I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

     "This is a very neurotic person, the ship realized.  I am having an awful lot of trouble finding happy memories.  There is too much fear in him and too much guilt.  He has buried it all, and yet it is still there, worrying like a dog worries a rag.  Where can I go in his memories to find him solace?  I must come up with ten years of memories, or his mind will be lost."

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon is a collection of short stories written by Philip K. Dick, the most effective being one that was originally entitled Frozen Journey and published in Playboy Magazine in 1980.  It is a tough and emotional roller coaster ride that, well, is about life itself; and time, and the perception of time, and of how the human brain is constructed to love and concentrate on the things that are good for it by it's nature, but then sometimes things happen, and even though you may mean well, well; things disintegrate, relationships change, people move in and out of your life; it's precarious enough...now add a long space trip and some faulty suspended animation and a well meaning computer to the equation....mmmmmmm.......It's a Modernmoonman favorite....a timeless classic....... there's a great review by "A Customer"  on Amazon that, for the sheer excellence and Duende of it, ah, I just gotta steal it (!):

"Philip K. Dick was one of science fiction's short story "master craftsmen", though he was better known for his novels. His short stories are reminiscent of Frederic Brown's, but usually Dick's were better paced and fuller. Published almost exclusively in SF magazines, most of his best stories were printed in Del Ray's "The Best of Philip K. Dick" collection. A good handful of these are some of the authentic gems of short SF. Towering above all the others (including the others collected in this volume), however, is "Frozen Journey", published in this volume with the less effective title "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon". This was one of the first Dick stories to see "mainstream" print, as it first appeared in "Playboy", usually the domain of writers like Roth and Mailer. This short story brings together so many Dick themes in one place, it's like a pure distillation of his explorations; the unclear nature of reality, the difficulty of gender relations, the mistrust of technology, and the tendency to mental instability. But there is also something new here, a powerfully moving evocation of the effect of one man's guilt and sorrow on his consciousness and his resulting isolation from other people. In this story, Dick is able to wed his well-noted ontological ambiguity seamlessly with his compassion for humanity's predicament, something only partially achieved by his best novels (though some come close, notably "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"). All of the elements of the story serve to demonstrate the central tragedy, bring us in to the heart of the protagonist, make us see through his troubled eyes (even at the reality he has become blind to), and move us to reflect on the profound metaphor Dick has created: life as a frozen journey through space, alone with the shadows in our minds and hearts, broken by the sorrows of lost love, corrupted conscience, impending decay and death. Not since the "half-life" concept in "Ubik" has Dick created such a potent and bleak image. To my mind this story represents a special kind of apex for Dick, his deepest expression of tragedy. It deserves to stand among the best such in English in short story form."

Philip K. Dick Interview/ The Matrix

Modernmoonman Interview du Jour:

Minority Report

The Minority Report is a short story written by Philip K. Dick and published in Fantastic Universe Magazine in 1956:

The story is about 30 pages long; it's a classic tale about a man named John Anderson, who is the head of a police agency in the future called "Precrime."  It's an agency designed to prevent murders before they happen with the "help" of three mutant "precogs;" strange humans with special mental powers that enable them to see the future.  The "precogs" are kept in a tank of chemical solution against their will, they are tools and are used by the government to control the population.  Published just 6 short years after Orwell's 1984, this story is sleek and streamlined, with Dick's prose at it's leanest...seriously, omit a paragraph, and the whole thing falls apart, he's so economical here, that he accomplishes a hell of a lot in 30 pages.
 
It's a story where the government establishes a corrupt system that can instantly declare a citizen a threat to national security, and a potential murderer, and hence, the accused individual forfeits his rights to freedom and all of it's privileges.  They can be imprisoned and held indefinitely.  Violators are placed in a detention camp.  It's about how society is affected when a too powerful military wants control.

Pause.

Stephen Spielberg made this short story into a major Hollywood film in 2002.   I saw it in the theater then, and thought it was really good...I just watched it again, and was blown away by it; This Film Has Grown In Stature!   Republicans may complain about too much government, but never want to cut the military's budget; the change in surveillance laws during "The Bush Years" has been mirrored by this film; it's about control, control, control, and the rich have got their channels in the very bedrooms of the poor, now don't they.  (Thanks, Leonard.)  Spielberg added some pretty cool shit to the original story, the eye scans, the character development of Anderson as a man who lost a child and his family, and the ADS, the advertisements that hound him wherever he goes are freaking great!   :  The film is actually better than the Philip K. Dick original, and Tom Cruise, he's pretty great in this film:

This is solid gold, If you haven't seen it, please do, and even if you have, it's worth a re-look!

The Windup Girl

The Windup Girl was written by Paolo Bacigalupi and published in 2009.  It won a Hugo and a Nebula award and is the most current offering reviewed on Modernmoonman so far.  It's taking me forever to slog through this book; seriously, I hit a wall here: this book (and Snow Crash) brought this blog to a halt.  It's written well, but there's no tension, no motivation to turn pages, no characters to care about, and it's hard to care about genetically engineered fruit, no matter how beautifully it's described... I dunno; still, there is some nice writing:

     "Ngaw.
     Piles of them.  The little red fruits with their strange green hairs sit before him, mocking him from within a photo of a farang bargaining for food with some long ago Thai farmer.  All around them, brightly colored, petroleum-burning taxis blur past, but just to their side, a huge pyramidal pile of ngaw stares out of the photo, taunting.
     Anderson has spent enough time poring over ancient pictures that they seldom affect him.  He can usually ignore the foolish confidence of the past--the waste, the arrogance, the absurd wealth--but this one irritates him:  the fat flesh hanging off the farang, the astonishing abundance of calories that are so obviously secondary to the color and attractiveness of a market that has thirty varieties of fruit: mangosteens, pineapples, coconuts, certainly...but there are no oranges, now.  None of these...these...dragon fruits, none of these pomelos, none of these yellow things...lemons.  None of them.  So many of them are simply gone.
     But the people in the photo don't know it.  These dead men and women have no idea that they stand in front of the treasure of the ages, that they inhabit the Eden of the Grahamite Bible where pure souls go to live at the right hand of God.  Where all the flavors of the world reside under the careful attentions of Noah and Saint Francis, and where no one starves.
     Anderson scans the caption.  The fat, self-contained fools have no idea of the genetic gold mine they stand beside.  The book doesn't even identify the ngaw.  It's just another example of nature's fecunfity, taken entirely for granted because they enjoy so damn much of it.
     Anderson briefly wishes that he could drag the fat farang and ancient Thai farmer out of the photograph and into hid present, so that he could express his rage at them directly, before tossing them off his balcony the way they undoubtedly tossed aside fruit that was even the slightest bit bruised."

There's also a "Windup Girl," a robot who is all too human and she gets humiliated a lot and is a combo of Asimov's Caves of Steel "Olivaw" Robot and Spielberg's A.I. pleasure robot....

I'm slogging through this sad and depressing novel, and as of pg. 67, I still can't wait to get back to the Van Vogt, but maybe I'll change my mind...(to be continued...)  I really wish this book would make me want to read it.  Farang this.

Splice

Saw Splice this week.  This sci-fi movie started out great, then quickly went banannas.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, but it's not boring, that's for sure:

Martian Chronicles

     "The ship came down from space.  It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space.  It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm."
 

The Martian Chronicles was written by Ray Bradbury and published in 1950.   Some would say this book is pure fantasy, but I say look: it's got rockets, it's got Mars: it's sci-fi, and he can really write:

     "Suppose all of these houses aren't real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black.  Suppose these houses are really some other shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions.  What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?"
     "And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all.  But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time."

Ray Bradbury is such a good writer; Martian Chronicles reminds me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, another classic that dwells upon the idea of the same city viewed from many different perspectives=many different cities.   I think these books are very similar in a way, but I digress...Ray Bradbury is a national treasure and  has inspired a Tina Fey-esque video, that is kinda funny and kinda obscene, but he said he liked it anyway.  Ray Bradbury is a good sport; and Racheldoesstuff is a riot that is worth watching at least once; here's the video: (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

Olbermann leaves MSNBC/ NETWORK

****** Modernmoonman has learned that the world is a poorer place because Keith Olbermann just got fired from his job at MSNBC.********************************************************

He must have spoken truth to power one too many times, for he was given 10 minutes to say goodbye to his audience.  It was a complete surprise.  He mentioned the 1976 prophetic movie Network as he left, so, good-bye Keith, you will be missed, you were a class act, and here's a scene from the movie Network: