Author: joeltagert

A Brief History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, via the Best Sci-fi and Fantasy Novels Ever Written

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Recently I was talking to a friend about some of my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels. “Make a list,” he said, and so I began. But the more books I added to the list, the more I ran into the question of how to organize them. I could have used a rating system – start with Lord of the Rings and work my way down – but people’s tastes vary widely, and who’s going to choose a book rated at #59?

Instead I settled on the date of publication. And as I rearranged my list, I started to see historical patterns emerging, trends I suppose I’ve always known were there, but hadn’t considered through the lens of specific works. The list became a jumping-off point to consider the history of science fiction and fantasy as a whole, with its various subgenres and development more clearly delineated, and authors placed in relationship to each other.

Understand, however, that these books haven’t been chosen to fill out a history lesson (with a few exceptions, mentioned near the end of this post). The list came first. These are actually my favorite books in the genre, and picking any one at random will yield something amazing. I guarantee it.

The Progenitors: So Old School They’re Wearing Top Hats

Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1870)
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1897)

Today we call Jules Verne and H.G. Wells science fiction, although of course in their time there was no such genre. In fact, Verne was largely ignored by the French literary establishment of the time, who dismissed his popular books as boy’s adventure stories (thus establishing the pattern for the next century and a half). As with Carroll and Wells, we’re all familiar with the stories from television and movie adaptations, but the originals are well worth reading at least once. Edgar Allan Poe probably also deserves a place here, although only a few of his works engage with fantasy per se.

The Founding Fathers: Classic Sci-Fi and Fantasy from the Mid-Twentieth Century

H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness (1931)
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954)
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950)
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Fahrenheit 451 (1954)>John Wyndham, The Chrysalids (1955)
Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)

There isn’t a single thread connecting these mid-century writers, unless it’s in the energy with which they pursued and developed their ideas, their works shaping whole subsequent genres. H.P. Lovecraft wrote dozens of memorable short stories whose imagery and structure have shaped fantastic horror ever since. Tolkien, of course, almost single-handedly invented what most people still consider fantasy, with countless imitators down to the present day. Aldous Huxley’s and George Orwell’s revolutionary political ideas are found to some extent in nearly all modern dystopian novels.

0936e-i_robotIsaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein (mentioned below), among many others, wrote countless short stories and pulp novels published in the venerable sci-fi magazines of the ’50s, mostly to do with space travel, time travel, alien races and the like, all the science fiction tropes that were, for the most part, old hat even then. Most of these works have aged poorly, cursed with flat characters and dull prose, tossed into the boys-adventure bin alongside Doc Savage and the Hardy Boys; but their best works, informed by compelling ideas, remain relevant and entertaining. Most sci-fi lists include Asimov’s Foundation series, and while I agree that its millennia-spanning vision of galactic civilization has been influential, it also reads like a historical artifact, whereas I, Robot remains interesting to modern readers. Ray Bradbury worked alongside the pulp authors, but his work has fared far better over the years, since it always relied more on his lambent prose than the novelty of a new premise.

Worth mentioning together are Wyndham’s and Miller’s books, both set post-nuclear apocalypse. While Wyndham used nuclear armageddon primarily as an excuse for a fantastical future dystopia (the most common application of apocalypse in fiction), Miller’s is concerned with the human drive to self-destruction itself, a theme addressed also in Neville Shute’s On the Beach (1957) and, much later, in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (below).

Expanding Consciousness: Trippy Shit From the ’60s

Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961)
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962), Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Ubik (1969)
Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 (1968), Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
Ursula K. Le Guin, the Earthsea trilogy (1968), The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Lathe of Heaven (1971), The Dispossessed (1974)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5 (1969)

ae45b-frankherbert_dune_1stThe ’60s were a decade marked by experimentation, and nowhere is that clearer than in science fiction. These authors pushed against boundaries in every direction, demanding readers fundamentally re-examine their views on religion, sex, marriage, history, politics, gender, and consciousness itself, from the alien views and mystical powers of Heinlein’s Michael Valentine Smith, to Philip K. Dick’s over-the-limit reality-bending, to Herbert’s mind-expanding spice. Herbert’s Dune demands special mention as perhaps the single greatest science fiction book ever written, at once lyrical, daring, philosophically fascinating and tightly plotted. Ursula Le Guin has consistently crossed boundaries in her writing, her stories invariably moving in unexpected directions to challenge our own genre expectations.

There are a couple of odd ducks here as well. Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is more in keeping with the dystopias of the ’50s, milk with knives in it notwithstanding, although the Cockney-Slavic dialect he wrote it in is as experimental as it gets. Arthur C. Clarke stands with Heinlein and Asimov in his hard-sci-fi style, although his is yet more opaque in character, enhancing the sense of mystery in his uncommunicative alien artifacts. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-5 is, to my mind, only nominally science fiction, the fantastic elements mostly a narrative method to convey Vonnegut’s own experiences in World War II, but it’s also one of my favorite books, so I’m including it anyway.

Escape from Reality: ’70s and ’80s

Roger Zelazny, The Chronicles of Amber (1970)
Phillip Jose Farmer, the Riverworld series (1971)
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, The Mote in God’s Eye (1974),Footfall (1985)
Piers Anthony, A Spell for Chameleon (1976)
Frederick Pohl, Gateway (1977)
Anne McCaffrey, The White Dragon (1978), Crystal Singer (1982)
Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
Michael Ende, The Neverending Story (1979)
Stephen King, Skeleton Crew (1979), The Running Man (1982), It (1986), The Drawing of the Three (1987)
Julian May, Saga of the Pliocene Exile (1981)
Alan Dean Foster, Nor Crystal Tears (1982)
Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (1983), Last Call (1992)

By and large, these are light books, paperbacks to read on the bus, or for a twelve-year-old to stick in his backpack (as was invariably the case with me). Their prose is not necessarily the finest, their ideas not necessarily the freshest; they rely primarily on world-building for their fascination. And yet, I have a tremendous fondness for them, as I do for beautiful places I travelled to once and enjoyed a great deal. And in each there is something remarkable: Zelazny’s shadow-riding princes of Amber, Farmer’s colorful cast of historical misfits, Niven’s and Pournelle’s inventive aliens, Anthony’s light-as-air humor, May’s embellishments and refinements of psychic powers.

2b669-tumblr_lid950guze1qc1enbo1_500There are also, however, a few more substantial works in with the escapists. Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide is one of the funniest books every written, with profundity constantly peeking from beneath the absurdity. Ende’s Neverending Story is about fantasy itself, the liberating power of the imagination, and how that power gets lost in adulthood. (Also, while everyone’s seen the movie, the movie actually only covers the first half of the book – and that’s not even necessarily the better half.) Stephen King, of course, is always put on the horror shelf – I think they put that shelf there just for him – but in fact, he’s a superb fantasist and an unmatched master of suspense. I’ve listed four of his best, but if you’re going to just read one, make it It.

The Digital Age and Dawning Disillusionment

William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984), Idoru (1996), The Peripheral (2014)
Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game (1985)
Greg Bear, Blood Music (1985), Hull Zero Three (2010)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen (1986)
David Brin, The Uplift War (1987)
Dan Simmons, Hyperion Cantos (1989)
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992), The Diamond Age (1995)
Jeff Noon, Vurt (1993)
Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials (1995)
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire (1996)
George R.R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996)
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (2000)
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2004)
Neil Gaiman, American Gods (2001)
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon (2002), Broken Angels (2003)
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004)
Vernor Vinge, Rainbows End (2006)
Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)
Max Brooks, World War Z (2006)
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl (2009)
Lev Grossman, The Magicians trilogy (2009)
Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (2012)
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks (2014)
Yoon Ha Lee, Ninefox Gambit (2016)

2dedc-neuromancer_bookFew books stand so clearly as boundary markers in literature as William Gibson’s Neuromancer. At its pulsing heart was a burning vision of the digital future, in which all information could be represented in virtual reality, and hackers rode programs like cracked-out sharks diving into deadly AI ice. Its ideas, and the dawning computer age that informed them, invigorated the genre like nothing had since space flight and LSD. Most futurist novels that followed dealt with the implications of the digital revolution, along with the continuous miniaturization of computer systems that accompanied it: Blood Music, Hyperion Cantos, Snow Crash, Vurt, Holy Fire, American Gods, Altered Carbon, Rainbows End, 2312.

There is a second trend here, namely a broader cultural mood of disillusionment and pessimism about the future. McCarthy’s The Road may be the darkest book every written, and its ashen landscapes are a precise description of nuclear winter. George Martin brought new life to sword-and-sorcery by casting his characters as cynical, power-hungry scrabblers in a dirty, violent world, and Phillip Pullman stoked some minor controversy by penning a popular young-adult trilogy with an atheist slant. Alan Moore’s Watchmen (yes, it’s a graphic novel, but it’s too good not to include) offered a vital critique of superheroes, depicting them variously as violent vigilantes, sociopaths, sexual fetishists, or disinterested gods.

Several of these works also display an increasing literary sophistication, from the hard, unsparing sentences of The Road (the only sci-fi book to ever win the Pulitzer), to David Mitchell’s cunningly interlocked plots, Susanna Clarke’s endless spinning of fairy tales, and Mark Danielewski’s labyrinthine textual constructions. Along with the wonderfully inventive genre-bending of his New Crobuzon books, China Mieville is known for literary experiments like The City & the City and Embassytown. Worth mentioning also is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, set in an alternate-universe Alaska.

While it’s true I’ve included a few of these selections for “educational” purposes (Verne and Wells, Huxley, Orwell, Miller, Burgess), I also want to say that as a rule, these aren’t hard books to read. To the contrary: they’re nearly all fast-paced, grip-you-by-the-throat stories that I’ve read and reread until the pages fell free from their bindings, out of pure fascination and delight. Just last Sunday I finished Gibson’s The Peripheral, and it was good, so freaking good, I felt like I was thirteen again, reading Neuromancer for the first time, with the very same sense of wonder at how strange the world is and how strange it may yet become.

It’s all about expectations

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If you think that humans are essentially celestial creatures created of God, beautiful beings of radiant light akin to the angels, then you will invariably be disappointed in their behavior and angry at the world. On the other hand, if you realize that we’re really just a bunch of dumb apes, then anytime we’re not literally throwing feces at each other we’re doing all right.

Vegetarian Food in Turkey: What to Expect

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Being a vegetarian, I tried to do some research before traveling to Turkey regarding food. After all, food can be the deciding factor in choosing a destination and enjoying a trip. Most websites I found said that’s it’s easy to find vegetarian food in Turkey, and this is more or less true, but after reading such assurances we were surprised, on actually going there, by how limited our options were.

The first thing to understand is that Turkey has very few foreign restaurants. Nineteen out of twenty restaurants are Turkish, and even in sizable cities it can be hard to find non-Turkish food. There are a few Indian restaurants and a few Chinese restaurants, and you may want to seek them out if and when you want an alternative to the local cuisine. The rest of the time, you’ll be eating Turkish food for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The second thing is that while there are lots and lots of Turkish restaurants, by and large they serve the same things. Walking around Sultanahmet, you’ll be approached by host after host asking you to look at their menu, but the fact is every menu is nearly the same. Turkish restaurants don’t go for culinary innovation. There’s no experimentation, no nouveau cuisine. Instead there’s the same vegetables in saffron sauce, the same pilav, prepared with small variations. Once you’ve eaten a dish at one restaurant, you have a good idea what to expect at the others.

Within these bounds, the food is generally well-prepared and flavorful. Turkish food heavily favors certain vegetables: tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers, mushrooms, eggplant, zucchini, green beans, and onions. Generally they do not use legumes in main dishes, so you’ll have to rely on eggs, cheese, mezes and soups if you want more protein.

While this is fine for ovo-lacto vegetarians, vegans face considerably greater challenges. Many dishes are cooked in butter and cream. The cold meze platter is safe enough for dinner, but breakfast especially offers few options beyond fruit and bread (if the bread is vegan). If you plan to make your own meals, choose your hostels carefully: most Turkish hostels don’t have kitchens, and ask that you not bring in outside food. If you have a private room, the last is easy to ignore, but Turkish markets also offer little in the way of healthy ready-to-eat items.

Anyway, here’s a detailed breakdown of vegetarian options:

Turkish breakfast

Breakfast: A buffet breakfast is included at virtually all Turkish hostels and hotels, so it’s a good opportunity to fill up early. The buffet will invariably include hard-boiled eggs, white bread, cucumbers, fresh tomatoes, olives, white cheese, fresh fruit (most often watermelon), butter, honey, çay (tea), and instant coffee. Usually there’s also yogurt. Additional items may include muesli, cereal, milk, croissants, various other cheeses, dried fruit, and sigara borek (rolled phyllo dough stuffed with feta and/or spinach).

Lunch: Lunch was a persistent challenge for us, partly because we didn’t know all our options. We didn’t want to spend a lot of money at restaurants, especially since we’d likely be eating at those same restaurants for dinner, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of other choices. For meat eaters, döner (shaved roasted meat in a pita) is ubiquitous and cheap, but there seemed to be no equivalent for vegetarians. At first, we mostly we either ate pide (melted cheese on a flat pita, essentially a Turkish pizza; actual pizza is also common), or found a local market and bought crackers and cheese.

Later, someone introduced us to cig köfte. Now, köfte is meatballs, so this was a little confusing for us: obviously we didn’t want meatballs. And reading online, it seemed cig köfte was a traditional dish of raw meatballs, so clearly we wanted that even less. However, in the last decades the raw-meat version of the dish has been outlawed for public health reasons, and it’s been replaced with a vegan substitute made of chickpeas or walnuts. There’s no meat involved whatsoever, and there are small fast-food joints that specialize in the dish. It’s also cheap, fast, and flavorful: the perfect thing for lunch when you’re out shopping or seeing the sights. Ask for a cig köfte durum, and you’ll get a tortilla wrap with walnut/chickpea paste, plentiful iceberg lettuce and/or arugula, spicy barbecue sauce and sweet pomegranate syrup (the sauces are optional but recommended).

Cig köfte durum

There are also two kinds of soup that became a staple for us, at lunch and dinner both. The first is mercimek çorbası, or lentil soup, a light soup of strained lentils served with lemon wedges and pita. It’s absolutely delicious, very reasonably priced, and provides the protein you’ll probably be craving. Be warned, however, that it is often made with chicken stock, so you may wish to ask before ordering.

In a similar vein is ezogelin, a red lentil and tomato soup seasoned with mint, again served with lemon and pita. This was one of our favorite dishes in Turkey, and perhaps the best lentil soup I’ve had anywhere.

Often we would order a soup with a green salad (yeşil salata), which varied far more than the soup. Always the salad would have cucumber and tomato (one time, only those), generally lettuce or arugula, sometimes green peppers and white onion.

Many cafes also advertise gözleme, which they describe as a “pancake.” Well, it’s not a pancake: it’s more like a crepe, with cheese and other fillings pressed between two thin layers of pastry. Turks often accompany it with ayran, a yogurt drink similar to kefir.

Supper:

Supper offers considerably more choices, with prices varying widely; restaurants outside tourist areas can be half the price of those inside. We’ll start with the cold meze (appetizer) platter, which is delicious and found at most every dinner restaurant. In general the meze platter is all vegetarian, but there may be a non-vegetarian platter available as well, so ask to be sure. The platter may include:

• humus – simpler and less potent than its Middle Eastern versions
• patlican salatası (eggplant salad) – mashed eggplant, similar to baba ganoush
• saksuka – cubed eggplant with tomato sauce
• cacık – yogurt with cucumber and fresh herbs
• ezme – spicy tomato salad
• roasted red pepper and walnut tapenade
• yogurt with roasted red pepper
• dolmas – grape leaves stuffed with rice
• olives
• pita or flatbread

Several hot vegetarian entrees are also common:

• vegetable pilaf – rice and orzo with sauteed vegetables, typically some combination of bell peppers, carrots, eggplants, zucchini, green beans, mushrooms, and tomatoes
• vegetables in saffron sauce – essentially the same vegetables as above, sauteed in a buttery saffron cream sauce and served with rice
• vegetable casserole – ditto, but with tomato sauce instead
• vegetarian pastry – same vegetables, this time layered with cheese and thin hand-rolled dough (similar to crepes)
• vegetable kebab (kebap) – just what it sounds like. Be warned, also, that an “eggplant kebab” may include pieces of sausage; ask when ordering.

Street food:
Most street food in Turkey is vegetarian. Common items include:

• simit – a bagel-like twisted bread covered in sesame seeds
• mısır – corn on the cob
• roasted chestnuts

All considered, it’s true, it’s not difficult to be vegetarian in Turkey, although you might start craving broccoli or tofu after a while. As a side benefit, I found the Turkish diet remarkably easy on the digestion – nary a stomach ache in sight.

In the Mood to Consume: A College Text Adventure

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You are on Boylston Street facing a low gray building. It has a fuchsia-pink door with a sign above it that says “Fred Wildlife Refuge.” There is another, smaller sign on the side of the building. You wonder briefly why it’s “Fred” and not “Fred’s.”

>west

You can’t go that way.

>read small sign

The sign says, “ENTER ON BELMONT STREET ONLY.”

>north

You are on Olive Street. You’re close to the Stumbling Monk, which has great beer.

> west

Wow, the Stumbling Monk is right on the corner. Maybe you should go there instead.

>south

Okay, obviously you’re determined to go to this art show thingie. It was the whole reason you came out on a Thursday night anyway, which you normally wouldn’t do since you have work in the morning.

You are on Belmont Street, facing a fuchsia door.

>go inside

You smash right into the door’s aggressively bright, aggressively hard surface.

>open door

The door is now open.

>enter building

Fred Wildlife Refuge seems pretty cool, even if it’s obviously hosting a college art opening. There’s a bar in the corner and some stairs leading up to a second level. It’s dimly lit with spotlights on the art pieces and there’s some techno music playing. Twenty or thirty college students are standing in clumps around the main floor, presumably discussing their improbable dreams of being professional artists and how they connect to the leaf-covered papier-mache globe upon which these dreams rely. Other art pieces include a series of abstract ballpoint-pen drawings (sure, just use the doodles you made during your Italian Futurism seminar, why not?) and a swaying-dots-over-translucent-ripples video projection (okay, actually kind of neat).

> find friends

The guy at the door wants to check your ID first.

>show ID

He hands it back to you wordlessly. There’s no stamp or anything.

>find friends

You cruise around the main floor for a minute, glancing at dimly lit faces. You conclude that college art openings would be a great place to pick up girls, if you were fifteen years younger and single, but you do not see your friends.

“Do you want to get a drink?” your girlfriend asks.

>fuck yes

There’s no need to be crude.

>go to bar

Amazingly, there’s no one in line.

> whiskey coke, please

The bartender hands you the drink. Unfortunately he’s overfilled it with ice and when you pick it up it slops onto your fingers, making them sticky. “Seven dollars,” he says. That may sound like a lot, but actually for Seattle it’s not crazy.

>go upstairs

On your way to the stairs you realize that there’s a table with snacks on it. Really not a bad spread.

>get snacks!

You eat some salty pita crisp thingies. There’s no hummus left for them. There never is. This follows a universal physical law dictating that the first two people to arrive at an art opening will be famished vegans who will promptly gorge themselves on the only readily available protein source.

>go upstairs

There are more college students up here. There is a small unmanned bar. There is a gray-green painting of cubes that is perhaps the worst thing you’ve ever seen, like an otherworldly assault from a neighboring dimension of ugliness on all that is beautiful in our own. Claire is here.

>claire!

“Hi, guys!” she says, in her threateningly cute way. Claire is the fuchsia door of friends: aggressively bright, gleefully obstructive. “You made it!”

Crystal is here. Shannon is here. Some girl you don’t know is here. You say hi to everybody.

>where’s mark bell?

“I’m right here, dude!” Mark Bell says. “I’m blending in!” You look down. Mark Bell is wearing an electric blue hoodie and is sitting on an electric blue couch. Did he plan this?

>where’s matt bell?

“My brother’s over there, behind the curtain. Go check it out.”

>north

In the far corner of this upstairs room, our three precocious authors – Max Kraushaar, Graham Downing, and Matt Bell – have created a little alcove by hanging a sheet between two pillars. Within its confines they are ensconced behind a banquet table, with a smaller table of books on one side and a nearly life-sized cardboard cutout of themselves on the other. This forces would-be book buyers to approach them like supplicants seeking favors.

>talk to matt bell

Matt Bell is busy signing books. There are at least six people between you and him, and the space is too small to get by them.

>wait

Okay, you’re waiting.

>wait

Still waiting. This could take a while.

>look at cutout

The cutout is nearly life-sized. In it the three authors are standing seriously, their faces carefully still, each holding a copy of the book they’re hawking. They are wearing nearly matching outfits of light blue button-up shirts and dark pants, the very same outfits they’re wearing tonight. You note that they’re arranged in order of facial hair length: clean shaven, short beard (Matt Bell) and long beard (you’re not sure if it’s Max or Graham – you’ve never met them before – but whichever it is, he has a quite glorious, long, silky beard, like something Dürer would want to paint).

You wonder how much it cost to print. You also have to admit, it makes the three guys sitting at the table look more impressive. I mean, they have an almost life-sized cutout! You know who else has a life-sized cutout? Spock, that’s who! And Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator! No one to fuck with, anyway.

>look at books

The books are stacked very neatly on an end table to your left. There are more than you expected, at least twenty or thirty remaining. A sign says they are $10. You wonder how much they cost to print.

>pick up book

The book isn’t large, maybe four inches by seven. Its cover is printed in color on some nice card stock, and has a Photoshopped image of two people standing in a park whose torsos for some reason are disappearing, like Michael J. Fox getting erased from time head-first. The authors’ names are on the back, and on the spine is the title: in the mood to consume. Apparently they subscribe to the no-capitals school of naming.

>buy book

Sorry, they’re still talking to other people and signing books. They may be writing a whole other book within the pages of this one, for all you know.

>hang out with friends

Cool. Mark already has a copy of the book anyway, if you want to look at it.

>ask mark about book

“So basically they had a month to do this project for school, and they spent it writing this book. I think it’s great.”

>read book

Actually it’s too dim in here to read easily. Also, you’re hanging out with your friends. Are you really going to ignore them and read a book?

>browse book, then

Fine. Don’t be snippy.

It has a title page, which the authors have very amiably signed. It has a table of contents, although apparently this does not describe the actual contents of the book, since page 60 is listed as “blank” (it’s not) and page 250 as “synergy//regenerative landscape” (the book is 142 pages long). The first real sentence, which you read aloud, is “Jesus didn’t die for this.”

“Jesus didn’t diet for this,” Mark corrects you.

>so he’s fat jesus?

“Yeah. So basically Santa Claus. Santa Claus is Fat Jesus.”

The next two pages are an essay on carburetors. The most remarkable thing about them is the spelling of “carburetor,” which somehow you really thought was “carburator.” No, okay, that does look wrong.

Then there’s a page about how water is like blood, a recounting of a Bill Hicks joke you’ve already heard, and an incomplete short story about a mutiny on the Ride the Ducks tour bus (it’s a Seattle thing). There’s some ASCII art of types of swords: katana, broadsword, flaming sword, sword with skull. There’s another short story about a haunted Mack truck.

Continuing with this catalogue, there are a lot of one- or two-sentence aphorisms a la Jack Handy’s Deep Thoughts, only not so funny. There’s a play-by-play description of a chess game, which kind of annoys you because the narrator’s opponent loses his queen on move 9, which means the game is basically over, but then it goes on for another seven pages. There are two pages of the sentence “THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.” There’s a list of videos on Vine. There’s a first-person narration of an online MUD, which gives you an idea for this review.

It is, in other words, a lot of nonsense. Occasionally there’s a chuckle.

Really, it’s not so much a book as a mockup of a book, an almost life-sized cardboard cutout of a book. It seems intended as a sort of winking mockery of book publishing and author signings in an age where anyone can walk into an Officemax with a flash drive and walk out with a stack of neatly bound paperbacks. Want to be an author? Great! Put your money on the table! Want to be someone who knows an author? Great! Put your money on the table!

There are, however, several valuable lessons here:

1. There’s safety in numbers. As one person, you have a limited number of friends willing to go to your events. But you know how many more friends three people have? Three times as many! Team up to pump your sales numbers.

2. Gimmicks work. Who doesn’t love a gimmick? Make the buying process itself an adventure and people will do it for the sake of a story to tell their friends. You’re suddenly contemplating the viral value of dressing in costume for your own self-published book signings.

3. Drunk people love buying stuff. Seriously. Forget bookstore signings. Find the busiest, loudest, drunkest bar in town and set up by the front door.

Finally you see that the crowd by the authors’ table has dispersed. The way is clear.

>buy book

Sure, why not? You’re in the mood.

5 Tips for Making the Most out of Memrise

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Before discovering Memrise, I had made some half-hearted attempts to learn Turkish. I got some books from the library, printed out some phrases from the internet, and dutifully set about learning how to say “hello” and count to a hundred.

Problem was, sitting on the couch repeating words to myself was really, really boring. Also, I had no idea if I was pronouncing the words correctly, so even if I successfully memorized a few phrases, I might find when I got to Turkey that no one could understand me.

But surely I can haz Turkish via the Internet. I looked at Rosetta Stone and some other language-learning software, but I didn’t want to pay a large fee. I’m going on a three-week vacation, not trying to emigrate.

Enter Memrise. It’s free. It has multiple language courses, including Turkish. You can use it on your computer or portable device. It offers not only audio, but user-created “mems” (read: mnemonic devices) to aid in recall. Via a simple gardening metaphor, it encourages you to learn new items (“plant”) and review what you’ve already learned (“water”). The review process itself is structured as interval training, meaning that you review newer items first, older items later, with reducing frequency depending on how many times you’ve reviewed them and how often you’ve identified the word or phrase correctly.

This all amounts to a powerful, simple, and fun learning experience. Maybe the most brilliant aspect of Memrise is that it turns language learning into a simple but addictive game. Since you’re only learning five or so items at a time, no one section is ever that difficult, especially if you review frequently, but cumulatively you learn a lot, very quickly. Imagine where you’d be if you’d taken those 4,000 hours you spent playing World of Warcraft and used them to learn languages.

“Yeah, so I’m like, a level 60 French learner.”

However, it’s not perfect. Fundamentally, Memrise is not language-learning software. Rather, it’s multimedia flashcard software with a clever structure and review process. What this means is that it’s very effective for memorization, but naturally it lacks key features of the costlier software packages or actual classes, in particular extended composition and face-to-face conversation.

Even disregarding its inbuilt limitations, there’s clearly room for improvement. My greatest frustration is that Memrise courses never explain anything. It’s all pure memory. Of course, learn enough items, see enough examples, and eventually you’ll deduce or intuit the underlying structure – that is, after thousands of examples. This is how we all learn languages as children. Nobody explains how to form the past progressive tense to us; we just hear it ten thousand times and absorb it by osmosis.

As an adult learner, though, I want to understand the how and why of things. It’s far easier for me to learn the six common pronouns (I, you, he/she/it, we, y’all, them) as a group, and then be able to pick them out from a given phrase, then to try it the opposite way and pick out the totally unfamiliar pronoun from a series of foreign words. What part of “O kaç yaşında?” (“How old is he?”) is the pronoun? In the phrase “Doğum günümde seni görmek isterim” (“I want to see you at my birthday”), which word is the verb? What denotes the object? If “gün” is “day,” what’s “günümde”?

Doğum günü: Doggone birthday

Often, too, I’d find that I’d learn a complex phrase, only to see its individual words included in later vocab sections. This is doubly stupid. First of all, why am I learning phrases about time, say, when I haven’t yet learned the words for “day,” “week,” “minute,” etc.? Second, if I’ve already successfully learned the complex phrases, then I’ve quite likely already puzzled out their components and don’t need to be retested on them.

This is part of the problem with crowdsourcing. You get a lot of content very quickly and cheaply, but it’s rarely as well-organized as a professionally designed course.

Fortunately, after a while I developed some strategies for avoiding these problems, and I’ll share these tips with you here:

1. Preview the course before you start, and compare it with other courses. There are hundreds of courses on Memrise, including dozens for each language, and not all courses are equal. Memrise will present the most popular courses, but popularity isn’t necessarily the best criterion for judging a course. Some courses include audio, others do not; some focus more on vocabulary, others on structure or common phrases. Click on the individual sections to see what the course includes and how it progresses.

2. Don’t be afraid to jump around. If the courses were all well-structured, they would build naturally, and you would want to move from A to B in the order suggested. Since this is not always the case, however, feel free to pick and choose. Personally, I would suggest learning the alphabet first, then very common phrases (“Hello,” “Goodbye,” “Where is the bathroom?”), then numbers, and then a good deal of basic vocabulary. With that vocab under your belt, you’ll feel more confident navigating more complex phrases.

Where is the toilet: Tuvalet nerede? (toilet nerd)

3. Buy a textbook. I spend way more time using Memrise than reading the Turkish textbook I have, but that textbook has helped me a lot in understanding key rules and structures.

4. Use a real computer. Memrise is available as an app for your portable device, and that app is terrific and fun in its own right. However, I found that using Memrise on my desktop computer was considerably more demanding, and hence better for learning. Also, a number of features, such as the ability to make your own mems (see #5), are only available on the web platform.

5. Make your own mems. Memrise will automatically show user-created mems whenever they’re available. If one works for you, great. If not, look for your own associations and make your own mems. You’ll remember it better for having created it.