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defrogThat’s more like it!
The Night Mayor by Kim NewmanMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading Kim Newman outside of his articles for Empire. I’d been meaning to try out his Anno Dracula novels, but this was the first of his books I managed to come across – and it also happens to be his first novel, so I guess it’s kind of an appropriate place to start. And based on this evidence, Newman decided to start off with a fully weird take on virtual-reality cyberpunk based entirely on noir films, where everything is black-and-white and it’s always 2:30 in the morning and raining.
In this alternate future, VR (a.k.a. “dreaming”) has replaced films as entertainment and runs on Yggdrasil, a sentient AI that runs a global computer. Professional Dreamers create VR narratives in Yggdrasil, but master criminal Truro Daine has used this to “escape” from prison into his own virtual world based on 50s noir films and established himself there as The Night Mayor – which might not be an issue except he’s expanding his world with the aim of taking over Yggdrasil completely. The govt sends in pro Dreamer Tom Tunney (a.k.a. Richie Quick, 50s noir private eye) to kill Daine inside his VR world, but when Tunney loses his grip on reality, it’s up to pro romance Dreamer Susan Bishopric to save the day.
Like I say, it’s an unusual take on cyberpunk, with Newman making the most of his encyclopaedic knowledge of noir films to the point that all of the supporting characters are named as the actors typecast in those roles (Ralph Bellamy, Dan Duryea, Mike Mazurki, Otto Kruger, John Carradine, etc), which if nothing else is a treat for film nerds like me. And while Newman avoids the technological specifics (wisely or otherwise), he does have some fun with the possibilities of tracking down an omnipotent criminal in a malleable virtual world where you can, say, throw Godzilla in there if you really want to. His Chandler-esque patter ain’t bad, either.
The Compass Rose by Ursula K. Le GuinMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my dive into the works of Ursula K Le Guin, here’s another anthology, this one from 1982, ostensibly organised as points on a compass, although Le Guin herself notes in her introduction that her reasons for placing a particular story on a particular point aren’t always serious. But it’s fair to say the stories are all over the map in terms of both genre and approach.
Indeed, this collection kicks off with fictional extracts of therolinguistic studies on the language of ants, penguins and plants, and ends with a secret all-women expedition to the South Pole. In between are stories of memory-erasure, Atlantis, grief, Schrödinger's Cat, time shortages, mental-health dystopias, and a lab experiment from the POV of the mouse, among others.
Nothing here is particularly dull, but not much sticks in the memory either – at least not for me, which seems to be especially true of the more “literary” pieces that get a bit surreal with the prose. On the other hand, the ones that do stick are engaging, moving and brilliant, or at least fun, and those at least are worth the price of admission.
The Cross and the Lynching Tree by James H. ConeMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is my first time reading James Cone, though I’d heard of him and his works on black theology. This was a class reading assignment, and thus a good opportunity to try him out. As you might guess from the title, the thesis of the book aims to draw the connection between the cross and Jesus’ crucifixion with the practice of lynching black people in America – the idea being that both involve torturous suffering and injustice – and point out the horrible irony that many white Christian churches in America who didn’t make the connection either actively condoned lynching or at best stayed silent about it.
Cone – who grew up at a time when white supremacy was mainstream and lynching was still a thing – argues that of all the elements of the Gospels, the cross was the symbol that resonated the most with African-Americans precisely because the crucifixion was, in essence, an extralegal lynching that mirrored the brutality of lynchings in America. Cone traces the influence of the blues and African-American spirituals on black activism and the civil rights movement, and how it was mostly artists, musicians, writers and poets like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright – rather than while American church leaders and theologians, especially Rheinhold Niebuhr – who had the imagination necessary to connect the two, theologically or otherwise.
To be clear, Cone isn’t equating black lynching victims with Jesus as the Son of God. His argument is that the parallels matter partly because it embeds Christ’s suffering in the meaning of the cross, making it more than a sterile icon of God’s love, and partly because it holds white American Christianity accountable for its failure to oppose white supremacy and defend its victims. What you make of that will obviously depend on your religious and sociopolitical worldview. There’s a lot to appreciate here and a lot to argue with (personally I think he’s a little unfair to Niebuhr), but I found the pop-culture connections fascinating, and I also found the overall book valuable as a dire account of just how horrifyingly evil lynching was, and a warning that America ignores and erases its racist history at its own peril – especially given the current actions by the Trump admin to strike DEI, CRT, the 1619 Project etc from the public record.
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