Robert Heinlein - Methuselah's Children (1958)

 

I guess Bob had taken to thinking about his own mortality, or at least about his no longer qualifying as a spring chicken, whatever that is. I know the feeling. Methuselah's children are a group of extraordinarily long lived humans whose socially awkward longevity has brought them all together as a secretive subgroup inhabiting the fringes of human society. They're not a secret society in that they don't, as a group, have any particular collective influence on anything, and - unusually for golden age science-fiction - neither are they anything so obvious as homo superior or the coming race. They're simply people who live longer than the rest of us for reasons no-one quite understands. Anyway, fearing discovery and the possibility of dissection in order to glean the secret of longevity when even they have no idea what that secret could be, they band together and flee the planet, going off in search of a world where they can all live their lives without having to forge a new birth certificate every seventy years or so.

Whether by accident or design, Stephen Baxter would eventually revisit a few of these ideas in the Destiny's Children books, because they're worth revisiting, and Heinlein threw out some weird and fascinating ideas in this one. The problem is that we're two thirds of the way through the novel before anything interesting happens. I can barely remember what occurred during the first hundred pages. There seemed to be a lot of yacking, page after page of dialogue and not much else, and most of it the sort of snappy content-free repartee which made Stranger in a Strange Land such a fucking chore; so it's a relief when they steal the spaceship and flee the solar system because things happen, and Bob gets to play with science and relativity and the rest, which is where he excels. I also enjoyed the fact of this final third of the novel having the almost haphazard cadence of Simak or even A.E. van Vogt, eschewing the usual brilliant minds with elaborate scientific plans and the need to explain them at length. The long lived hundred or so thousand just sort of sneak onto the conveniently unoccupied New Frontiers - as the galaxy spanning craft is named - assuming there will be something to eat, places to sleep and so on; and one of the gang has conveniently come up with a revolutionary new star drive.

'It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.' He poked a thumb at Libby's uncouth-looking space drive. 'You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?'

'That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course, I don't really know that it will work,' Libby admitted. 'There is no way to test it.'

'Suppose it doesn't?'

Luckily it works, and we're off. The two extraterrestrial civilisation they eventually encounter are both friendly but very odd, and the crew of the New Frontiers decide to head back to Earth after all, because this isn't one of those novels about seeking out new life, new civilisations, or boldly going anywhere in particular. It's mostly about mortality, specifically that of the author.

'I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wisdom and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren't for us at all, ever. Either way, I'm satisfied to be living and enjoying it.'

I've had trouble reading later Heinlein, and you can tell the preoccupations which informed his less agreeable works were creeping in here, but he's still making the effort, still mostly at the top of his game, and still delivering much more than is promised by the summary on the back cover.

pStan Batcow - The Sleeping Party (2025)

 

Veterans of the weirdy tape and/or mail art scene may recall former Ceramic Hob pStan Batcow as the prime mover behind Howl in the Typewriter and Pumf Records. He's been at it since the eighties, and not only has he failed to slow down a bit, as many of us have done, but if anything he appears to be accelerating. This is his first novel, although it doesn't read like a first novel having arguably spent at least four decades in the making with many of the texts found herein originating as Stanzines, as he deemed them - short zines of Batcow fiction or simple rumination periodically produced by the man seemingly because he just couldn't stop himself. I had a couple here and there, notably This Bleeding Heart which doesn't seem to have made it into the novel and which I remember as noteworthy. So the prose and general composition are confident and accomplished as the work of a man who found his voice - as the saying has it - many years before. This ain't his first rodeo.

The premise has a group of people monitored as they sleep, their dreams recorded herein towards ambiguous ends. It's structured pretty much as a loose tangle of unrelated lengths of super-8mm film edited together into a single continuous strand, and it would be fair to call it an experimental novel; although unlike a few experimental novels I've encountered of late, this experiment is undertaken by someone who has some idea of what the fuck he's doing. We meet our cast as the book opens, learn what they're about to do, and the rest is one individual testimony after another - either unrelated, or related by means which aren't immediately obvious. Former Stanzines appear as Rachel dreams about reading them in a library, which is cheeky as fuck in compositional terms but the material blends beautifully into the whole regardless. We alternate autobiographical musings with surrealism and punky philosophy and somehow it all hangs together as a sort of social realist Naked Lunch written under the influence of Lewis Carroll, amongst others. It kicks against the pricks while remaining generally humanist and refreshingly low on the kind of cynicism to which the Batcow might be entitled given a few of the more obviously autobiographical details. Themes emerging may depend on where the reader is sat, and I found something generally positive with a firm grounding in reality amounting to we're all in this together so let's not be arseholes, as proposed by our narrator's thoughts as he observes a couple of rats.

The crouching rat hadn't moved, but he sensed that it was very aware of his presence. It was plainly terrified, but resisting its natural instinct to flee. In a bizarre moment of empathy, he realised that these rats were mates, and the one lying dead was being watched over, protected posthumously by its loyal and mourning consort.

It was a touching tableau, sorrowful yet a somehow uplifting scenario. He was witnessing something that seemed to mirror what should be the very meaning of existence - something that should be duplicated in spirit as the blueprint for a perfect world.

It's a weird one, as might be expected of such an assemblage, but it holds together beautifully even if it isn't always obvious why, effortlessly drawing the reader though to the point at which it ceases to feel like random images.

Buy as many copies as you can afford here.

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (2003)

 

I'm backtracking from A Thousand Splendid Suns which I read a year ago and which is honestly a masterpiece, but also from the movie adaptation of The Kite Runner. This was Hosseini's first, the one which sealed his reputation, and which I expected would be amazing. To be fair, the accolades heaped upon it have been mostly justified, and yet something isn't quite clicking. As you will possibly be aware, the tale is told against the backdrop of Afghanistan, specifically Kabul before and during the reign of the Taliban. Our focus is on the relationship of Amir, our narrator, and his friend, Hassan, towards whom he experiences an unendurable guilt parallel to the survivor's guilt which both character and author feel regarding Afghanistan and the Taliban. We also focus on Amir's ambiguous relationship with his own somewhat imperfect father, which he comes to understand better as he commits the same mistakes. As I suppose you might imagine, given the presence of authoritarian figures with firearms, much of what transpires is harrowing without ever quite being allowed to eclipse anything else the book might have to say; and it's beautifully written and communicated, particularly given how much of this is unfamiliar territory to me.

So what gives?

It's a minor detail, and possibly something I might not have noticed had I not already been so completely blown away by A Thousand Splendid Suns, but it's something in the tone, or elements of the tone of how the whole is bound together - something which, I might argue, distinguishes The Kite Runner as a debut novel. The narrative is respectfully conversational and carried with such a strong voice as to read like autobiography, which can prove deceptive because despite a wealth of autobiographical detail, it's very much a novel, arguably allegorical, and even a saga at least as much as the tale of Rostam and Sohrab from the Shahnameh, which Amir reads to Hassan at one point; and because it's a saga, it makes use of happenstance and repetition, thus Assef who terrorises the boys in their youth, turns up as the sociopath directing the public executions when Amir returns to Kabul as an adult - and in spite of the visceral realism of the telling, it feels a little like Darth Vader revealed as Luke's dad. So it's not so much the bricks of the novel as the mortar, the conspicuously tidy connections, segues, and patterns which somehow undermine the otherwise powerful realism. It isn't a huge problem, because The Kite Runner is nevertheless a tremendous and sobering read, but it feels like a first novel and there was better to come.