Science Fiction Gets the Royal Treatment

Force fields, time travel, hovercars, and mind reading are no longer a thing of the past…nor the future. Certainly not the present, either. But wouldn’t it be cool if someone were to finally come out and say just how possible such things would be, given the right technology and time?

Enter Michio Kaku, physicist, and author of Parallel Worlds and (most recently) Hyperspace. I was lucky enough to unpack an ARC of his newest book — due out from Doubleday in March of next year — entitled Physics of the Impossible. Science fiction moonlighters rejoice!

Kaku takes all of our favorite sci-fi tricks like teleportation, phasers, starships, and invisibility, and subjects them to a grading system. Is it a Class One Impossibility?, or Class Five? How could these things actually work?, and what improvements must be made to our technology in order to enable them to work? As he does so well, Kaku’s writing is as accessible to the layman as it is entertaining (I must imagine) to the more erudite aspiring Stephen Hawkings. He laces in great illustrations and examples from every known corner of the literary world. From Tolkien to Star Trek, Plato to Back to the Future. Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book, on the topic of invisibility:

Clearly, invisibility is a property that arises at the atomic level, via Maxwell’s equations, and hence would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to duplicate using ordinary means. To make Harry Potter invisible, one would have to liquefy him, boil him to create steam, crystallize him, heat him again, and then cool him, all of which would be quite difficult, even for a wizard.

Playful and wry, but unflinchingly honest about the lengths to which our present technology may or may not be able to take us, Physics of the Impossible somehow manages to be informative but also a light read. Well, maybe not “light” in the truest sense, but certainly a good weekend, lounge-on-the-couch read, with the occasional guffaw and frequent, “huh, that’s interesting.” For anyone who loves science fiction, but disapproves of its far-fetched themes, this book will make you want to curl up in front of a Battlestar Galactica marathon and say, “Hey,…maybe that’s only ten years from now…who knows?”

 

Another Oxford Graduate Gets Published

After finishing Wodicka’s All Shall Be Well…, which I addressed at length in my last post, I moved directly on to the dark Edwardian mystery, The Somnambulist.  Jonathan Barnes, an Oxford grad and contributer to the Times Literary Supplement, has made his debut with a wonderfully weird book.  At first I thought I was in for a Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell sort of tale, but this couldn’t be further from the truth.  The Somnambulist manages instead to be hilarious at moments, absurd at times, and intriguing overall.

Edward Moon, illusionist and part-time crime-solver, is bored with his life.  He hasn’t had a good mystery to solve in quite a while.  He and his “Watson” — in this case an eight-foot tall mute who writes on a chalkboard (and can’t spell a damn thing correctly) — are quickly dragged from their torpor when a circus freak called the Human Fly commits a murder.  Sound bizarre?  You don’t know the half of it.  Among the many despicable characters in this book are a man who claims to know the future because he’s “lived it,” a brothel full of mutant prostitutes (among whom Moon himself has a few favorites), and an incredibly hate-able albino.

It’s Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently books, though set in the world of Doyle, as told by a pleasantly bombastic and wholly unreliable narrator (whose identity remains a secret till the end of the story).  To dust off an old adage, “There’s something in it for everyone.”  And that’s not something I say often — in fact, I loathe cliches as much as the next writer.

The Somnambulist is due out from William Morrow, a Harper Collins imprint, in February of 2008.  Though naturally you could track a copy down in the UK, where it’s been out all year.  Once more, damn you Brits for getting all the good stuff first!   

 

All Shall Be Well

It’s not often that the younger writer — and by this I mean the writer in his or her twenties — comes across a fantastic work of literary fiction written by someone of a similar age. (I’m excluding here the sort of sensationalist pulp that passes as literary these days, with regards to a young writer whose name I refuse to mention and whose books make me physically ill.) Enter Tod Wodicka, author of All Shall Be Well; and All Shall Be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall Be Well. Young literary novelists rejoice, for here is our man!

Originally published the UK this year, the book will make its American debut in January of ‘08; I can only surmise that the Brits got dibs because Wodicka, though originally born in New York, is an expatriate living in Berlin. He was only twenty-nine when his novel was published by Jonathan Cape, a division of Random House. (This means I’m only two years behind the man.) In the States, it’s being published under Pantheon, an American imprint under Knopf — also, of course, a division of Random House.

Burt Hecker, the main character of the piece, is 63, divorced, and dresses in medieval garb. He calls himself a “medieval reenactor.” Often he’ll refuse to interact with anything that wouldn’t have been present during medieval times — in the first chapter he politely refuses to drink coffee, calling it “OOP,” or “out of period.” The story begins with a pilgrimage from the States to Rhineland, Germany, in order to celebrate the 900th birthday of St Hildegard von Bingen. What the others in his company don’t realize is that Hecker has bought a one-way ticket. He admits that he has no idea why he did this, and seems whimsically aloof to the consequences.

I’ll leave the synopsis there. I suppose if your interest has been piqued, you’ll either track down another blurb through the links above, or just order the book and read it. The latter being, of course, the recommended approach.

What appeals to me most about this novel is Wodicka’s execution. Though told primarily in first-person subjective, there are seamless interweaves of rumination that blend incomparably with the present-tense narrative. The effect is not unlike the daydreaming mind: One moment, Hecker will be sitting in a car, staring out the window, and the next he’ll be revisiting a road trip that he and his ex-family had taken years prior. But the stunning element is that the two, very separate, times overlap. Clothing, conversation, and setting all seem to intermingle. And yet never is there a moment that Wodicka’s style resembles the rambling (and often confusing or boring) feel of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Which is a great relief to me, since stream-of-consciousness has always left me feeling like more of a codebreaker than a real reader.

For further information, there are a few sites to visit. One is a great interview from the BBC, linked with Wodicka’s name above, but also here. Not to mention that there’s a collection of CDs on Amazon; the author wishes to point out the various musical influences on his book.

(I would never have built a link to Amazon, in all honesty, unless the tiny blurbs Wodicka offered for each of the albums weren’t supremely entertaining. Most of it is Hildegard’s own music — that’s right, she isn’t only a saint, but also a famous composer.)

All of that being said: READ THE BOOK.