Not-Review: World War Z

I'm a very bad flyer. Right now, in my wallet, nestles the business card of a very nice Egyptian man who sat next to me and let me paw his arm and knee in sweaty, shaky panic as we descended into JFK Airport during a tornado warning. This was during the Arab Spring uprisings and he was on his way to fetch his mother in Cairo and bring her back to live with him in Los Angeles. Between the two of us, I think he had a hell of a lot more to be worried about. But panic is stupid and irrational that way, and there's really nothing I can do about my fear of flying except get on the damn plane and wait for it to be over.

I tell this story because I'm panicking right now for a very stupid and irrational reason, and it's time to land this plane. I have to stop reading "World War Z."

I hate zombies. I hate how fucking ubiquitous they've become in modern culture because it means I have to encounter them on every geek website and convention I go to. I'm not a big horror fan to begin with--I don't much like being scared, I get nightmares, and I grew up in a place that believes very strongly in the existence of ghosts, gods and ghouls. Tell a grown-up in Hawaii that you had seen a ghost, and they're probably going to say, "Yeah, there's loads of them around here." So my mind is very ready to believe.

As you might guess, I loved this show. It confirmed all my worst fears about the world.

And yet, despite knowing this about myself--despite getting nightmares from "Zombieland," which is a goddamn comedy about zombies, I find myself spending my Sunday afternoon in a soggy mass of fear-sweat reading this stupid book. Why did I think it would be a good idea to pick up Max Brooks's "World War Z" from a Brooklyn stoop and take it home with me? What possible outcome could I hope for other than sweaty, shaky panic and the utter conviction that society is about to collapse under the weight of the undead hordes? Was it because Max Brooks is Mel Brooks's son?

I may have had very different expectations for this book.

I don't know. But I had to stop reading and come write this instead, even though I can't really write a review of a book I haven't exactly read. I mean, I read the first 10 pages, and then I skipped ahead and read a 30 page chunk in the middle of the book, thinking that maybe if I jumped to the middle of the action, where it's all zombie-killing all the time, I wouldn't be as scared.

I should say that as far as zombie stories go, this one is pretty good. It's hard to come into a genre that's already overstuffed with variations on a theme. We've had slow zombies, fast zombies, romantic comedy zombies, zombies as a metaphor for racism, for capitalism, for sex--you name it, somebody has probably put zombies in it. "World War Z" sets itself apart from the pack by its form more than its story. It's written as an oral history of the titular World War Z, which ended 10 years before the book opens. The author collects first-person accounts from survivors about their experiences in the war, and I read them and cry and cry and cry.

That's all I've got in terms of a formal review. I'm sure this is a very good book, but I'm going to dump it on the doorstep tomorrow. The truth is, zombies hit a little too close to home. They're a manifestation of humanity run amok, a blight upon the earth, an unstoppable force whose existence signals the end of society. And I don't need a reminder of that shit. A hurricane brought floodwaters within two blocks of my home; student loan debt stands at a trillion-plus; the coral is dying in Kona. Cataclysmic destruction is real enough in my world. I don't see the need to compound it with the fear of fucking zombies.

Scifi Review: The Left Hand of Darkness

The sixties. Hell of a decade for science fiction. Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse-Five," Robert Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land," Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electrical Sheep," aka "Bladerunner," and "The Man in the High Castle," aka "The Nazis Won."

But like everything that ever existed, it's not all about white dudes. This week we're going to look at Ursula K. Le Guin's 1969 novel, "The Left Hand of Darkness," which broke new ground for the exploration of feminism in science fiction. The book raised the bar for the sci-fi genre in general, reaffirming its importance in the family of literature as a vehicle for challenging deeply held societal concepts.

"Left Hand" takes the concepts of sex and gender--which are so fundamental to the identity of humans everywhere that they seem to fall under the category of "instinct" rather than "cultural norm"--and asks what would happen if they simply didn't exist. What would humans be like without genders or sexual identities?

I feel compelled to point out that this isn't like the Junior Anti-Sex League in "1984," nor is it the weee, free love let everyone fuck everyone else! in "Brave New World." Sci-fi abounds with societies in which sexual behavior is distorted or controlled by governments and outside influences--that's pretty much the world we live in now, which is why so many authors of all genres like to write about it.

Nor is it like that one episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" where the writers tried to make a point about gay rights by having an alien from ambi-sexual, genderless race "come out" as female and declare her love for Riker, only to be kidnapped by her family and go through gender conversion therapy to get rid of all the lady in her.

To be fair, who wouldn't turn lady for that face?

The examples above start with the assumption that humans have genders and sexual identities, and extrapolate situations in which those attributes are shaped or controlled to achieve various societal and cultural outcomes. "Left Hand" is significant because it begins with a different premise altogether. It asks readers to imagine a world in which humans don't think about those things because they simply don't exist. What if we really could just treat each other like "people"?

The world of "Left Hand" is populated by humans who are gender neutral the vast majority of the time. Once a month, they go into "heat," as it were, wherein their bodies are able to get pregnant or sire children. For those few days, their bodies have a "gender" or a "sex" as we might conceive it, but because people have an equal chance of being either gender every time they go into heat, such distinctions are largely meaningless. Except for those few days of the month, the humans have neither the urge nor the ability to have sex, so while the society has "room for sex, it is a room apart."

Ironically, I have to spend a lot of time talking about sex in order to introduce a society in which sex simply doesn't matter. Except for a few pages toward the beginning, describing what I've outlined above, the plot of "Left Hand" isn't at all concerned with sex, gender, or sexual identity. The most significant aspect of this book, the one everyone talks about when they talk about "The Left Hand of Darkness," is the least important part of the actual story, which is about a small planet's first contact with alien life. But that's how central sex is to our own society--it's there even when it's not.

So, the story is about first contact. A human from our Earth, Genly Ai, has come to the icy planet of Gethen as an envoy for this vague, benevolent organization of planets called the Ekumen (the United Nations or Star Fleet equivalent of this world). He is there to convince the people of Gethen that they are not alone in the universe and invite them to join the other planets in trade and cross-cultural exchange. One high-ranking member of the government, Estraven, believes in Genly's mission and what he represents, but Estraven is outmaneuvered by another politician, who wants to use Genly's presence to start a war with another country. Estraven and Genly both end up exiled to the other country, which is a totalitarian state. They have to escape from a concentration camp and get out of the country over a glacier in the middle of winter, with the slim hope of contacting Genly's ship and crewmates in orbit around the planet if they reach civilization alive.

I remember being somewhat perplexed the first time I read this book, because I thought it was going to be explicitly about sex and power, a la "The Handmaid's Tale." It's actually an adventure story, full of political intrigue, daring escapes, and treacherous journeys through merciless but beautiful landscapes. Gethen is in the middle of an ice age, so the characters are always on the razor edge of survival, and tiny decisions can mean the difference between life and death from exposure or starvation. (It's winter here in New York, by the way, and I hate it, which is why I decided to read this book.)

I read in a couple of different reviews that "Left Hand" is considered soft science fiction, meaning it's more concerned with characters and society than with physics or engineering. And it's true that while the narrator Genly Ai is an alien from a society that has mastered space travel, Gethen itself has about the same technology as the era in which it was written, minus television and air travel. However, I find it more challenging than other hard sci-fi works I've encountered, such as Isaac Asimov's "Foundations," because reading "Left Hand" requires a constant readjustment of the reader's relationship to the Gethen characters.
I had to view them as both male and female, and remind myself that their actions and attitudes have to be seen as coming from both sexual identities. It's quite a mind trip. I can't accurately describe how it makes me feel as a reader to work so hard at undoing my social conditioning about sex and gender, just to understand a character and a world that has neither. That, for me, is the very definition of "speculative fiction." And it is hard.

No pun intended.

Final Grade: B+. Lots to like in this book, and it's challenging without being boring. But it's essentially a buddy story, so people who go into it expecting to see advances in technology or sweeping societal changes may be put off by the intimate nature of the plot.

True crime: Columbine

Let's just pretend that four month break never happened.

To celebrate the month of October, I checked out a bunch of true crime books from the Brooklyn Public Library. I wanted to be scared about things that could actually happen to me instead of zombies.

The first book I read was "Columbine," by Dave Cullen (2009). The 1999 massacre at Columbine High.School in Colorado was the first major media event of my life. That sounds a little sick, like it was my first Superbowl or Macy's Thanksgiving Parade, but it's true. It was the first news story I ever noticed, because it was about people in my age group (or slightly older, I was in middle school). So much of the follow-up commentary was about people like me, what we were doing, and how we were feeling

Reading this book, I remembered what we all "knew" about Columbine. The shooters were bullied loners; they were in a gang called the Trenchcoat Mafia; they were after jocks, minorities, homosexuals, and/or Christians; they could have been helped if only they'd been discovered earlier. The whole thing turned into this juicy morality tale about the importance of early intervention in the lives of troubled teens, and it was a satisfying enough narrative that it remains the accepted explanation of the Columbine Massacre even though it's almost entirely wrong.

The truth is more mundane than the accepted tale of fragile young men pushed to the breaking point by a cold, uncaring society. Society had actually poured a lot of effort into the two. Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were in court-ordered therapy for committing a string of petty thefts and vandalism in the years leading up to the massacre. They had therapists, doctors, parole officers, medication, stable home lives, and a strong network of friends and co-workers. They weren't loners, they weren't unpopular, they didn't hate jocks, and they weren't bullied. "Trenchcoat Mafia," one of the most lurid and compelling parts of the story as it broke, was a nickname given to a group of kids at Columbine the year earlier. The term had fallen out of use by the spring of 1999, and anyway, neither of the shooters were part of it to begin with.

What actually happened is that Harris was a full-blown psychopath. The efforts of his parents and doctors to turn him into a caring, productive member of society either amused him or infuriated him, and he felt no remorse or empathy for the people he hurt or killed. He was a real-life Joker who just wanted to watch the world burn.

Klebold was depressed, suicidal, and obsessed with a girl who never seemed to have spoken to him outside his own mind. His motivation is a little harder to figure out--how much of his involvement was due to manipulation by a brilliant, charming psychopath, and how much of it was just his own desire to die and take as many people with him as he went down?

I can't recommend this book enough. It's an incredibly compelling story to begin with: an in-depth look at one of the most shocking events of 20th century America. But when you come into it thinking you already know everything there is to know about the Columbine Massacre, like I did, you come away with a new awareness of the power of the media. We 21st century folks are familiar with the 24-hour media spin cycle, but in a way, Columbine is where that all began. (It was, for example, the first time emergency response crews had to deal with victims still inside the building using cell phones, which seems like a no-brainer now but was so radical at the time that it literally changed the rule book for emergency crews.)

Final Grade: A.