Christopher Brown Rule of Capture

Donny Kimoe wants to be a good lawyer. He’s the one who defends the undefendable, though, and the scorecard does not tell a good story. His last client was executed. His current client is on a fast track to disappearing. His drug habit isn’t helping as much as it used to. Donny’s legal shenanigans are beginning to threaten his own safety. He wants to do the right thing. Is it particularly hard, or is he not as good as he needs to be?

Welcome to the day-after-tomorrow world of Christopher Brown, who, like his character, is a lawyer in Texas. Rule of Capture, his second novel, has the same setting as his first, Tropic of Kansas, wherein he manages the unique feat of creating a believable dystopian present. Xelina, Donny’s newest client, has footage of a political assassination. Donny knows he can help her by using the law. At least, that’s his hope, which unfortunately is his weapon of choice in a gunfight.

Rule of Capture is a unique legal thriller. Brown is rigorous in his world-building. There’s no shiny extrapolated technology to magically blast in. Instead, the author applies his excellent powers of extrapolation to the law, finding Reagans far more threatening than lasers. The world is bristling with danger. It’s an open-carry paradise, with all the horror we currently hide from ourselves striding in the unpleasantly bright sunlight.

Donny’s an interesting and compelling character, surrounded by the sort of sleaze we get to read about on a daily basis. He’s likable but inclined to deceive himself when it comes to what sort of help he can provide. He sympathizes with his rebellious clients, but blinkers himself into the belief that the law is here to protect them, even when it is clear the law will not protect even him.

Brown knows how to score point after point for the reader, though. Rule of Capture has a bit of the feel of a horror novel, and readers will enjoy following Donny down into the legal equivalent of the cellar beneath the haunted house. We know it’s a bad idea and we know that Donny expects it is as well. But we sure as hell love to hope with him. Rule of Capture eventually reveals just what the title is about, as Donny finds he’s on the train that’s carrying his clients. Brown is a master of law-twisting terror, and every page threatens to show us a headline from the world we live in as opposed to the one we hope we are only reading about.

Rule of Capture takes the toolbox of technological science fiction and uses it to rebuild the legal thriller, crafting a reality that seems more pertinent to what’s going on around us than mere descriptions can possibly manage. It’s compelling and gritty, and imaginative enough to capture all the terrible things you know or have heard about and put that puzzle together. Is the result a mirror? We hope not, thinking hope, if not the best, may be our only weapon.

Christopher Brown tells a good story, particularly in person. Here’s a link to your hope of having a better day, or, if you need to kill some time while waiting for good people to arrive and knock at your door – listen below.

Advertisements

Tea Obreht Inland

Lurie tells his story on the run, speaking to you – we do not know who you are, not yet. He’s young and on the run in a landscape that threatens him with death by thirst, hunger, and gunfire. The American West in the mid-1800’s is not a place for orphans, especially those who can sense the needs of those many who have died here. His path leads him to become a sort of outlaw.

Nora is stranded as well, stuck at her home(stead) in Arizona, very specifically in 1863. Her husband is absent on an unknown trek, her youngest is certain a monster is stalking them, and the young woman her husband brought home as a sort of step-child adoptee is more interested in talking to spirits than hauling water to the ramshackle home that is being transformed by drought into a deathtrap.

Téa Obreht’s second novel, Inland boldly re-invents the Western with a unique prose and storytelling style that rewards readers in the ways possible only in literature. First and foremost, Inland is a reading experience. Those familiar with Obreht’s first novel, The Tiger’s Wife will find the appeals of that story – a detailed historical vision infused with the human supernatural understanding of life – present and accounted for in this book. But that’s where the similarity ends. Obreht takes an equally effective but very different prose and storytelling approach here. The difference perfectly suits the material, and the result is a powerhouse incarnation of an American genre, reborn. Newer than new, older than old, Inland is what reading is all about.

Each story is equally compelling, and both are well-removed from the sort of storytelling in The Tiger’s Wife. Lurie’s story unfolds over a span of years. His path as a smart orphan leads him to join up with a gang of outlaws, and puts him in the sights of a lawman determined to run him down, a trope that Obreht rewires with entertaining expertise. His ability to sense what the dead want is no gift; it’s another problem for him to deal with in a life where death is a constant companion. He tells his story in the first person, and we do learn who he’s speaking to.

Nora’s story unfolds over far less elapsed time, but with equally eloquent detail. We hear her story in the third person, a choice that feels perfectly in place to a reader for whom the West as experienced by both storytellers is an unknown expanse, chock-a-block with the unexpected. Her youngest son has everyone on the lookout for a monster. The layabout girl her husband brought home is a table-knocking spiritualist who thinks herself special. Her husband is not home, and she senses he’s kind of dodgy. Water’s short. The politics of their tiny town have an immediate impact.

Obreht weaves these two seemingly disparate stories with great expertise, and crafts a vision of the frontier west unlike most others (camels, monsters, ghosts) that rings with impeccable truth. She also unites the engaging entertainment of the Weird Western with a prose style that echoes the lonely desperation of the lost. Which is to say that Inland is fun to read but as striking as a deadly desert sunset that transforms a waterless world into a cold hell.

Obreht’s ability to combine opposites in prose that echoes the beautiful and dangerous world that surrounds her two stories is present even in the architecture of the novel as a whole. The tension of the diverse narratives and persons, as it were, telling the stories, is itself a driving force to keep the reader immersed, and a reward for doing so. Close the book, and you will know you have read a whole, single story, new in all the ways implicit in calling the work a novel. The words go into your mind and create a new world, a place you come to understand, a place you realize is now a part of your life.

Here’s a link to my conversation with the delightful Téa Obreht about her journey into the desert of novel-writing.

Cephalopodcast Plus Dream Journal

 

A special bonus in this delivery of Cephalotron mixes is a full hour of uninterrupted soundtrack only from The Dream Journal, hosted by Katherine Bell Saturdays,10-11 AM PDT/PST on KSQD.org.  This is a talk show featuring the discussion of dreams and dream theory science with guests and callers (call in with your dreams for live analysis, 831-900-5774!).  Listen to the podcasts at KSQD.org! I provide a live, improvised soundtrack composed while listening to both the conversation and an ambient-level version of the music I am creating on a four-second delay.  The music is cued very low in the mix, meant to create an audio sense of place for the talk of dreams to unfold.  If you enjoy this music, please let the station know.  If you would like to know more about the music, let me know.  You can find some photos of the gear, both packed and set up to play on Facebook.

Here are five more hours of Cephalotron, in a totally word-free mix [occasionally a song with lyrics sneaks in].  If you view via iTunes, you’ll find a setlist in the lyrics.  Enjoy, if you like or listen to this let KSQD.org know via their feedback portal.  It will assist in keeping this broadcast on the air. You can listen live, includes song source announcements, 9-10 PM PDT/PST Sundays at KSQD.org.

 

Lisa Lutz The Swallows

It’s an isolated boarding school, out in the country a bit, but not the best. Stonebridge Academy students are not high achievers. They call themselves Stoners. Alex Witt, who left her last teaching job in a hurry, finds herself teaching creative writing, which is to say, mostly winging it. her firsts assignment suggests that something unpleasant is afoot here.   The dead rat in a desk drawer on the first day does not phase her. Her students, however, are another matter. There’s more than a whiff of the unsavory.

With The Swallows, Lutz brings her trademark perceptive and often funny prose to do battle in what becomes a war of the sexes. Just who is fighting and why is best left to the reader to discover. In this environment, Lutz’ ability to evoke a smile from a turn of the phrase and slyly cutting repartee becomes a two-edged sword, wielded with precision. Our willingness to make light of intractable problems ensures that nearly every smile is followed by a cringe of discomfort. Credit her skill as a wily designer of plot traps as you helplessly turn the pages. Lutz brigs the obsessive to compulsive reading.

Told in round-robin style, there’s a low-key feel of Rashomon at work here. The four storytellers are nicely (un)balanced. Witt is complemented by Ford, a male teacher at the school who proves to be far more complex than we are ready to expect. Gemma is the new girl in town who does not arrive with an agenda but whips one up in short order. Norman Crowley is deeply immersed in an agenda the puts him firmly in a place he’d avoid if there was a choice. Needless to say, everybody’s plans are sabotaged by an all-too-believable reality.

Lutz is a master at cranking up tension while tamping down over-reach and overkill. The funniest and most terrible thing about The Swallows is that what happens seems sort of subdued compared to reality. But readers will know that in the thick of it, nothing feels underplayed. Lutz has a killer sense of humor, here in the service of a sort of social horror story. It’s OK to laugh so long as you are not looking in the mirror.

The real triumph of The Swallows is Lutz’s ability to keep the pages flying and the (uneasy) laughter flowing while excavating some very unpleasant truths in the most ordinary of lives. “Look at this,” she says. “Now, this,” laughing, and you laugh too. You want to, you need to, you know it will be a hoot to find out what’s at the center of the mystery.

Uh oh. A mirror.

Here’s a link to my entirely spoiler-free interview with Lisa Lutz, wherein the same humorous sensibility is deployed in the general direction of writing this sort of novel. You’ll feel like a kid, reading Highlights, fun with a purpose. NOT in the dentist’s office.

Beth Macy Dopesick

Putting any problem in perspective required more than mere fact. To be sure, facts are necessary; reality cannot be change unless it is accurately described. But the power of narrative, the discovery of stories that bind the facts, is the only way to create the intellectual and emotional understanding within which one might discover not just the problem, but as well the solution.

While there has been no recent shortage of admirable reporting about the opioid epidemic, it requires a book like Beth Macy’s Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America (Back Bay Books / Hachette Book Group; 400 Pages; $17.99) to put the acts in perspective. The mother of a victim in this book tells the author that she hopes Macy will “find the story” of her daughter’s death. Dopesick does this and so much more. It tells a nation’s story. Even mere facts move the narrative; 300,000 dead so far. That’s 100 9/11 attacks – with another 100 to unfold in the next five years. It is impossible to imagine that we’d do nothing. But so far, beyond the outliers (doctors, parents, addicts, a few more) we’ve barely begun to admit it is a problem.

Macy manages to, in a very compact narrative, get to the nub of the problem, find the stories that started with the problem and takes her readers on a journey into the heart a medical nightmare, a man-made plague that began over 100 years ago, when Heinrich Dreser invented a molecular disease vector. He put it in a pill and called it Heroin, and it was prescribed to cranky babies and anxious adults. Until. We generally think we know how that story ended, but a sequel was in the works.

It was re-made and marketed in the US (not for the first time, but recently) as Oxycodone – around 1989. Texas led the way to “legalization”, and the pills were aggressively marketed, particularly in the poorest part of the Appalachians. Macy resides not far from what proved to be ground zero in this outbreak, and she took the tie and effort to talk to the people who suffered. The stories she uncovers and tells are compelling and horrifying, not just because the facts themselves are both, but also because our perception of addicts is that they have made a selfish moral choice. Macy makes it clear that this epidemic is not just man-made; it was exploited for profits by Perdue. The human tragedies of that exploitation are the stuff of incredibly powerful storytelling and courageous research on Macy’s part. She did not just ask questions. She took part in these lives, to make their stories more immediate, involving and direct.

The facts of this epidemic speak for themselves. In Dopesick, Macy speaks for and to those on the receiving end of those facts. But she does so with the sort of bravery the victims and their families need to summon to fight the molecule. For all the despair she encounters, and that left even now, Macy manages to bring to life the human power of stories that can end well. It is certain that not all will end ell. Too many lives have been needlessly lost. When you read Dopesick, you will be certain that there is much to be done. But you’ll also be part of that story. It is a story you can not only narrate, but change.

Here’s a link to my conversation with Beth Macy about Dopesick. It’s not her story, it is everyone’s.

Soundtracks for The Dream Journal from KSQD

 

While driving in to KSQD recently to host On Being with Krista Tippet followed by my show, Narrative Species, I was listening to The Dream Journal, a program in which co-hosts Katherine Bell and Carol Malady discuss dreams with both guest specialists and call-in listeners. It’s a fantastic show, very smart, with nary a namby or pamby in sight. When I tuned in, Carol was talking about a recent dream.

Without my permission, the music I wanted to hear to accompany the conversation started to play in my mind. When I arrived at KSQD, I pitched the hosts an idea; I’d show up with them next time around and add some ambience from a few odd boxes. Mostly during the dream parts.

The following week I was there, with the Elektron Digitone, the Haaken ContinuuMini, and the Akai MPX-16, wired in a kludgey manner so I could hear them and add sound as inspired, which is to say, sparsely and at a very low volume. Below is a link to three pieces extracted from the recording. I am very grateful for the opportunity to do this, and hope to do so again. This is up on SoundCloud.

Richard Kadrey The Grand Dark

Largo Moorden’s life in Lower Proszawa is prosaically familiar and utterly strange. He’s 21 years old, a bike courier with a decent place in a bad part of town and a lovely girlfriend. But he pedals past monstrous robots (known as “Maras”) and garbage-eating “eugenics” who keep the streets if not clean, at least less filthy. It quickly becomes clear that Lower Proszawa is not our past or future, but rather the present revised by the precise and joyous imagination of Richard Kadrey. It is nowhere we know, and everything we are.

Kadrey’s urban creation knows no boundaries of genre. He crafts his world with the precise language of science fiction and the wild abandon of modern fantasy. Keeping it tightly focused and ever-immersive are his carefully crafted characters. Read a page or so of this book, and you won’t be thinking of genre. Instead, you’ll start to worry for and with Largo. He’s no naïve kid from the sticks. He’s a scrappy, yet caring underdog from a bad part of town with no plans to return.

Largo’s girl, Remy is a talented beauty who works as an actress (of sorts) at The Theater of the Grand Darkness, a theatre that takes more than a cue card from the Grand Guignol. The Grand Darkness, and Lower Proszawa remain in the shadow of War. One has just concluded in a mixed victory and another looms. Iron Dandies, the disfigured veterans, walk the street in steel helmets to mask their disfigurement. Even though Largo is getting by, and a promotion, what looks weird and not good proves to be much worse than readers might guess. It’s compelling as Hell itself might be, were you to have the chance to glance inside.

Kadrey’s world is built without effort. His prose is stripped down and spare, musical in the manner of The Sex Pistols or Radiohead. He’s a master at revelatory plotting, showing us precisely what we need to know to ask the next question that he’s going to answer. His page-turning world is both delightfully imaginative and uncannily reminiscent of ours. Alas, it seems that creeping fascism is a universal thing, especially when it is creeping towards a state of endless war.

For all the here-and-now that lies just underneath Lower Proszawa, The Grand Dark is a creation of striking and very engaging originality. It’s a world you will want to return to, a world that you come to understand lies just beneath ours. At the core, storytelling is both the means and the end. The bloody horrors of The Grand Darkness are eerily mirrored in Largo’s life. Looking up from The Grand Dark, you’ll find unfortunate answers to the questions it asks in your world, enough to make you hope for a return trip for more hopeful answers to the question s you’ve yet to ask.

Here’s a link to your plunge into darkness with Richard Kadrey. The light you save will be your own.

 

Welcome to Word-Free Cephalotron: Podcasts of Instrumental Electronic Listening Music

In my luxurious free time, I’ve been broadcasting Electronic Listening Music on KSQD.org/-Squid 90.7 FM Santa Cruz Community Radio, streaming live every Sunday from 9-10 PM. For this show, I have a generous definition of so-called ambient, or Electronic Listening Music, which might be better categorized under “things I like that generally don’t have words or lyrics so as to make a better background for reading, conversations, studying or, as it were, zoning.”

Usually synthesizers are involved, not always, though. But it took me a while to figure out how I wanted to podcast this material. I limit my own yakking during the show to before-and-after tracklist announcements, to keep the show as word-free as possible. It seemed a shame to podcast it larded it up with broadcast-oriented announcements. Those are necessary for RayJoe, but as a podcast it would defeat the purpose to offer up instrumental music that includes my distracting yakking.

The solution was to create a voiceless version of my show, careful tracklists, then apply my announcements on a second version. I did not do this for the first few shows, so too bad. Ask me if you like and I will edit them for podcast. That said, the last five shows all have ready-to-podcast versions hanging out. Now you can hear them; links to each show and tracklist are below, six hours of e-music just for you.

A note, I’m “Trashotron,” which is to say the interstitial bits are composed and recorded by YT. If you see “Monterey Bay Electronic Ensemble,” or MBEE, that includes Dana Massie playing Linnstrument and Logic, and Matt Isaacson on Guitar, Logic and drums. There are likely bits with Billy C. Reed on Guitar, Bass and effects as well. More on all this later, as the material provides itself. I’m still catching up. Here’s the music, enjoy! Contact rick@ksqd.org, or via whatever method works best for you.

 

Neal Stephenson Fall, or Dodge in Hell

Richard “Dodge” Forthrast –last seen in REAMDE – is puttering through the beginning of another day-after-tomorrow in the early 21st century. It’s an intimate, engaging scene that stands on its own, which is to say that Fall is a follow-on to REAMDE, not a sequel. In short order, he dies, and before readers have belted themselves in, the pages and plot acquire super-sonic speed, hurtling one into a gripping, unsettling and prescient makeover of today as tomorrow. Stephenson does not slow down, and those 880 pages seem more like 320 even as you achieve escape velocity and are hurtled from a visionary science fiction story into an equally visionary fantasy novel.

Stephenson is firing on all cylinders in Fall, handing family tensions, international intrigue, and unfettered imagination with equal ease. Starting with the basics, he demonstrates his power with prose in the opening, where he conjures a palpable nostalgia for the present. It’s a nice way to open a science fiction novel, especially since Dodge’s death requires that his body be preserved for resurrection in some unknowable future. The path to that future is lined with a truly terrifying extrapolation of the dangers of the dissolution of consensus reality. As truth becomes personal, divorced from the measurable and external, marketing and promotion become weapons of mass destruction. Without a doubt, this will be for many the most powerful section of the novel. Don’t read it in the vicinity of the news. It won’t end well for you.

When next we meet Dodge, he’s Egdod, a nascent intelligence in a world unformed, until he takes a look around. Stephenson lets us slip into his online fantasy novel as Egdod lets there be light, sound, a mixmaster of human mythos, and wildly fantastic action that manages to break boundaries in post-Tolkien fantasy fiction. And while Stephenson’s afterlife is a deep dip into our religious human tapestry, complete with Miltonesque verses, its plot takes a page from 20th-century anti-religious philosophy; hell is, indeed, other people.

The joy of Stephenson’s fantasy novel-within-a-novel is that it is informed by and intercut with a toe-tapping tale of near-future intrigue. Every coin in the fantasy world has two sides as characters from the supposed real world (assuming we are not a simulation), find themselves reborn in a world that manages to be weirder than ours. Stephenson uses the fantastic not just to externalize our world into his near-future, he uses his fantasy to externalize the characters in his novel. It’s an economical means for him to entertain the hell out of us (you’re ignoring the so-called real world when you’re immersed in this tense-in-all-worlds narrative) while providing a great dose of exploding-head thought experimentation. Fall, or Dodge in Hell wallops your brain while it whips you into a future that is all to reminiscent of today.

You can follow this link to a conversation via Skype with Neal Stephenson’s excellent voice avatar:

Follow this link to hear my conversation with Neal Stephenson’s meatworld incarnation.

Malcolm Nance Reveals The Plot to Destroy Democracy: History Repeating

Hearts and minds are not generally changed by externalities. Belief and understanding, for all that they are concerned with the world round us, are not a part of that world. They are internal phenomena; change comes from within. Present us with new experiences, new facts, new perspectives, and we may change. The stories we tell ourselves are the only ones that will persuade us.

With the first sentence of The Plot to Destroy Democracy: How Putin and His Spies Are Undermining America and Dismantling the West, Malcolm Nance offers a terrifying scenario: “On November 8, 2016, Vladimir Putin became the first Russian President of the United States.” The bulk of what follows looks at the last 100 years of Russian espionage as well as current events. Nance is a brilliant orchestrator and analyst of history. The facts speak for themselves, and the author lets readers draw their own conclusions. By the time events get close to current, readers, engrossed in a page-turning look at dirty deeds done in the dark will have made their own internal arguments. We are natural pattern matchers, looking at the fall of Crimea during a long weird Washington summer.

Nance keeps us focused on the import of today by showing us the results of yesterday, and that today’s hot new trend is yesteryear’s reheated leftover from the previous generation. For example, “fake news” is all the rage, and it seems as if it might be impossible without the leg up offered by a ubiquitous Internet and omnipresent social media. But the Soviets were, back in the day (the 1970’s), busy sending trained Russian nationals to India as reporters, to plant stories with the hope (sometimes realized) in smaller, more easily-reached Indian papers, with the hopes that they would be picked up by AP and disseminated to the wider world. (Some were.) In the stream of a gripping run-up from Soviet times to today’s oligarchy, it’s a nice detail that itself makes no argument. It needs no argument. Just look around, and the patterns match whether you want them to or not.

Nance knows how to strip down to the basics, and rips through recent history and the current catastrophe with grace and a sure eye for economic storytelling. By the time he arrives in the present, readers are just the right bit ahead of him. The Plot to Destroy Democracy is tense and gripping, even if we think we know what’s going on. Nance never pulls his punches, and he has a knack for finding the details that bind together disparate strands of events to transform apparent chaos into unpleasant order. You will not read this book with the intention of change. And by the time you finish, you may not feel changed. But it’s quite likely you’ll want to see change, early and often.

Here’s a link to my in-depth interview with Malcolm Nance, or listen below.