state of undress, expose hypocrites, and get the one man who sees through it committed to an asylum.

Our title characters are introduced later in the narrative: we meet the Master in the asylum, when he's the neighbor of the character who's committed. We hear of Margarita through the story of his life he tells, but we don't meet her until much later in the novel.

Would recommend, as this is a variety of novels in one: that of the historical Jesus in Judea, a not-quite bildungsroman of the poet we meet early, a political satire, and a madcap adventure.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline

Sometimes it's interesting to see how a writer thinks, how their experiences shape their stories. The afterword to Civilwarland in Bad Decline is a little on the nose in that regard; George Saunders details what he was going through as he was writing these stories, how he was relatively broke, working a job he wasn't entirely enthused about, and worrying about how he would be able to provide for his family. In that light, the stories here about parents working a job they hate to support their children, worrying about failing their family, and actually failing to support their family are a lot more poignant.

Out of seven stories in this collection, four ("Civilwarland in Bad Decline", "The Wavemaker Falters", "Downtrodden Mary's Failed Campaign of Terror", and "Bounty", as well as the bonus story "A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room") are set in amusement parks. Saunders cover this in the afterword, as well, as well as in an interview:

The truth is, I started writing theme park stories not out of thematic or political interest. I was just trying to divest myself of a certain tendency that I had, which was to be a stodgy, Hemingway-esque realist. I really loved Hemingway, so I wrote a lot of stuff in grad school that was kind of like Hemingway transplanted into my life, but somehow it didn't work. I noticed as a device if I set the story in a strange place, the language got a little more oomph in it. At first it was a way to keep myself honest, to keep me from falling back into this reactionary realist mode that I couldn't pull off. And at the time that I was working on the first book, I was also working at a company that was kind of squeezing the life out of me. It was one of those artistic accidents where I thought I was just doing something to be pragmatic, and then when I did it I could see all the political ramifications. So now I'm actually trying not to do those stories as much, but every so often one will hit me and it will seem like so much fun. It's a step up into that kind of weird fiction that's irresistible.

 The theme park stories are all a little different, of course: "Civilwarland in Bad Decline" is both funny and tragic as hell, as we see through the eyes of a downtrodden verisimilitude inspector who both hates and is lousy at his job, but sticks it out for the sake of his children (with a wife who no longer respects him). "The Wavemaker Falters" concerns a man who caused a tragedy losing the respect of his wife through dealing with it. Of the others, "Bounty" is the longest, and the most memorable; it deals with a dystopian future where society has broken down and where mutants, called "Flaweds" are second-class citizens: working menial jobs, or even enslaved. Unfortunately, it's the least tight of the stories here.

I would highly recommend this; all the stories are imaginative and effective.

The Devil in the White City

Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City is widely praised, and it's easy to see why. It's a meticulously researched work that alternates chapters on the planning of the 1893 World's Fair with the activities of the serial killer H. H. Holmes, who operated in and around Chicago at the time. At least, the planning and architecture chapters are meticulously researched; the Holmes chapters are full of speculation, as he didn't document his activities the way the Fair's architects did; most of Holmes' actions are thus from informed speculation or forensics. (This isn't a problem unless one is going to insist on strict historical accuracy, as Larson is certainly an entertaining writer)

As a work of history that reads like a novel, this is absolutely a success. Obviously, this is not a novel, or we would have our major characters (Burnham and Olmstead on the architecture/planning side, and Holmes) intersect at or near the climax of the novel. Happily, they remain unaware of each other (Holmes was more interested in young, single women, being who he was). The closest we have to something like that is a subplot revolving around the eventual assassination of Carter Harrison, by a Guiteau-like office seeker.

Definitely recommended.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

Like all short story collections, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher has its ups and downs. There are a few that could be autobiographical ("Sorry to Disturb" and "How Shall I Know You?"). There's what may be a vampire story (or just an extended meditation on mortality) in "Terminus", and there's a story that was possibly written to indulge in a grammatical pun ("Comma", because of course).

There's at least one story in here that I'd never like to read again, which is "The Heart Fails Without Warning." (which, incidentally, is an incidence that occurs in one of the other stories) It's a look at a family dealing with one of their daughter's eating disorder, and it's unsettling as hell.

The class of the lot is the title story, which is (I believe) the only piece in this collection that was not previously published. It's oddly fascinating to read, given that it's a revenge fantasy for a certain class of British intellectual, and it's not played 100% straight (thankfully, because even if you believe Thatcher is odious, you have to wink a little, or it comes off as psychotic.)

This is very much worth reading -- the prose is both memorable and limpid, I knocked this out relatively quickly.

The Anabasis

On the one hand, this is a classic. On the other, it's a disjointed mess. I'm not even sure it's this particular translation -- Xenophon is occasionally mentioned (in passing) in the first half of the book, before being prominently featured in the second. This isn't an epic (so there's no divine intervention), but there's a lot of sacrifice -- Xenophon will hardly leave his tent without having the diviners tell him what he should do.

It's one of the original adventure stories, but I would not recommend it.