Sara Barkat Takes Us into “Otherside”

Until the late 1970s, my reading of science fiction was limited to the stories and novels of Ray Bradbury, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, and The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. I didn’t have any inherent bias against science fiction; it was more my reading interests were in other directions. 

For some reason, I picked up a paperback edition of Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg. Then I went to the Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov (published in the 1950s, it may explain American politics of the last decade). Then the novels of Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. And Arthur C. Clarke, whose Rendezvous with Rama and Childhood’s Endremain among my favorite books. But as much as I loved the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, even then I knew how much it was changing science fiction. Fantasy was taking over. 

 

Years passed. Reading interests changed. And then the old memories stirred when I read The Shivering Ground by Sara Barkat. The wonderful graphic version she did of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space, was another reminder, even though it’s usually called a horror story. And now she has a new novel, Otherside, which is about as close as you can get to mainstream science fiction as you can.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

For the Road to Santiago – poem by David Whyte.

 

The Wordless Rose: Ruchard Wilbur’s ‘Advice to a Prophet’ – Alexander Fayne.

 

Veshicular – poem by Franco Amati at Garbage Notes.

 

Poetry in Prose – Where Love is Born – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Lives upon Lives – poem by Baruch November at Evey Day Poems.

 

“Requiem,” poem by Robert Louis Stevenson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“Boom!” by Mark Haddon

In 1992, British author Mark Haddon published a middle grade book with the improbable title of Gridzbi Spudvetch!He says that, with a title like that, only 23 people bought the book (and he claims that number is an exaggeration). 

It went out of print, but he’d occasionally hear from fans who loved it. He’d been writing and publishing other books (like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003) and his publisher would ask him about updating Gridzbi Spudvetch! He reread the book and realized it needed more-than-serious updating, plot hole-filling, and other improvements. He put it off, until he heard from a schoolteacher in Oxford, who read it aloud to her students, who loved it. So, Haddon tackled the rewrite, and Boom! was born in 2009.

The book, still aimed at the middle grades, is now 10 years old, just about the age of its hero, Jim, called Jimbo by the family. The story is fiction, and science fiction, and comedy, and drama, and downright funny. I knew I was captured when I laughed out loud on page three, as Jimbo lets fly from a balcony a “helicopter sandwich” of cheese and strawberry jam that smacks his sister’s greasy boyfriend squarely in the face. What brother hasn’t wanted to do exactly that, or something like it?

Mark Haddon

Jimbo and his best friend Charlie get into all kinds of mischief. When Jimbo’s sister claims she’s heard teachers at school talking about sending Jimbo to a “special school” for discipline, he and Charlie concoct a plan to bug the teachers’ lounge with walkie talkies. Mostly what they hear is boring teacher talk, until only two teachers are left in the room. They begin to speak in a language neither Charlie nor Jimbo has ever heard, saying things like “Gridzbi spudvetch!”

From there, the two boys stage a break-in of one of the teacher’s homes and find strange papers and documents that look like they’re in code. One turns out to be coordinates for an ordnance map of a location on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. And then Charlie disappears. A strange policeman tries to capture Jimbo. Two men break into his family’s apartment and are fought off by Jimbo, His sister, and the greasy boyfriend. Jimbo and his sister hop aboard the boyfriend’s motorcycle, and they’re off to Scotland to rescue Charlie. 

It’s all wildly improbable. It’s completely within the imagination of a nine-, ten-, or eleven-year old, defending Earth against scheming extra-terrestrials. And it’s totally fun.

Haddon is the author of several novels and young adult novels, including A Spot of Bother (2007) and The Red House (2013). He blogs under his own name.

I can easily see my fourth-grader grandson reading Boom!, while his second-grade brother listens, enraptured, and the two saying things to each other like “Spleeno ken mondermill.”

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Red House by Mark Haddon.

My review of Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon.

My review of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

“The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August” by Claire North

British author Claire North has something of a knack for writing science fiction novels that read like literary fiction.

She’s published five novels since 2014 and a trio of related novellas. That is, that’s the number she’s published using the pen name of Claire North. Her real name is Catherine Webb, and she published eight novels under than name from 2012 to 2010. Using another pen name, Kate Griffin, she published six novels from 2009 to 2013. 

That’s 19 novels and three novellas from 2002 to 2018, published under three names. It’s almost as if she’s a character in one of her stories.

One of her best known works is The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, published in 2014. The title alone is intriguing. The story is exactly that – what happens to Harry August, born shortly after World War I in a train station bathroom, his mother a servant girl who was the victim of rape and his father a war veteran and the heir of the manor where the servant girl was employed. Harry will be raised by the manor gamekeeper and his wife. Harry lives until late in the 20^thcentury, dying of multiple myeloma. 

Harry will be born of the same parents 15 times. And each life will be different. Harry is a Kalachakra, which is actually a real term – a Buddhist term for time cycles. In this story, the Kalachakra are a tiny number of people who are born numerous times, usually forgetting their previous lives after a few rounds. Harry is one of an even smaller number of Kalachakra; he’s a mnemonic and remembers everything, usually be the age of six. 

The Kalachakra has a place to gather – the Cronus Club, with no headquarters but premises in every major city. Their locations change; members come and go, die and are reborn. It takes Harry two or three lives to understand and accept what happens. He also discovers he can alter his own circumstances by making different choices and anticipate and plan for what he knows will happen.

Claire North, aka Catherine Webb

Somewhere about the eight life in the 20^thcentury, Harry begins to see things happening that shouldn’t. Certain inventions are happening a few years earlier than they should. Other Cronus lube members notice, too. And then some start dying and are not reborn. Someone, some Kalachakra, is playing the system. And Harry decides to find out whom, and put a stop to it before he and his remaining brethren (and sisters) are destroyed. 

Webb’s other works under the Claire North pseudonym are Touch (2015), The Sudden Appearance of Hope (2016), The End of the Day (2017), 84K (2018), and the three Gamehouse novellas (The Serpent, The Master, and The Thief). She works as a theater lighting designer and lives in London.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August ranges across history, philosophy, religion, World War II, Cold War politics, and 20^thcentury technology. It has the added element of suspense, as Harry discovers, tracks, and gradually closes in on his quarry (it takes two or three lives to do that). And when it’s done, we’re left with a rather imaginative, creative, and dazzling read.

Top photograph by Martin Bjork via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Strange and Wonderful Worlds: How I Discovered Science Fiction

Back in the late 1970s and 1980s, I discovered a literary genre that I knew existed but generally paid little attention to: science fiction. As a child in the 1950s and 1960s, I had been terrified and scared witless by science fiction movies – The Day the Earth Stood Still, Them, The War of the Worlds, and even b-grade movies that aired on television late on Saturday nights, like Caltiki, the Immortal Monster. 

But between those movies and the late 1970s, I had read only a small handful of science fiction works – Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and, in college, Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. My reading tending more to literary fiction and non-fiction; my major indulgence in popular fiction was murder mysteries, which enjoyed a minor resurgence in the 1970s.

But science fiction didn’t really interest me.

In 1977, I was in a bookstore in Houston, Texas, and for some reason found myself among the science fiction shelves (they were next to the mystery shelves). Shelved alphabetically by author’s last name, I noticed a book by scientist and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. It was entitled Foundation, the first in a trilogy about the alleged science of “psychohistory.” Asimov invented this “science” in his Foundation books; it claimed that the history of large populations could be predicted. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.