good morning! good morning!
horsemouth is up and about and he has his coffee. the sun shines in the window. later today some child minding.
yesterday horsemouth found a copy of the second trip by robert silverberg in a bookbox (in powerscroft road).
and so he has read it. it reads easily but despite this the book seems to have been stabbed repeatedly (horsemouth could easily see someone getting annoyed with it). the cover is actually the pan lozenge one (beloved of outlaw bookseller).
as a friend noted the wikipedia entry confidently asserts that the annoying material "...placed the second trip squarely within the new wave subgenre" but that this may not be how 'the new wave of SF' was understood at the time, that indeed british and american new waves had different aims in that they responded to different SF old waves and establishments.
horsemouth replied that he agreed. formerly subgenres were not marketing categories but parts of the open work (an as-yet-unrealised splitting of science fiction with works to be retroactively assigned).
horsemouth appended a quote about althusser that he found while trying to find the quote about the anatomy of the human is the thing that gives us a guide to the anatomy of the ape.
' to commit implicitly to a temporality that is non-contemporaneous (to use althusser’s term) with the changed temporality of the cultural field' - oded nir, althusser, or the system, meditations journal 30/02/2009
of course these problems (with things not being what they used to be, or things not yet being what they will become) mount up as soon as one is dealing with the things that are in the past or in the future with the understanding that we have today. in fact science fiction is one long encounter with it. interestingly enough the book is set in 2011 - a future that is already gone by being in the past.
the book itself is a jekyll and hyde - the central character is a deckard type construct living in the body and brain of a former rapist. the mind of the rapist has been blanked and a new personality installed by the 2011 system of criminal justice. the new construct is then found a job and rehabilitated. (except this being a drama the mind of rapist comes back). combine this with prurient 60ies style writing (when people thought sex was the golden road to self-actualisation and freedom) and you can see why the book got stabbed (or it might have just got left in the street and run over). it is a book that no longer fits the times.
left to philip k.dick (there are many phildickian obsessions here. personality replacement, false memories, psychiatrists, the intersection between the state and mental states etc.) the book would have been better. there is some dull stuff here from silverberg on artists and creativity taking picasso (artist as monster) as his starting point.
in silverberg's a time of changes the erstwhile writer of the book attempts to dig himself out of the repressive society by means of drugs, sex, (so far so new wave) and autobiography. if the autobiography survives to be read this is proof of the erstwhile author's success in changing the society (to one where the feelings and thoughts of the individual can be discussed).
horsemouth should probably re-read silverberg's dying inside (telepathy as curse and as gift) again. he remembers liking that one as a kid.
following this up horsemouth watched zombieland. essentially a modern amusement park ride of a film (that ends up in an amusement park er. with zombies). our cautious survivor has rules (seatbelts for example) - rule two is double tap, if in doubt, and as a general precaution, shoot the zombie a second time in the brain (this being the only guarantee that it is deactivated).
horsemouth (being cautious) subscribes to double tap.
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ok today. work from 2.30/3pm. looks good out there.
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