A Sad Tale
Well, I just got a royalty check, and, after paying off my bookie Sky Masterson, my bar tab at Guido’s Family Fun Drinkatorium, the drug pushers and whoremasters from the Purple Gang, and paying some money toward the principle of that unwise loan I took from the Sharquino Family, and buying my second child back from the Gypsy band run by ‘One-eye’, not to mention my ‘donation’ to the crooked cops, Officer Gruntch and Officer McScrewel, who would otherwise tattle to my parole officer Crusher Mongolo, I found I had forty dollars to spend on whatever I wanted.
Ah! It was a fine day! Over at Madame McVermine, they have a new girl who is pretty enough, even when heavily sedated, and the Drinkatorium has fine industrial-strength rotgut, and Mr. Sleem and Mr. Deethe say they have a shipment in from Bolivia, and the ponies were running at Belmont, and I had an inside tip that the fix was in to let Crazy Legs win in the eighth.
No, I did not spend my hard earned dough at any of these fine and upstanding establishments, almost all of which would be legal in a libertarian commonwealth. Instead, ashamed, I drew up my collar and pulled my hat down over my features and slunk into the bookstore. No, I was not buying anything respectable like Playboy or John Norman books or Obama biographies. I passed by the racks of cheap pulp and children’s adventure fiction. I did buy something. The clerk, unwilling to meet my eyes, wrapped my purchase in a plain brown wrapper and slid it over the counter to me. When I tried to pay, the clerk drew back and asked me to drop the money on the counter. I understood. She did not want to touch my hand. My stomach boiling, not daring to ask for my change, I picked up my purchase and slunk away, ashamed.
You see, the bookstore has a back room where they keep ‘literati’ books, including fiction that can be described as modern, experimental, or even postmodern. I bought the complete fictions of Jorge Luis Borges.
My parole officer was waiting in the street right in front of the bookstore. “Well, Liverlips Wright! Purchasing something…? Maybe something to read…?”
“Hello Mr. Mongolo! Top of the morning to you, Mr. Mongolo! Well… I guess I have to be getting along now….”
“What’s in the package, Liverlips?”
“J-just a b-book Mr. Mongolo, sir. Schoolgirl Spanking Slave of Gor, by Susan Wright and A. N. Roquelaure! It’s trashy erotica, really it is!”
He ripped it from my hands, and started to open thewrapping, but when he had torn just a corner of the brown paper, and saw the name, he book fell from his nerveless fingers, and he stepped back, wiping his hands on his coat as if some sticky substance had touched him. He waited, a looked of less-than-bestial cruelty in his eye, for me to stoop and pick up the book, before he started kicking me in the ribs.
“It that a work of MODERN…” (crack!) “… EXPERIMENTALIST …” (crunch) “…POSTMODERN…” (groink) “…LITERATURE!”
“It cannot be modern and postmodern at the same time,” I whined, tears and mucus streaming down my dirty face, trying to shield the book by curling around it, fetal-like. “Surely that would constitute a contradiction in terms.”
This time the boot caught me in the mouth, jarring one of my gold teeth into the rancid gutter. “I thought you were going to make something of yourself, Wright! I thought you read Maxwell Grant and Heinlein juveniles! Is there even a single Space Princess in any of that … that … dreck? ”
“Well, well, well, that depends! If you asked me, I would say that Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius has certain themes of alternate or even alternating reality, combined with an almost paranoid sense of the world being pliant to a secret conspiracy, which we see in certain works of Philip K. Dick or A.E. van Vogt! And could it not be argued that his famous Garden of Forking Paths touches on the theme of parallel timelines — and Library of Babel proposes an alternate universe as otherworldly and memorable as anything in HOLE IN THE ZERO (1967), that under-rated and unjustly forgotten masterpiece of surrealist science fiction by M.K. Joseph, New Zealand’s most famous author of the fantastic? Not to mention The Aleph which is clearly science fiction … YEEEOWW!” Mongol put an end to my pathetic excuses by stubbing out his cigar on my neck.
He shook his head, looking down in disgust, and spat on me. “Reading modern literature. And you used to brag about how plebeian your tastes were, how much you loved multivolume generic Tolkien-ripoffs. You told everyone who would listen how many comic books you read! How you have memorized which stars the Kzin homeworld orbits, or the planet of the Sardaukar terror-troops! You pretended to be a fanboy! ”
I pawed at his knees, blubbering. “But I am a fanboy! I am! Look at how overweight I am! I even moved back in with my mother when I was broke! The homestar of the Kzin is 61 Ursae Majoris! The Sardaukar come from Salusa Secondus, which orbits Gamma Piscium! I am a fanboy!”
“You are not!”
“No! NO! Han shot first! Kyle Rainer is not the real Green Lantern! Soylent Green is People! Tanelorn is Amber! Frodo lives! ‘It is by the juice of Mountain Dew that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion…’”
“Shaddup! You are not fooling anyone!”
“Live long and prosper! Tanj! Grok!”
Another savage kick left me twisting in the gutter among the used needles and sticky condoms. He leaned close and whispered through clenched teeth: “Why don’t you toddle along now to the cafe or the student union, and have a conversation with a longhaired leftwing professer wearing a beret about the themes of labyrinthine mirrors The House of Asterion or Funes the Memorialist characterize the inhumanity of non-linear infinity, talk about the socialization of schizophrenia or about how Magical Realism descenters privileged centers?”
“No .. no … Lottery of Babylon is science fiction! It is! It is not an ironically self-referential mediation on the nature of free will in a random universe! It’s like a Jack Vance story!”
“You’re no fanboy! Your tastes have become refined and patrician!”
“P-please! D-d-don’t tell anyone…”
The fine folks over at SfSignal are discussing which multivolume fantasy series are both underread and worth reading. In order to get back in the good graces of my parole officer, I thought I should read up on more genre fiction, time permitting, before people find out about me.
So here is my wish list so far of things to get to:
• Daniel Abraham’s The Long Price Quartet
• Paul Kearney’s ‘The Monarchies of God’
• Barry Hughart’s Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox
• Charles Saunders, the Imaro books
• Leigh Brackett, the Eric John Stark series
Of these books, I read some Leigh Brackett in my youth, and I read (and very much liked) BRIDGE OF BIRDS by Barry Hughart.
Are these good recommendations, dear readers? Or are there others I should read?
(And please do not recommend China Mieville. The man is a fine writer, and I take no glory from him, but his view of the universe, what we might call the scatocentric view, is opposite and antithetical to mine, and this limitation of my psychology prevents me from taking pleasure from his well-crafted works.)
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
