A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut

A Man Without A Country: A Memoir Of Life In George W Bush's America (2005) by Kurt Vonnegut: This is the great American humourist and satirist's last 'new' book, a collection of essays that appeared in the magazine In Our Times during the George W. Bush presidency.

At this late date (Vonnegut would die in 2007, still stuck in the Bush 2 Years), Vonnegut still had the power to amuse and instruct, though no desire to attempt another novel. At least one of the pieces did get reworked into his final 'half-novel' Timequake, half a novel because Vonnegut published it unfinished but filled out with observations about life in America.

Here in The Trump Years, A Man Without A Country reminds one of how lousy the Bush years were -- how criminal, how unsupportably undemocratic, how moronic and ridiculous. Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is a logical extrapolation. Have we forgotten so soon that the 2000 Presidential Election was stolen by disenfranchising minority voters and not just through all the more public post-election shenanigans?

Vonnegut notes at one point that a real horror story would be called 'C-Students from Yale.' Like Bush 2 and so many of his cronies.

If Vonnegut were around today, maybe he'd note that Bush 2 normalized all the crap that Trump has now expanded. Or that Trump is also dangerous because he makes seemingly rational left-wingers nostalgic for the days of Bush and Reagan and Nixon. Hidey-ho! So it goes! Recommended.

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race

SUPER BEST FRIENDS AGAIN !!!

The Dark Knight III: The Master Race (2016-2017/ Collected 2017): written by Brian Azzarello and Frank Miller; illustrated by Andy Kubert, Klaus Janson, Frank Miller, Eduardo Risso, John Romita Jr., Brad Anderson, and Alex Sinclair: Rumours are that Frank Miller had very little to do with the writing of this follow-up to The Dark Knight Returns (1986-87) and The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002). His art duties involve the inking of a few covers and drawing inter-chapter 'mini-comics' that contextualize portions of the main story. 

The main story is credited as 'Story by Frank Miller and Brian Azzarello.' Penciller Andy Kubert and inker Klaus Janson (inker of The Dark Knight Returns) do a fair job of maintaining their own styles while also paying homage to Miller's art style circa 1986. Miller's art in the mini-comics is sort of awful at points, reaching a nadir when he hinges the Atom's legs backwards, having apparently forgotten how knees work.

Taking up three years after The Dark Knight Strikes Again and six years after The Dark Knight Returns, DKIII again features aging versions of DC's major superheroes in a near-dystopic future. Events conspire to team up Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and many others to oppose a new global threat. One of the signs that Miller may not be writing much of the book is that Superman comes across pretty well for once, even saving Batman's life at one point. It's a shocker. 

Azzarello, if he scripted most of this, supplies lots of tough-guy and tough-girl introspection alongside all the fist fights and explodey-ness. Kubert and Janson give us suitably over-sized heroes and villains, innocents and grotesques and all that jazz. The whole thing goes down smoothly and way, way faster than the original The Dark Knight Returns and its intermittently densely packed pages of dialogue and exposition set off by full-page spreads. There's still satire here, particularly of both Obama and Trump, but it's pretty boilerplate stuff. 

Azzarello, not really known for writing superhero punch-ups, has written a giant superhero punch-up. It's enjoyable, certainly far more enjoyable than the clumsy and misanthropic Dark Knight Strikes Again, though no touch on the original. Miller's far-right politics seems to manifest in the idea of Kryptonian cultists who look and act a lot like stereotypical Muslim fundamentalists, but the comparison is never pushed too far (and these fundamentalists appear to believe in gender equality). In all, lightly recommended.

The Minority Report and Other Stories (1987) by Philip K. Dick

The Minority Report and Other Stories (1987) by Philip K. Dick, containing the following stories:

• Autofac (1955) 
• Service Call (1955) 
• Captive Market (1955) 
• The Mold of Yancy (1955) 
• The Minority Report (1956) 
• Recall Mechanism (1959) 
• The Unreconstructed M (1957) 
• Explorers We (1959)  
• War Game (1959) 
• If There Were No Benny Cemoli (1963) 
• Novelty Act (1964) 
• Waterspider (1964) 
• What the Dead Men Say (1964)  
• Orpheus with Clay Feet (1987) 
• The Days of Perky Pat (1963) 
• Stand-By (1963)
• What'll We Do with Ragland Park?  (1963) 
• Oh, to Be a Blobel! (1964) 

A typically excellent collection of stories by Philip K. Dick, this text being part of the five-volume Collected Philip K. Dick first issued in 1987. There's a perceptive introduction from the late James Tiptree, Jr. (the writing name of Alice Sheldon) and notes by PKD on some of the stories culled from a couple of earlier Dick collections. One story from the early 1960's, "Orpheus with Clay Feet", gets its first publication here.

This hefty volume covers stories long and short from the 1955 to 1964. Dick's typical atypicality is in full flight here -- his protagonists are ordinary, often neurotic characters trapped in strange realities. The plots often defy anything resembling typical plotting, one of the things that makes Dick so difficult a nut to crack in film and TV adaptations.

"The Minority Report" is a pretty good example of why Hollywood almost never "gets" Dick. (Haha!) 

The central concept of Dick's story appears in the Spielberg/Cruise film, but pretty much everything else is different, and lesser. There is a Precrime division that uses precognitives to allow the police to arrest murderers before they murder. And the head of that division in one city is indeed flagged by Precrime as a Murderer-to-be. But that's about it when it comes to correspondences. And there's certainly none of the technological gimcrackery of the Cruise movie. Dick is almost never interested in presenting the visual wonder of machines. He's not about spectacle. 

Nor is there anything to do with freeing the Precogs -- in Dick's story, precognitives are the victims of terrible genetic mutation that leaves them essentially mindless conduits for the future, derisively referred to as "monkeys" by many of those in Precrime. There's nothing sentimental in Dick's story, no stirring speeches about free will. The protagonist is a frightened, flawed, but pragmatic man who does the right thing in the end. He's no Tom Cruise.

There are many stand-outs here, and a few fascinating oddities -- including a piece of metafiction ("Waterspider") starring sf great Poul Anderson and many other cameos from science-fiction writers of the 1950's and 1960's, themselves believed to be Precogs by the time-travellers who come back from the far future seeking their help.

Dick's fiction doesn't remain relevant because of accurate technological prediction. It remains relevant because Dick's observations and speculations about the social, psychological, and political effects of technology are startlingly prescient, primarily because they're based on what he saw around him. 

Stories about the social impact of Fake News ("The Mold of Yancy," "If There Were No Benny Cemoli") still resonate in the Trump Era because "fake news" was around in the 1950's and 1960's for Dick to ponder upon. "Novelty Act" posits an America involved in an endless, state-mandated talent show aimed at getting people to perform for the First-Lady-for-Life on TV. It seems weird right up to the point that it seems weirdly believable, even with its easy flights to Mars and 1950's conceptions of talent shows (the protagonist and his brother perform classical music... by blowing on jugs). 

Yes, it's Philip K. Dick's Jug-band Crisis.

As with any collection of PKD stories, The Minority Report and Other Stories crackles with wit, horror, and humanity. Some people do good things. Some people are just small and mean. Their rewards are not commensurate with their moral worth. Highly recommended.

The More Things Stay the Same

Reset: written and illustrated  by Peter Bagge (2012-2013): Peter Bagge, that great cartoonist of the distorted, grotesque mundane contemporary world (Buddy, Neat Stuff, Hate)  turns to a piece of near-science fiction in this sharp, often hilarious graphic novel. 

Guy Krause is a washed-up comedian/comic actor who accepts a job testing out a new Virtual Reality set-up. But not all is what it seems. For one, the makers of the VR set-up have exhaustively interviewed even minor, long-ago acquaintances of Krause so that his life from high school onwards can be simulated and manipulated depending on what decisions he makes. For another, this may not be a project meant for entertainment. 

Bagge's linework is superb as always, as is his satiric but probing and sensitive writing. Like most of Bagge's protagonists, Krause is both annoying and sympathetic, as are the various supporting characters. Recommended.

Sandman Presents: The Furies: written by Mike Carey; illustrated by John Bolton (2003): Mike Carey and John Bolton bring some closure to the saga of Lyta Hall as seen in Neil Gaiman's Sandman in the 1980's and 1990's. Hall, a second-generation superhero, became a pawn in Desire's plot to kill Dream because Hall herself was a descendant/avatar of the Greek Furies -- the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, tasked by the universe with punishing those guilty of killing blood relatives. To make a long story short, Desire succeeded. Sort of. The then-current Dream did indeed die, but Dream itself cannot die: Lyta's infant son, born in The Dreaming, became the new Dream. 

Hall's memories of what happened while she pursued vengeance have become vague and cloudy as The Furies begins. She's still suffering from PTSD three years after the events seen in the concluding issues of The Sandman. An attempt to restart her life by taking a job as an interpreter for an American theatre troupe headed to a Greek drama festival seems like a good idea at the time.

It isn't, of course, because gods and monsters and spirits of vengeance just can't leave Lyta Hall alone. Carey's prose fleshes out Hall's character poignantly -- despite her super-strength, she's an aimless wreck because of what the supernatural has done to her life. She's allowed herself to be acted upon again and again. The Furies sees her attempt to seize Agency in her own life even as the supernatural comes pouring back in looking for her to play the pawn once again in a Game of Gods.

I'm not a fan of artist John Bolton's incorporation of retouched photos in his art since computer technology allowed him to do this sort of thing -- there are points that The Furies feels like the least amusing fumetti ever. There's a point to the mix of photos and fantastic drawings -- a juxtaposition of the fantastic and the mundane -- that comes through at some points and fails at others. Hermes looks especially ridiculous in quasi-photo-realistic form. 

As an admirer of Bolton's earlier comics work, I'm a bit underwhelmed by the art here. Only the fully drawn sections bear comparison with his fine 1980's and 1990's work, some of it for the original Sandman and its older sister John Constantine Hellblazer (the latter in a splendid Annual about the 'original' Constantine, the Emperor, and his ties to our cynical modern-day magician). It's really Carey's fine writing, with its bursts of sympathy and its unnerving moments in which the supernatural breaks through, hideous and inhuman, that does much of the heavy lifting. Recommended.

Topsy Turvy: written and illustrated by Peter Kuper (1997-2000/Collected 2000): Collection of the terrific Kuper's political cartoons from the late 1990's demonstrates that the more things change, yadda yadda yadda: many of the strips lampoon Donald Trump's presidential ambitions while others lament America's love affair with guns and the NRA's love affair with gun-loving Americans. Yes, it's the American Treadmill to Oblivion. All aboard! Recommended.

The Spider: The City That Paid to Die!

The Spider: The City That Paid to Die! (The Black Police Trilogy Volume 1): written by Norvell Page under the pseudonym Grant Stockbridge (1938): Pulp-action-hero The Spider's crime-fighting disguise was so bizarre that it was only depicted on two of the covers of his 1930's and 1940's magazine. Basically, he dressed up to look like a hideous vampire. Most of the time, the cover artists depicted him as a generic masked crime-fighter, similar to The Phantom and a legion of others.

The Spider's adventures were no worse than the second-most apocalyptic pulp-hero sagas in history (Operator 5 may have been moreso, but it was set in a vague near-future America under siege by a host of foreign powers both real and imagined, which is to say both the Japanese military and The Purple Emperor laid waste to North America). The death toll was often in the millions, with New York often being depopulated in every issue by building-destroying death rays, plague-carrying vampire bats, and endless armies of criminals, madmen, and enemy fifth-columnists.

The City That Paid to Die! is the first part of what's now known as the Black Police Trilogy. In this first novel, fascist criminal forces basically trick New York's population into voting for their political proxies. That done, the forces of evil -- led by a mysterious Master -- enact legislation that allows them to terrorize and enslave the population of New York State. Even the federal government is helpless, we're told, because everything is legal and above-board!

Enter Richard Wentworth, The Spider, unmasked and forced to fight with his secret identity in shreds, his property and weapons seized, his friends and allies in perpetual mortal danger. But his ties to the benevolent inhabitants of Chinatown allow him to escape New York City just ahead of the forces of The Black Police (their uniform colours, not a racial bit, by the way).

In the wilderness of upstate New York, the Spider must build an army from those he's rescued from the murderous clutches of the New New York Order. But the Black Police number 100,000 or more dangerous criminals made legal by the machinations of their Master. Can the Spider prevail? Can he even survive? Two more novels tell the story. Recommended.