"The Recognition" (1967)

J.G. Ballard's story probably has to count as one of the best in the Dangerous Visions collection, if only because it's so artfully done in terms of setting and maintaining a mood (not to mention Ballard's subsequent reputation). But ultimately I think it fails by being a little too smugly ambiguous. It's summer solstice time and a small town in the vague country is visited by both a traveling fair and a circus. The circus arrives after the fair and must set up on "waste ground." It's a small circus, with some half-dozen cages occupied by animals we never see. It arrives late in the day, sets up, and people are told it is leaving in the morning. Most of the townspeople go to the fair and only a few visit the circus. Not many even know it's there. Those who do can't quite make out the animals, and occasionally a maddeningly familiar smell is in the air. At the end of the story our first-person narrator has had "the recognition" of what that smell is and what that circus is all about. It might be gauche to say, but I wish Ballard had spelled it out a little more, so I could have a recognition too. Still, there's a wonderfully mordant air about this one. Ballard really captures the fascinating sense of so many carnival scenes (and/or elements such as clowns) as sick, wrong, mysteriously depraved. Really this story is hardly science fiction at all but feels more like something on the order of a fairy tale. For what it's worth, Ursula K. Le Guin and to a lesser extent Ray Bradbury were also good at pulling this off. Checking in with the internet, I found a plurality agreed with me the story is slightly underdone. Others had ridiculously easy answers ("the smell is humanity," whatever that means). Still others pointed out details that seem significant. At least one of the cages, for example, locks from the inside. This could well be a story that improves with careful rereading, or discussion. And that's fine—even makes the case for Ballard as transcending his home genre, which is a case often made for him. I haven't read much of him beyond this and the novel Crash but I'm starting to think I need to read a little more. Still, even taking it just in terms of what's in the story, it seems designed to annoy. The narrator is so pleased with himself that he calls the story "The Recognition" and then declines to name whatever it is he recognized. Sure, right, I get it, "the smell is humanity"—but does that mean like outhouses, or body odor, or cooking food, or plain old spiritual malaise? Or what? And what is inside those blasted cages? This is arguably a strange and unfortunate case of not telling and not showing, but somehow it's still a pretty good story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

"The Altar of the Dead" (1895)

Henry James addresses an interesting life condition in this story—the deaths of friends. There is a typical James plot to go along with that, with the usual odd and suggestive ambiguities. But I wish he'd stayed with the friends a little more, and the sense of loss. James was in his early 50s when he wrote it, and our hero, George Stransom, is 55. His most painful loss was a fiancée, but there are many other friends as well, including one, Acton Hague, who offended Stransom so deeply he never forgave him. One day, mulling these matters the way James characters will, Stransom wanders into an unfamiliar church, has a strange inspiration, and wins permission from the church to dedicate one of their candlelit alcoves to his friends—all except Hague. Soon enough a woman is involved, who often sits in silence with Stransom at his altar of the dead. Years go by. Slowly Stransom and the woman warm to one another and finally speak and find personal connections. By an amazing coincidence (what a small town London can be), it turns out the woman not only knew Hague but he was important to her. She beseeches Stransom to add a candle for Hague, but Stransom can't do it. The never-specified wrong was too great. In the end, the story and Stransom bend toward forgiveness, but it's left fraught and ambiguous. Because the sin is never specified the situation becomes overly abstract. Sin is sin and forgiveness is supposed to be absolute, but really there's more nuance to it. It's hard to feel too much for or against Stransom without knowing the reason for his break with Hague. But I did like the sense of watching and even standing vigil as friends (and family, not discussed here) inevitably begin to die. The story has some access to the experience of living on with friends even after they have died. For example, a friend of mine died in June 2001, and I often wonder how he would have reacted to 9/11 and all its aftermath. But that kind of thing is not for James. The closest he gets is the loss of Stransom's fiancée, which is so much more intense than a pal they're barely even comparable. But it's a nice idea, and the scenes at the altar of the dead are notably beautiful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 36 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

[Original 2010 Movie of the Year ballot here.]

USA / UK / Canada / Japan, 112 minutes
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Michael Bacall, Edgar Wright, Bryan Lee O'Malley
Photography: Bill Pope
Music: Sex Bob-Omb, Beck, Nigel Godrich, Broken Social Scene, etc.
Editors: Jonathan Amos, Paul Machliss
Cast: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Alison Pill, Kieran Culkin, Aubrey Plaza, Jason Schwartzman, Brandon Routh, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Anna Kendrick, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons

Set in hipster precincts of wintertime Toronto, based on a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a movie that obviously feels free to dress up any old way it likes, cycling through its modes like wardrobe changes: romantic comedy, teen sex farce, indie rock band bio, quest or journey tale, superhero comic book fare, and, perhaps most oddly of all, video game set piece. Director and cowriter Edgar Wright is the kind of filmmaker in love with making movies for the pure fun of it and it's almost always infectious. His shameless genre slumming, which reminds me of Joe Dante in its pure glee, has already produced a number of great pictures and maybe one or two interesting failures: Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, Baby Driver, The World's End. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World may be the best thing he's done yet (I know I might get some argument on that) but Wright is still young and not close yet to being finished, whatever it is exactly he's doing.

A frequent complaint about Scott Pilgrim is Michael Cera in the lead role—with Jesse Eisenberg, Cera was the quintessential millennial pincushion target of 2010. Born on TV's Arrested Development, Cera established himself in the movies in such exercises as Superbad and Juno. He's starting to age out now, basically always playing the same guy, a gentle, daffy, ineffectual mumbling model of sensitive male youth—Woody Allen as undriven by sexual compulsion. Or, put it this way, Cera may be possessed of toxic masculinity (it shows up in Pilgrim a couple of times unexpectedly) but he has the sense to feel actual remorse about it. Scott Pilgrim's task here is to dump his rebound "fake high-school girlfriend," Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), in pursuit of dream girl Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead)—and defeat Flowers's seven evil exes in battle. Presumably the reason Pilgrim is up for it at all is because he has spent his life playing video games.

"Land of the Great Horses" (1967)

R.A. Lafferty's story has an intriguing though maybe not particularly dangerous concept, a sort of explanation for the Romani (aka "Gypsy") diaspora from northern India some 1,500 years ago. In the story, aliens from outer space carved out a large region like a section of skin and took it away for study, leaving behind a mirage as a placeholder. This is where the story most feels like it's busy making up shit. Presumably, you can't live on a mirage, and so the worldwide scattering started. Eventually, the Romani territory is returned, the mirage deactivated, and somehow all Romani know it's time to go home again. Then the aliens go steal Los Angeles, which no one notices is missing. It's hard to see a point here. The strange life of Gypsies? The great power of aliens? Um—Los Angeles is vacuous? The latter is a live possibility. Lafferty is at great pains on the alien operation, emphasizing its shallowness: "the sliver taken [was] about ten thousand square miles ... and no more than a mile thick at its greatest." In a way, it's similar to what Kurt Vonnegut does in The Sirens of Titan, explaining monumental aspects of human history such as the Great Wall of China as absurd incidentals in larger alien projects. I dig the freeform riffing but wish it added up to something. In this collection, it should make me worried about something. Aliens chopping out giant pancakes of Earth terrain is only weird. Lafferty's afterword doesn't help much: "We are all Romanies, as in the parable here, and we have a built-in homing to and remembrance of a woollier and more excellent place, a reality that masquerades as a mirage. Whether the most excellent place is here or heretofore or hereafter, I don't know, or whether it will be our immediate world when it is sufficiently animated; but there is an intuition about it which sometimes passes through the whole community." Fair enough, but I still don't know where the Gypsy stuff comes from. Lafferty was strictly an American Midwest guy, born in Iowa, living most of his life in Oklahoma. Maybe something was singing in his blood, except you don't catch much of that here. Odd duck of a story.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

Director Barry Jenkins's first feature since Moonlight is based on a 1974 novel by James Baldwin. It's a period piece, set in '70s New York, but one of the saddest sides of it is that the story wouldn't have to be much different today. Fonny Hunt (Stephan James) is 22 and an aspiring sculptor and Tish Rivers (KiKi Layne) is his 19-year-old girlfriend. They have known each other all their lives. Just as Fonny and Tish are about to take a loft downtown—they've had to look long and hard to find a landlord who will rent to African Americans—Fonny gets caught in a trumped-up charge of rape. In the wrong place at the wrong time, plus there's a cop out to get him. The physical evidence (not to mention the resolute character evidence of Tish's family, who believe in him) makes him an unlikely suspect. But the racist corruption runs deep in this rigged system and the de facto burden of proof is on Fonny. He's going away to prison unless something extraordinary can happen and this is not a movie where extraordinary things like that happen. What is powerful and special here is how recognizable Fonny and Tish are as a young couple in love setting out to make their way. They are young and naïve enough to see a bright future, though it is quickly derailed. Jenkins's ease with setting up and executing tender scenes is as remarkable as ever. And If Beale Street Could Talk touches on many different aspects of African American life. When Tish announces she is pregnant, for example, Fonny's mother, a devout blood-of-Jesus Christian, reacts very badly, in an intense scene that unfolds in a handful of unexpected directions—great ensemble work in a tight physical space. In another scene, a friend Fonny hasn't seen in some time, Daniel (Brian Tyree Henry), tells Fonny over beers that he recently got out of jail, and the way he talks about the experience is haunting. Of course there are confrontations with racist cops too, who of course conform to stereotypes that are not hard to believe—we know much better now than in 1974 how these things go. Jenkins often plays to the extremes for effect—the love of Fonny and Tish can be preposterously sweet and the relentless specter of racism so bitterly galling. Nicholas Britell's score often reminded me of Chinatown—moody bruised Ellington-like swells inevitably signaling political corruption somehow. These extremes are part of what makes If Beale Street Could Talk work so well. But mostly it's the affecting way the characters are shown standing up to love even in the greatest distress. It's a good one.

"The Hanging Stranger" (1953)

Philip K. Dick can be made to fit too easily into the caricature of muzzy-headed acid casualty and/or mental illness case, which is why it's helpful to read a story like this one. He was young when he wrote it, not quite 25, but the images are powerful, mature, and hard to shake. It's written by someone who obviously knows what he is doing. After spending the day working on redoing the foundation of his house, Ed Loyce, an unpretentious model of the postwar working man, emerges to find a strange man lynched, his body swinging from a lamppost. It's a gruesome sight, but what's even more unusual is that none of his neighbors or friends finds anything strange about it. Loyce is wild to do something like call the police but no one seems to understand his reaction. Eventually someone does call the police—on Loyce—and the story deepens into stark paranoia. The power of this story is achieved in various ways. For example, the police do come and take Loyce away. We see Loyce chatting with them in the car. Suddenly he leaps from it in motion and runs away as fast as he can. Only then do we learn that Loyce knew immediately that the policemen were not who or what they said. It's a small enough town that Loyce can figure this out quickly. But we learn nothing of his suspicions until he has run away. It's much more chilling, confusing, and scary to be kept two steps behind the main character and primary point of view this way, a skillful choice by Dick. The story's plot goes much like a Twilight Zone episode—only a single isolated man can see the shift to insanity that no one else can—though it was never produced for film or TV until an episode of Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams in 2017 (haven't seen it). Not everything works. The insect nature of the invaders is a mixed bag as is their portal way to us, and generally it can't quite shake the stink of the Cold War '50s. But calling up the simmering racism of mainstream America—the hanged man is not black, but it's a lynching—does much to overcome these problems and make the story feel fresh and relevant and if anything even more powerful all these 66 years later. The story has the same kind of conformity issues that show up in the original 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and may have been the most terrifying element of it when it was first published. For me, it's the image of the hanged man swinging from the lamppost in the wind, made infinitely worse by the indifference of everyone. Whatever route you take to get there, this story is unsettling.

The Philip K. Dick Reader

"From the Government Printing Office" (1967)

Kris Neville is another obscure part-time science fiction writer (full-time scientist) who crossed paths with Harlan Ellison as Ellison was putting together the Dangerous Visions collection. In this story the terrible dystopia revolves around education and career choices for individuals in the future. They evidently don't have much say in it, as formalized testing in the first four years of life determines a person's course. Then some kind of horrible medical procedure locks it in. Our 3-year-old hero in this story has been slated to be a scientist, which his parents support and push him toward. His parents are awful to him, calling him a filthy shit. Their abuse is the worst thing going on here, as far as I can see. The story attempts the point of view of the child, but I was skeptical, partly because I have no memories myself of being that age. Personalities are still being worked out at that point—that's pretty much scientific (child developmental) understanding, now and when the story was written. In a way I envy the kid. I've spent a lifetime second- and third-guessing my career choices. For that matter, a scientist sounds like a better life than others. If this future society has given up, say, slavery in exchange for assigned middle-class careers, it sounds closer to utopia overall to me. The title is perhaps the main giveaway that this story is little more than received antigovernment farting. Because of the age I lived in, I'm still quicker to believe evil corporate conspiracies over government versions, but either way it's all a little tired. Junior may well be losing some precious spark of human individualism, but I'm not sure the first years of life are the most effective or convenient time to snuff it out. Ultimately, I did think there was a good sense of the child's fear here—the point of view is actually pulled off. But partly as a result, the fears and concerns feel more childish. As a kid, he doesn't have that much credibility for his plight. Babies are well known for crying all the time about everything. You're frequently trying to calm them down over things like a loud noise. Maybe his terrors are well-founded and it's cruel to force him to be something he isn't. On the other hand, isn't the testing intended to look for what he is? At the same time, his parents are monsters. I'm not sure how it's all supposed to add up.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

The Secret Agent (1907)

For some time now I've been poking at the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 Best 20th-Century Novels (see the Novels tab). I have a number of complaints about it, as I have about practically every institutionalized attempt at such honorifics, from the Baseball Hall of Fame to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the Oscars, Grammys, and Miss America pageant. It's a flawed list, in short. I have felt free to go picking and choosing—I will never read Finnegans Wake (#77), I can say with some certainty. As further tonic, I paired it with Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits, another pack of 100 novels, with approximately 30% overlap. McCaffery's list leans more toward currents of the second half of the century. I will probably read even fewer of them in the long run, as it includes not only Finnegans Wake (at #10) but also Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans (at #7) and other such phonebook-sized blasts of dense non-narrative language. I like the cheek of McCaffery to make his #1 not Ulysses but Pale Fire—inspired choice. Then he makes Ulysses his #2. I guess some things you just can't get away from (not that I'm carping about something I don't know—I'm looking forward to finally getting to it). Gravity's Rainbow is #3, and so forth.

I've made my peace with the Modern Library list, even for all its flaws, as I keep finding books I love on it. I've already been aware of most of them, but not all, and some of the finds have been very fine indeed. But Joseph Conrad happens to be an example of one of the list's greatest flaws, so a ritual airing of grievances must now briefly proceed. My main problem with the list may be expressed as a bad case of Usual-Suspectivitis, combined with a kind of willful blindness toward such writers as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. To make matters worse, the one problem exacerbates the other. The list is the result of polling the 10 members of the Modern Library editorial board at the time (names I know include A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, William Styron, and Gore Vidal), which is a fairly small and doubtless insular sample in the first place. It would be interesting to see the titles that fell 101-200, because then we might get a sense of how the list would change if the simple limitation of one title per author were imposed. Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it—I know it's arbitrary and precludes a certain perspective of how relatively dominating single figures might be—but I'm really not in favor of the clustered-up redundancies in the final list either.

La Jetee (1962)

France, 28 minutes
Director / writer: Chris Marker
Photography: Jean Chiabaut, Chris Marker
Music: Trevor Duncan
Editor: Jean Ravel
Cast: Helene Chatelain, Davos Hanich, Jacques Ledoux, James Kirk

I prefer the version of La Jetee with the voiceover by James Kirk in English because, between the images and words and the high concept of the narrative, it feels easier to absorb by watching and listening rather than by reading and trying to watch. La Jetee is not much longer than an episode of The Twilight Zone, with which it has many affinities, including the black and white photography, the science fiction themes, and something like a twist ending (in this case the twist serves more to give the whole thing a densely constructed poetic integrity rather than to shock, but it's still a surprise). In other ways it's even more primitive than earliest cinema, let alone '60s commercial TV, composed visually entirely of still photos and a few title cards. Very occasionally, the camera pans across a photo, or tracks or zooms in or out of one, and many transitions are dissolves rather than pure cuts. But it's basically a slide show, perhaps the best edited one you will ever see. The approach may not be surprising, given that director and writer Chris Marker like Stanley Kubrick started his career as a professional photographer, but it's still bold, even now. I saw La Jetee first in the mid-'90s, after Terry Gilliam's "inspired by" remake Twelve Monkeys came out, which is four times as long and not even a quarter as effective. I liked La Jetee for its eccentric aesthetic but it took a while for the full implications of the story to register. It's almost too short—perhaps behind Gilliam's impulse to blow it up big and make it operatic. And the conflation of early-'60s art cinema with science fiction is disorienting and distracting as ever. See also Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, which more strays across the line into ridiculous. Time travel in La Jetee appears to be accomplished by some kind of hospital procedure involving injections, which is different from most SF explanations to say the least. It took DVD extras to finally hep me to how deeply inspired the picture is by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. La Jetee has narrative points and visual shots, such as the one at the top of this review, specifically mimicking Hitchcock's strangest and perhaps best movie. The time traveler (Davos Hanich) and the woman he falls for because something feels so familiar about her (Helene Chatelain) have a similar kind of troubling, circling, stalking relationship as Scottie Ferguson and Madeleine Elster (and/or Judy Barton) in Vertigo, though note that no extreme makeovers occur in La Jetee. Once you see that connection a lot of the scenes start to fall in place. At its most fundamental, La Jetee has all the beats of a romance, which is one of its secrets for getting away with the science fiction (not just time travel but also World War III and virtual human extinction). As odd as it is, there is something almost perfect about this small picture. And it's probably not overstating the case to say it's beloved—I've seen it at the top of all-time lists of films more than once, with its fierce partisans ready to fight. I don't think I'm quite there but there's a lot to admire in La Jetee. Rod Serling never came close.

"Encounter With a Hick" (1967)

Once again, in Jonathan Brand's story for the Dangerous Visions collection, we see "dangerous" equated to a challenge to religious convention. And once again I am thinking about the "Is God Dead?" cover of Time magazine. Brand is among the most obscure writers in the collection. I can't find much about him on the internet. It sounds like he was some kind of graduate student who wandered into the right science fiction convention at the right time, with this story in hand. They liked it. They really liked it. And it's not bad—lively, fun, and sharply written. It's on the short side and does have the familiar problem of explaining concept while advancing plot. As it comes into focus, it involves terraforming corporations in a far future. A brochure describes the six-day process—you can guess where that's headed. At least it leaves the literary sledgehammer alone for resting on the seventh day. It's a bit unnerving, or "dangerous" (and certainly impressive), for the way it seamlessly yokes a fundamental creation myth with the glad-handing air of corporate sales. Someone in the story—the hick in the title, actually—hears it as we would, through our cultural filter, and of course finds it blasphemous. It's not really necessary, in fact it's overkill, but the encounter is practically the only thing that happens in the story. Everything else is concept. Actually, that's not true. There's another story about the scions of two terraforming companies in competition arranging a marriage of their children to each other, with hopes of future corporate consolidation. That's a pretty good story in itself, but leaves no good way to get the brochure in, which is more or less the point and dangerous part of the story. I find myself slipping dangerously myself now toward second-guessing workshop mode, tempted to kick around alternative ways to make the story work. Maybe the marrying children have a slight Romeo and Juliet thing, and reject their parents in terms of the terraforming work for some reason? Well, it's way too late now for anything like that, of course. But the story, not bad as it is, seems like it could be better somehow. Translating the first book of Genesis into jargon-riddled marketing copy (slightly dated more than 50 years on, but recognizable PR jive) is so inspired—that alone is worth a gold star. It just needs a better place to live.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

Free Solo (2018)

Here's a documentary that kind of does it the old-fashioned way, focusing on a monumental human achievement and doing its best to stay close to the subject but out of the way too. The human achievement is the first free solo climb of Yosemite's El Capitan half-dome wall, by Alex Honnold in 2017—"free solo" meaning without ropes or other climbing equipment, a trend in recent decades among a select few rock climbers, most of them prematurely dead. The camera work is so good in this picture that it's often very hard to look at it. What they're doing is dangerous. Like most great athletes Honnold can be a bit of a robot in interviews—someone here refers to him affectionately at one point as "Mr. Spock"—but he's an interesting character study, introspective, articulate in his way, obviously deeply grounded, and honest to a fault. Filmmakers Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi humanize him by including his girlfriend Sanni McCandless and making their relationship part of what he is doing. It's a good impulse and makes it an even better story. But the best part is just seeing it done—how someone goes about walking up to the base of El Capitan and climbing up the vertical face to the top with just hands and feet. It was first done—with ropes—only in 1958, and since then a number of routes have been charted. Honnold spends a lot of time studying the most intricate parts of the climb, meticulously working out the specific movements required for certain passages, and practicing them. Sometimes he slips. We see a lot of people slipping, saved by ropes. There are other setbacks, including injuries. The movie is continually pushing the danger element. But it is fair and saves the best for last. Honnold makes a first attempt in the fall of 2016, which he calls off early. The following June, he finds a day that is very good for him and makes the climb in less than four hours. It is spectacular, and so hard to watch. The cameras are not intrusive—the operators are friends of Honnold by this time and couldn't bear to distract him (one can't even bear to watch during the most treacherous parts). The cameras are not intrusive but they are omnipresent, offering tight and sharp close-ups of fingertips and shoe edges on bare rock as he executes the most difficult portions. Just really awesome stuff, and often hard to watch. It's an achievement in documentary filmmaking too. This is one for a big screen if you can.

The Sheltering Sky (1949)

Let's start with Wikipedia, because it's so pithy: "a 1949 novel of post-colonial alienation and existential despair." That's really true, and not just because it involves Arabs from North Africa, like The Stranger by Albert Camus. Paul Bowles, however, is less inclined to illustrate an intellectual precept and more inclined to attempt to steal a part of your soul. The actual main character in The Sheltering Sky—we don't realize it's her until the person we thought it was (or I thought it was because I'm a man) suddenly takes ill and dies halfway along—is named Kit. I kept imagining her as Joan Didion—fragile, slightly hypochondriac, filled with elaborate dread, yet a very tough survivor. She and her husband Port are drifting about the region, transfixed by the Sahara Desert and the cultures clinging to it. Port has some kind of fetish for native prostitutes, which is kept vague. He stays out late. Kit resents it but she's also a loner by nature and appreciates the freedom that the distance in this obviously open relationship affords her. Assorted strange Europeans and other travelers flock about them and fly off again. No one is to be trusted exactly, but loyalty can be purchased. The Arabs are unfathomable. They are described in surface detail, and often their intentions can be gleaned, but they are opaque and mysterious. Bowles made them even more so by obfuscating Arabic words to the point where an internet search on them turns up commentary on his poor understanding of the language. The kindle dictionary and translator were useless as often as not. Still, the sense is often there from the context. This is an extremely dark journey, one that is shocking as events unfold. I love it for this strange power. In many ways The Sheltering Sky veers close to horror. By the way, for what it's worth, a 1998 note by Bowles confirms that all the action here takes place in Algeria, and not Morocco, with which Bowles is more generally associated. He also emphasizes that Kit was not based on his wife Jane, also a story writer of some reputation. The foreignness in The Sheltering Sky is intense and palpable. Bowles's writing is elegant, finicky, and precise (if often wrong on the Arabic). This novel is great and unforgettable.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Happy Breed" (1967)

John T. Sladek's story is full of well-used science fiction tropes: the society dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, the utopia become dystopia, robot overlords, and the paradox that rational ideals are more often delusions (Dangerous Visions editor Harlan Ellison writes in his introduction to the story that it's the second he included without knowing anything about the writer, the other being James Cross's "The Doll-House"). In an unimaginably distant future, the 1980s, computers have evolved into artificial intelligence overseers, with absolute power to care for people. The priority is happiness and safety. The result, perhaps not surprisingly, is emotional retardation and helplessness. Your door locks if you attempt to leave home barefoot. Sedation and other measures are applied if you attempt to drink unpasteurized milk. I admit these are not things I am likely to do or even want to do, but you see the point. Eventually the human population is infantilized and pacified, and Earth resembles a kind of nursery. The tragedy here, such as it is, is that the people seem ignorant of their own intellectual regressions. Mostly they don't care, and anyone who does can expect to encounter behavior modification drills from the machines. By the end of the story the omniscient third-person narrator refers to them with contempt, using baby names. A Dave has become a Davie. There are some parallels here with Brave New World—on the surface, it's hard to make out the horrors exactly. On the other hand, the whole robot overlord "killing them with kindness" thing, taken to one of its furthest extremes for example in the Matrix movies, clearly goes too far, so I'll give the story that. But there is also a familiar idea here that something is problematic or wrong with bliss and utopia. It's possible that's true, but my position is that I'd rather learn it the hard way. Please give me bliss and utopia and I will work on the problems arising therefrom. As for the story, it's a pretty good piece, laying out the situation with a lot of clarity, and deftly teasing out the larger concepts and themes as it goes.

Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison

New Year memo

Happy new year to all. Thanks as always for being part of this brave experiment. I start these annual messages with the intention to say something uniquely insightful, or at least witty, but soon retire behind small talk about the weather, scheduling plans for the coming year, and an odd list of movies. This year will be no different. It's been too rainy and wet so far and looks like it's going to be that kind of winter. I might blog a little less in the coming year—sometimes I feel my stamina flagging—but the general approach will remain Sundays for books, Mondays for newer movies, Thursdays for stories, Fridays for older movies, and Saturdays for albums. All best to everyone in the coming year!

Here are 20 great movies I saw in 2018:

1. I, Tonya (2017)
2. Lean on Pete (2017)
3. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)
4. Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)
5. First Reformed (2017)
6. Faces Places (2017)
7. Eighth Grade (2018)
8. RBG (2018)
9. Venom (2018)
10. Why We Fight (1942-1944)
11. Courage of Lassie (1946)
12. The Last House on the Left (2009)
13. It Follows (2014)
14. Morning for the Osone Family (1946)
15. This Happy Breed (1944)
16. Johnny in the Clouds (The Way to the Stars) (1945)
17. A Hen in the Wind (1948)
18. From This Day Forward (1946)
19. To Each His Own (1946)
20. The Corn Is Green (1945)