{"id":4362,"date":"2015-05-05T06:42:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-05T10:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4362"},"modified":"2015-05-22T06:56:41","modified_gmt":"2015-05-22T10:56:41","slug":"the-books-of-summer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4362","title":{"rendered":"The Books of Summer"},"content":{"rendered":"
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House of Leaves page (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)<\/p><\/div>\n

The May Wired<\/em>\u2019s guide to summer fiction leads with two 880-page doorstops: one from my fave Neal Stephenson titled Seveneves<\/em> (I\u2019ve pre-ordered!), and the other from Mark Z. Danielewski. Danielewski\u2019s is The Familiar, Volume 1: One Rainy Day in May<\/em>, with a planned 26 more volumes to come, BTW. If Danielewski\u2019s name is unfamiliar, you may recognize the title of his last convention-shattering tour de force, House of Leaves<\/em> (my review<\/a>). He may have done it again, suggests Jonathan Russell Clark in his Literary Hub article<\/a>, “Did Mark Z. Danielewski Just Reinvent the Novel?”<\/p>\n

Also out in May is Paolo Bacigalupi\u2019s The Water Knife<\/em>, a thriller set in the near future when the water supplying Las Vegas and Phoenix runs out. \u201cIt\u2019s just as apocalyptic as his first book (The Windup Girl<\/em>, which won both Hugo and Nebula awards, among many others), more political, and though it didn\u2019t seem possible, angrier,\u201d says Wired<\/em> reviewer Adam Rogers. \u201cThese days are coming,\u201d thriller writer Lee Child says about the book, \u201cand as always fiction explains them better than fact.\u201d Bacigalupi views his books as thought experiments\u2014by seeing where the world is headed, people can \u201cmake different decisions and vote for different politicians.\u201d In other words, \u201cLet\u2019s not do this<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the same Wired<\/em> issue, Caitlin Roper interviews Hollywood\u2019s Damon Lindelof (Lost<\/em>) and Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille<\/em>) about their new film, Tomorrowland<\/em> <\/a>starring George Clooney, and the omnipresence in entertainment media of a catastrophic future. Lindelof says, \u201cI think one of the real reasons for all these dystopian movies, TV shows, and videogames is that it\u2019s just easier to wreck things than it is to build something new.\u201d Tomorrowland<\/em>, he says, began with the notion of recapturing the \u201cidea of an optimistic future, which has become completely and totally absent from the landscape.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s certain true in fiction. In an NPR essay, Jason Heller<\/a> says that ever since Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Road<\/em>, the dystopian literary trend has been unstoppable, if only because \u201cthe world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever.\u201d Like Bacigalupi, Heller believes that \u201cby imagining what it\u2019s like to lose everything, we can value what we have.\u201d<\/p>\n

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