Only in recent months, with the news of the Russian hacks and trolls, have Americans begun to wonder whether the platforms they previously assumed to have facilitated free inquiry and communication are being used to manipulate them. The fact that Google, Facebook, and Twitter were successfully hijacked by Russian trolls and bots (fake accounts disguised as genuine users) to distribute disinformation intended to affect the US presidential election has finally raised questions in the public mind about whether these companies might compromise national security.
Books
Bang for the Buck
If reason played any part in the American love affair with guns, things would have been different a long time ago and we would not have so many mass shootings like the one that took the lives of seventeen high school students in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Almost everywhere else in the world, if you proposed that virtually any adult not convicted of a felony should be allowed to carry a loaded pistol—openly or concealed—into a bar, a restaurant, or classroom, people would send you off for a psychiatric examination. Yet many states allow this, and in Iowa, a loaded firearm can be carried in public by someone who’s completely blind. Suggest, in response to the latest mass shooting, that still more of us should be armed, and people in most other countries would ask you what you’re smoking. Yet this is the NRA’s answer to the massacres in Orlando, Las Vegas, Newtown, and elsewhere, and after the Parkland killing spree, President Trump suggested arming teachers.
A Hanging Matter
To the Editors: Your beautiful Jasper Johns cover—the painting “Summer” from his “Seasons” series of 1985–86—is part of the retrospective currently at the Broad museum in Los Angeles that Jason Farago writes about. But there’s a problem with the way that series is displayed.
Not Over Yet
To the Editors: Normally I would hesitate to correct a journalist of Charles Glass’s stature, but as a reporter who’s covered the war in Syria for several years now I have to point out some inaccuracies in his “Syria’s New Normal.”
Unforced Errors
To the Editors: The article by Paul Reitter, “The Business of Learning,” contained an egregious error. It reads that “hundreds of admissions offers [were] rescinded by UC Irvine on shaky grounds.” As of August 2 Howard Gillman, chancellor of UC Irvine, announced that the decision to withdraw admissions was “unacceptable”…
A Very Good Meal
To the Editors: In reply to Peter Green, Hayden Pelliccia writes that the “carcasses at Troy would have been picked over by carrion birds…not by birds of prey equipped to rend the living.” This is wildly wrong.
The Gone World
With his first book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow, appearing only in 2014, Tom Sweterlitsch announced himself as one of those “new voices” that periodically serve to reinvigorate science fiction. Sweterlitsch debut was, like many books that offer a revitalization of SF’s sense of possibility, a hybrid tale — part New Weird, part thriller, part counterfactual — whose composite novelty picked up flavors of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, Jeff VanderMeer and the Strugatsky brothers, filtered through Sweterlitsch ‘s unique sensibility. His sophomore outing is an alternately terrifying and mind-blowing trip that examines whether human nature is fit to withstand the howling cosmological madness that underlies our falsely placid and fragile mundanity.
The Gone World opens with a prologue set in the year 2199, striking in its stomach-wrenching eeriness and initially half unfathomable, in an irresistibly teasing fashion. A young woman, Shannon Moss, agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, is on a training mission, via time travel, to the ineffably alien day of the Terminus, a barely comprehensible celestial Armageddon event. But the mission goes kerflooey, and she almost dies — and in the vision of time Sweterlitsch offers, that “maybe” means “actually,” in some multiversal iteration. But in the tale we follow, a grievously injured Moss is rescued and brought back to her home time and base, the year 1997, known as “terra firma.” She loses a leg to gangrene and is thereafter reliant on a computerized prosthesis — which does not slow down her heroic, even superheroic exertions one whit. Stubborn, dedicated, unrelenting and self-sacrificing, Moss battles doubts, fears, and uncertainty to power through crises with her mantra, “Someone else would quit.” Onstage every second of the narrative, Shannon will arouse in the reader every possible emotion, from sympathy to aversion, awe to incredulity, love to fear.
The reader soon learns that Shannon’s 1997 is counterfactual to ours, due to one large discovery. The invention of the Brandt-Lomonaco Quantum-Foam Macro-Field Generator has permitted both unlimited faster-than-light space travel and time travel into the future only. A secret government program, Deep Waters, with departments Deep Space and Deep Time, has been long established. From an orbital station, expeditions go out to far galaxies and far eras.
The Gone World‘s vision of time travel is interestingly problematic. There in no singular assured future but merely a sheaf of possible timelines, “Inadmissible Future Trajectories.” Travel, say, from 1997 to 2015 on one voyage, and you encounter one set of historical events. Travel a second journey, get a different result. Moreover, the presence of a person from 1997, terra firma, has the effect of destabilizing the probable timeline, collapsing it via a kind of Heisenberg observer process so that it evaporates when the traveler departs. In effect, one is visiting not so much the land of tomorrow as a country of ghosts whom one has inescapably doomed.
Ghosts, echoes, multivalent, even contradictory outcomes, overlapping identities — these are the bugaboos and motifs that will bedevil Shannon and her companions. But there is one element consistent among their various shadowy destinations: The Terminus cuts across all futures and, in fact, seems somehow to be inching closer and closer to 1997.
Shannon’s introduction to this crisis is an indirect result of her part in an NCIS murder investigation alongside her fellow investigators, and she begins to apply her deft intelligence to solving the case. She runs down all her leads as far as possible and hits a dead end. There’s only one thing to do: jump to the future and see if the case was ever already solved.
Sweterlitsch’s version of time travel is unique in that the time traveler experiences duration during the trip. Shannon must live for three months in her cloistered spacecraft before reaching 2015 and also subsist thus on the return leg. Once in that far-off year she remains undercover and lives there for six months, falling in love, ferreting out clues, and digging through records. She soon discovers that the first murders — and others yet to come, from her perspective — involve the crew of a vanished interstellar Deep Space ship, the Libra. Much to her horror, Shannon learns that the Libra was responsible for the Terminus and has in effect doomed all humanity. Now it becomes a race to forestall the actions of the Libra‘s crew, who are intent on killing anyone in their way. Shannon’s desperate quest involves more trips to the future and incredible assaults on her life and mental health. The climax is a pull-out-all-the-stops Götterdämmerung.
Sweterlitsch’s story manages to expertly fold and blend a half dozen different streams of science fiction into its telling while never losing its organic shape. First comes the counterfactual aspect. Shannon’s 1997 is palpably different from ours, the outré machinations of the Deep Waters people forming the uncanny substrate for the more familiar cultural touchstones. (Black-humorously and ironically, Shannon is a big fan of The X-Files.) Second come the Phildickian aspects of foreknowledge and predestination. The NCIS is even resonantly equipped to issue “pre-crime warrants.” Along these same lines, William Gibson’s depiction of interlocked and intercommunicating continua seen in The Peripheral is closest to what Sweterlitsch delivers. Third come the intricate time-travel paradoxes so beloved by writers from Heinlein (“ ’—All You Zombies—’ ”) on down to Wesley Chu (Time Salvager). (One associational image that kept coming up for me, pulpish as it is, was that of the DC Comics bad guy the Time Trapper, who once erected an “Iron Curtain” across the future.) Fourth come the thriller-crime novel frissons. Shannon leaps off the page as a diligent and trained investigator, and the crimes she seeks to solve are limned with gruesome fidelity.
But it is the fifth strain of fantastika that is predominant in the book, and that aspect is Cosmic, or Existential, Horror. Like Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, like Jeff VanderMeer and the Strugatsky brothers and Stanislaw Lem, Sweterlitsch is intent on invoking the sense of a universe that is often malign and incomprehensible, and he triumphs at every stage. Consider this account by one of the Libra crew, remembering their encounter with the planet Esperance:
You could actually feel the change in the gravity they produced together — a lightness, a lift, being pulled upward by the moons like a thread in your chest had been tugged. And the oceans responded, receding from the shore, following the moons’ pull, a waning tide. The beach elongated as the ocean retreated, and the ocean floor was covered in lichen, a luminescent carpet that grew in the furrows leading deeper into the ocean. There were glassy rocks in twisting shapes like lava as it curls through water, and farther out still we saw crystals that dazzled like diamonds. The water receded far enough to expose the body of one of the leviathans, the ringing bodies we had seen from above — or rather the crystal shape of the leviathan. It was at a distance but seemed more like a shape than a body, the same shapes the plants had grown into — or maybe it was once a body but was crystal now. I don’t know how to . . . I don’t have the words . . . A crystal shape, like interlocking diamonds or pyramids inside of pyramids. A fractal.
I maintain that Sweterlitsch can channel the Weird Tales crowd with the best of his peers. And his prose is ultimately much more subtle, evocative and poetic than theirs.
We saw the future of mankind dissolve. We saw men running to the seas to drown and saw men hanging in the air. We saw men, their mouths filled with silver. Remarque transitioned into other futures, but the white light shone above every sky, fouling every possibility.
I thought of something like wildfire scorching the skies of infinite Earths. I thought of the White Hole shining like a dead eye.
And he compounds the visual estrangements with deep ontological conundrums as well. One can compare his book to such postmodern SF landmarks as Barry Malzberg’s Galaxies, with its indeterminate and ever-shifting ship of fools, and James Tiptree’s “A Momentary Taste of Being,” with its revelation of humanity’s insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
This novel manages to be both cinematically vivid yet intellectually replete, at once immediately and grippingly hook-filled yet with time-delayed philosophical bombs. To bring it to the screen would require the combined talents of Lynch, del Toro, and Gondry. But it took only one exceptional man, Thomas Sweterlitsch, to render it on the page.
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Disarming the Weapons of Mass Distraction
Attention is a limited resource: to pay attention to one thing requires us to withdraw it from others. But in today’s pervasive digital culture, technologies are transforming our patterns of attention, pursuing “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” as Tim Wu puts it. Digital technology has thus provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. Given current political anxieties about social mobility and inequality, how do we foster this most crucial and basic skill: sustaining attention?
The B&N Podcast: Brad Meltzer
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
When you read a Brad Meltzer novel, the author tells us, he not looking to give readers a passive experience. The author of twelve bestselling thrillers is playing a game with you, and he’s going to give you just enough clues to make sure you know he’s playing fair. But make no mistake: he’s playing to win. Brad Meltzer joins us on this episode to talk about Houdini, history, misdirection, and the hero who inspired his latest, The Escape Artist — and, yes, his award-winning work in the world of comics, too.
Who is Nola Brown? Nola is a mystery. Nola is trouble. And Nola is supposed to be dead.
Her body was found on a plane that mysteriously fell from the sky as it left a secret military base in the Alaskan wilderness. Her commanding officer verifies she’s dead. The US government confirms it. But Jim “Zig” Zigarowski has just found out the truth: Nola is still alive. And on the run.
Zig works at Dover Air Force Base, helping put to rest the bodies of those who die on top-secret missions. Nola was a childhood friend of Zig’s daughter and someone who once saved his daughter’s life. So when Zig realizes Nola is still alive, he’s determined to find her. Yet as Zig digs into Nola’s past, he learns that trouble follows Nola everywhere she goes.
Nola is the US Army’s artist-in-residence-a painter and trained soldier who rushes into battle, making art from war’s aftermath and sharing observations about today’s wars that would otherwise go overlooked. On her last mission, Nola saw something nobody was supposed to see, earning her an enemy unlike any other, one who will do whatever it takes to keep Nola quiet.
Together, Nola and Zig will either reveal a sleight of hand being played at the highest levels of power or die trying to uncover the US Army’s most mysterious secret-a centuries-old conspiracy that traces back through history to the greatest escape artist of all: Harry Houdini.
Discover more fiction by Brad Meltzer.
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Author photo of Brad Meltzer (c) TK.
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Chairman Xi, Chinese Idol
I was skeptical at first when political analysts suggested that Xi might try to rule past a second term. One reason was that the Chinese political class has fought hard to institutionalize transfers of power. I wondered if Xi would want to risk alienating so many of his peers by taking such a step. Another risk is that this puts Xi in the crosshairs if his policies fail. And while it’s easy to imagine Xi steamrolling opponents until his health fails him, there are small signs of unease among people in China.
Sig Nordal 