McSweeney's 45

It's another anthology from McSweeney's, with dueling (ok, alternating) tales from a Bradbury anthology and a Hitchcock anthology. Some of them are classics (Bradbury's "The Pedestrian"), some are tediously long (Lucille Fletcher and Allan Ullman's "Sorry, Wrong Number"), one is out-of-place (John Cheever's "The Enormous Radio", while an excellent story, just doesn't quite feel like it belongs in here).

China Mieville's "The Design" is excellent and really impressed me, and Brian Evenson's "The Dust" certainly feels like it could be in a 50s/60s anthology. Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" is both terrifying and awful (and the machine described therein is featured in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun). Julian May's "Dune Roller" is an example of a really worthwhile story I was previously unfamiliar with (more than likely because Hitchcock, rather than Bradbury, picked it, but it certainly could have been a Bradbury pick). In contrast, Benjamin Percy's "Suicide Woods" doesn't belong in here, both because it has little in common with the other stories in the anthology, and because it has far too much in common with stories in other McSweeney's anthologies. I feel like I've read it a dozen times previously, and that's not a good thing, either for it or those other stories.

Overall, recommended. Even the stories I was less than thrilled with are page turners (and as far as page turners, the last story enclosed here is terrifying, and has a lot in common with a favorite, Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit.")

The Guns of August

I'm not sure if there's anything I can say about Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August that hasn't been said already. It's nothing if not tight, though -- yes, it's not a short work, and the subject matter isn't easily and quickly distilled, but Tuchman retains her focus throughout.

Tuchman starts with the funeral of King Edward VII in 1910:

"the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last."

and moves with deftness through the pre-war conditions, of the Germans, the French, the Russians, and the British, as well as the psychology that drove those plans -- of Kaiser Wilhelm, of the French generals, of the Czar and the general staff, and the British government.

 How many children witness something that impresses them enough in early childhood to write a book featuring the incident? How many of those stories would be noteworthy? As a child, Tuchman (along with her family) witnessed the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben's mad dash across the Mediterranean to Constantinople, fleeing British pursuit, who had realized too late that she wasn't making a break for the Atlantic. In a paper move, she was purchased by the Ottoman government, and spent the rest of the war in their service. Tuchman (as she notes in the introduction) was fascinated by this, and incorporates it into her narrative. Is it wholly necessary? Not entirely, but it helps set the stage of the naval war. I would have preferred the Battle of the Falkland Islands have been incorporated, but that was in December, rather than August (although Tuchman sometimes reaches into early September and October)

I'm not sure that I know enough about the First World War to say that this is a comprehensive account of August 1914, but there's a wealth of information here, about both what actually happened, and the motivations of those actors, drawn from letters and memoirs.

I was honestly hoping this would be more about the July Crisis, but Tuchman's extensive account of the first month is so masterful, I was very disappointed when it ended on the eve of the First Battle of the Marne. Recommended highly.

Heart of a Dog

There's a reason this wasn't published in Russia until 1987, and it had nothing to do with the quality of this novel. Written during the height of the NEP period, it's a transparent satire of the life of both the arrivistes and the old money.

At first I thought this was going to be a work along the lines of Jack London, as it opens with the dog as the narrator. But it quickly moves to a third person perspective (although the changes in intelligence the dog undergoes would make for a challenging first "person" perspective).

The conceit of the story is that by transplanting certain parts (such as the pituitary gland) from a (recently deceased) human into an animal, the animal could gain human form and intelligence. Of course, the newly-human dog behaves exactly the way one would expect (crudely), and sides with his benefactors enemies.

It's an easy read, would recommend.

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.