A Second Trip to Mars from Damien Larkin

 

Blood Red Sand – Damien Larkin (2021)

 

            In 2019 I was introduced to a young science fiction writer named Damien Larkin after his publisher sent me a review copy of his debut novel Big Red.  Once I read the book and wrote up a review, I wondered when Mr. Larkin would transport me once again back to Mars to catch up on the doings of the Mars Expeditionary Force.  Upon receiving a shipment from the good people at Dancing Lemur Press I knew that time had come.  Inside was a review copy of Damien Larkin’s second novel Blood Red Sand for me to enjoy.

            The world of science fiction is as wide and varied as any other “genre.”  Blood Red Sand like Big Red, is a work of militaristic, alternate-history science-fiction, akin to Heinlein or other well-known sci-fi giants. Every author brings something of themselves to the stories they tell and it is evident while reading Blood Red Sand that Mr. Larkin not only experienced combat, but he understood the true feelings and horrors experienced by soldiers of all types, in all times.  The way he captures this on the page is thrilling and repulsive at the same time.  Mr. Larkin does not ever aggrandize combat or the military for their own sake.  Instead, they are the vehicle for the very large story he is telling.

            As with other novels, I do not wish to give away plot points, or anything that may take away from a reader’s enjoyment of Damien Larkin’s books.  I refuse to provide a synopsis.  Good science fiction needs an air of mystery going in, to let the mind be blown as it experiences the story.  What I can say is that this novel follows the events of Big Red at the same time that it precedes them.  Is that confusing?  Welcome to science fiction!

            One of my favorite writing devices that Damien Larkin utilizes is the way he separates the various “scenes” and chapters.  As we go back and forth between our protagonists and antagonists we see what they think, how they act, and why they feel they are in the right.  This is something that applies to nearly all wars, the idea that both sides are adamant they fight for the “true cause.”  Our heroes, regular men placed in extraordinary circumstances, understand that all that matters is one’s survival and that of your fellow soldiers.  Too often I have read fiction works that portray the military men and women as mindless, as robots trained to kill, not feeling the effects of what they do and what happens around them.  Much science fiction focuses on the bigger picture, not the individual story.  Damien Larkin knows the truth.  He shows those of us who have fortunately never been in combat what it is really like, including the worries, doubts, fears, and most of all the chaos.  There were times when I would read 10-15 pages in a frenzy!  It is an exhilarating read.

The filmmaker Truffaut supposedly once said, “There is no such thing as an anti-war film.”  He meant that any film about a war, even one vehemently against war, inevitably will aggrandize and glorify combat, soldiers, and their camaraderie, even as it tries to decry war itself.  Some may say this applies to books as well.  I think Damien Larkin has succeeded in telling a militaristic tale without forgetting the trauma and horror caused by wars and battles, especially to the innocent people on the sidelines.  I look forward to more stories about Mars and to whatever else Mr. Larkin puts his mind to write!

(This novel is available for purchase here: AMAZON )

A Great Debut from a New Science-Fiction Talent!

Big Red – Damien Larkin (2019)

The life of a reader contains many bittersweet moments.  For me, one of the worst is discovering a writer that is new to me, but that I later find out has already passed, and will no longer be writing new work.  This always fills me with an odd sadness, as if I missed the boat somehow, knowing all I can do is catch up on what I already missed.  The exact opposite situation has occurred as I read Big Red, the debut science fiction novel from author Damien Larkin.  I was hooked in from the very start of this book, and my interest and enjoyment grew with each chapter I read.  Damien Larkin crafted a tight, increasingly suspenseful, and altogether satisfying bit of science fiction. 

Big Red begins with our narrator waking up, unable to explain where he is, who he is, or what has happened to him.  It is obvious he is involved in some sort of military operation, from the people he sees around him.  As we move into the story, the protagonist is grilled by doctors and commanding officers, essentially forced to try to remember what has happened to him.  Mr. Larkin’s cleverness as a writer comes through in the manner by which he divided up the threads of the story as separate chapters, allowing the reader to follow a story that, in a lesser writer’s hands, could have easily become confusing. 

Early on, our hero discovers what we readers have gathered from the novel’s title, the fact that he is not on Earth, but on Mars.  What he felt was to be a straightforward term of service is instantly complicated.  The problem with finding oneself caught in a web of bureaucratic, military, and government obfuscation is that to find the truth, you have to fight through so many layers of LIES that it becomes nearly impossible to know who to trust, and what exactly is happening to you.  As our hero grows in experience and knowledge, so the reader become aware that something is terribly wrong on Mars, creating a real sense of dread for what will happen to our narrator as the story gets bigger and bigger. 

I do not want to go further into the plot points of Big Red.  I leave that for you to find out yourself.  It is an engrossing book, building steam page by page.  I read the last 100 pages in a mad fit of excited reading.  I was completely satisfied.  I love a story that invests me in all the characters, not just the main hero, and that is self-consistent in its world-building.  One of the main thoughts I came away with after reading Big Red is that, for all the speculation, what is being described is so close to what our reality is now that it should serve as a warning to all the people that faceless military and government organizations look to recruit, use up, and throw away.  If you love action-packed science fiction, speculative ideas, and the exploration of one man’s challenge as he faces up against a giant web of tyranny, you will find a lot to dig into in Big Red.  What an exciting debut novel.  I look forward to Damien Larkin’s development, and his future work.

(This book is being released on May 14, 2019)

(This book can be pre-ordered/purchased here: AMAZON )

My first dive into Russian literature pays off

One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1962)

      The name Alexander Solzhenitsyn was known to me.  His place among the great writers of Russian literature was something I was taught as a matter of fact.  I knew very little else than that  when I picked up this, the author’s first published work, a novella that details the happenings of an entire day, from waking to sleep, of a man imprisoned in a Soviet-era prison camp.  It was only after finishing this oddly humorous book that I looked up Solzhenitsyn’s life, and learned that, like Ivan Denisovitch, he too spent some years of his life in a Soviet prison camp.  This came after he had served with honor in the Soviet military, rising to the rank of Captain.  His crime?  It was much like all the other stupid and tyrannical “crimes” used by despots to crush their people.  He was claimed to have made seditious statements against Stalin after his private letters were intercepted and read by the Soviet government.  After he was released from the prison camps, he turned to writing and this novella was the only one of his works to be published in his native Russia.  It is a sad shame that the writing that helped him win a Nobel Prize in literature had to be published surreptitiously in the West, and smuggled back into Russia.  Down with tyrants and despots everywhere!  Burn them all down.

      In this book I found a man who had become so accustomed to his life, and it was barely life, inside the prison camps that his every single thought, from waking to sleep, was concerned with his immediate concerns and needs, with no thought given to escape or freedom, and very little thought given to the state of the world outside the prison camp’s fences.  The tone of the novel reminded me of a Russian Vonnegut, the otherwise ordinary characters matter-of-factly resigned to the stupidities and irrationality inherent in the world they inhabit, finding cold comfort in gallows humor, and seeking every single opportunity to stretch the rules, gain a tiny advantage, or finding ten minutes somewhere to try and keep warm.  Nearly every second is spent by Ivan either plotting on how to make his current situation slightly better, or in watchful fear of doing the wrong thing, saying the wrong thing, or even looking at the wrong person for fear of retribution from the camp guards. 

      As Ivan tells it, there are very few moments of true rest for the prisoners.  One of them is the first moments of wakefulness after the morning alarm has been rung.  Ivan stated that, in these fleeting minutes, still in bed, eyes still closed, and his body somewhat warm, he was “free.”  There were no obligations for these few minutes, and he tries to make them last as long as possible.  One of the other times he stated he felt free and that his time was his own, and not the state’s, was the ten minutes he was allotted to eat his servings in the mess hall during breakfast and dinner.  The hour before meals was hectic, with lines, pressing, queues, counts and recounts of prisoners, all in an attempt to feed them in an orderly fashion.  That hour of stress was relieved by the ten minutes of quiet, slow eating.  The instant he was done however, the manic thoughts and worries return. Sad but true.

      As Ivan goes through his day, Solzhenitsyn has his narrator describe the nearly-fractal levels of bureaucratic bullshit that permeated every aspect of life in these Russian prison camps.  One small example is the numbers assigned to the inmates, and painted on their hats and shirts, making it easy for the guards to single them out individually from a distance.  There were several older trustys that were permitted to paint and touch up these white numbers on a black field, for a price, and theirs was a tricky art.  They had to make sure the numbers were legible, for illegible numbers would constitute a violation and ten days in the “cage.”  However, the prisoners requested that the numbers be slightly blurred, just enough that guards further than a few meters way would have trouble reading it.  It was a delicate balance, like everything in the prison camp.  This level of insanity suffused everything in the camps.

      Solzhenitsyn does an amazing thing with this novella.  As I read it and progressed through Ivan Denisovich’s day, I became filled with a dread.  Throughout the day Ivan had managed to save himself from bad situations, plan for the day ahead, manage to finagle two bread rations, get a little tobacco, find a piece of broken hacksaw blade, and lead a work crew building masonry.  I waited for the hammer to fall.  I expected tragedy to spring forth and engulf our narrator, for everything seemed to be going as well as it could for him.  This was not to be.  Solzhenitsyn is not after that.  Instead, he shows us a “good” day, but a day not unlike the hundreds that Ivan had before, and the hundreds that were yet to come.  In this way, it really hit me how BIG this novella was.  We humans can conform to nearly every horror, and assume it as our new normal.  We can go to work and see our fellow citizens be killed and mistreated, and we see it as the normal day to day life we lead.  This nightmare, this waking delusion, is what lies at the heart of all tyranny.  In showing us a non-tragic, normal, ordinary day in the life of a normal, ordinary man, Solzhenitsyn shines a harsh light on the true tragedy involved, that hundreds of thousands of normal, ordinary people were tasked with imprisoning and torturing millions of normal, ordinary people, all at the request of a distant, rich, and aloof government.  It is a great book.

     

(This book can be purchased here:  ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF IVAN DENISOVICH )

(When Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he was afraid to leave the USSR and go to Stockholm for fear of not being allowed to return.  He sent in a written acceptance speech, which is amazing and well-worth reading.  The speech is found here: https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.html )

Freeman Dyson describes his life and science, and his hope for humanity.

Disturbing the Universe – Freeman Dyson (1979)

            While exploring the bibliography section of some of the science books I have read recently, I came across a mention of this book, by noted theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, and thank goodness the amazing M.D. Anderson Library had a copy for me to check out.  I had previously read that Mr. Dyson wrote some very interesting books which did not stick strictly to equations and mathematical rigor, but instead explored the Universe through Mr. Dyson’s inquisitive mind.  These types of books provide a great insight into the minds that have shaped our modern scientific world.

            The preface to this book details the circumstances leading up to its writing.  The Arthur P. Sloan Foundation started a book series.  They requested eminent people, people who were the leaders in their respective fields, to write something for publication.  It could be a small tome on pure mathematics, or a detailed history of a great scientist’s life, or, as in the case with Freeman Dyson, an exploration of his own life in the sciences, mixed in with the wisdom and gathered insights that he developed through his life.  Because of this, the title of the book,  Disturbing the Universe, is very apt.  The story contained within is of Freeman Dyson and the many times in his life where a chance encounter, a choice made, or an accidental experience, have led to a shake-up, a disturbance, in the way he saw and understood the Universe at large. 

            I love how this book begins.  It pays homage to the written word and the human imagination as being the grounds upon which greatness is dreamed of.  Mr. Dyson begins by detailing a children’s science fiction story that really stuck with him from his childhood, The Magic City by Edith Nesbitt.  This story detailed an alternate world, and Dyson mentions one rule that the story’s citizenry needed to heed.  In this world, you are free to choose to use any type of technology available, but, once chosen, the individual would have to use that technology, and ONLY that technology, for the rest of their lives.  For example, should a person choose to use roller skates as a means of transportation, that person, once they chose, would be denied the use of any other transporting technology.  This idea became a metaphor for Freeman Dyson.  He came to understand that any technology that is created by humans has the power to alter anything and everything that comes after its creation.  The scary part is that, as Freeman Dyson explains, 99% of all new technology stays purely as a clever toy for the powerful and rich few.  Only around 1% of all created technology finds a wide use and spreads throughout the human world.  The problem lies in that there is no way to predict what tech will catch on, and what the moral and philosophical implications and repercussions will be.  Once the printing press was invented, there was no shortage of people who sought to destroy or abandon this technology because of the fear that printing presses would allow for the dissemination of ideas and knowledge contrary to what the powers-that-be wish the masses to read or know about.  Freeman Dyson understood that this same problem applies to even seemingly innocuous technology, such as household goods, and not just to new weapons or giant machines.

            Mr. Dyson goes on to discuss his education and development into one of the premier mathematical and theoretical minds of the 20^th century.  He details his involvement in the British Air Force during WWII, and how the omnipresent bureaucracy showed him the blind stupidity of man, the illogic of “leadership”, and the brutality of those that send our youngest to die in war.  He saw the stupidity of the Air Force equating mission successes with number of sorties flown, or number of planes involved, and not with whether the target was actually hit, whether the crews came back alive, or whether their methods were pure suicide for these air crews.  The crews were never told the amount of planes and airmen that came back or that died or that were lost.  They were fed lie after lie after lie to keep them motivated to enter unsafe flying targets and get blown the F up over some unseen and unimportant target.  This shaped him very much.  He stated that when he moved to the USA, it was not until the Vietnam war that the people of the USA lost their innocent and naïve belief in the inherent goodness of their leaders.  The British and most of Europe had lost this during the interminable First World War.

            One of my favorite passages deals with Freeman Dyson’s relationship with my idol, Richard P. Feynman.  The two worked together while at Cornell University, and shared a road-trip across the USA.  His descriptions of Feynman and their relationship are so cool.  Freeman Dyson was lucky to work with the greatest minds around, from Feynman to Hans Bethe, to Robert Oppenheimer.  He is very honest in his portrayals of these peers of his.  It is always reassuring to me to hear of how deeply scientists can disagree over issues and still maintain a collegial working relationship and even be very close friends.  More people could learn from such things.

            Much of the latter half of this book deals with the various political and social engagements that Freeman Dyson took up after his main work was complete.  He is candid about his failures and humble about his achievements.  The last chapters deal with Mr. Dyson’s vision for the future of humanity, of life itself, and make for very moving reading.  I wish his vision of our future indeed comes to pass, allowing humans to differentiate themselves by exploring our solar system, creating colonies, and spreading Life through the cosmos.  Dyson has done the math and he feels, much like I do, that, while Life existing on Earth seems to point to the ability of Life to be anywhere in our Galaxy and Universe, the truth may very well be that the myriad conditions needed, not only for cellular Life to develop, but for the planet to be stable enough for Billions of years to allow for the creation of “Intelligent” Life, are only found here on our Planet Earth, out of all the possible worlds of our Multi-verse.  If there are a quadrillion planets in our Universe, and the odds against Life arising are 1 in a quadrillion, then we are indeed alone.  If the odds turn out to be 1 in a septillion or bigger, then the very existence of Life on Earth can be seen as the ultimate miracle and all of our humanity as a blip in the vast expanse of space-time.  I too think we humans have a mandate to spread Life, in all forms, throughout the Galaxy and then the Universe.  I hope Freeman Dyson’s vision comes to pass.  I will definitely be on the lookout for more books by Mr. Freeman Dyson.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

Mr. Louis Zamperini's life is a testament to the resiliency of Man in the face of the horrors around us

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption – Laura Hillenbrand (2010)

           

            While at dinner a few months ago with my wife and several other people from her work, the subject of books came up and I was asked what I had been reading.  I mentioned the book Beasts, Men, & Gods, by Ferdinand Ossendowski, and described its true-life tale of horror and hardship at the start of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.  One of our dinner companions mentioned to me that I should read the book Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, which similarly dealt with one man’s experiences during war, this time World War II.  I made a note of it and proceeded to check out the book from the library I work for.

            Unbroken is the biography of Louis Zamperini.  It details his childhood as a son of Italians living in Torrance, CA, his rise to Track & Field stardom and success at the Olympic games, his entry into the military, the crash at sea of the B-24 bomber of which he was bombardier, his 40+ days spent along with two companions drifting at sea, his capture by Japanese forces, his two and half years spent in various POW camps, his release and return to civilian life, the tortures he endured as a result of his hardships, and his eventual redemption and joyful life, lasting all of 97 years.  That is a lot to digest, and it is even more amazing to read every detail. 

It is said that each of us leads multiple lives in a single lifetime.

            I had read many accounts of wartime, and of prisoners of war, but the endless pain, abuse, and degradation suffered by Allied POW’s under the hands of the Japanese army are innumerable, and nearly overwhelming.  I broke down several times reading this book, each time feeling ever so grateful to have been spared experiences such as the ones Mr. Zamperini and every single person having to try and live through war and it’s horrors has to endure.  To know that right now, around the world, there are countless hundreds of thousands of human beings suffering these very same terrors is almost too much to bear.  To know that for the past decade the USA has been using torture on prisoners from the “war on terrorism” not far removed from the inhuman derangement forced upon Mr. Zamperini, and excusing it for the sake of “national security” makes me fucking SICK. 

            I have close relatives who endured similar things during the Vietnam War.  No one who experiences war firsthand, whether as a combatant or as a civilian forced to survive amid battles and killing and occupation forces, comes out unscathed.  Mass trauma distorts humanity.  It makes those suffering it feel less than human, losing all dignity in the process.  I wish people would read and absorb stories like these before choosing to send our youngest and fittest out to wage war.  I cannot help but feel that if they did, they would not be so quick to treat military actions and deaths as if they were just business as usual.  I wish regular civilians would all read this book.  It may make them stop ignoring the actions of their leaders, since it is more convenient to think about something else, to be distracted by the day-to-day concerns of living, than to face the trauma being created in their name.  I highly recommend this book, and give thanks to the kind lady who pointed me in its direction.  I will carry Mr. Zamperini's life story with me.

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )