From the archives: Randy Johnson (2015)
As a young boy discovering a love of reading even as I was learning, John
Brunner was an early find, third I believe, behind Heinlein and Norton.
The early stuff was mostly from the Ace Doubles. Black Is The Color is a
little bit different. From 1969, part spy novel, it has a plot line
that would fit in in things happening today.
Mark Hanwell, a disillusioned young man returns home to London after six months in Spain where he’d met and worked for The Big Famous Writer he only ever refers to as Hairy Harry. It didn’t take long for him to realize his hero had feet of clay, making the bulk of his money selling pornography and weed. In fact, the last four pieces of writing under his name had been written by Mark.
Home, he goes looking for a woman who’d sent him a few letters early on, then stopped. A singer, he traced the bank d she’d been with falling into as different a world as he’d ever run into.
Sadism was part of it, voodoo, a plan to start a race war in England, Mark finds his work an and the man she’d taken up with, a South Africaner.
I’d never heard of this book before I came across it. Good stuff.
Sometimes I wonder what people who died pre-2016 would make of the world we know now.
11 comments:
Sadly, all the roots of it were in place, Patti, and no little of the puffery, the two (or more)-facedness, the smug reversion to elitism and fascism (and sometimes even simon-pure Fascism). "Keep Government out of My Social Security" wasn't on a MAGA hat, but a sign more than one Tea Partisan carried around in the first decade of the new century. The Democratic Party being taken over in the late '80s by neoliberals who gave up on half the elections (or more) at the state and county level (and Pelosi on Colbert/LATE NIGHT he other day demonstrated she still hasn't fully figured out why that was Not a Good Idea), and resented and often sabotaged the populists and progressives in the DP, abandoned that many more borderline and underinformed voters to be sucked into GOP yahooism.
I wonder about that, too, Patti. How things have changed...Interesting how this book picks up on that.
Yes, I think of that in terms of my parents, who died in 2012 and 2014.
It was already appalling but not nearly at the place we rest in now. Would they have guessed democracy was not necessarily forever.
Watching our democracy and economy unravel along with the deaths of a million Americans would have staggered my parents. It staggers me, too!
We had no preparation for so many calamities. I was lucky to grow up when I did and so too my kids. But the next generation has little to be grateful for. Covid came unbidden but the rest of it we participated in.
Varying values of "We", though. Though I freely admit that I've never done enough, because it's never possible to do Enough. But one does what one chooses to, and maybe even what one can.
But various sorts of manipulation and Business as Usual have kept millions from being able to vote as freely as they should, or has minimized the effects of their votes, even when they chose to overcome their encouraged (or enforced) apathy, or fought their way through the latter-day equivalents of poll taxes or literacy tests to try to pick a lesser evil. And others have assumed, all to often in a way that's hard to argue with, that a conservative, big-business Democrat who might not be as deeply chauvinist as a reactionary, big-business and big-church Republican isn't an inspiring choice to make. And then there's a helpful Electoral College to make sure their attempts to make even a little difference can be foiled, sometimes with the assistance of the Florida State Election Commission and their intentionally sloppy and easily-fouled 2000-election ballots.
One thing the last decade or so has made abundantly clear was how little commitment to democracy there has been in this country for quite some time (as in, throughout its history), and how little commitment to education or encouragement of commonwealth in its truest sense. Homelessness is not new; disenfranchisement, not new. The degree of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few is a recurring fact in US history, whether we recall the Whiskey Rebellion, the depredations of the Gilded Age, various Depressions before the Great one, or other more subtle examples of institutional dysfunction. I was in the Boston area for the school busing bullshit, for example, where the racist objections helped mask the at least as great failure of the political elite in the city, county and state (and not those of that area alone) to ensure a decent opportunity for education for all students, and the half-assedness of busing kids in various directions as a stop-gap measure, giving even the most asinine of objectors two reasonable concerns--that the kids would be even more distracted than usual by hostility and threats, including violence (aside from those from racist adults), and that they would be that much harder to get to by their parents, in the case of any sort of emergency. Not addressing something as basic as the inequality of the schools in the same systems, much less the inadequacy of schools almost universally, was the underlying problem, and not hardly a new one nor a unique one.
The current Covid (as opposed to those detected in years in near and less near past) was just another of the disease waves that have never ceased, and vaxxer obdurance, with the sadly sensible kernel of the ineptitude of some corporate drugmakers and criminal indifference to the costs of their ineptitude, mixed in with suspicion, not altogether unfounded, of various mandatory campaigns from various levels of government, that included inept responses to AIDS, the influx of oxycodone in the wake of meth and that after crack, and further burdens on the majority of the population to just get by. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/basics/past-pandemics.html doesn't even include the dangers of relatively limited-population diseases, such as AIDS or the "bird flu" and the like.
Things have been bad for too many of us forever. They are not currently getting better, because the same self-protection by the most fortunate in human society continues unchecked, and unsurprisingly, those with the most influence are no more willing to share that influence than they have ever been. Fascism seems like an easy solution for the outcrowd, particularly when offered by a clown who strokes their ignorance and their anger, whether that clown be a Putin, Trump, DeSantis, Greg Abbott (no cousin, I assume), Giorgia Meloni, Bolsinaro, Xi, Modi, or take your choice of others.
So, enough of my sermonizing about how things were mostly good for most of us who might read these comments even at the best of times past, and not so good for all too many (including, say, some of my cousins).
Here's something not solely about sexuality (gotta pull in the sophisticated rubes) bu on the different worries editors Get At, at least in the author's experience, in the US and Europe:
https://europeanreviewofbooks.com/how-americans-edit-sex-out-of-my-writing/en
Thanks, Todd. Interesting summary of the state of things: past and present. Afraid to contemplate future.
I've only recently realized how angry I've been throughout my life as a default. These are times where it is hard to miss how many others are defaulting to permanent anger, and not even controlling it as "well" as I am. And, sadly, there's always been so much to be angry about, and so much in dire need of change...and that certainly isn't lessening, either.
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