BOOK REVIEW: INTER ICE AGE 4 (1958, 1959, 1970)

by Kobo Abe

Illustrated by Machi Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders. Published in 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf.

Original Japanese language version serialized in Sekai magazine in 1958 and 1959. Novel published in 1959 by Hayakawa Publishing.

Publication information sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the Wikipedia article for Inter Ice Age 4, and the 1970 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the novel.

. . .

“This dog, can it catch fish?”

. . .

“The most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.”

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

One discovery leads to another.

A mystery is interwoven into other mysteries.

The more data you collect the more nuanced your overall picture of life becomes, until, inevitably, there’s no more mystery to it . . . right?

Hmmm.

Or is it more like you ask questions that just lead to more questions with no end in sight?

You’re asking me?!

Katsumi is a government computer engineer who works with a powerful forecasting machine in a near future Japan. This adorably retro predictive engine utilizes punch cards, presumably by the truckload, although the ability to reduce human nature to patterns of holes on paper could be a sly commentary on the vaulting ambitions of those who dream of totally reductionist quantification schemes . . . and/or the arrogance of novelists presuming to capture a convincing portrait of existence via language marks on pages. Science and literature make for quirky, dysfunctional comrades in Inter Ice Age 4. 

The Russians and the Americans also have predictive engines. Japan-a nation that’s already been nuked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is sandwiched between the atom bomb armed factions. Protracted Cold War Nuclear Jitters has everyone wondering about what’s around the corner. Is Communism the future? Capitalism? Can technology solve the problems created by technology? What about other horizonal crises? Resource depletion? Petroleum shocks? Carbon pollution? Global warming? Rising water lines? Can a future predicting machine be sustained by hard, unyielding quantitative facts and logic alone, or does it also require soft, squishy qualia? Also, if a machine tells us what’s going to happen next . . . is that the machine ordering us around or an infallible prognostication? What’s the difference? How do we know we’re not feeding prejudicial parameters into the system? Is it possible to counteract unconscious bias? Do the experts running these miraculous machines care about anything other than locking down their own domain of hyper-analytic power so governments and corporations have to come calling politely with hat in hand? Could this all be a pseudoscientific scam?

Meanwhile, parallel to the computer shit there’s a bunch of bio-shenanigans going down. Human and animal fetuses are being secretly harvested/kidnapped to be used as fodder for sinister genetic experiments. Two murders have seemingly been committed to keep the lid on this next level Frankenfuckery. 

Katsumi stumbles across the fetusnappings while running an experiment with the forecasting machine. At first, Katsumi dismisses the bio-shenanigans as delusional ravings but then his pregnant wife is coerced into what at first seems a forced abortion by mysterious people who managed to impersonate him. Katsumi receives threatening phone calls from someone able to perfectly impersonate his voice. In a world where everything can be totally quantified it may end up being a purely procedural endeavor to output copies of human beings. 

Narratively, Katsumi functions as a detective who grapples with mysteries outside and inside himself. His interactions with the forecasting machine resonate with our contemporary dilemmas of generative AI and its attendant hype and hallucinations. Katsumi begins as the technician maintaining the machine intelligence, but ends up facing his own obsolescence within its oracular insights.

Of course, Katsumi could be cracking up under work stress. Inter Ice Age 4 has a peculiar narrative hiccup wherein we find out sorta late about Katsumi’s personal life outside his job. Katsumi-who narrates much of the tale-describes his marriage and home life almost as though he were recounting a hypnotically repressed alter ego. I choose to interpret this as a satirical commentary on the notoriously grinding demands of Japanese work culture, but it may also be a consequence of an already complex narrative being imperfectly translated into English.

The forecasting machine develops some wild talents. It’s artificially intelligent. It can talk in convincingly human tones. If used in conjunction with specialized probes it can scan brains-even dead ones-to formulate semi-self-aware simulations of people that can communicate. That’s right: a computer as a medium in both the technical sense and the spooky sense. Technology even encroaches upon the realms of the occult in the world of Inter Ice Age 4, as it would seem supernatural/spiritual phenomena also submit to radical quantification. 

There’s a big twist, of course. Everything’s connected. Inter Ice Age 4 seems to suggest that humans operating under high tech nation states will have extreme difficulties adjusting to global crises that demand massive changes in how we all live. This is due mostly to rigid hierarchies and overspecialization. Each of us has our job, our role. We go to work secure in the knowledge that we have our chosen/imposed thing that we do. But if a big enough crisis threatens to overturn this order, how do we get everyone on board to make necessary changes to prevent disaster? Inter Ice Age 4 assumes that the powers that be would act coercively-that, in fact, a new power base would secretly emerge from within the established order to make otherwise impossible decisions for all of us. The reality disrupting crisis is just too severe to realistically expect squabbling atomized individuals to make effective democratic decisions. Even totalitarian Communism is too rigid, too stratified by the dictates of its cumbersome party elites to react in time. Inter Ice Age 4 is a provocation, in this sense, asking us to look beyond our current limits and roles to consider what lies beyond our specializations, our professionalisms, our nationalisms, our bigotries.

Inter Ice Age 4 also takes perverse joy in describing an aquatic mad science facility and what all it is doing to those human and animal fetuses. These passages are grotesquely comical in the way one expects from the cynically deranged Kobo Abe-a writer famously disillusioned with Japanese Imperialism, Soviet Communism, all forms of nationalism, and capitalism. I’m sure these passages describe impossible things . . . and yet there's so much detail that it’s weirdly convincing. Inter Ice Age 4 functions well as a pitch black science fictional comedy of errors. It even has a happy ending. Sorta.

BOOK REVIEW: CITY AT WORLD'S END (1950, 1951, 1983)

by Edmond Hamilton

First published in the July 1950 issue of Startling Stories. Published as a hardcover novel by Frederick Fell in 1951. 

This review is based on the Del Rey Science Fiction paperback edition published in July 1983.

Publication information is sourced from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and the copyright page of the Del Rey book. 

. . . 

"And the released force of the first super-atomic bomb did it. It blew this town into another part of the space-time curve, into another age millions of years in the future, into this dying, future Earth!"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

City at World's End is a cornball redemption of America's angst over inventing nuclear weapons. 

Let me see if I can explain.

The allegorically named American city of Middletown gets blasted by an experimental nuke and catapulted into a bizarre future. Middletown is home to some kind of Top Secret atomic research and development project. The husbands do the science shit, and the wives stay home, in the kitchen, and in the dark. Middletown's importance as a military asset has painted it as a target, or there has been a horrific accident. The text is somewhat ambiguous on this point. Instead of destroying Middletown and killing all the people, this new kind of nuke blasts a hole through the fabric of space/time causing the city and all its residents to be transported into the far future. 

In the far future, the Middletowners seem to be the only humans left. There's an eerie abandoned shell of a futuristic city just down the road full of fantastic technology. The Middletowners relocate to this more secure location. Soon, future humans and extraterrestrials arrive in space ships. It is revealed that humanity abandoned the Earth to establish an interstellar dominion, one made possible, in the fullness of time, due to the groundwork laid in the 1940s by the advent of nuclear weapons and all of the attendant scientific advances that grew from harnessing the power of the atom. 

So, uh, the logic-if you can call it that-at work here is that as horrific as the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, and as terrorizing as the proliferation of doomsday weapons was to everyday people on planet Earth . . . eventually . . . somebody somewhere made a bomb so powerful that it skipped over Genocide and just went straight to Space/Time Warp. And, luckily, Middletown and its people got blasted by one of these "special" nukes as opposed to the bland and boring "incomprehensible slaughter" kind. It's rather convenient.

Now, City at World's End is told from the perspective of a nuclear physicist named Kenniston-possibly named for the Lensman Kimball Kinnison-who must maneuver from one chapter to another, all the while performing significant Protagonist Actions until the story ends. These actions include learning extraterrestrial languages, giving stirring speeches to doofus crowds of Middletowners that seem like set-ups for The Simpsons jokes, and ditching his Earth Wife for a bodacious Space Babe on the very last page. Along the way, he saves the Earth and wins the respect of an intergalactic coalition of humans and extraterrestrials. At one point, Kenniston has to convince the intergalactic future folk to let him use an even more special kind of nuke to restart the rundown core of Earth. So you see, nuclear weapons seem scary to Earthfolks in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but who knows? Maybe in the far future, a super-duper nuke can be used to reignite the core after running down to fumes.

Yeah . . . City at World's End isn't terribly convincing. It is painless enough to read, though, coming as it does from the prolific science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton who had written scores of sword and planet tales for the sci-fi pulps by 1950 when this story was first published. Hamilton's prose style is concrete, no tricks, and he even generates some creepy mystery vibes in the early chapters. Later, when the Middletowners deal with the intergalactic folks, the writing loses some of that tension, but it is easy enough to follow. No mention is made of Communism, the USSR, and the USA doesn't seem to have any real politics, aside from fully normalized misogyny. Technology drives everything. Ultimately, City at World's End is more of an attempt at a dramatic techno-allegory than a swashbuckler, so give it points for ambition. If one looks at science fiction as a way of processing anxieties about the future, and the disturbing potentialities of advanced technology, then I guess City at World's End is a way of using storytelling to make sense of nuclear weapons. We use religion to make sense of suffering and death. City at World's End seeks a deeper purpose for The Bomb.

One of the more amusing episodes involves the Middletowners' first contact with extraterrestrials who are described with a chimerical mixture of human and animal traits. Nothing too alien. I could picture the action figures, the Saturday morning cartoons. The adults of Old Earth react with fear, but their unbigoted children love these beings from beyond the stars. I wondered if young George Lucas read City at World's End and got a nuke-induced future prophecy of a fortune hustled from mass produced action figures. I guess that's one more reason to stop worrying and kiss The Bomb. If it helps, you can imagine one of those "special" nukes as being shaped like a pair of gleaming steel ass cheeks.

BOOK REVIEW: HEAT 2 (2022)

 

by Michael Mann + Meg Gardiner

Published in 2022 by Michael Mann Books aka William Morrow aka HarperCollins aka Rupert Murdoch.

. . .

"Rumors you hear about Ciudad del Este-consider 'em all half true. Whatever you want, whatever you need, people here will find a way to get it for you. If . . ." He rubs his fingers together. "Capitalism uber alles."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Heat 2 is a sequel/prequel to the 1995 movie Heat written by the movie's writer/director Michael Mann in collaboration with the respected novelist Meg Gardiner. Heat 2 is not a movie-as of this writing-but is, in fact, a book with words you can read if you are so inclined. It tells a story that picks up right after the ending of the 1995 movie, and then it goes back in time to what happened before the events of the movie, and then it goes forwards past the movie, and then it goes back, and then forwards-Heat 2 goes backwards and forwards in time. It jumps around, as your parents might say after watching Pulp Fiction.

So, in order to get the full value of Heat 2 you have to have seen the movie Heat. And if you haven't seen the movie, well, there's a concise prolog that serves as a "Previously on Heat-"

-BTW try saying out loud "Previously on Heat," it's good for a laugh-

-so, I guess Heat 2 technically functions as a stand alone read . . . but not really. Of course, I cannot assess this objectively, because I've seen Heat numerous times over the years. My widescreen double cassette VHS copy was a prized possession of my adolescence, and my 2005 two disc DVD edition has seen much play over the years. If I were into numerology-two tapes, two discs, Heat 2-my head would be kinda fucked'n'sputtering right about now. In my opinion, Heat 2 is marketed towards the fans, and we're probably the ones who'll get the most value out of this spinoff novel.

If you have never seen Heat, it is a hard-boiled crime thriller about a supercop on the hunt for a supercrook. The supercop and the supercrook-a professional thief-develop an unexpected rapport and mutual respect even as they escalate their war-in-the-streets. Basically, they are the ultimate frenemies. The supercrook tells the supercop that he will never return to prison, even if that means blasting the supercop. The supercop tells the supercrook that he, too, is not going to give up, even if that means he has to kill someone he sorta respects. It's all very fraught. The supercop is played by Al Pacino. Robert De Niro played the supercrook. The scene where these two connect over coffee has probably launched a fair few Honors Thesis statements about the nature of masculinity and friendship, or so I assume. Heat also features a large supporting cast of cops'n'robbers, all played by top notch actors. Among them is another supercrook memorably portrayed by Val Kilmer. Heat 2 primarily revolves around these three: Pacino, De Niro, and Kilmer-the same three actors marketed as the stars of the original film. 

Now, these characters do have names: the supercop is named Vincent Hanna; De Niro's supercrook is named Neil McCauley; and Kilmer's supercrook is named Chris Shiherlis. However, even the marketing copy on the dust jacket mentions the actors' names, so we are clearly supposed to visualize the people from the 1995 movie even as we read the book. Of course, you could imagine different people in these roles. Bruce Vilanch could be interesting casting for Hanna. Or maybe even G.Gordon Liddy. Did you know Liddy had a career as a film actor? As for McCauley, either YouTube's Rich Evans or Shaq would work for me. I could see Report of the Week-another YouTuber-as a fitting replacement for Kilmer. But those are just my picks. Feel free to come up with your own casting choices!

Heat 2 offers a lot of 'Extended Universe' content, if you will, including flashbacks to both Hanna's and McCauley's experiences with the madness of war in Vietnam; Hanna's cocaine and Adderall habits; McCauley's attempts at maintaining a family; and, most significantly, Hanna and McCauley's parallel histories of making moves on the streets of Chicago. But my favorite passages concerned Shiherlis, especially his endeavors in the Paraguayan Free Trade Zone of Ciudad Del Este, in which Mann and Gardiner rework material from the 2006 movie version of Miami Vice. Shiherlis's evolution into a kind of anarcho-capitalist mafia's field commander has the feel of a Grand Theft Auto avatar evolving into a criminal iteration of a 4x strategy gamer. It's undercooked, but the ideas are there. It's also weirdly hilarious. There's even a needle drop of Tupac's "California Love" as Shiherlis guns his motorcycle through the traffic of the Paraguayan tri-border Free Trade Zone. 

I was less taken with what Heat 2 does with Hanna and McCauley. Much of the novel revolves around their conflicts with a character who is original to Heat 2: a scuzzbag named Otis. Otis did not work for me. I was not convinced that a character as single mindedly violent and reckless as Otis would achieve the station that he eventually occupies in Heat 2. Moreover, what was fascinating about Heat was the moral confusion experienced by Hanna and McCauley as they realize their true soulmate is someone they'll either have to kill or be killed by, and how that dilemma illuminates the wastelands of their private lives. Otis is just a bad guy from a 1980s action flick who deserves to get lit up, a scapegoat of a kind that allows Heat 2 to avoid the really difficult shit that Heat faced head-on, with no apologies, and no compromises. So, unfortunately, even as a Heat fanboy, I cannot recommend Heat 2.

Allegedly, Michael Mann has plans to make a film out of Heat 2. If he does, I hope he shitcans the Otis character, and just focuses on Shiherlis's adventures in the Free Trade Zone and beyond. It's undercooked in the text, but the basic ingredients are there. Just needs a little more time in the oven. Basically, I hope the movie ditches the prequel stuff, and leans into the sequel material. Although, honestly, I have no plans to watch it no matter what form the movie version takes. First off, Heat 2, the book, left my ass kinda chapped. Secondly, the 1995 movie has no need of a sequel. Heat's loose ends and ambiguities are part of the point. If you've seen it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't seen it, well, I recommend you give it a shot. Even if it doesn't sound like your kind of movie, you may be surprised by its depths. Hanna and McCauley are a couple of hardasses, yet the final moments of their saga are unexpectedly tender. Heat 2 doesn't have anything like that, but it does have a big fiery car crash/shootout on a freeway. 

Which is the damndest thing, isn't it?

The book ends up dumber than the movie.

Sorta genius, that . . .

BOOK REVIEW: THE BOX MAN (1973, 1974)

by Kobo Abe

English translation by E. Dale Saunders.

Published in 1974 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Original Japanese language publication in 1973 by Shinchosha.

. . .

"It would be better for you not to forget that you are merely my scribblings. You say that I tend to cling too much to the box? As soon as I dispose of it as you advise, you too will completely disappear with the scribblings."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

In Tokyo, middle-aged men are abandoning their lives to become Box Men, which entails giving up their jobs and their families-if they had such relationships in the first place-to don modified refrigerator boxes and shoot at each other with airsoft rifles modified to shoot lead pellets. So, if you see a tall cardboard structure with a pair of legs and a rectangular opening at eye level-hey, it's a thing now, so know that you're not hallucinating.

Of course, a Box Man might be hallucinating. It's possible that one could be quite detached from reality in order to become a Box Man. And if you are indeed a Box Man yourself, and you start seeing Box Men everywhere, well, maybe you're just seeing what you want to see. Or you're just picking up the signal of other Box Men from the noise of mainstream existence because you're focused on hanging around other people who are like you. 

There's also this thing where when someone sees a Box Man they may be filled with a kind of cryptic fear and loathing at the sight of such a strange being, and so they seek to attack a Box Man . . . but then the attacker finds themselves compelled to become a Box Man themselves, perhaps upon finding the remains of a modified refrigerator box abandoned by an injured Box Man. Every shell needs a snail, right? 

The Box Man is a novel which starts out describing what seems to be a bizarre but semi-plausible social phenomenon. But read into it deeper and it spins out into a fractured yet recursive narrative that gives one the sensation of a novel in the process of rewriting itself. The Box Man starts with a news article about the oppressive cycle of police round-ups of homeless people in Ueno. This article comes across as an inspiration for what follows-what if disenfranchised people made their own way of life as Box Men as a fuck you to respectable society? But then the narrative seemingly collapses down into the mind of some authorial figure-Kobo Abe himself?-who burrows deeper into the labyrinth of his own imagination. This author seems obsessed with a pair of recurring figures in his ongoing narrative: a doctor whom he considers a Fake Box Man and the sexy stripping nurse who is the doctor's consort. We get variations on themes of voyeurism, guilt-ridden masturbation fantasies, and endless arguments over who gets to be a 'real' Box Man as opposed to a fraudulent Box Man. Abe once studied to be a doctor but never practiced medicine, so perhaps this is the author confronting some leftover regret about abandoning a mainstream life to become a weirdo artsy writerly type. 

All of this is, according to the author-or one of the identities assumed by the author-being meticulously scribbled all over the inside surfaces of the modified refrigerator box. Occasionally, addenda are written upon different colored sheets of paper, and there are also various marginalia scribbled between and among different blocks of text. 

The Box Man is a restless, frustrated text that starts out as social satire about capitalist alienation, drifts into ruminations upon sexual fantasy and sexual humiliation, and seemingly recapitulates themes of postwar identity abandonment from other Abe works such as The Woman in the Dunes. And then it changes the ground rules. It spins variations on the idea of being a Box Man. It glories and/or despairs in the absolute solipsistic power of an author endlessly re-authoring his own tale. Dreams, nightmares, and tawdry pornographic stroke-off fantasies collide. The authorial presence flies free into abstractions and visions and animal transformation fantasias only to come crashing down into peeping tom scenarios worthy of Letters to Penthouse. To don the armor of the Box Man is to enter into a state of transformation both powerful and isolating. Think of the towering anthropomorphic battlesuits from future war anime mecha franchises such as Mobile Suit Gundam, Armored Trooper VOTOMS, and Neon Genesis Evangelion, wherein humans gain power but suffer psychological trauma on the battlefield. Now think of the contemporary phenomenon of the hikikomori-people who isolate themselves by seldom leaving their rooms, sacrificing normal relationships and careers as they are disabled by extreme social anxiety. The Box Man could well be adapted into an anime titled Mobile Suit Hikikomori, in which one achieves an ambiguous freedom from the rat race by merging with a bizarre kind of armor that marks one as an outcast even as it facilitates grandiose visions and hallucinations.

BOOK REVIEW: OFF THE EDGE (2022)

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

by Kelly Weill

Published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2022.

. . .

"Hughes had an advantage that most other would-be zetetic Flat Earthers lacked: he knew how to build a rocket and had no fear of dangerous stunts."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You ever wonder where that Flat Earth bullshit comes from? Off the Edge has answers. 

You ever wonder if and when people who have bought into Flat Earth bullshit will grow up and read an actual introductory astronomy book, or, at the least, watch a Crash Course YouTube video on the subject? Off the Edge . . . well, it has answers, but none of 'em are easy or satisfying. In fact, Off the Edge makes the case that even discussing such fringe ideas as Flat Earth poses a risk of pushing the true believers into a more fervent defense of their crackpot beliefs. There's also a risk of inadvertently spreading the intellectual contagion to vulnerable minds by even offering up the option of believing in something as wacky and contrarian as Flat Earth. I mean, to even engage with such ideas-however critically-means acknowledging that they have a following even if it's nothing but a hypervocal, insular minority, and this merest acknowledgement may be twisted into a form of validation. Mockery and satire have comparable perils in that true believers don't like having their core beliefs ridiculed, and so they dig in deeper.

Off the Edge is written by a reporter-Kelly Weill-who spent time attending Flat Earth conferences and interviewing the people she encountered, including key organizers and leaders. Weill puts the Flat Earth idea in its historical context as well as showing how it became incorporated into other aspects of conspiracy thinking. Weill shows how Flat Earth flourished despite being treated as a joke for many decades by scientists and journalists, and achieved a sinister new life with the ascendancy of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, and Qanon. Moreover, Off the Edge illustrates how people can gain power through appealing to antisemitic racism, anti-immigrant bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia; and by exploiting popular resentment of government, academia, and scientific institutions. Even the most elite of elites are prone to conspiracy thinking, including politicians, wealthy CEOs, and even Winston Churchill. Weill reminds us that Churchill-who stood strong against Nazi Germany-was himself an antisemite who actively promoted conspiracy theories falsely accusing Jewish people of evil plots. Yes, even those we revere as heroes can fall prey to crackpot thinking. 

Weill describes the systemic factors that contribute to people embracing conspiracy theories as a perverse means of empowerment, but she also explains the downsides. For every successful grifter, there's a score of largely unrecognized  folks who lose jobs and friends over crazed social media posts. Tying one's identity to Flat Earth and other conspiracy theories can drive people to make disastrous financial and relationship decisions. Family gatherings become argumentative battlegrounds. Bonds are sundered. Any dinner or PTA meeting or city council can become a (not so) civil war as conspiracists assert their extremist identities and play out persecution fantasias before the public eye.

Extreme conspiracy beliefs can also lead to acts of harassment,  full-on violence, and terrorism. Parents whose children were murdered in mass shootings have been targeted by denialists who claim the shootings were staged by the US government. Anti-Asian hate crimes have been motivated by conspiratorial lies that exploit the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors and nurses have been harassed by anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. Most notoriously, the grotesquely idiotic Pizzagate shooting was motivated by conspiracism. It's all a joke until people are harmed or killed. 

Off the Edge is a deft and sobering read. It reminded me that many of those who truly believe in Flat Earth and other forms of conspiratorial nonsense are being scammed by the handful of heavy operators who build media empires, political machines, and merchandising regimes off the backs of gullible folks. It's kind of a conspiracy to benefit the conspiracy theory grifters-which is a bit of a mindfuck to contemplate. 

BOOK REVIEW: EXTRA LIVES: WHY VIDEO GAMES MATTER (2010)

by Tom Bissell


Published by Pantheon Books in 2010


...

"As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have some how spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it. I can think of only one personal activity I would be less eager to see audited in this way, and it, too, is a single-player experience."
                                           -Tom Bissell
...

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Tom Bissell is a video game junkie. No question. He is also a very smart and articulate writer, and, like William Burroughs with heroin, he writes about his addiction, his master, with obsessive zeal and even offers up some brilliant critical insights into video gaming as addiction, as a multi-billion dollar industry, as an art form just now being broadly recognized as such, and as a path to self-destruction. His book Extra Lives is an entertaining and disturbing mixture of memoir and journalism. He combines descriptions of his experiences playing video games with interviews with some of the most successful game designers currently working to create an intriguing dialectic between a subjective confessional narrative and a critical consciousness aimed at picking the minds of video game designers and theorists, and exploring what it is that we seek when we play video games.

What is it that we seek when playing video games? For Bissell, it would seem that his title says it all: more lives, more life, we want to crawl into some other identity, usually one that is heavily armed, and essentially immortal and indestructible. Sure, you get killed all the time in games, but then you just go back to your last save point. Video game death is almost never permanent.

But Bissell is also looking for quality stories and characterizations, and he makes the case that video games are in a kind of renaissance in terms of games' capacities for deep stories, open-ended game play, and sophisticated characterizations. Video games are now capable of visual spectacle above and beyond what's possible at the cinema, that earlier, cruder form of virtual reality. Moreover, video games allow you to take control of the action. The player is totally in control.

Except when those arbitrary cut scenes kick in, and then you have no choice but to follow the plan laid out by the game designers. Bissell asserts that this tension between freedom of play and the coercive demands of an overarching narrative that intrudes on the illusion of freedom and empowerment one experiences while gaming is one of the key hurdles video games must overcome in order to achieve . . . but Bissell doesn't resolve the tension. He merely illustrates it.

But if one stops to consider what he's suggesting, he's basically calling for video games to be able to offer completely free-form, endlessly variable experiences. The ultimate merger between the demands of narrative in the literary sense, and what Bissell refers to as ludonarrative, which could be characterized as the the story which grows naturally out of the act of play, would basically be an extra, or second, life. It's a paradox. It's a mindfuck.

Think about it. Gaming is absorbing because it is an escape. And the more detailed and graphically and aurally impressive games become, the more we want to play them. But if a game were to totally replicate the free form experience of being alive, it would include massive amounts of minutiae which might destroy the gaming experience, to make it so demanding that it would cease to be fun. Even if the game was a fantasy experience including magical powers and heroic deeds it would be work to keep up with it. And then you would go looking for some other form of escape . . . to escape your escape . . .you 'd need not just a second life, but extra lives.

It makes me think of the Konami code: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, START.

How many lives does the obsessive gamer require?

And talk about a warped sense of entitlement. It's not enough that our high tech civilization gives us such advanced amusements, but now we expect them to substantially or even completely replace our meatspace lives. But maybe there's something to this. If we all just stayed home and became absorbed into virtual existences, maybe we'd be less inclined to drive fossil fuel powered vehicles and engage in real world wars of adventure and folly. Of course, the electricity expenditure would go up, but where are people driving to, anyways? There are no jobs to go to. Most people are overweight, out of shape, and disinterested in meeting face to face.  Now, everyone works from home as the ultimate hi-score warrior, conjuring up second and third and fourth lives from the digital void. Game on!

Bissell's logic is that of the junkie chasing the ultimate high. The junkie who has come up against the outer limits of his accumulated chemical resistances. Bissell doesn't hide the fact that being hooked on video games has come at a high personal cost: a damaged work ethic and seriously strained, perhaps even broken, human relationships. Bissell is to be commended for being up front about this aspect of gaming addiction. He isn't exactly apologetic, but he does acknowledge the rather steep downside of his devotions.

This downside is illustrated by his adventures playing Grand Theft Auto IV while coked out of his mind with a buddy. They made a point of playing GTAIV while coked-up. Sometimes the Scarface poster isn't enough.

Bissell comes across as a guy who is seeking unusual, obsessive, and dangerous experiences. He was in the Peace Corps for a stretch until he dropped out, he's worked as an embedded reporter in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has burned through relationships with women at a rapid clip, and he has also Hoovered large quantities of cocaine with a friend while fanatically playing Grand Theft Auto IV. His consciousness seems to be divided between the here and now and some sort of idealized zone of continuous peak experiences. As a reader, I was captivated by his engaging, intellectually substantive, and humorous writing style, but I also wondered what it must be like to be friends with this guy. I would imagine his friends and family worry about him and his well-being. I hope he gets a handle on his appetites. It would be a shame to lose such a talented writer.

----

I've talked mostly about the personal side of Extra Lives. But the book isn't all druggie confessional narrative. Bissell went out and interviewed a some of the people who were instrumental in creating games such as Mass Effect, Far Cry 2, Braid, and Fable 2. These are all excellent pieces of reportage and analysis, and the most I can say is read them for yourself. They are most enlightening.

But something about this book really got to me.

 Tom Bissell  writes the single best obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil  for PS1 that I have ever read. It is also the only obsessively detailed description of the experience of playing the original Resident Evil that I have ever read, but sometimes you just grok a winner when you're in the presence of one, you know? Bissell breaks down that epochal game's technique: its deliberate pacing, the Mystery Science Theater quality voice acting, the camera angles which obscure as much as they reveal and create anxiety and make you wonder from which direction the enemy will strike, the sinister ambiance of the scoring and soundscaping, and then he goes one better: he creates a brilliant interpretation of why the controls for the very first Resident Evil game kinda sucked. In Bissell's view, the clunky controls augment the terror, the anxiety, the suspense, and function in a way antithetical to the first person shooter games which were then, and still are, all the rage.

In an FPS, you want responsiveness, you want to be able to mow down the enemy, reload instantly, and move quickly to avoid being surrounded or cornered, but in Resident Evil the player character can't just shoot from the hip. You gotta press the button to draw your weapon, then you gotta press buttons to position your character to aim at the enemy, and there's no goddamn cross-hair! There's no on-screen targeting icon to indicate whether you're actually locked on to the zombie or hunter or giant spider or undead attack dog--all you can do is hope you're pointing in the right direction and fire at will. In an FPS, the design of the controls facilitates fluidity and fast paced play. In Resident Evil, you are forced to be deliberate with every step you take, each hallway you choose to explore, every shot fired because you're unlikely to survive too many full-on encounters with the enemy, and the supplies of ammunition are severely limited.

And then there's the typewriters and those ink ribbons. In order to save the game, you gotta find an ink ribbon, and then you gotta get to a room with a typewriter. Every time you save, you use up an ink ribbon. The supplies of ink ribbons are not unlimited, so saving your game becomes as much a part of your strategy as how you use your ammunition, whether you choose to fight every monster you come across, or beat a strategic retreat.

Bissell describes all of this brilliantly, capturing the mindset one evolves to survive in such a dire gaming scenario, and how such games frustrate and addict those who play them in equal measure. As I read Bissell's description, I thought back to when I first got a PS1 and how one of the first games I got was Resident Evil. Most of my Christmas vacation was spent plugged into that sinister mansion. Hours passed like seconds. I played from three in the afternoon until seven in the morning, woke up at five p.m., played 'til seven or eight in the a.m., and I went a week without seeing any sunlight. In Florida. And Resident Evil wasn't all fun. It made me want to pull my fingernails out, just to try and jack myself back into real life with some overwhelmingly agonizing act of self-torture. It made me scream and swear and invent new uses for the words fuck, shit, goddamnit, and mother long before I had ever read a David Mamet play or watched an Angry Video Game Nerd video. It fucked with my patience and my sleep cycles, and it also hooked me like few other things. Playing Resident Evil gave me some idea of what it was like to be a junkie.

BOOK REVIEW: MEDIC! THE STORY OF A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR IN THE VIETNAM WAR(2002)

by Ben Sherman
Published 2002 and 2004 by Ballantine Books/Presidio Press

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Ben Sherman was willing to serve his country, he was no protester, but he saw little point in invading Vietnam. He did not believe that Vietnam was a clear and present danger to the United States. He had serious moral objections to taking human life. But he didn't want to break the rules. He did everything in his power to legally register as a conscientious objector and seek alternative service status. He filed all the necessary forms in triplicate. He was directed to attend a hearing before a board of three World War 2 veterans. The Selective Service Board No. 23 in Sacramento, California asked him esoteric philosophical questions about how he would decide who would die in a situation involving a bus full of crippled school children, failing brakes, a precipitous cliff drop, and a baby left out in the middle of the road. Sherman asked them who left the baby out in the middle of the road, and they asked him if he was a communist. The board voted down his appeal 5-0, even though there were only three members present.

Sherman was inducted into the US Army. He tried to tell his superiors that he would never fire his gun at another human being. They called him a fucking commie. But Sherman was otherwise a model soldier and performed well at boot camp. But all that CO bullshit landed him in barracks arrest for four months, followed by an office assignment, and then, finally, due to recognition of his competence, he was placed with the Medical Corps.

Sherman went to Vietnam as a medic, and endured horror and folly. He survived and after many years wrote this book which is disturbing not so much for its descriptions of the horrors of war, although that is very much a part of his story, as it is for how the mobilization of a nation to war can destroy the capacity for individual citizens to make moral and ethical choices.

 People got drafted into military service back during the Vietnam War, which meant, if you were an American male of appropriate age, and your number came up you were going into some branch of military service. Your legal choices were limited. You could apply for conscientious objector status. Some got student deferments. Sherman was consistently denied in his legal appeals to become a CO.

 You could go outside the legal choices. You could desert. Some people faked mental illness, or went on the lam, or did everything in their power to convince the military gatekeepers that they were pinko commies or homosexuals or otherwise unfit for service. Those were the options. You went when your number came up, you tried to get a student deferment, you applied for objector status, or you left for Canada, or you tried to go on the run in the US, or you used deception to get booted out of the system.

Sherman went through all the legal channels to apply for objector status because he wanted to be honest, because he believed that stating his convictions clearly and unambiguously and within the legal framework was the honorable way to go. It would seem that honesty is not always the wisest strategy to get what you want. At the very least, Ben Sherman will never be known as a liar.

It's an open question whether the same can be said for Mr. Sherman's government.

 Why did we wage war against Vietnam? You could fill a library with the books that have been written attempting to answer this question. To fight communism? To counter the Domino Effect? To prop up a massive military industrial complex with an excuse to crank up the arms factories? Maybe it has something to do with who shot JFK if you're a conspiracy fruitcake.

Let's keep things simple: did Vietnam ever pose a true strategic threat to the United States? No. Could they have ever invaded our shores? No. So why did we go to war over there? I know of no sane answer. And, no, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I can sympathize with those that see far-reaching plots and schemes behind all the folly and bloodshed. I can understand why so many Americans came to lose faith in their government. Considering our early 21st century invasion of Iraq, and the open-ended War on Terror, we seem hell-bent on reenacting the same mistakes over and over again, on a geometrically expanding scale. Vietnam was a matter of invading just one country. Now we are committed to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no clear parameters for victory. Presumably, we are staying until we kill all the terrorists. This is probably neither possible, nor morally defensible when one factors in the inevitable destruction of civilian lives as collateral damage and the certain blood sacrifice of American and allied soldiers and contractors, but that doesn't stop dreamers from dreamin'.

But Sherman's book is no left-wing screed, I'm just bringing my own rants to the party. And even if you're a right-wing warmonger, there are plenty of reasons to read Sherman's book. The man writes vivid, no bullshit prose. Sherman includes many of the letters he received from the Army to document his ongoing status as a draftee, and his efforts to assert himself as a conscientious objector. He also includes personal letters exchanged with family and loved ones. All of this illustrates the kinds of words that he was confronted with, and what those words meant for someone who lived in the era of the Draft.

Sherman begins with a description of his first assignment as a medic: the body bags and the corpses that got stuffed into them. Sherman and the others on Graves Registration duty treated those dead soldiers with utmost care and respect, carefully brown bagging all the personal effects and belongings, and grooming the unkempt faces, to restore their dignity, and so that they got back to family and friends in as presentable a shape as possible. Sherman talks about the near unbearable smells, and plugging rectums with cotton balls.

Sherman begins with this description of Graves Registration duty, I believe, so that the reader knows right from the beginning that people get killed in a war. It's not Nintendo. It's not a game. When the decision is made to invade another nation with military personnel, people are going to die on a massive scale.

 Soldiers, no matter how well-trained, no matter how noble the cause, will be killed on the battlefield. They will not be coming back. Civilians will die. No matter how careful, no matter how grand the strategy on the part of military planners and leadership, unarmed non-combatants will be killed as a matter of course. Property and infrastructure will be obliterated, and whole populations will be displaced.

The costs are enormous both to the invader and the invaded. Politicians are fond of saying that there's no such thing as a free lunch when it comes time to do away with entitlement programs for the poor, but they never seem to apply the same logic to defense entitlements. Drawn out military engagements drain the coffers and do damage to the trust that citizens are willing to put into government institutions. Many soldiers come back traumatized by the experience of war to failing economies, scant job prospects, and inadequate health care.

The reality of what happened between the United States and Vietnam, once upon a time, is perhaps too grim  to face. It's better to marble it over with movies and books about heroic strategies, valorous sacrifice, and the might-a-beens: if only we'd used this strategy or that strategy, if only we'd cut off the food supplies by seizing the rice paddies, and what about nuclear weapons? My own father, a Vietnam veteran, perhaps insincerely, told me he thinks we should've used nuclear weapons in 'Nam. I say "perhaps insincerely" because I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But, as nearly as I can tell, war has a capacity to distort people's sense of morality and decency. So maybe he meant it. Even if there were no serious plans by the leadership to do such a thing, and I don't think there were, the overall adventure left a lot of people feeling betrayed, angry, and disenchanted. Those that feel let down may harbor deep resentments and occasionally entertain ghoulish fantasies of retribution and victory.

But Sherman didn't let his experience with war cloud his judgement to such a degree. Instead, he decided to confront it as best he could by telling his story from his perspective. In a way, it's rather inspiring to know that someone could go through such things and still have a grasp on reality. Why don't guys like this run for elected office? Maybe we don't want that much reality.