“…Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you-not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they’d gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (OCT 18, 2011)

Zone One by Colson Whitehead plays on the archetype of apocalyptic zombie literature. The unnamed protagonist is known as Mark Spitz, because he is afraid to swim. He is a sweeper, someone assigned by the pseudo-government in Buffalo to destroy any zombie AKA skel or catatonic victim AKA straggler of the plague that has destroyed civilization. The zombies are virtually mindless with a lust for human flesh that can only be quenched by destroying their heads. A zombie’s bite is what spreads the infection. Stragglers just stay immobilized where they stopped. They do nothing, even in response to attack. Both are routinely exterminated by a lethal strike to the head via bullet, baseball bat, axe or what have you. The authorities in Buffalo are sponsored by the remnants of corporations and are in touch with similar enclaves around the world

Everyone suffers from PASD, or Post Apocalyptic Stress Disorder. Every survivor has killed, starved, and betrayed others in order to survive and has horrific flashbacks. Nobody is immune to PASD. The horrors of Last Night (when the plague started) and its sequelae have taken all joy out of life. This is dystopia maxima.

Pheenies, non military survivors, do the grunt work. Mark Spitz is a pheenie, but as a sweeper, he is more or less privileged, better off than many and somewhat valued. He has always wanted to live in Manhattan. Now he has been assigned as part of a team to mop up zone one, the first part of Manhattan to be cleared of skels and stragglers and made safe for a rebirth of civilization. Mark is “everyman.” He never stands out; neither brilliant nor dunce, leader nor blind follower. He ekes out survival and remembers horror upon horror like everyone else except the skels, the stragglers and the dead.

We have a brilliant exposition of survivor guilt; of the dehumanization that derives from inhuman behavior. The prose is poetic and compelling. It has the awful beauty full of grue that is required to represent a world gone mad. No one is a survivor in this world; they are all dead, brain dead or going to die. The dead and the dying are all ugly. Paranoia is the norm. What is delusional are hope and belief in a future. Is this a judgment like Sodom and Gomorra, a revolt by Gaia, or just an unlucky roll of the dice over and over and over again unto bleak horror and total despair? We never learn why skels do not eat stragglers or why they do not fall on each other in an orgy of eat and be eaten. How can any creature, no matter how torpid survive with absolutely no food? Who cares in a story about zombies; and one so well-written!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 342 readers
PUBLISHER:	Doubleday (October 18, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Colson Whitehead
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Sag Harbor And more dystopian problem futures: The Passage by Justin Cronin The Good and the Ghastly by James Boice

Bibliography:

• The Intuitionist (1998)
• John Henry Days (2001)
• Apex Hides the Hurt (2006)
• Sag Harbor (2009)
• Zone One (2011)

Other:

• The Colossus of  New York (2004)
• The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death (2004)

“People don’t like themselves today. We’re a rentier class left over from the last century. We tolerate everything, but we know that liberal values are designed to make us passive. We think we believe in God but we’re terrified by the mysteries of life and death…We’re an accident of nature, but think we’re at the center of the universe. We’re a few steps from oblivion, but we hope we’re somehow immortal…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (SEP 4, 2011)

Millennium People by J. G. Ballard is an important existential novel, not as some suggest about the corrosive effects of technology, but rather about the vacuity of middle class life. As the middle class comes to realize that all the things for which they have yearned are meaningless traps, they become consumed by a fear of nothingness. In response they seek authenticity. They find authentic feelings from violence and protest, the more meaningless and random the better.

The protagonist is a psychologist whose ex-wife was killed by a bomb that went off in the luggage carousel at Heathrow. He has decided to infiltrate a middle class revolutionary movement in order to investigate the crime. In the course of his investigation he becomes involved with their charismatic leader and her shadowy mentor in revolution; a doctor who specializes in treating terminally ill children; and a priest who has lost his faith only to see it becoming reborn out of violence.

Characters in this novel posit that true meaning can only be found in authenticity, an authenticity that derives most purely from absurd acts of meaningless rage. Inescapably we are led to the conclusion that the fear of nothingness is the fear of a very real situation that finds a remedy only in escape from the entire system via revolution. The middle class will go to revolution only if fortified by a fresh cappuccino and never in yesterday’s underwear. They are vacuous revolutionaries. Their revolution is by its very nature foredoomed to failure. God is found only in the absurd, particularly in meaningless violence.

One might consider this book as an explanation of Osama Bin Laden and al Qaida. He was the spoiled and educated child of wealthy Saudis; a man who had learned that there were no consequences to his actions. His search for authenticity led him to embrace the stupidest, most ignorant excesses of Islamist fundamentalism and the most profoundly absurd violence against that icon of modernity, the World Trade Center, emblem of 20th century America. The result has been a Holy war that corrodes life on all sides and resolves absolutely nothing. But a similar analysis can be made for Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing and those children who commit mayhem in public schools, further demonstrating the point that meaningless violence is the middle class’ response to the void of inauthenticity. For that matter, the same could be said of many of our political leaders for whom consequences are for the under classes.

This is a whale of a good read, well plotted, competently told and with an important message about the core meaninglessness of our civilization. It is also profoundly pessimistic. Ballard is the real thing and this next to the last book of his life should be read by anyone with an interest in the Hell that is modern middle class liberal culture.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 8 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (July 5, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on J. G. Ballard
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Bibliography:

• The Wind from Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Drought (1964)
• The Crystal World (1968)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984)
• The Day of Creation (1987)
• Running Wild (1988)
• The Kindness of Women (1991)
• Rushing to Paradise (1994)
• Cocaine Nights (1996)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (November 2010)
• Millennium People (2003; July 2011)
• Kingdom Come (2006; March 2012)

Movies from books:

• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970)
• Empire of the Sun (1987)
• Crash (1996)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (2001)

“I think when the dust settles and the Bipartisans are history that’s how we’re going to live, as small units who don’t agree. I don’t know what we’ll call it, political parties, military councils, city-states, but that’s how it’s going to be and we’re not going to screw it up this time. It’ll be like 1776 all over again. Act Two for America.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (AUG 2, 2010)

It’s probably best to get this one interesting tidbit out of the way: 38 year-old Gary Shteyngart, the author of the clever new satire, Super Sad True Love Story, recently made the New Yorker’s list of “20 Under 40” fiction writers—writers whom the New Yorker described as “capturing the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction.” With Super Sad, Shteyngart has done just that.

One doesn’t know for sure how many autobiographical elements are in Shteyngart’s protagonist, Lenny Abramov. But the two are close in age. Lenny, an unsure, bumbling, child-adult still, is 39. As the book opens he has just fallen in love with Eunice Park, many years his junior.

While this might seem straightforward enough, it is not. For this is the America of the not-so-distant future where the country is pretty much on the verge of social and economic collapse and a political apparatus named the Bipartisan Party is in power. Sinister elements of authoritarian rule are creeping up everywhere. The National Guard has posted random checkpoints all around the country to weed out unwanted citizenry all while the country is locked in an endless war against Venezuela.

Lenny works for an outfit that is invested heavily in Life Extension and his assignment is essentially to seek out “High Net Worth Individuals” who will subscribe to the concept. In fact, at the outset of the novel, he is just returning from Rome where he has spent a couple of years trying to scope out potential clients in Europe (he meets Eunice Park in Rome).

As far as everyday human interactions are concerned, the situation is equally grim. Everybody lives out lives in a constant flow of information streamed through individual devices called äppärät. At any given time, these “apparati” can tell others what your hotness quotient is or how valuable an asset you are, to your employer. Everybody’s worth is constantly tabulated. “One unfortunate Aiden M. was lowered from ‘overcoming loss of loved one’ to ‘letting personal life interfere with job’ to ‘doesn’t play well with others,’” Shteyngart writes. Hardly anybody ever talks to each other anymore and if they do, it’s called verballing (as opposed to just using pictures streamed live).

Needless to say, such an environment is hardly conducive to the nurturing of a budding relationship. It doesn’t help that Eunice Park, for her part, doesn’t see Lenny through a romantic lens right away. Her first impressions of him are that of a nerd in dorky clothes, someone who is trying way too hard and getting nowhere. Slowly however, she warms up to him, as she realizes he genuinely cares about her.

Super Sad is written in the form of two thought journals. One is maintained by Lenny and is more conventional in its format. The other, maintained by Eunice, is written in the form of brief and intense email messages (or as GlobalTeens messages as they are referred to in the novel) to her close friend, Jenny Kang. Together they paint the picture of a couple slowly navigating the landscape around them to fall in love.

Of course, as the novel’s title implies, this story does not have a fairy tale ending. For one thing, the strained political landscape explodes and there are riots in New York with casualties. The government bombs targets within the country and everyone’s äppärät stops working. All kinds of chaos ensues—nobody is sure exactly who the bad guy is here. In this politically stifling climate, with all kinds of “Big Brothers” watching, it remains to be seen how and if Lenny and Eunice’s fragile relationship will endure.

Shteyngart, himself the son of Russian immigrants, has portrayed Lenny as one too. Eunice, for her part, is the daughter of Korean immigrants. Her father’s systematic abuse of the family (Eunice’s mother, sister Sally, and herself) on the heels of a failing podiatric practice, also looms large in the background. Shteyngart beautifully portrays the unbearable expectations placed on second-generation immigrants to be high achievers. And he makes it clear not all immigrants and their associated dilemmas are the same. One of the best scenes in the novel comes when Lenny gets to meet Dr. Park over lunch. He can see the similarities between his own overbearing father and Dr. Park but can yet spot the telling differences.

Shteyngart has always written wonderful satire starting with the delightful The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, which gave a good sneak peek at this author’s talent. And while it too has sharp satire, Super Sad lacks some of Debutante’s zaniness. Yet it makes up for this in its more significant emotional heft. Perhaps this is a sign of the gradual maturing of Shteyngart’s own work.

In an interview with the New York Times, Shteyngart has said that he is very comfortable painting dystopian societies. “Dystopia is my middle name,” he says, “I was born in the Soviet Union, and then we moved to Reagan’s America.” Even ignoring the tongue-in-cheek factor in that statement, it is easy to see what he means when you read Super Sad. “That’s what I admire about youngish Italians, the slow diminution of ambition, the recognition that the best is far behind them,” Lenny says in the novel. One wonders how long before the same could be said of us Americans.

What’s worse, the scenario painted in Super Sad is not all that far-fetched. One can see the beginnings of such madness all around us. In that sense, not only is Gary Shtenygart’s new novel super sad, it is also super scary.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 114 readers
PUBLISHER:	Random House; 1 edition (July 27, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Official website for Gary Shteyngart Wikipedia page on Gary Shteyngart
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Another satirical book of our times: The Unknown Knowns by Jeffrey Rotter And one set in London: A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks And some countries make it hard to write a love story: Censoring an Iranian Love Story by Shahriar Mandinpour

Bibliography:

• Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002)
• Absurdistan (2006)
• Super Sad True Love Story (July 2010)

“What does the gentleman think I will do with his extra baht?’ she asks. “Buy a pretty piece of jewelry? Take myself to dinner? I am property, yes? I am Raleigh’s.” She tosses the money at his feet. “It makes no difference if I am rich or poor. I am owned.”

Book Review:

Review by Kirstin Merrihew (MAY 14, 2010)

Unlike much of the world, the Thai Kingdom had avoided inundation by the rising oceans. It had avoided pandemic decimation of crops and population. It had kept the global agri-corporations from accessing and either exploiting or destroying its vast and precious seed banks. It had taken drastic, isolationist steps to preserve itself while most of the rest of the world faltered into massive contraction and potential extinction.

The white shirts of the Environment Ministry enforced the official policy of the Child Queen’s regime, burning fields and villages if genetic blight or plague struck, conducting customs inspections of the expensive goods imported on dirigibles and confiscating and destroying even items supposedly protected by large bribes. And, “mulching” any windups they discovered.

Windups — also called New People — were bio-mechanically engineered creatures from Japan that could pass for human beings except that their everyday movements were jerky — reminding natural people of windup toys. Emiko was one of these windups; she had been imported to Bangkok and was, by constitution, submissive: she had been designed to obey, submit, and please. Her current “master” was neither Japanese nor Thai; he was Raleigh, a Westerner whose “club” was bar, opium den, and bordello among other things. Emiko, who in severely underpopulated Japan would have been valued and accepted, was basically a slave and “genetic trash” here.

Emiko caught the eye of Anderson Lake, a representative of AgriGen, a so-called “calorie company,” i.e., one of the multinationals that had a stranglehold on genetically modified grains and other foodstuffs which were being sold at exorbitant prices to other starving nations. He ostensibly ran the SpringLife factory that produced next-generation kink springs which were commonly used to power items that had formerly run on oil. Lake’s factory employed not only Thais and “yellow card” Chinese refugees but also, on the dangerous manufacturing floor, towering elephantine megodonts with four tusks that sometimes rampaged. Lake’s factory was more of a sham than a real enterprise, however. His true preoccupation was trying to ferret out the top secret storage sites of the Thai seed banks and to do whatever he could to shift high officials away from isolationism and toward free trade. Lake hoped Emiko could become a valuable informant, but he also found himself vulnerable to her trademark silky skin and sexual charms, complicating both of their existences.

Meanwhile, Jaidee, the Tiger of the white shirts, a fervent believer in guarding his country’s borders and long-term survival, misjudged the changing political winds in the Kingdom. Accused by his superiors of overstepping his authority, he was made a scapegoat by those aligning for a crucial showdown regarding the country’s future. The immense pressure on the Kingdom to open itself to “free trade” and to “share” its seed bank with the world might crush Jaidee, not to mention Hock Seng, a scheming yellow card Chinese employee of Anderson Lake’s, and…Emiko.

Emiko had heard rumors of a place to the north where other New People had a community of their own, and she wanted to escape Bangkok and find her own kind. But as the city became a powder keg waiting to be lit, she got more, not less, entangled with Lake, Raleigh, a genetic scientist, and other mercenary or exploitative examples of humanity. She also discovered hidden strengths (and aggressions) within herself she’d never guessed at before. Would Emiko affect the entire course of history in the Thai Kingdom? Or would that be left to others, and would she end up as a bystander, a witness to ecological disaster?

The Windup Girl vividly depicts a dystopian future ushered in by radical climate change and the reckless depletion of our natural resources as well as mismanagement and “generipping” of our crops and other food sources. Paolo Bacigalupi invents a scenario that one hopes is not too prescient but which compellingly grabs the reader and doesn’t let go. This, Bacigalupi’s first novel (he had previously written award-winning short stories), creates characters and plot with assurance that builds immediate and continued reader confidence in the integrity of the unfolding story. His characters are blemished, greedy, ambitious, and ruthless. They often act “badly” but as one might expect in their unforgiving environment. The world in which he enfolds them leaks disease and death but continues to display irrepressible human ingenuity. Bacigalupi’s future is one where science’s interference with nature has led Mankind to the brink. Emiko and the other windups represent one tangent of scientific development that might outlive human beings, and although the idea of articifial “life” surviving us isn’t a new idea, Bacigalupi’s version teams with innovative perspectives about her construction and status. Although Emiko is reasonably accused of having no soul. the author convinces the reader that she possesses an inner life and has a survival instinct at least as insistent as that of any natural person.

This novel is a 2010 Hugo Award nominee — along with five others. Looking at the list through my own bias for science fiction that deals with space travel and alien civilizations in other star systems, I noticed a trend this year with a bit of a jaundiced eye: most of the nominees were about a dystopian future/fantasy earth. I’d hoped for more subject matter breadth. But when I read the publisher’s summary of The Windup Girl, it wasn’t to be passed up. Whether it actually wins the Hugo or not, this novel is visionary, gritty, cautionary and highly intelligent. It definitely ranks in the top echelon of science fiction. Bacigalupi is a great and already polished talent, and I expect many more terrific (but maybe not quite so terrifying) tales from him.

Editor’s note:  The Windup Girl has won the Nebula Award and tied for the Hugo Award. It has also been chosen as Time Magazine’s book of the year.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 233 readers
PUBLISHER:	Night Shade Books (April 20, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Kirstin Merrihew
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Paolo Bacigalupi
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of another 2010 Hugo and Nebula Award Nominee: The City and the City by China Mieville And another 2010 Hugo Nominee: WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Bibliography:

• Pump Six and Other Stories (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Ship Breakers (2010)
• The Alchemists (2011)
• The Drowned (May 2012)