Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought these books in Iowa in October (I read the first of the series, The Ghost Mine, last year). And I said of the first:

I had been reading a book about text games for a while when I started this book, so I perhaps too easily compared the first part of the book to a text adventure, with the way it mapped out the mining complex and described entrances and exits and things that might be useful (the last is probably more in how I was reading the book after weeks of reading about text adventures). The main character, Justin, is a bit of a cipher–we don’t know from where he’s coming and going, and the plot carries him along as he mostly follows the mysterious light or follows the actions or guidance of others (NPCs) in the book. About half way through the book, though, it turns from slow text adventure mapping and buildup to watching someone else’s Twitch stream of a Doom knock-off.

I thought since I just finished a book about an actual video game (Brute Force: Betrayals), I thought it might be a good idea to read them to do a little internal compare-and-contrast.

So: Remember, the plot of The Ghost Mine is that a space miner named Justin Barclay takes a job at an ACM mine, and strange happenings are afoot. It’s supposed to be a creepy space mystery of sorts as he finds out what happened in the abandoned mine where an accident took the lives of many. He finds that exposure to the valuable reactive gas that the company is mining caused an accident and killed the miners, but that some space magic had embedded the personality of one of them in the mine’s computer systems which led to the final dungeon crawl wherein Justin escapes as his best friend sacrifices himself, but he, the best friend, gets the space magic and is embedded in the prosthetic arm that Justin earned during the course of the book’s events.

These two books are a single story spread over two books, and the thematic feel of them differ from the first kind of like–oh, gods, here I am saying it–Alien and Aliens. This one is a more straight ahead action/thriller kind of pacing without the mystery and horror, although there is some horror in it.

So: Justin and his tech ghost have taken a position on an asteroid-mining ship, but a problem on an unstable asteroid damages the ship, and they land on a ship carrying thousands of colonist and a complete colony-in-a-box for repairs. At the same time, a scientific vessel is pursued by an advanced warship owned by ACM corporation trying to capture a small parcel it’s carrying. Neither of the vessels is a fan of ACM, and they end up teaming up along with a band of escaped prisoners from the Avarice, the ACM ship, and they try to escape as ACM captures the ship. However, when they’re backed into a corner, the attractive scientist opens the case and releases the weapon–a collection of self-replicating nanobots which capture humans and turn them into sharp-bladed zombies. But ACM has a secret weapon of its own: a bio-engineered super-soldier.

So it’s then a series of set pieces and shifting missions to destroy the nanobots or to escape the ship or destroy the ship. It wasn’t bogged in the “mystery” as the first was. In the almost six hundred pages between the books, it has a number of subplots so that you never knew what might happen next. It also had a varied cast of characters, and they for the most part were really at risk (perhaps except for the main character). The characterization and writing lacked real depth, though. I mean, it’s no worse than men’s adventure fiction, but it’s not John D. MacDonald.

From my limited exposure, I’d also say that Wolf seems to be improving as a writer. I’ll not dodge his other books as I have other writers (such as, say, Cary Osborne, whose book Iroshi I read in 2018, and I’ve quite passed over the other two books of the trilogy in the years since). I do so hope that his imagination broadens so all of the plots are not torn from today’s video games. Although given one is Santa versus Zombies and another is a developer gets trapped in his own video game, perhaps not.

I have no idea where I picked up this slender volume of poetry to check to see if I paid close to the cover price for it. I don’t know if you remember seeing these out and about around the turn of the century (that is, the end of the 1900s), but Dover Thrift Editions came out with a long line of classic (and out of copyright literature) printed on cheap (but not quite newsprint) paper and priced only a dollar. New. They cannot have been making a mint on it, but they were certainly doing the world a service up until the world, or at least the American public, couldn’t be arsed to spend a buck to read classic literature.

The book’s title does not overstate its case or selection criteria; it is not the best poems, and it does not include anything modern–we get to the middle of the 20th century with Auden, and we’re done–of course, the poems most likely had to be out of copyright in 1998 to make a dollar book possible. It’s got your Broadstreet (1 poem), it’s got your Longfellow (5 poems), it’s got your Poe (3 poems), it’s got a fair share of Whitman (7), one by Abraham Lincoln, 10 by Emily Dickinson, a couple by Stephen Crane, 3 by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 9 by Frost, and then we get into the 20th century hucksters including Carl Sandburg (3), William Carlos Williams (5), Wallace Stephens (4), and only two by Edna St. Vincent Millay. The book pays maybe oversized attention to the poets of the Harlem Renaissance with two by Langston Hughes and a couple by poets whose names I did not recognize.

A good smorgasbord, though; although I’ve read some Longfellow, Millay, and James Whitcomb Riley (not included in this book) recently (for MfBJN values of “recently”), I’ve been away from Frost for too long (over twenty years? Oh, my god).

I flagged a couple poems as being especially good, including:

• William Cullens Bryant’s “Thanatopsis“–or at least I flagged some lines in it, but I’m not really sure why.
• Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” which I will read again when I get to his complete poems which I bought in 2020 and maybe in Lyrics of Lowly Life which I bought in 2023. The poem includes the line “I know why the caged bird sings, ah me” which is the source for the title of Maya Angelou’s autobiography. Shame that she eclipsed Dunbar, but she came into prominence when that was possible.
• Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night“.
• Vachel Lindsay’s “The Leaden-Eyed“. Geez, is this a poem that the world grew into. I am not sure I’ve heard of this poet before; I’ll have to keep an eye out for his works.

By its nature, even with the lesser lights thrown in, still better than most of the poetry I tend to read. Which I shall now return to.

Wow, okay, I bought this book seven years ago. You know, I know that books languish on the shelves here at Nogglestead for decades, but sometimes it catches me by surprise. Perhaps I would have expected to pick it up before now. Especially since a while back, Facebook decided I liked Dorothy Parker and started showing me groups that posted quotes from her. That came and went, and likely once this post goes live, it will come again.

So: The intro, which I read because it was by Dorothy Parker, a bit she wrote for The New Yorker in 1927 called “The Short Story through a Couple of Ages” where she slags a bit on genre fiction and the kind of wholesome stories that one would have found in Grit or Good Housekeeping even into the waning days of the 20th century and a whole hecka lotta magazines and monthlys in 1927. Instead, she swore she would do something different. And…. Well, okay, she wrote a pile of “literary” stories featuring the doxies and their admirers in New York in the flapper era. And although she was lightly mocking them, they would come some seventy years later to be celebrated in Sex and the City and various other things which probably did not solely ruin women’s expectations in relationships, like Dorothy Parker probably did not herself ruin people’s reading of short stories for pleasure, but they’re part of the deluge that did.

So: Yeah, 21 stories. Slice of city life monologues, most about going out and partying and the results thereof, although a couple married couples living the stifling married life, which contrasts with…. the stifling doxy/party life, I guess. A couple, three, or more of the stories are monologues, whether an interior monologue or someone talking to another person for the whole story, sometimes a dozen pages, which does not ratchet up tension even as it reveals a story. But they’re certainly not like the genre or short stories for the plebes. They’re targeted to a certain class, dear (and not one who would say char instead), even as they satirize probably the same class.

It took me a while to read it at 386 pages–I thought I’d breeze through it because it was witty short stories, but I found myself reading a story or two a night and then reading video-game-based science fiction or watching movies for the remainder of the evening.

I did flag a couple of things:

• I did not flag the use of no truck with slang construction as I noted. This instance comes from, what, 1925? 1930? It appears periodically throughout the whole 20th century apparently, although I associated it with the mod squad era.
• I actually related to the story “The Little Hours” which is an interior monologue of an educated woman perhaps in the party scene anyway who awakens in the middle of the night, and it’s a stream of consciousness bit about how she thinks about French novels and whatnot as she tries to go back to sleep. Lately, I’ve been awakening and thinking about projects I’m on, projects I don’t have, where I’m getting firewood this winter, and other practical concerns. I thought I might reproduce a little of it here for you, gentle reader, but I’m not sure anyone gets anything out of the blockquotes. If you’re really interested, it looks like a PDF collection that includes the story is available at the Internet Archive. It looks to contain all the stories in this volume, actually.
• “The Little Hours” also contains, in a montage of poetical quotes near the end, I think I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. I just bought and read Vigils by Aline Kilmer, Joyce Kilmer’s widow, and when I bought the book, I told the shopkeeper whom Joyce Kilmer was and that that poem was quoted in two movies. Two old movies now I guess. If only I had read this volume before, I could have added a ninety-year-old short story to the list along with a thirty-year-old movie and a forty-year-old movie. To show the kids how “hep” I am.
• A short story has a character say that New York show business is run by Jew bastards. In 1930, this was probably the equivalent of using the baddest word to highlight that the speaker is a, erm, flawed person (if not outright bad). In the 21st century, this might very well mark the opposite in New York Society–whatever is left of it.

So with Dorothy Parker, you’re better off with the bon mots, I guess. Or maybe the poems. Which include one called “The Small Hours”, I learned whilst searching for “The Little Hours” on the Internet. I am sure I have run across her poems from time to time. Maybe I even have a volume of them around here. Or maybe I will someday. Maybe I’ll pick up a volume of her nonfiction. But Collected Stories Volume 2 (if it exists)? Well, probably that, too, because I am indiscriminate in my purchases, and seven years later I might read it.