The Smithsonian Institution, now the world’s largest museum complex, was founded 170 years ago this week — August 10, 1846, when President James Polk signed the necessary legislation. This was seventeen years after the British scientist James Smithson had died, leaving his fortune to his nephew. Smithson’s will stipulated that if his nephew died without children, then the fortune should go to America, “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men.”

The nephew died childless in 1836, but it took the American government a full decade to debate whether they could accept the windfall money and what they might do with it. Government officials wondered if the eccentric Smithson, who had never set foot in America, “labored under some degree of mental aberration.” In the Senate debate, some argued that the United States was no place “to raise foreigners to immortality,” else “every Whippersnapper vagabond that had been traducing our country might think proper to have his name distinguished in the same way.” But in the end, John Quincy Adams successfully argued that, as Smithson’s name was the only string attached, the foundation of the Smithsonian was “an event in which I see the finger of Providence, compassing great results by incomprehensible means.”

Affectionately known as “the Nation’s Attic,” the museum contains some 137 million items (this does not include the 19 million photographs and tens of millions of books, films, etc.). For The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects, Richard Kurin and his colleagues at the Institution have selected items that “could act as signposts for larger ideas, achievements, and issues that have defined us.” Each item is explored as a reflection of the nation and of the museum itself, in that each is placed within a living, evolving display case: “Each of these objects has stories to tell not only about its place in history but also about how it came to the Smithsonian, and how it has been studied, displayed, and understood.”

Kurin says that some objects are included because unique (Neil Armstrong’s space suit), some because ubiquitous (a Plains buffalo). In the ubiquitous and exceptional category is a section of the Woolworth’s lunch counter where, in 1960, the Greensboro Four began their historic sit-in for meal service, one of the catalytic events of the Civil Rights Movement. Lonnie Bunch, one of the Smithsonian curators who went to Greensboro in 1993 to salvage and ship the Woolworth’s counter, is now director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opens in September. In his Introduction to Begin with the Past, the museum’s own account of its origins and its mission, Bunch describes his desire for “a building that said there has always been a dark presence in America that’s always been overlooked . . . an homage that so much of African-American and American history is hidden in plain sight.”

Early on it was decided that the Greensboro lunch counter and other such exhibits spread throughout the various Smithsonian museums would not move to the NMAAHC. Instead, the new building sought new material and either found or was given thousands of items from across the nation — a Historical Black Lives Matter initiative that inspired many to contribute. A descendant of a slave who escaped with Harriet Tubman inherited her hymnbook and other personal belongings: “For eight months I kept them with me in my bedroom, but they belong in this museum.”

Among the NMAAHC treasures is an extensive collection of photographs, ranging from pre−Civil War daguerreotypes to work by Gordon Parks, which they have begun to publish in their Double Exposure series. The first volume, Through the African American Lens, ranges across the entire NMAAHC collection, from a portrait of Sojourner Truth to a candid photo of Barack and Michelle Obama. Rhea Combs, curator of photography at the NMAAHC, says that the Double Exposure series title alludes to a comment in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk:

One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

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I won’t say that the day of the Scandinavian crime novel has passed, nor that of the Scottish, but I will say that it is high noon for the Irish novel of crime and corruption. Set in both the South and the North, from postwar to the present, the books share a contemporary mood that owes everything to the various species of villainy and betrayal that brought down the island’s economy and put paid to the social and moral hegemony of the Catholic Church. A fine dyspepsia pervades the novels of Stuart Neville, Gene Kerrigan, Arlene Hunt, Benjamin Black, and Adrian McKinty — to mention only a few. Now here is Lisa McInerney, whose debut novel, The Glorious Heresies, won this year’s Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize). McInerney was previously best known as “The Sweary Lady” for her blog, called, if you will pardon me for saying so, “The Arse End of Ireland.” (Certain admirable remains of its ten-year existence may be found at http://ift.tt/2aP9paR).

The Glorious Heresies is set in Cork city of recent years, its plot launched by the accidental killing of a domestic intruder. Sixty-year-old Maureen Phelan has smashed in the man’s head with a souvenir stone stamped with the image of the Virgin and Child. Maureen, as it happens, is no stranger to the crushing power of the Church. Unmarried, she bore her son, crime boss Jimmy Phelan, forty years ago, escaping by only a decade being confined to one of the penal “homes” for unwed mothers, the now notorious Magdalene Laundries. Still, there was punishment enough, in Maureen’s having been forced to give up the infant Jimmy to be raised by her poisonously pious parents. Now he stands before her — the criminal product of a stifling upbringing — called in by his mother to deal with this corpse that is leaking blood and brains over her kitchen floor. Ruthless and hardened though he is, Jimmy is nonplussed: ” ‘Clean up after your mother offs someone’ was a much more significant task than he’s ever have thought to factor in.”

He hands the job over to one Tony Cusack, dipsomaniac father of six, whose wife was killed when she tore off in the family car in a drunken rage. Tony, alas, knows the dead man and lets his name slip. That would not be so bad, as the victim was a drug addict about whom the authorities could care less — except in this instance it leads to trouble in a highly circumlocutory way. Other characters become implicated in one way or another. There is Tony’s son, Ryan, a nice fifteen-year-old schoolboy when we meet him — who also deals drugs. He is in love with his girlfriend and schoolmate, Karine but has caught the fancy of the woman next door, who is some decades his senior. She plies him with booze and seduces him — which is to say, given his age, rapes him — much to Ryan’s continuing mental and spiritual distress. Also at large is a cocaine-addicted prostitute, Georgie Fitzsimons, the girlfriend of the dead man. She keeps trying to get herself straightened out, but, as with most of the people in this book, it’s a losing game.

The plot, loose in the joints, meanders about for five years: People do this, people do that; lives intersect here and there and then head off in different directions — sometimes fatally. It’s all pretty haphazard. On the other hand, the individual scenes are excellently done and convey the disappointed, dead-end feeling that pervaded the land in the last several years. McInerney portrays the lot of the losers with excruciating verisimilitude, most especially that of poor, no-hoper Georgie — and often with humor, too, as in the case of the alcoholic waster Tony Cusack. Back from court-mandated rehabilitation (after smashing his neighbor’s window), we find him forced to look for a job as a condition of his release. He is assisted by one of his computer-savvy children to look at job postings: “Between them they figured out which posts were worth procuring rejection letters from. Sometimes he got an email back that thanked him for his efforts but denied the existence of suitable positions. When he was so blessed he showed them to his probation officer. The job hunt was going well.”

And then there is Maureen Phelan, the pivot around which the plot rambles. It is she who expresses the anger that so many Irish — women in particular — feel toward the Church, the revelation of its crimes and cover-ups made all the more enraging in the light of its history of sanctimonious and punitive despotism. Railing against the cruel treatment of pregnant young women such as she was, Maureen gives an old priest a piece of her mind: “The most natural thing in the world is giving birth; you built your whole religion around it. And yet you poured pitch on girls like me and sold us into slavery and took our humanity from us.” The novel ends on a note of redemption that, if not entirely credible, offers at least kindness in a world of souls starved for it.

 

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Joe McGinniss Jr. writes like an ’80s Brat Pack writer, which in 2016 is about as peculiar as writing like Henry James or specializing in Petrarchan sonnets. Except that in the public imagination, McGinniss’s choice is about ten times worse. In their signature novels, Bright Lights, Big City and Less than Zero, Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis claimed the portion of the zeitgeist that’s always reserved for youthful disillusionment. But by decade’s end — and especially after Ellis’s over-the-top Grand Guignol capitalist satire, American Psycho — literary culture was exhausted with twentysomething novelists and their novels lacquered in brand names and bad habits. Spy magazine, which routinely skewered the cohort’s foibles, zapped the genre with a CliffsNotes parody in 1989, arguing that, ultimately, there was no there there. (“What effect did Ellis hope to achieve by italicizing certain passages in the book? Do you care?”)

But McGinniss still believes, and there is much in his second novel, Carousel Court, to suggest his belief isn’t misplaced. Those Carveresque lines can evoke characters’ willful shallowness, not the writer’s; brand names can deliver a brisker critique of capitalism than more social-realist, Franzen-y methods; fantasias of drugs and violence can still do useful work to expose our fears and moral corrosion. More important, McGinniss recognizes that the genre is well suited to the post−Great Recession era, where middle-aged, middle-class financial dreams and foibles can seem all the more poignantly misguided.

That’s the case for the housing development of the book’s title, located forty miles east of L.A. and a Boulevard of Broken Dreams for its lead couple, Phoebe and Nick. They’re raising their toddler son, Jackson, in a place where many neighboring houses are vacant and where the rest burn their furniture and keep guns handy. “More stainless steel. More square footage. More landscaping,” McGinniss writes of the original dream. And it all turned out to be less.

Nick’s filmmaking work brought the family west from Boston, but with the industry in a slump, he’s relegated to cleaning out foreclosed houses to stay in the black. Phoebe has jumped from financial services to pharmaceutical sales, a despairing gig that largely involves her sending flirty selfies to doctors to complete sales for a drug company that drags its heels on gas reimbursement. She befogs herself with Klonopin to cope, even though the resulting mental haze led to a car accident that left Jackson with a head injury. Nick blithely sexts with a coworker’s girlfriend, bemoans his fate (“How many Emerson College media production majors does it take to remove a rotting dog from a bedroom closet?”), hatches a scheme to secretly rent out vacant houses, and resents his wife.

All of which is to say that Nick and Phoebe are as unlikable as they are desperate, and bad parents besides — if they’re not squabbling in front of their child, they’re fobbing him off on a nanny they can barely afford or letting him get precariously close to household dangers like the drained backyard pool. (Every gated-community amenity, from the pool to the climbing wall, is a threat.) The precarious mood is exacerbated once Phoebe reconnects with her old financial services mentor, who dangles promises of a new job and a better life if only she’ll abandon her husband.

Yet the tension in Carousel Court isn’t driven by the fate of Nick and Phoebe’s marriage — or even Nick’s well-being once his squatlord racket wobbles. The two are too deliberately flat and emotionless for that. (Phoebe is a study in anonymity: “Hers is a face people steal when they create fake online profiles.”) The tension is in that disconnection — how much of our lives do we need to live via text message and selfie, in anonymous hotels, in half-abandoned housing communities, before we lose our sense of self?

McGinniss is gifted at cultivating a feeling of emotional distance in response to that question. Something menacing is always happening just a tick away in the novel: A neighbor camps outside with a rifle; a passing car has a bumper sticker reading “Ask Me About My AK-47”; cicadas creep under unkept lawns; low-flying police helicopters constantly speed by like wind through wheatfields in a Willa Cather novel. Those gestures are all ripped clean from the Brat Pack playbook, where ennui, disillusionment, and narcissism were our default positions in a hypermediated and overmedicated society. But those ’80s kids had money, college educations, jobs, and talent to squander; as universal statements went, they felt niche. In Carousel Court, the themes gain more gravitas when there’s a couple with an underwater house and a kid to raise, and community of bad-news acquaintances who also got dealt a bad hand.

McGinniss is the son of the late journalist Joe McGinniss, who played a central role in the Brat Pack era, mentoring Donna Tartt and Ellis at Bennington College. (Ellis dedicated Less than Zero to him.) In turn, Ellis sherpa’d McGinniss fils through his debut novel, 2008’s The Delivery Man, a Zero-ishly austere study of Las Vegas youth. McGinniss grew up enchanted with this territory, and he has it pretty much all to himself now: Ellis is busier with screenplays, and not even McInerney writes like McInerney anymore. McGinniss will need to do more if he wants to build a movement out of it, though. Phoebe and Nick have about three too many hollow squabbles followed by hollow reconciliations, and he could stand to be funnier; Carousel Court‘s dark mood leaves little room for dark satire. But his dry, crisp, sun-glared vision also suggests a path for fiction that is at once existential and operatic, slick but with a moral imperative, too. “I have blood on my iPhone,” Nick texts after a moment when things go violently south. In Nick’s case it’s literally true; for the rest of us, McGinniss offers a metaphor that isn’t hard to decipher.

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“The kidnapping of Patricia Hearst,” writes Jeffrey Toobin,  “is very much a story of America in the 1970s.”  But in his gripping new book — part strange-but-true crime epic, part cultural history — the veteran legal reporter presents a case with unsettling overtones for an unsettled nation almost fifty years older.  American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst traces the intersection of a strangely assorted group of radicals who called themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army and the 19-year-old granddaughter of the legendary newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst.

Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials — including hours of FBI interviews with suspects —  Toobin painstakingly and compellingly reconstructs the events that unspooled when the Berkeley-based SLA first abducted Patty Hearst from the driveway of her home, from their demands of food donations to the poor in lieu of ransom, to their announcement that Patty had renounced her former life to join their armed cause, to an infamous San Francisco bank heist, and the apocalyptic gunfight between the LAPD and SLA.  Having missed out on the confrontation, Hearst and two others fled and found sanctuary among fellow radicals.  When the FBI finally tracked Hearst down in 1975 — more than a year and a half after her abduction —   her conversion looked to have been total, aiding in bomb-making plots and in another bank robbery that caused a teller’s death.

Hearst’s subsequent trial featured yet another shocking twist — the assertion by the defense that their client’s transformation had been wholly a matter of psychological manipulation on the part of her captors, and that her life as a fugitive and participation in SLA crimes was the result of a program of brainwashing.  The resulting controversy over Patty Hearst’s intent and culpability have only added to the sense of enigma around her case, and American Heiress offers it as a perhaps unique case study in the question of how far any one of us is capable of changing ourselves to match a shift in the reality around us.

Toobin is not only a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and legal affairs correspondent on CNN, but the author of multiple bestsellers including The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court, and The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson. Just before the release of American Heiress, Jeffrey Toobin spoke with me by phone about his research, what brought him to the Hearst case, and how the strange atmosphere of early 70s California resonates with an anxious U.S.A. in 2016. –Bill Tipper

The Barnes & Noble Review: What brought you to this? Was there a specific moment when you thought, “Patty Hearst; I want to write about that story.”

Jeffrey Toobin:   It’s actually a very straightforward story. I wrote a piece for the New Yorker a couple of years ago about this jail in Baltimore that had been taken over by a gang called the Black Guerrilla Family, and the history of the Black Guerrilla Family, which started, it turns out, in the California prisons in the 1970s, which were a big hotbed of political activism. I got interested in that story, and I went to lunch with my editor at Doubleday, Bill Thomas, and I was telling him about that, and he said, “But what about Patty Hearst?” Because the SLA also came out of the California prisons.

BNR:   You write that prison activist George Jackson, the author of Blood In My Eye is something of a link between those movements…

JT: He was actually the founder of the Black Guerrilla Family. So my immediate reaction when Bill suggested that was, “Oh, there must be a million books about Patty Hearst.” So he said, “Well, go check it out.” And I found that, in fact, nothing has been written about Patty Hearst for decades, that there were a bunch of books that happened in the immediate aftermath, and then nothing. So I thought, “Wow, there really might be something here,” and I started looking into it, and I realized that the story was much richer and more evocative than I had expected.

BNR:   As I began reading it became clear how little I knew  or remembered– and I suspect this is true of most people today – about the SLA. The name, the Symbionese Liberation Army, itself almost resisted sort of interpretation. They couldn’t have picked a name that was more of a kind of cipher for the idea of vague radicalism.

JT:   In fact, as I write in the book, the name is a good reflection of the absurdity of the whole SLA enterprise. There is no such word as “symbionese.” They didn’t liberate anyone or anything. You can’t really call a dozen people an army. But the name has, you know, entered into American history because of this bizarre case.

BNR:   So to exactly that point, as you present who they were, forming around this escaped convict, Donald DeFreeze, who became known as Cinque, and the kind of set of radicalized younger people some of whom had been working in the prison education aspect of the left wing movement in that time, getting further radicalized and getting attuned to the idea that the Revolution will have to be led by black Americans, by people who have been imprisoned. But what you present is this group that’s a chaotic amalgam of radical fervor, this half-baked Bonnie and Clyde outlaw fantasy, and cult-like dysfunction. Was it just chance that this is the group that became the most notorious of all those leftist radicals of that period?

JT: I don’t know if I would call it chance. They committed the only political kidnapping in American history, before or since. So it’s not surprising that their name is remembered. That is a sinister, important accomplishment. What they had no way of knowing is that their target was in a restless moment in her life that found her receptive to joining with these lunatics.

That’s what turns this case into an American epic, the transformation, disputed though it is, of Patty Hearst.

BNR:   What’s fascinating about the story, in your careful retelling here, is that she goes from victim to protagonist — she really does become the figure who makes this such a notorious and lasting kind of event in our history. She takes over the story.

JT: The lunatic politics of the SLA are subsidiary to the broader and really important questions of: What is free will? How do people decide what they do? The question of Hearst’s conduct is really the mystery at the heart of this case.

BNR:   You’re very careful as you walk through and lay out all of the evidence in the quest for the solution to that mystery. The books is structured so that you both tell the story from the various viewpoints that illuminate it and eventually lead the reader to the court case, giving us the evidence that the juries in the various cases had, and also all the evidence that they didn’t have. You’re very careful not to draw a final conclusion yourself—or to explicitly say that you do—about the truth or falsity of Patty Hearst’s claims in her trial. But you do leave us saying that there’s bigger game here, which is the question of what does it mean that she could change from one person to another person, another person almost directly opposed to that earlier personality, and then change back.

JT:   That’s right. I do think that I am pretty clear that I don’t believe that Patricia was coerced into committing this extraordinary list of crimes that she did over almost a year-and-a-half. I think that she did join the SLA. She did voluntarily rob banks and set up bombs and shoot up a street in Los Angeles. I don’t think she staged her own kidnapping. But I certainly believe that she was a voluntary participant in a lot of crimes.

BNR:   As you point out, that looks very clear in retrospect. It is interesting, then, as you do, to revisit that case for the commutation of her sentence that was made, and, interestingly and fascinatingly to me, driven forward or given extra strength by the tragedy of the People’s Temple.

JT:   Right. One of the things that interested me the most in the book is that the overall atmosphere of madness in the United States in the mid-1970s, especially in the Bay Area, and the People’s Temple, was a classic demonstration of that

BNR:   You also note that her kidnapping happened right on the heels of a string of the Zebra murders in San Francisco.

JT:   The Zebra murders, which I knew nothing about before researching the book. Can you imagine if a group of Black Muslims decided just to murder random white people on the street, which is what happened, how that would be responded to today? It’s just unbelievable how crazy it was. The People’s Temple forms a sort of bookend to the whole story. Jim Jones tries to get in on the action.

BNR: He wanted his group to distribute the food for the poor, which the Hearsts bought as an SLA ransom demand.

JT:   Right. And then later, the fact that he led all of his followers into suicide persuades a lot of people that brainwashing is real, and Patricia should have her sentence commuted, which it was.

BNR:   Is this the last gasp of a kind of 1960s-based idea that there will be a real left-wing revolution, or is it more of a zombie afterlife of those movements?

JT:   I think it’s a combination of the alienation of the post-’60s counterculture, which, you know, after the end of the draft, saw most middle-class kids fade away, and only the hardcore remained. And then you had the example around the world of other revolutionary movements, like the Tupamaros in Uruguay, like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, which the SLA very clearly modeled themselves on.

BNR:   I want to talk about that famous photograph of her that the SLA stages right when she is announcing her joining. You call it “the Mona Lisa of the 1970s,” What does that image come to represent for people now? In other words, have we overlaid too much glamour on top of this?

JT:   What gives the book, I think, contemporary resonance is that, you know, terrorism is nothing new in the United States. We are very scared of ISIS today. But in fact, there was more terrorism in the ’70s. That photograph also I think shows that outlaw glamour is a concept that’s been around for a long time.

BNR:   Let me ask you a little bit about what it was like to put the book together. There’s an element of historical reconstruction that you had to do, that must have been quite different than writing about, say, the O.J. case.

JT:   This is the first book I’ve written that is really at the border between journalism and history. I covered the O.J. case in real time.

BNR:   So you had your own experiences and interviews and notes to build that book from.

JT: Yeah. I was a kid during the Hearst story, and essentially had no first-hand knowledge of it. So it was completely reconstructed from the sources that were available to me. Fortunately, I found that not only were there a lot of documentary sources that had never been tapped, but also that there were a lot of people still alive who wanted to talk.

BNR:   Who for you were the most revelatory people that you spoke with?

JT:   I don’t really want to sort of rank my sources. I was able to speak to people in all parts of the story. FBI agents. Prosecutors. Defense lawyers. SLA members. Crime victims. The crazy bystanders. People who had weird tangential connections to the case, like Jane Pauley and Lance Ito. It was an eclectic, fun experience.

BNR:   What aspect of the story yielded the most surprise for you, where you might have had one expectation about it that turned out to be different?

JT:   I think, to me, the biggest revelation was Patty’s lost year, which is the period after the shootout in May of ’74 until her arrest in September of 1975, when the incompetent FBI had no idea where she was—and she was participating in this extraordinary terrorist offensive that went on for some time, until she was caught. I think that period to me was the most extraordinary and interesting.

BNR:   It’s a period in which she’s both doing that, and she’s falling in love in a very real-seeming or real way with one of her fellow terrorists, basically.

JT:   Yes. She did it twice, first with Willie Wolfe, then with Steve Solia.

BNR:   You remark that there’s a throughline in all of her relationships, that these are figures who provide sort of protection and authority she winds up…

JT:   Yes. Steve Weed, her teacher, her kidnapper, her protector, her bodyguard.

BNR:   Who she winds up married to for the rest of his life.

JT:   Right.

BNR:   You’ve remarked on the fact that the Hearst case confronts us with the history of homegrown American terrorism, at a moment when our sense of the word is strongly associated with the idea of foreign terrorists. During the time this was all happening, the sense of real panic in the culture surrounding these events, the sense that lots of the rules of engagement between the political class and ordinary people, between the media and the people who they report on and serve, are all in tremendous and terrifying flux. Some of that seems unhappily familiar right now. As you were working on this, did you see this speaking at all to our particular moment, not just with regard to something like terrorism, but with regard to the mood of the country?

JT:   I think it’s a combination. I do think that if you believe, as many people do, that events are shimmering out of control, it may be helpful to know that things have been worse in the past. But I don’t want to pretend that I wrote this book as sort of like a guide to contemporary life. It’s mostly just an extraordinary story from the past that has one woman at the mysterious heart of it.

Photo of Patricia Hearst courtesy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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“I have always known what it means to be a character in someone else’s story,” Nadja Spiegelman writes in her memoir, I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This. Her famous father, the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, immortalized her in some of his own work. Her mother, Françoise Mouly, is the art director for The New Yorker and a publisher/editorial director at TOON Books. Nadja says that one of her mother’s strengths is “a certain shaping of reality and a certain force of narrative and of will that also felt like a rewriting of things that I had lived through.” Both of her parents, then, formed stories out of her own life.

Nadja started interviewing Françoise for her creative writing senior thesis at Yale, when she was twenty-one. She was scared about life after college and frustrated that her mother “couldn’t possibly understand.” In her daughter’s eyes, Françoise was a sophisticated, successful, worldly woman who always knew what she wanted. But that, of course, wasn’t true.

“It was really humbling to realize how little I knew of my mother,” Nadja says. “You think that your mother belongs to you, and on some level I think that most people tend to believe that your mother’s life starts with your life, and there’s not that much to know.”

Nadja started recording their conversations in French. As she talked to her mother about her childhood in France, she wanted to know about her maternal grandmother, too — a woman with a “strong force of will . . . an indomitable woman.” So she traveled to France to spend time with Josée, her grandmother, and learned that daughters searching for their mother’s love is “a pattern that keeps repeating itself through generations.”

I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This is a memoir, but what makes it stand out from so many other books in the genre is the process of uncovering family history, examined on the page. Nadja recorded hundreds of hours of informal conversations with her mother and grandmother. She had them recount the same anecdotes three separate times just to see how the versions differed. And it wasn’t until much later on that she realized she needed to add her own story to the narrative. In doing so, Nadja uncovers a strong, hidden strand linking multiple generations of women. Times may change, but the desire to control one’s own personal history does not. There’s a surreal moment as Nadja is on the plane to Paris to interview Josée. She thinks of her mother first arriving in New York City as an eighteen-year-old. “Perhaps a ghost of her plane crossed mine,” she writes. “Perhaps, for just an instant, we overlapped in the silence over the black water.”

I chatted with Nadja recently over Skype, as she smoked a cigarette in her Paris apartment. (She splits her time between Paris and New York.) The memoir emerged from her own questions about the conflicting versions of family stories. Who decides what the truth is? Who owns a story? It’s these questions that Nadja wanted to explore. “Within families there often isn’t any kind of historical record, but there often is a real battle for who has the truth.”

In writing her own account, Nadja stakes a claim on her own version. “There’s power in being the narrator, and there’s power in being the one who controls the story,” Nadja says. “And everything is constantly shifting. Our relationships to the people that we love are constantly writing over themselves in real time, so that when you look back on your journal entries or on your diary entries or even on old emails, I think most people are often surprised by how they used to feel — because in the intervening years, things have either gotten better or gotten worse in a relationship with a certain person, and you allow the present state to color the entirety of the past. And that’s powerful. Being able to change reality in those ways, being able to constantly change the past so that it fits the present and the present makes sense, that’s a real kind of magic.”

It’s no surprise that she thinks of the process as a kind of conjuring. When she was a child, her father would tell her stories about a magical anything shop. If she found a penny on the ground, she could redeem it at a shop that would appear or disappear in alleyways. She started to tell these same stories to her brother. Then she wrote about a magic pencil — anything you drew with it could come to life. “I really wanted there to be magic in the world, and telling stories seemed like a way to create that and have that,” Nadja says.

The enchantment, however, ran uncomfortably into the distinctly real details that emerged from her mother’s life. “I ended up feeling a lot of it in my own body, strangely,” she says. When her mother told her about attempting to slit her own wrists at one point, for instance, Nadja’s own wrists ached as she typed the words.

The difficulty in telling — and hearing — those sometimes painful stories gave Nadja her title, a phrase that captures the paradoxical demands at the heart of her memoir. “In all the conversations I had with my mother and my grandmother, after they had read the book, about what it would mean for me to be publishing such intimate stories about their lives, often they both said to me: ‘You were supposed to protect us from this.’ You were supposed to protect us from this being weird. You were supposed to protect us from this being uncomfortable . . . there’s a certain moment when things flip, and when you do need to be protecting your parents from certain things, or when they stop needing to protect you from certain things.”

The twenty-nine-year-old author spent seven years working on the memoir. “I really feel like I grew up through writing this book,” Nadja says, ” . . . and through sort of taking my place among [my mother and grandmother] by becoming the narrator of their stories.”

The role reversal, she says, allows those family stories to become building blocks rather than boundary markers. “We’re creating a real sense of narrative and of cause and effect throughout our lives that in a way life mirrors art. Stories exist with the kind of logic they have because it’s a logic that we need in our own lives in order to make sense of them,” Nadja says.

“Pure memories are like dinosaur bones . . . discrete fragments from which we compose the image of the dinosaur,” Nadja writes in I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This. “They are only flashes: the examining room table in the nurse’s office, the soft hand against the forehead. But memories we tell as stories come alive. Tendons join the bones, muscles and fat and skin fill them out. And when we look again, our memories are whole, breathing creatures that roam our past.”

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In the Beginning, there were the Ediacarans: “brainless, jelly-quivering do-nothings.” They lived in the nasty bacterial mats and toxic sediment that carpeted the littoral waters off Mistaken Point, Canada, 565 billion years ago, in the wake of the worldwide glaciation event known as Snowball Earth. Now, Ediacarans may well have looked like “a bag of mud,” but journalist Robert Moor is being a little rough with the “do-nothing” gibe, for these creatures cut the oldest known trails on earth. And when you are writing a deep history of trails on earth, as is Moor in his good, rangy, and spry On Trails, Ediacarans are the Beginning.

Your own first steps are high up in life’s celebratory moments. What do we do with this newfound locomotion? We blaze a path to the cookie jar. We cut a trail from one point, mother’s lap, to another point, the land of cookie, whence we may move on to the watering hole (that would be the toilet bowl) or return to the point of origin, mother’s lap. That, for Moor, is the crux: trails “persist because they connect one node of desire to another: a lean-to to a freshwater spring, a house to a well, a village to a grove. Because they both express and fulfill the collective desire, they exist as long as the desire does; once the desire fades, they fade too.” Trails are lines of desire, here muddy — real, sucking glop — and there, metaphorical.

Trails are a “tactful reduction of options,” writes Moor, evolving to serve a need: spiritual, philosophical, directional, often rolled into one. Trails have authors — water, ants (“arguably the world’s greatest trail-makers”), the cow paths that became Boston’s street plan (“Well, there are worse surveyors,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson) — but every creature that comes behind is an editor, adding proof marks to the simple, organic, and iterative trails. Like all communal projects, trails morph with time, like work songs, old jokes, and recipes. Shortcuts are found — “geographic graffiti” — that rebuke a path’s waywardness or subvert the tyranny of a trail’s constraints. Intentions change as well. A path once skirted a mountain’s peak but now seeks out its field of view. Or, as Moor neatly puts it: “A trail sleekens to its end.”

Moor is a boots-on-the-ground empiricist of trails. No armchair explorer, he has hoofed the Appalachian Trail, just for an example, which is serious trail cred. He is a connoisseur of toe fungus, crotch rot, and twisted ankles. He walks alone and with a pleasing selection of oddfellows and fruitcakes. Gratifyingly, he has also tramped the literature, from professional, contemporary trail-makers to great walker/writers of the past. William Cronin may bemoan that by “imagining that our true home is in the wilderness we forgive ourselves the homes we actually inhabit.” Yet how often do we get a chance to touch the untamed landscape, the truly wild? You know that Moor has experienced something like a trail’s mystic transport when he tenders, without trepidation, one of Henry David Thoreau’s juiciest transcendences, experienced when he was caught in a lightning storm on the flank of Mount Katahdin: “This was the Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandseled globe . . . It was Matter, vast, terrific . . . rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!” Contact, and goosebumps.

Moor doesn’t moon about as he seeks the meaning — the soul — of trails. His is a serious endeavor. Occasionally his writing will become painfully dry to appropriate science in making a point, sometimes quoting others (“life is ‘a self-perpetuating chemical reaction’ or ‘a self-assembling dynamic system’ “), sometimes constructing his own frames: a trail is “a collective, externalized mnemonic system.” Both true, if spontaneously combusting. Let them go. Better to walk along with Moor as he reads trails, offering “a rich cultural creation and a source of knowledge in themselves,” an archive of botanical, zoological, geographical, ethical, genealogical, cosmological, and esoteric wisdom. There are the trail networks, some human and some nonhuman, that collapse “a complex environment down into neat, easily recognizable lines, like the color-coded lines of a subway system,” this one taking you to medicinal herbs, or a stone circle, or Piccadilly Circus.

In one beautiful episode recounted by Moor, an old Apache cowboy quietly recites to himself a long list of place names. Asked what he is doing, the man replies that he “talked names” all the time. This activity also goes by the word topogeny, the reciting of place names one after another; “storytelling at its most spare, rendering a narrative down to a string of dense linguistic packets, like seeds, which flower in the mind.” Or, as the old cowboy shaved it clean: “I like to. I ride that way in my mind.”

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Jesse Owens made history eighty years ago this week, winning four gold medals in track and field events at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an achievement not matched until Carl Lewis won the same four events (100 m, 200 m, 4×100 m relay, long jump) in Los Angeles in 1984.

History has also credited Owens with a qualified victory in the racial-political arena. The Nazi attempt to appropriate the 1936 Games as a demonstration of Aryan superiority was mathematically successful — Germany won eighty-nine medals, thirty-three more than the second-place United States — but even the German crowds cheered the Owens victories. That he did not use his moment in the spotlight to vigorously denounce Hitler’s racist propaganda has, say some commentators, tarnished his legacy.

Owens did speak out on the topic later, especially at home, where the same racial discrimination that had disadvantaged him during his record-setting college track career continued to shape his life. At the ’36 Olympics he had been approached by Adi Dassler, who wanted him to use his new track shoes. After Owens did so, helping launch the Adidas brand to international success and making him the first male African-American athlete to gain such sponsorship, he hoped that his own fortunes might improve. But as David Goldblatt notes in his just-published The Games: A Global History of the Olympics, no southern newspaper had even carried a photo of Owens or any of the other African-American medalists, and even the assistant coach of the American track team attributed their achievements to being “closer to the primates than the white man.” As Owens bitterly acknowledged decades later, he was eventually reduced to pumping gas and racing against horses to earn a living:

People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.

Usain Bolt, one of the favorites to win next week’s 100 m event, reportedly makes more than $20 million a year, and if he chooses to stay in the Rio Athletes’ Village he will be alongside many other athlete-millionaires. In Players: The Story of Sports and Money, and the Visionaries Who Fought to Create a Revolution, Matthew Futterman explains how, to use his introductory example, the Dallas Cowboys went from paying their star quarterback in 1971 (Roger Staubach) a salary of $25,000 a year to giving their current star quarterback (Tony Romo) a six-year contract worth $108 million:

In the span of a generation, everything about the sports business changed . . . In this world money determines everything from who plays for what teams, to how dynasties are created. It determines how the stars of tomorrow are made. It shapes the star-centric style of play that dominates many of the world’s top sports leagues. It even determines how big a commitment children and their families are expected to give their travel soccer team. This world is about the business of creating champions in societies conditioned to worship them . . .

In his upcoming From Russia with Drugs, David Walsh shows how the business of creating Olympic champions can lead not only to institutionalized corruption but personal tragedy. The title’s allusion to 007-style intrigue is more than casual, given that the full story of what happened in Russia relies heavily on the revelations made by Vitaliy Stepanov, a former member of the country’s anti-doping squad, and by his wife, Yuliya, a former Russian track star. Their decision to “turn Judas” (Vladimir Putin’s term) put their careers, marriage, and even lives at risk.

True amateurism in sports may now be but a sepia memory, but one of its defining moments, says Duncan Hamilton in For the Glory, is Eric Liddell’s decision at the 1924 Olympics not to run his 100 m heat because it was scheduled on a Sunday, violating his religious beliefs. Liddell won gold at 400 m and then chose missionary work over fame:

Overnight Liddell could have become one of the richest of “amateur” sportsmen. But he wouldn’t accept offers to write newspaper columns or make public speeches for cash. He wouldn’t say yes to prestigious teaching sinecures, refusing the benefits of a smart address and a high salary. He wouldn’t endorse products. He wouldn’t be flattered into business or banking either. He made only trivial concessions to his celebrity. He allowed his portrait to be painted. He let a gardener name a gladiolus in his honor at the Royal Horticultural Show. In everything else Liddell followed his conscience, choosing to do what was right because to do anything else, he felt, would sully the gift God had given him to run fast.

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If Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s summer blockbuster The Nest made you mildly relieved not to suffer the infantilizing burden of an inheritance, Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles will make you feel nervous about having money at all. Because, though it also features a bevy of children panting for their payout, the family doesn’t suffer alone. Before they even get a chance, the world economy rejects the American dollar for an invention called the bancor, and the cash that would have saved them is recognized as legal tender only within U.S. borders.

The Mandibles is set in the near future of 2029, where East Flatbush is still gentrifying and a tenured econ professor in D.C. can support a family of four in style. The economy has already been rocked by an earlier recession known, in slang, as “The Stonage” and has recovered: barely. Overqualified offspring Florence works at a homeless shelter because, she determines, there will always be a market for it.

Along for the ride are her son, Willing, and boyfriend, Estaban (a “Lat,” for “Latino,” in the slang of the day); her brother, Jarred, who’s retreated, Luddite-like, into a self-sustaining farm; their parents, Carter and Jayne, a frustrated journalist and bookstore owner, respectively; Nollie, Carter’s rich expatriate, cantankerous novelist sister; and lifestyle coach Avery, whose husband, Lowell’s, expertise on the economy proves less and less accurate. Presiding over them all is The Grand Man, the holder of the family fortune, a former literary agent whose money was earned generations earlier from an ancestor who wisely invested in diesel engines. Though grandpa didn’t earn the money himself, he nonetheless holds it tightly: their inheritance, Carter acidly observes, is “stuck further up the system, like a wad of disposable diapers you’re told never to flush.”

One of the funnier, and more ironic, aspects of The Mandibles is novelist Shriver’s indictment of a literary career in the face of a concrete crisis. In the new economy, books are low, rice is high. The world has devolved: the government demands all personal holdings of gold to prevent a black market from forming, and house-jacking is common. (The entire family winds up crammed into Florence’s house, until they are thrown out by gun-wielding neighbors.)

Only Willing, Florence’s son, is prescient enough to give his dog to a neighbor departing overseas, because he knows the family won’t be able to feed it. Meanwhile, Lowell is scribbling unpublishable treatises on his computer while the family scrounges for meat. Nollie, a onetime literary wonder, hauls around her “papers” even to the tent encampment to which the family is relegated. That she plans to donate them to a university is a source of amusement and consternation. (Spoiler alert: they turn out to be worth something.)

Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers does not need to leap into a far future to create a family where meat is unaffordable. Right before our own recent Stonage, Leni and Jende Jonga and their son, Liomi, have emigrated from Cameroon’s coastal town Limbe, and a lucky break — Jende lands a well-paying job as a chauffeur to a wealthy family — puts citizenship within reach.

Though they all share a bed in a teeny, roach-filled apartment in Harlem, if Leni can make it through school to become a pharmacist while Jende’s lawyer inches him toward permanent residency, Liomi will have schools and opportunities Limbe can never provide. As Jende puts it as he and Leni watch traffic in Columbus Circle, marveling at their new circumstances: “Columbus Circle is the center of Manhattan. Manhattan is the center of New York. New York is the center of America, and America is the center of the world. So we are sitting in the center of the world, right?”

Jende’s boss, Clark Edwards, works at Lehman Brothers and is, as Jende overhears, a particularly earnest form of investment banker, attempting to convince his colleagues that their house of cards is about to crash the economy. His wife is cossetted but unhappy: ” ‘Vince won’t be coming to Aspen,’ Jende overhears her say . . . slowly and sadly, almost in shock, as if reading aloud the headline of a bizarrely tragic news story from the paper.” When Clark asks if Jenge left his job in Limbe because it wasn’t a good job, Jenge laughs. “There is no good bad job in my country . . . any job is a good job in Cameroon, Mr. Edwards.”

It’s telling that, in these two literary excoriations of the power of the dollar, the gritty details of each crash are always overheard, placed in large blocks of text in other characters’ mouths that a reader is happy to skim. In The Mandibles, the info comes from newscasters and family arguments, while in Behold the Dreamers we learn through Clark’s one-sided patter to his colleagues how bankers crashed the market.

But perhaps this is less a function of a writer’s uneven skill than the actual difficulty of writing about the fall of the dollar (future or not). After all, crashes really happen in boardrooms and backrooms and trickle down — or flood — into our daily lives in horrifically vivid form. We only understand after the fact, and we understand very little. In both books, terse comments are far more illustrative. When Willing looks calmly at a world with $40 cabbages, we shiver when he declares, “This is nothing.”

And it’s particularly striking in a world where the dollar is so pinned to race and class that novels tackling its decline find their weakest point at its jointure. Though Shriver writes broadly about a U.S. in which Mexico’s economy booms and keeps U.S. citizens out in droves (Estaban, though he holds only a U.S. passport, takes a perverse pride in the reversal), all the people of color in her novel are still helpmeets and partners, one suffering the indignities of dementia and the need for frequent diaper changes, at that. Behold the Dreamers has the opposite problem: while the Jonga family exists in vivid detail and emotional depth, and Mbue’s writing is fierce and affecting, the Edwards family is taken straight from White Rich Folks Central Casting. (Though it’s somewhat of a relief to find a book in which white, not black, characters are one-dimensional.) If you could mix the Mandibles and the Jongas in one book, you might wind up with the marvelous portrait of America that each is missing.

But both novels deliver a verdict in strikingly similar terms. In each, a family is shaken to its core, and in each, the characters must salvage a life that is bountiful, if different from the one they planned. In both, the dollar is central. But both families, in this new world, have to leave America to live the American Dream.

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The word may be overused these days, but there’s no way around it: we inhabit the age of the curator. Given the vast, bewildering wealth of newly digitized information, representing huge jumbled treasuries of global culture from all eras, the necessity for experts who can employ discernment, knowledge, and taste to select and arrange entertaining and educational samplers, along chosen themes, from the overwhelming hoard has increased immensely. While not precisely creators, curators can in their own way create works of art, just as an interior designer can fashion beautiful domestic compositions out of furniture and fixtures made by others. Moreover, a curator can sometimes categorically and freshly define or limn a subject by assembling the essentials in a way never before imagined or accomplished. A painter’s whole career, for instance, might be transformed or reevaluated as a result of a particular museum or gallery show. At their most effective, curators create — or revise — canon.

But long before the Internet, science fiction readers were deeply familiar with a specific kind of professional literary curator: the anthologist. Out of the welter of published fiction, they would select a table of contents for their books of reprints: books that sought to define an era, a movement, a genre, or a style — or that would simply justify an eye-catching cover. Best-of-the-year compilations would even attempt to discern trends or progress and chart the ascent of new stars and the decline of old ones.

The science fiction anthology boasts a long and glorious history (much of it unfolded in a passionate volume of essays by the recently departed Bud Webster, Anthopology 101), wherein these books have shaped the field as much as they have reflected it. (I omit here all discussion of original anthologies, those featuring brand-new stories, since they always functioned more like traditional magazines in book form, with their custodians acting as traditional commissioning editors.)

Don Wollheim, a pivotal figure in the field, gets credit for the first mass-marketed SF anthology, The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943). After him, the floodgates opened. Raymond Healy and J. Francis McComas stepped forward with the landmark Adventures in Time and Space in 1946. Anthony Boucher assembled A Treasury of Great Science Fiction in two volumes in 1959, a set which, due to its being a perennial loss-leader sign-up inducement for the Science Fiction Book Club, assumed integral places in the libraries of several generations of readers. For his whole career, Groff Conklin held the title of SF anthologist par excellence, making a specialty out of mining the back issues of the pulps for gems that he could offer in general-purpose volumes like the Big Book of Science Fiction (1950) or in thematic tomes like Great Science Fiction About Doctors (1963). At the same time, all the major magazines — Galaxy, Analog, F&SF — had their own line of triple-distilled reprint collections, often annual. Judith Merril’s Best of the Year volumes, from 1956 to 1967, dominated discussion of how the field could grow and mature. The year after that series ended, 1968, Merril crystallized the New Wave movement by putting together England Swings SF. Another project from that same year, Damon Knight’s One Hundred Years of Science Fiction, has relevance to a new book at hand.

Certainly among the leading lights of contemporary anthologists in the SF field, the names of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer shine brightly. In recent years they have brought us definitive volumes on Steampunk, the New Weird, Time Travel, and Feminist SF. Now, with their latest project,  The Big Book of Science Fiction, they seek to capture the dimensions of the whole famously heterogeneous genre. Like wrestling with Proteus, the task requires stamina and determination, and victory is not assured from the outset. But the prize would be a single volume that can essentially define the genre and be used by newbies and veterans alike to chart a lifetime’s reading. (Academics looking for a textbook for SF 101 will also benefit.) And surely a new selection of stories capturing the archetypical essence of science fiction will illuminate the genre’s past, present, and future.

The VanderMeers make their remit and methodology explicit in a comprehensive, passionate, and rigorously logical and convincing introduction that could also serve as a mini-survey of SF during the whole twentieth century. (They limit themselves, wisely I think, to this 100-year timespan. For while the current century is far enough along to allow us to render some judgments and observations, and has indeed supplied a large number of fine stories, we are still a bit too close to the current section of the road to identify its landmarks of significance.) To crudely nutshell their thesis: the old distinctions and battles — between literary fantastika and genre fantastika; between fine writing and rough-edged ideation; between plot-driven narratives and metafictions; between male technophilia and female sensitivities; between English speakers and “foreign” writers — are all useless, distracting, misleading, counterproductive, and inutile. We need a new synthesis to accurately capture the essence of science fiction.

Thus the stated goal of the editors becomes “building a better definition of science fiction.” (And how better to accomplish that laudable end than by showing, not telling: providing dozens of examples of the field’s variety until an emergent portrait bootstraps itself?) Without “discarding or privileging” the consensus, marketplace-dominated mode established by Hugo Gernsback and heirs, they intend to incorporate luminaries such as Borges and Jarry in roles as essential as Asimov and Heinlein. That this strategy and outlook harks back to Judith Merril’s own eclectic, inclusionary tastes is indicated by the book’s dedication: “The editors dedicate this book to Judith Merril, who helped show us the way.”

The result is an altered genre landscape where you stand on a familiar mountaintop and find the view of the plains below all changed. Moving onto the next mountaintop, a similar newness prevails. Maybe from a familiar valley, a new peak obtrudes. This is pretty much the consensual country we once knew, but with additional districts patched in, harmonizing to greater or lesser degree.

Over 100 chronologically arranged stories here — many non-English ones appearing newly or unprecedentedly translated — are accompanied by author-centric notes that further explicate motifs and precedents, connections, and dialogues, all in pursuit of the new vision of the field. Naturally, this review can only leapfrog among a few selections.

And so we start with H. G. Wells and his “The Star,” that classic tale of a destructive wandering cosmic object that invokes the fabled “sense of wonder”; humility at humanity’s negligible status; science as unriddling the cosmos; and respect for the resilience of our species — all classic traits of science fiction. An excellent opener.

Immediately, the VanderMeers put their adventuresome Big Tent tactics into play. For the second entry is “Sultana’s Dream,” by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein (1880−1932), a figure entirely missing from the familiar SF canon. This early feminist utopia could certainly have appeared in one of the more open-minded pulps and replaces a brick in the edifice of SF that we hardly realized was missing.

From here we move on in stately alteration down the timestream. For every several pulp-derived entries, we get a more literary offering or a non-Anglo outlier. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey” butts up profitably against “The Microscopic Giants” by Paul Ernst. Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station” consorts with “The Visitors” by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. J. G. Ballard’s “The Voices of Time” takes “The Astronaut ” by Valentina Zhuravlyova for a spin around the dance floor. This fruitful interweaving of different traditions and literary objectives goes a long way toward validating the VanderMeers’ broader definition of the genre.

This anthology is so capacious and well stocked that it could be subdivided into several theme anthologies. Particularly strong are the selections dealing with aliens. Dick, Lafferty, Le Guin, Bishop, Jones — easily a score of stories, all with different angles of attack, touch this theme. A fine book of posthuman futures could be assembled from the stories by Sterling, Banks, Pohl, Bunch, Bear, Tiptree, et al. Take all the Russian authors out and stick them between hardcovers, and you have a fine survey of modern Russian SF, and the same could be done with the Spanish-language or Asian writers included. There are not quite enough French and Scandinavian names here to compile a separate book but plenty in context. (Altogether missing, however, is the grand Italian heritage of science fiction. Oh, for a snippet of Calvino’s Cosmicomics at least!) Postmodern storytelling styles and structures are represented in numbers large enough for a separate New Wave collection as well. But the VanderMeers, like masterful disc jockeys at a rave, keep up a vibrant, oscillating mix that never falls into a predictable groove from one entry to the next.

With the major writers herein represented, the editors have generally chosen items that are typical and representative and conducive to their thesis, although there can always be a difference of opinion on what might be best from a writer’s catalogue. Should Asimov have been represented by a robot story perhaps? Maybe Silverberg would have shone better with one of his more intense pieces rather than the humorous “Good News from the Vatican . . . “? But this is a game (beloved of my literary tribe) that has no actual winning conditions, and the selections made by the VanderMeers certainly do not mislead or fail.

Another fine aspect of their curation is in bringing forth forgotten gems or treasures. Among others, “Student Body” by F. L. Wallace, “The Hall of Machines” by Langdon Jones, “Plenitude” by Will Worthington, and “Passing as a Flower in the City of the Dead” by S. N. Dyer can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the more illustrious items here, and serve as exemplars of what SF can do in ways that complement the stuff from more famous writers.

In their individual story prefaces, the VanderMeers draw profound and entertaining connections among the various pieces and chart the larger forces at work in the genre while they vividly limn the authors and their careers. They exhibit an almost judicial impartiality and objectivity in their observations, although one amusing quirk does obtrude. So enamored of the work of Stepan Chapman are they that his name surfaces in a dozen or more prefaces as a baseline of magnificence. By the time the reader reaches Chapman’s own selection — “How Alex Became a Machine” — he or she will probably be expecting to encounter the best story in the universe. It proves merely marvelous.

In a project like this — which, however ginormous, boils down to selecting one meager story to represent every individual year of the century’s vast production — there is always the matter of who was excluded. No Heinlein, no Bester, no van Vogt, Varley, or Vance. No Atwood, no Brunner, no Stapledon, no Rucker, no Malzberg, no Zelazny, Morrow, or Herbert. A mirror-image volume — probably not quite as awesome but not negligible, either — could be compiled out of the excluded writers. One author — William Tenn — inexplicably gets two entries. Both fine, but someone thus had to be dropped who might have otherwise fit in. The final story, “Baby Doll” by Johanna Sinisalo, appears to derive from 2002, and is thus technically outside the timeframe of the book and might have given way for an older peer.

But ultimately, we have to cease playing “what if” and take The Big Book of Science Fiction as it is given to us, on its own terms. Doing this, we discover a treasury of magnificence and excellence along those trademark vectors that science fiction has claimed as the parameters of its own particular storyspace.

If I could alter one small thing, it would be to have closed the book with Cory Doctorow’s “Craphound,” which is third from last as the table of contents currently stands. Then you’d have SF’s twentieth-century history bookended symbolically by Wells and Doctorow. Victorian patriarch and his mutant offspring, antithetical along so many surface dimensions, yet united at the foundational level by their adherence to and love for the powerful, rebellious, visionary toolkit and territory represented by modern science fiction.

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In Blake Crouch’s new novel, Dark Matter, an atomic physicist is kidnapped, torn from his life in Chicago and the family he adores. The action never stops, and the plot twists and turns keep coming in this psychological thriller with sci-fi elements — but the heart of this novel is a man’s desperate search for his wife and son.

We asked Blake Crouch for a look at his library, and offered us this quartet of favorite reads which he’s used to introduce the mind-bending notions of time travel and alternate realities to his own family.

The Time Machine
By H. G. Wells

“The 1895 science fiction novel that popularized the idea of time-travel. I recently read this book to my son, and we had the best time venturing into the far, far future with the unnamed Time Traveler, and watching humanity evolve, adapt, and split in the most fascinating way. Even more than the notion of time-travel, this book’s real genius lies in its imagining of how humanity may continue to adapt and change into something that holds little resemblance to our species.”

 

A Wrinkle in Time
By Madeleine L’Engle

“My favorite of the four novels on this mini-list. The first time, my mother read it to me. The second time, I read it as a teenager, because I happened to pick the novel up one bored summer afternoon and ended up devouring it in a sitting, as is so easy to do with L’Engle’s tale. And in the last year, I read it to my son. Each time I’ve encountered this story, I’ve been blown away by the vivid, emotional journey it pulls me through, because at its heart, it’s about a girl trying to reunite her family through the only thing that actually ever moves the needle: love.”

 

The Magician’s Nephew
By C. S. Lewis

“My favorite novel of The Chronicles of Narnia series and one I particularly enjoyed reading to my son for its mesmerizing blend of tension and humor. The forest filled with pools, each leading to an alternate reality, is one of the most enduring images a book has ever imprinted on my brain.”

 

Time and Again
By Jack Finney

“This isn’t technically a young adult novel but I’ve put it on this list, because it means so much to me. I first read it when I was ten or eleven. I discovered it on the shelf of my public library and got swept away by the storytelling, and yes, even the love story. I remember sitting all afternoon among the stacks, inhaling this gorgeous book. It’s simply one of the greatest time-travel novels ever written.”

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