Frankenstein - Chapter 2

So I’ve gotta say, though I’m realizing this is kind of ironic given how I’ve spoken of him so far…I kind of identify with kid Vic. I’m so at odds with myself over saying that. Like, on the one hand I feel like maybe this was Shelley kind of intentionally making Vic have a background that maybe a lot of bookish kids had (I have no idea what childhood was like back in Shelley’s time… it’s actually kind of an overlooked portion of history, the lives of children throughout history). But there are some parallels there. So, I guess a bit of personal info may be of use here.

I was always one of the more bookish kids when I was young. I usually had a book out from the library more times than not, and I would read secretly at night past my curfew, and sometimes my mom would catch me and tell me to go to sleep. I got really adept at listening for them and pretending to be asleep when I heard her door open. This said, the kind of books I read weren’t what other children who read a lot were often absorbed with. I mostly checked out reference books and encyclopedias. I think around the time I had seen a few episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and that got me interested in Greek mythology. My elementary school had this encyclopedia of greek myths with wonderful illustrations of all of the different monsters and I loved it. From there I developed an interest in monsters generally. I’d look through drawing books on them, I had a lot of reference books about folkore and mythical creatures. Eventually, this led to a broader interest in the supernatural and paranormal, as I was fascinated particularly with the chupacabra. Fascinated and kind of afraid/excited all at once. I remember I’d started to read books that dealt more and more with the paranormal and I explicitly remember that for several school career days I stated that I wanted to be a cryptozoologist. It all seemed really fascinating to me, and I think that interest in the ethereal/occult has kind of stuck with me as I’m now working on my MA thesis in performance studies exploring ideas of spirituality, ritual, and archetypal dreaming.

For this reason, I guess, I’m kind of able to easily imagine being a kid (though I was a good deal younger than Vic is here) and finding a strange book and becoming really fascinated with the unique ideas in it. Victor, on a trip with some of his friends when he’s thirteen, finds a book by Cornelius Agrippa. He becomes fascinated with these books on occultism and esotericism. He’s very quick to give an interesting moment of reflexivity here, saying that he figures if his dad had said why he believed Agrippa to be not worth reading, than Victor probably would’ve put the book down and not looked back. I find it funny that of the hard sciences, the only one he seems interested in is mathematics. Again, this is something I can relate to. I’m terrible at mathematics, though I try to read the analytic philosophers when I’m able to because I think it’s really fascinating stuff.

Victor becomes a bit of a starry-eyed occult-enthusiast. He’s interested by a lightning storm, and theories of galvanism (I know where this is going) which sort of overtake his fondness for the Agrippa, Magnus, and Paracelsus. Although he’s still mournful about ever having gotten involved in any of this.

I will say, as I’m writing this out I’m wondering why I was originally so mistrustful of Victor. I guess there’s still definite room for this to change. My initial image of him was as a wholly abusive and cackling m** scientist, who shouts at Igor and does… I’m not exactly sure… with Adam. This is actually pretty refreshing. Yeah, he’s overdramatic at times, but he’s also rather pensive, thinks fondly of his friends and family, and in particular I note that he’s rather aware of his privilege all things considered. He’s aware that, at least among his peers, his parents are particularly loving and supportive and he recognizes that this has had an impact on his ability to even pursue intellectual goals.

Interested in where this is going. The chapters are much less plot driven than modern books and are centered around particular themes instead, it seems.

Frankenstein - Chapter 1

Well, Victor really knows how to start off a story doesn’t he? This chapter is spent with the stranger recounting his parentage. Particularly, of how his father and mother met and started their family. So, who are Vic’s parents?

Well, his father is… unnamed. Apparently his father was some sort of public official in Geneva (this is before it was a part of Switzerland) and had a friend by the name of Beaufort who fell upon hard times. Papa Frank at one point visited his friend, who he hadn’t heard from in some time, and finds that the situation that he and his daughter Caroline are in is dire. Caroline is keeping herself and her father afloat, as he’s sick with what I can only suspect is depression. Eventually, Beaufort dies and Vic Sr. marries Caroline. It’s noted that the two have quite an age difference between them, which is kinda squicky to me, but the book doesn’t linger on it too long.

The two of them had baby Victor and by all accounts it seems that Victor was raised in a loving household with kind parents. The family traveled a lot, and at one point Caroline travels to a part of the poorer district near Lake Como. Evidently, this was something that the two regularly did. By all accounts they were charitable, as Caroline always tried to keep in mind that she had once been poor.

It’s kind of strange discussing books that were written in a different time. At once I feel called on to address some of the strange social habits of characters in the books, but I feel like if I were to call out every instance of a problematic occurrence in 18^th-19^th century Europe, there’d be much less review of the book. As such, I’ll probably keep the commentary on the society which the characters inhabit to a minimum in these reviews, unless I feel it’s particularly rearing its head as a thematic element.

The point of this venture, though, is that Caroline adopts a young girl named Elizabeth from a poor family who had been taking care of her. Elizabeth is described as being a particularly adorable child, and all of the people back home seem to love her. Caroline presents the two kids to one another and they become more than siblings, they are great friends who are calling one another “cousin”. Vic displays a particularly possessive tone toward Elizabeth, and implies that, at some point in the past, she died.

Frankenstein - Letters

Alright, it’s about time I sat down and actually read this thing. Frankenstein’s one of those books that some classes were assigned in high school, but it sort of varied from teacher to teacher whether you read it or not. As such, I never have. I do know some things about the novel just based on cultural osmosis and from knowing about the movie, which I also haven’t seen. So here’s what I do know about it.

-The general plot? That Dr. Victor Frankenstein makes a monster and it’s just kind of exploring the ramifications of that? I think he escapes. I’m pretty sure he meets a blind man at one point and maybe kills a child accidentally?

-The monster can speak in the book.

-The monster, though unnamed in the movie and book proper, was referred to as Adam by Mary Shelley.

-I’ve heard that the character of Victor Frankenstein was sort of Shelley giving a light ribbing to Lord Byron.

Other than that, I don’t really know much about it. I know it’s considered the first sci-fi book by many, and it straddles the line between that genre and horror. I also know that it’s subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” so I imagine that there’ll be more mythological/religious parallels made surrounding the monster as a sort of transhuman entity.

That all said, let’s start this:

An interesting way to set up the story. We’ve got a series of letters from a man named Robert Walton to his sister Margaret Saville back in England. I notice that the letters are all dated “17—“, a deliberately non-specified date I guess. I’ve never been sure what non-specific past dates really add to a story. I always sort of figure that they’re there to set a scene and give a general feel to a piece, but it sometimes seems to me like that should be able to come across without a vague time period laid out. I think it’s different than guessing into the future as well, since that is necessarily guesswork anyways. Anyways, just a brief thought.

Walton writes to his sister that he’s exploring the North Pole, and I do like that he outright states that Robert is writing to Margaret per her request. It lends some character to a relationship which I doubt we’ll ever see both sides of. Robert’s up in the Arctic for fairly vague reasons. Seems like he’s mostly just interested in exploring it and learning about it so that he’ll become famous. While he’s up there though, he sees a giant man on a dogsled moving across a giant field of ice his ship is stuck in.

The next day, a second man appears next to the ship, him and his dogsled both in shambles. Walton’s crew takes the man aboard and finds him to be a melancholic sort of person who’s here chasing down the giant sledman. Walton and the man strike up a friendship and begin to talk. Maybe this is just a historical data thing: but how is Walton getting these letters to his sister? The first few he states that he’s sending with various merchants he finds, but the final few once he and his crew are stuck in the ice? I’m left wondering.

I’m going to assume that the man they picked up is Victor F. and the figure he was chasing was Adam. I know that most depictions of the book’s Frankenstein look different, but I’m having a lot of fun imagining Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein on a dogsled in the Arctic. Also, is Vic always going to be this.. dramatic? I kind of want him to just be like this all of the time. He’s kind of (really) a showboat and I get the feeling that Walton is puffing the image of him up a bit because he identifies similarly to him as some lost hopeless romantic/knowledge seeker.

The book’s taking a Heart of Darkness turn by the end, with the stranger saying he’ll tell his story to Walton, so that he might get the moral which the stranger himself has learned the hard way. To be wary of the pursuit for more knowledge.

Cosmic Puppets, final thoughts and future of the blog

This book was certainly not what I was expecting. Certain aspects of it (the reality questions and interest in religious themes) are pretty standard Dick stuff, but the way that the book was marketed as “Galactic Invaders have taken over a small town!” is incredibly misleading. The book feels more like a Neil Gaiman fantasy novel than a sci-fi piece. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and I wonder as I read more in this genre if I’ll find more instances where the two (sci-fi and fantasy) blend together.

Speaking of reading more sci-fi! I enjoyed doing this enough that I’m going to hope to make a project out of it! I realized about midway through that not only have I not read much of Philip K. Dick, but I haven’t read much of sci-fi at all. I’ll be reading more sci-fi from here on, and potentially watching some as well.

Some projects that I’ve listed for my reading:
The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Dune – Frank Herbert
The Foundation Trilogy – Isaac Asimov
Solaris – Stanislav Lem
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeline L’engle
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur Clarke
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula LeGuin
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Parable of the Sower – Octavia Butler
American Gods – Neil Gaiman (I know it’s more fantasy, but I like Gaiman and haven’t read it)
Y: The Last Man – Brian K. Vaughan
Ghost in the Shell, 2nd gig
Ergo Proxy
AND MUCH MORE

Truly I just went to various blogs where people made lists of “notable or required sci-fi” and picked the ones that I’d heard about before. I’m always willing to take suggestions, especially if people want to point me in the direction of sci-fi authors who aren’t white cis dudes, I’d appreciate it. All suggestions are welcome, however!

I do think I’m mostly going to do this in chronological order. It seems that a lot of these sci-fi authors knew each other and some of their pieces were written almost in conversation with one another. So to that end, I want to start far back and move forward. I know that theoretically I could really stretch the bounds of sci-fi, but I want to get to some of those big names sooner rather than later, so there are a few books that might be considered parts of the genre that I won't be including.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 15

Chapter 15
A pretty slow closing chapter to the book. Ted packs up his things and bids the town farewell as the old town slowly returns to its normal state. Some funny descriptions in here, like how in certain stores, pockets of the illusionary town still exist, so a person can literally walk into the other dimension, although when they do they transform into whatever they were over there.

Christopher bids Ted farewell before shifting back into his original, unchanged state. This version only has a vague impression that he knows Ted at all, being only somewhat aware of the whole battle for the town.
As Ted drives off, he thinks to his wife, who he basically accepts is going to divorce him (apparently this is a bit of a theme in Dick’s work), and he seems to be okay with that; rather dismissive of Peg in fact. He looks out the window and is generally left in awe of Armaiti in a pseudo-religious type of worship.

A few closing thoughts next post, and also talking more generally about sci-fi stuff in general, as I want to continue doing this.

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 14

Chapter 14: TW for talk of misogyny and brief mention of drugs

Well, that’s one way to solve a cosmological battle of deities that’s taking place over a small Virginia town.

Turns out the last chapter ended with a fakeout. A happy one at least! The golem on Ted’s shoulder turns out to be the one which Mary had controlled, and is now fully inhabiting. The rest of the battle feels very grey goo-ish, with Ahriman taking a pretty passive role in the whole “consuming everything” business. Most of the work is done by the rats, golems, snakes and spiders. However, Mary has a plan, and begins guiding Ted along, fighting off rats with her tiny spear (made of a needle stuck to a twig). I love the image of guy just running through a horde of rats with a tiny person on his shoulder fighting off the horde with essentially a nail. It’s pretty comical.

Eventually, Ted figures out what he needs to do. Or rather, Mary tells him. He needs to wake up Ohrmazd. Making his way through the crowd, Ted realizes who it is. Doc Meade. Ted drags the doctor out of his car and reminds him who he is in a very Spirited Away manner.

Suddenly the book takes a turn that is really hard to describe. I have a bit of an issue with sci-fi writing generally, and PKD in particular that shows up here. The reality breaks, while certainly impressive, are usually handled in a fashion that’s a bit over-the-top. I know that might seem unintuitive, of course a reality break should be over the top. It’s a break in reality. However, I feel like Eye in the Sky did it well with the subtle implications that something was just “off”, and the much more delicate understanding of “reality” as a philosophical construct rather than a purely ontic experience. There are passages in here that describe like, the entire unmaking of a star cluster and the pulsing feeling of Ted’s body floating outside of the whole of the known universe and it’s all a bit too much.

My problem, I guess, is that it’s hard to visualize the gravity of the situation. I can imagine a star exploding in my head, as though it were on a film. However, it seems like in the imaging of that occurrence, the magnitude of the event is undone somewhat. Similarly, when I attempt to imagine the magnitude of such a fundamental shift in reality as the universe being potentially unmade, it’s impossible to visualize. Any image doesn’t seem to quite capture the sheer awesomeness of the event being described. Honestly, I think I’d need to be tripping to really get into the headspace where I could both visualize the happenings and imagine their impact.




Anyways, the long and short of this sequence is that Ohrmazd and Ahriman just kinda… leave. I realize how ridiculous it is, but that’s what happens! They just start fighting and go carry on their fight somewhere else, and thus Millgate returns to normal! I feel like we’re less in sci-fi and more in weird fiction at this point. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just kind of ludicrous how rather mundane the actual events that solve the conflict end up being.

Ted and the Wanderers quickly gain the upper hand in the fight and drive away the rest of Ahriman’s horde. The town and the people in it are slowly returning back to the way they were before The Change occurred.

Which just leaves Mary. Ted talks with her, and it’s… I don’t know. It hits a bit of a mixed feeling with me. So basically, what happens is Ted asks Mary who/what she really is. She replies that she is Armaiti, daughter of Ohrmazd. Mary was the form she took during the eighteen years since The Change. She was the one who engineered events so that Ted would leave town before Ahriman arrived, so that some years later she could bring him back and awaken her father to go fight Ahriman once more. Ted and Christopher then set about returning her to her original form, and it’s described as being this rather tall and inhumanly beautiful woman before she then dissolves back into the Earth. On the surface level, I’m fine with all of this. It’s a pretty satisfying conclusion to the chapter. However, Dick inserts this weird conversation between Ted and Armaiti in which he kind of objectifies her body while in golem form, talking about how “she sure doesn’t look thirteen anymore”. It’s a really strange juxtaposition and I’m a bit put off by it. I guess on the one hand I understand the urge to position and describe deities as being human-like but epitomes of human beauty in some ways. However, the beauty described here (apart from the final line “she was the essence of generation, the bursting power of woman, of all life.”) is rather cis-het male oriented in what it lingers on (hair, breasts, eyes, sleek body). I’m not sure exactly what would have made this better. Like I said, at one level I understand the tendency in writing to make gods “beautiful” but on the other it certainly seems rather normative. Ahriman is a grey-goo blob, Ohrmazd is a giant radiating glow of night sky with stars in place of a head, Armaiti is a really pretty woman?

All this said, the chapter ends with a nice sentiment by Armaiti to Ted. Ted kind of feels like I do about the absurdity and randomness of Millgate being selected as the site for this battle to take place, and how ultimately the decision was fairly arbitrary and that Millgate didn’t really have any sort of significance. I think the solace she gives Ted is pretty helpful with regard to this:

“It was small compared to the greater picture. But it’s a part of the greater picture. The struggle is vast; much bigger than anything you can experience. I’ve never seen the real extent, myself, the final regions it’s entered. Only the two of them see it as it’s really waged. But Millgate is important. It was never forgotten.”

[since writing this review, and finishing the book, I’ve found a comparison online that likens the whole sequence with Ohrmazd awakening to the intro of Katamari Damacy, and I think the comparison is actually pretty spot on to my problems with the way it’s written. It’s kind of campy in its execution of this great mystical event].

Cosmic Puppets, Chapter 13

Chapter 13

I’m hoping the book will get better at this point. I’ve heard that PKD sometimes has endings that are not the best, and as this book heads toward its ending, I’m getting the sense that this may end up being one of those cases.

The Wanderers’ headquarters comes under attack by Peter… or, more appropriately now, Ahriman. Seems Peter was somehow able to transform into Ahriman, or perhaps Ahriman was sealed inside of the body of Peter.

That said, the descriptions of Ahriman are pretty generic. It reminds me vaguely of a being from Digimon Tamers. Most of the rest of the chapter is just pretty mindless action. Ahriman’s creatures attack and the Wanderers are pretty thoroughly trounced. The chapter leaves off with a golem about to thrust a spear into Ted’s eyes. I’m hoping the book goes back to some of the big questions it was toying with. There’s a brief mention in this chapter as Doc Meade is afraid of the town changing back, fearing that he’ll no longer be human or will somehow “die” in the shift. This is good stuff! It’s just kind of sad it’s got this mediocre action plot around it.