David Mitchell's Cloud Altas

In Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell tells the six interrelated stories, each with a distinct voice and style, using a symmetric structure: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1.

The Pacific Journal Adam Ewing, as the title implies, is a journal of the protagonist’s adventure in the Pacific. Reading the story is like reading one of Joseph Conrad’s stories, with the European colonists dominating over the natives. Dr. Goose, Rev. Horrox and the first mate Boerhaave, epitomes of greed and callousness and the sense of entitlement, could be villains from The Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim.

The Pacific Journal Adam Ewing

Letters from Zedelghem is an epistolary about Robert Frobisher’s coming of age, and he could be one of Stendhal or Flaubert’s protagonists, charming his way through life until he meets his match.

Letters from Zedelghem

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is a mystery written in multiple third-person POV and it is a John Grisham style thriller about a reporter stumbling into documents that reveal a nuclear plant’s safety issues. The company’s executives would do anything to conceal the problems. The hunger for energy drives the greed and ruthlessness of these executives. The Pelican Brief comes to mind.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish written in a first-person POV is a humorous account of the title character’s adventure in a retirement home, a twist on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Only through such an ordeal could this callous and cynical publisher learn to appreciate life.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

The Orison of Somni-451 is a sci-fi about a fabricant server’s rise to self-awareness. The interview between the Archivist and Somni-451 reveals the sickness of the consumer-oriented society and the encroachment of technocracy. Reminiscent of A Brave New World and Oryx and Crake.

The Orison of Somni-451

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After is a first-person POV dystopian tale of survival in Hawaii. Humanity comes full circle from savagery to civilization back to savagery, as if, after Nea So Copros, society could only descend into barbarism. Again Oryx and Crake comes to mind.

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After

The six tales would just be interesting stories, if written by six writers, but David Mitchell manages to cross genres—from mystery to sci-fi and from historical fiction to literary fiction—and integrate the stories through common human predicaments into a teleological vision.

Cloud Atlas, more than great storytelling, is a postmodern study of text. In Sloosha’s Crossin’, an aged Zachry tells a yarn, where truth mixes with fiction, to a group of children. His son finds an orison which when warmed would create a hologram of Sonmi-451 telling her story, which is The Orison of Sonmi-451. And in Orison, Sonmi-451 watches a movie about a twenty-first century publisher called Timothy Cavendish. That movie is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. In Ghastly Ordeal, Timothy Cavendish receives from an author, the manuscript of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. In Half-Lives, Luisa Rey comes across Sixsmith’s letters: Letters from Zedelghem. And finally, in Letters, Robert Frobisher finds Adam Ewing’s journals in the famous composer’s house. And so, we go from yarn to stored data, to cinema, to novel, to letters, to journal—a journey through various communication media. In the spirit of Italo Calvino and other postmodern writers, Mitchell creates several levels of texts, and thus various levels of fiction. Since the aged Zachry is an unreliable narrator, we would question his yarn’s truth, as his son was doing so. The orison as stored data recounts an earlier historical period and might be true. Or is it, given the story of Orison is a setup to manipulate Sonmi-451? The movie The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is fiction within fiction but since it is based on the life of the title character, the story may be true within Somni-451’s world. Half-Lives, Letters, and Pacific Journal are various levels of fiction within the novel Cloud Atlas.

Cloud Atlas is a modern masterpiece where the aesthetic form matches the intriguing stories. And the reader will continue to reflect on the human condition long after she has finished the book.

I saw the movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry around the same time I read the novel and I prefer latter over the former. The movie, which changed various stories’ endings, destroyed the beauty of the novel. I recommend reading the book rather then seeing the movie.

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Other Stories

TedChiang has some very imaginative and thought provoking stories in his volume Stories of Your Life and Other Stories. We can see Borges’s influence in stories such as “Tower of Babylon,” “Division by Zero,” “Seventy Two Letters” and “Hell is the Absence of God.” “Seventy Two Letters” also reminds us of stories by Umberto Eco. Chiang’s science fiction gives due to science but he creates worlds based on pseudo sciences and forces the reader to think hard about their implications.

Tower of Babel

 

“Division by Zero” is a fascinating inquiry into the incompleteness of mathematics (Gödel’s Theorem). What happens when a mathematician finds out that the system of mathematics isn’t consistent, that the foundation of everything just gives way?

“The Story of Your Life” dwells into the nature of time via relativity: that time is just another variable like x, y, and z. What if we can perceive the span of time (as a continuous segment rather than discrete points) as we do in space (as a span of space rather than a single point)?  Something like Henri Bergson’s continuous time.

In “Seventy Two Letters” a scientist and an inventor try to save the human race using artificial insemination and the power of name to animate or give life (like the breath or word of God). Chiang added an assassin and a cabalist just for fun.

Space-Time Curvature

 

“Hell is the Absence of God” is a thoughtful study of suffering and devotion. How would we respond to various blessings and misfortunes? After a misfortune, one turns to God while another away. One is troubled when she is healed and could no longer evangelize. Another wants to be the mouth of God but he receives neither blessing nor misfortune, as if he doesn’t exist. Then Neil Fisk, “though it’s been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still.”

In “Liking What You See: a Documentary,” students in a school vote to decide whether to mandate a device to eliminate the appreciation of physical beauty. Is it fair or unfair to put everyone on a “level playing field” where beauty has no advantage? What about other attributes such as mental and physical skills?

Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most imaginative writers I have come across, could have been a mathematician, a physicist, a philosopher or a theologian. I can see his influence on Umberto Eco in the manipulation of text and the blending between fiction and reality. To read Borges’s Labyrinth is immerse myself in a magical world where the concept of infinity manifests in space and time, where the boundary between dream and reality fades, where the past and the future converge into an instant, where levels of texts superimpose on one another, where fiction imitates nonfiction and life is a drama on stage. To read Borges is to become children again, listening to stories of magic and wonder, of unfathomable worlds.

In “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges creates a fictional world, where Berkeleyan idealism dominates its inhabitant’s thinking. “The world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; it is a heterogeneous series of independent acts.” Through the narrator Borges, we encounter a language without nouns, but with “personal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) with an adverbial value.” The author Borges has created an alternative world, where the language and the worldviews differ from our world and from it we learn of our biases and blind spots. And we can begin to imagine new worlds, new possibilities. We can create our own languages, as Tolkien has in his fiction, and as software engineers has BASIC, FORTRAN, PASCAL, and so forth. We see similar blending of fact and fiction in Umberto Eco’s The Prague Cemetery.

In “The Garden of Forking Paths,” we encounter an infinitely long book where at every juncture of the story, all possibilities are written and the branches grow exponentially. “In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses—simultaneously—all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork.” When I was younger, I have read stories where the reader can choose one of several actions—the decision tree—and turn to the appropriate page for that choice. The story continues from there until there is another choice. And the story would have several endings. After reading this story, I realize where the idea came from. Perhaps, Borges read about the many world interpretation of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that before an observation, a system could be in various states—position, momentum, time, energy—according to a probability distribution and only when someone has observed the system—photons bouncing off the object—would it collapsed into a single state. In science fiction, such as Star Trek, we read about parallel universes but this may be the first story with such a concept.

In “The Library of Babel,” Borges again plays around with the concept of infinity, but this time also with combinatorics and I can imagine Borges as a mathematician or computer scientist. A labyrinth of infinite number of rooms stores books that include all combinations of a 22-letter alphabet plus spaces and the comma and period. Since we know the number of characters in each book, we can calculate the number of possible books (not infinite). Of course, most of them are meaningless. Is this universe of repeated rooms each with five shelves and thirty-five books a mirror of our world? Interestingly, in Eco’s The Name of the Rose, the blind monk who oversees the library is named Jorge of Burgos.

I have heard of the argument that Judas betrayed Jesus to force the latter to reveal his divinity and complete God’s work, but in “Three Versions of Judas,” the controversial theologian reinterprets the Biblical text and declares Judas the savior and God’s incarnation. “To save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which make up the complex web of history; He could have been Alexander or Pythagoras or Rurik or Jesus; He chose the vilest destiny of all: He was Judas.” Borges’s fascination with text, whether historical documents or his own creation, dominates much of his stories and Eco certainly inherits that fascination.

In “The Circular Ruins” where a man is only another’s dream figment and “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” where a man’s execution for betrayal is part of a drama, Borges again mixes fact with fiction to create worlds as ephemeral as mist.

Jorge Luis Borges

I recommend Labyrinths to anyone who wants to dream of magical worlds, who wants to reflect on reality and fiction, who wants to analyze the boundary between text and the interpreter, and who wants to contemplate on the nature of infinity.

Book Review of Ubik by Philip K. Dick

When a bomb explodes on Luna and kills Glen Runciter, head of an anti-psi prudence organization, the world begins reversing in time and his team of anti-telepaths dying off one after another, shriveling up and decaying into dregs. The new leader, Joe Chip, must keep Runciter in half-life, the mind continuing to work while the body suspended and decaying, find the cause even as he began to decay. Through his half-dead boss, Joe realizes only Ubik, a mysterious spray, could save his life, but an evil force seeks to prevent him from getting hold of the cure.

Image by Meul

Ubik, Philip K. Dick’s futuristic tale of telepaths and precogs, takes the reader into a surrealistic world of time reversal and pseudo-science. Like other successful sci-fi writers, he creates a compelling world where the readers are willing to suspend their beliefs and experience coin-slotted doors and refrigerators with attitudes. Joe Clip isn’t likeable but the twists in plot lead the reader guessing on the causes of the changes and what Ubik is. A fun sci-fi read.

Philip K Dick

Book Review of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

Handmaids are the vehicles of reproduction in the Republic of Gilead, where radiation from sabotaged nuclear power plants had reduced the birthrate and mutated three in four fetuses. The Angles root out threats to the theocracy—nuns, scientists, scholars, etc—by hanging them on the wall of Harvard Yard and displaying the hooded figures to the public. The bastion of freethinking has turned into an exhibit of tyranny. Instead of using Newspeak as in Orwell’s 1984, the leaders here deny the people education. But the idea is the same: without the ability to think and analyze and critique, the masses would only react to threats and occasionally rewards. Pavlovian conditioning.

Margaret Atwood (Photo by Vanwaffle)

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian novel in the tradition of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. The means of control may be different, but the goal is the same. A subservient mass that would accept the social norm and cultural values, whether they be good or bad, without questioning their validity and without recognizing their assumptions and biases.

Margaret Atwood wrote the novel in the shadow of the religious fanaticism in Iran and Afghanistan, but she dedicated it to Mary Webster, an ancestor on her mother’s side who was tried for being a witch in Puritan Massachusetts, but survived the hanging. She understood that such a nightmare could happen anywhere in any century.