Space Vulture Vs. The Braindead Megaphone

Recently I promised myself a return to the excitement and fun of reading when I was kid by finding a cheesy sci-fi novel and swallowing it whole.

And there, on the shelf of new arrivals at the library, I saw Space Vulture. It looks like a sci-fi novel from the fifties - by design. It is a new novel that tries to capture the spirit of. . .well, right there on the cover it promises that I will "have a thrilling adventure that would have been serialized in Planet Stories."

Well, I never read Planet Stories, nor had I heard of it. On a family trip, holed up in sleeping bags and soda pop and comic books in the back of a big yellow Buick station wagon on the way to a beach, I did once have a copy of Amazing Stories, which felt conspiratorial, due to one story about a horny robot and another accompanied by a pencil drawing of a topless woman whose proportions, while never actually found in nature, regularly filled the pages of 1970's sci-fi adventure magazines, which I usually never read.

Anyway.

Then I noticed that one of Space Vultures' authors is an archbishop. I had to give it a chance.

And guess what!

It is one of the worst books I have ever read. And while one could argue that that is meant to be part of the charm, due to the authors' attempt to capture the nostalgia of the magazines they loved as kids, it seems to me that they aren't fully in on their own joke. The endless irrelevant exposition, the heavy handed characterization, the instantaneous and unmotivated epiphanies, the obvious moralization. And the prose. Uff-da, as my Norwegian friend would say.

Meanwhile, passages from George Saunders The Braindead Megaphone continue to resonate.

So here's a game. Identify the following passages as being from Space Vulture, The Braindead Megaphone, or, for fun, the Wikkipedia entry on the rock band Styx. Send or post your results, and you could win a sandwich or a $1000.00 shopping spree.

Ready? Okay!

1. Is human nature such that, under certain conditions, stupidity can come to dominate, infecting the brighter quadrants, dragging everybody down with it?

2. In the outer regions of civilization, laws carried as much weight as anything in outer space. Zero.

3. There is, in other words, a cost to dopey communication, even if that dopey communication is innocently intended. And the cost of dopey communication is directly proportional to the omnipresence of the message.

4. The room’s security-sealed door irised open. “Been quite awhile, Gil,” said a deep, imposing voice that Gil recognized instantly.
Gil faced his captor, the legendary Galactic Marshal Captain Victor Corsaire. “Not long enough,” snarled Gil.

5. Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three-dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture.

6. “You can’t buy justice.”
“Sure I can. I do it all the time.”
“Not with me. You never have, you never will.”

7. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.

8. Bob had been killed a year ago in a hovercraft accident. He had been Cali’s soul mate, and she missed him terribly. Her only comfort came from her firm belief that he had gone to a better place.

9. But more than fear, our new braindeadedness has to do, I think, with commerce: the shift that has taken place within our major news organizations toward the corporate model, and away from the public-interest model. The necessity of profit is now assumed for our mass-media activities. This assumption has been shorn of all moral baggage: it is just something sophisticated people concede, so that other, more vital, discussions of “content” can begin.

10. “No gratitude necessary, ma’am. Only doing my job. Protecting good folks like you and yours from the menace of evildoers.” Uttered by a lesser man, this proclamation would have come off as arrogant or boastful or pompous. Coming from Victor Corsaire, it rang true, a plain and simple statement of fact.

11. We have met the enemy and he is us, yes, yes, but the fact that we have recognized ourselves as the enemy indicates we still have the ability to rise up and whip our own ass, so to speak: keep reminding ourselves that representations of the world are never the world itself. Turn that Megaphone down, and insist that what’s said through it be as precise, intelligent, and humane as possible.

12. In the bright sunlight his almond-shaped green eyes looked black. Slanted, hooded, and unreadable beneath his silky lashes, they hinted at the soul of a demon in their sinister depths. It was his eyes, always his eyes, that his many victims saw in their nightmares.

13. [T]he process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and, most importantly of all, tells us what we really think. But this process takes time, and immersion in prior models of beautiful compression.

14. “. . .I’m a slaver. I deal in human trade. I am going to sell you as chattel.”
“How dare you? That violates basic human dignity. You horrible, evil man!”

15. Humor is what happens when we’re told the truth quicker and more directly than we’re used to.

16. Physical labor was such an aggravation. How did people stand it in the old days, before robots?

17. There’s something sacred about reading a book like Slaughterhouse Five, even if nothing changes but what’s going on inside our minds. We leave such a book restored, if only briefly, to a proper relation with the truth, reminded of what is what, temporarily undeluded, our better nature set back on its feet.

18. When he left home, Corsaire had joined the military. Those were the final days of what history books called the Millennium War, an almost unending battle for control of vast reaches of empty sky. It was an era when a soldier’s life span was measured in days, even hours. On the galactic battlefield there had been no place, no time for long-term romantic relationships.

19. If, at the moment when someone cuts us off in traffic or breaks our heart or begins bombing our ancestral village, we could withdraw from judging mode, and enter this other, more accepting mode, we would, paradoxically, make ourselves more powerful. By resisting the urge to reduce, in order to subsequently destroy, we keep alive – if only for a few seconds more – the possibility of transformation.

20. After a frantic last-minute search, the band brought on singer, songwriter, and guitarist Tommy Shaw as Curulewski's replacement.

21. America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom of the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: He, I didn’t do it. It looks at inequality and says: All my life I have busted my butt to get where I am, so don’t come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope for the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the tom part back up the river where it belongs.

22. The band was accused by a California religious group and later the P.M.R.C of backmasking Satanic messages in their anti-cocaine anthem, "Snowblind."

22. This is us. This is who we are. This is the PRKA [People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction]. To those who would oppose us, I would simply say: We are many. We are worldwide. We, in fact, outnumber you. Though you are louder, though you create a momentary ripple on the water of life, we will endure, and prevail.
Join us. Resistance is futile.

23. Meanwhile, James Young collaborated with Jan Hammer and recorded his own solo album, City Slicker.

Good luck!