Fiskadoro

This is a post-holocaust tale published in 1985, just before the end of the Cold War. It's a mythopeic and hallucinatory work that questions the nature of reality, especially when memory fades and history is lost.

Fiskadoro is a 12-year-old boy living near Key West, now renamed Twicetown after being hit by two missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The warheads were duds.

Life is simple and uncouth, facilitated by the forgiving climate, the sea loaded with fish, and the debris of a pre-holocaust world. People use odd names, like Flying Man and King David Rat, and speak a mangled patois: "All I own do is gepback home."

Woven into the narrative are several journeys, the most important of which are the first two:

1. Fiskadoro, an Orpheus-like figure, is being taught how to how to play the clarinet by Mr. Cheung. He's captured by swamp-people who erase, among other things, his memory.

2. Mr. Cheung's grandmother was one of the last people to escape from Saigon before it fell to Communist forces. Now she is scarcely cognizant of her surroundings. Her long ordeal is described in detail.

3. Mr. Cheung himself travels to another island in pursuit of knowledge--a book that will explain the nuclear holocaust. He "believed in the importance of remembering."

4. Mr. Cheung's half-brother is "a famous, almost legendary figure" whose current name is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He recounts an odyssey to the mainland where he and his shipmates are captured by gamblers. He wants to obtain the drug used by the swamp-people to obliterate memories.

Fiskadoro is not a slice of sci-fi. It is a gritty surrealistic tale, closer to a novel like Fishboy by Mark Richard than McCarthy's The Road or Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The author, Denis Johnson, is an award-winning poet and novelist. Some of his other novels are Already Dead, Recusitation of a Hanged Man, and Tree of Smoke.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they smoked their cigarets in the old days...

Radio Cuba

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking is a writer of cosmological space westerns, the most famous of which is this book, A Brief History of Time. His use of literary devices such as imaginary time and virtual particles makes our universe seem like the world of Bizarro in Superman comics, or an updated version of Alice in Wonderland.

Characters

First of all there’s Newton, a rather nasty fellow who pursued counterfeiters all the way to the gallows. Einstein was much nicer, but he disliked gambling, especially with dice. Heisenberg couldn’t make up his mind about anything, Godel proved nothing was provable, and Feynman said everything was possible. Fortunately most of these guys have a sense of humour, like the comedy team of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow.

The villains of the book are as odd a bunch as you’ll find this side of a pack of cards. There’s a secret society of Mesons, and a couple of clowns named P-Brane and Glueball, and the weak but chubby Massive Vector Bosons.

Then there’s the Quarks, a slippery bunch named after a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and described by Hawking as “somewhat metaphysical.” Thus did modern literature influence particle physics – not just in the trivial matter of names, but in the very subjectivity of existence.

Or to put it another way, stream-of-consciousness helped pave the way for quantum mechanics.

Plot

This is your basic coming-of-age story.

Quotes

A black hole has no hair.

String theory is rather like plumbing.

The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

The total energy of the universe is exactly zero.

Why do we remember the past but not the future?

An ordinary particle moving forward in time is equivalent to an antiparticle moving backward in time.

Black holes are not really black.

The Author

In my copy of this book, the previous owner had left a newspaper clipping dated 1995. It announced Hawking's second marriage. His first wife was quoted as saying that Hawking “is in the grip of forces that he can’t control.”

Of course, that is literally quite true. In 1963 he was diagnosed with ALS and given no more than two years to live. Yet despite being almost completely paralyzed and no longer able to speak, he's become a world-famous theoretical physicist and cultural icon. He’s addressed NASA, experienced zero-G, and appeared on numerous TV shows, including a famous episode of ST:TNG.

His picture on the book’s cover -- a crumpled body against a backdrop of stars -- sums up the pathos of human existence.

A Brief History of A Brief History

1988 - A Brief History of Time
1996 - The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Edition
1998 - A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition
2005 - A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow)
2008 - A Brief History of Time: 20th Anniversary Edition

More Cosmological Westerns

Interested readers might try the Shrodinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, and The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind.

The Road to Oxiana

In 1933 an Englishman named Robert Byron began a pilgrimmage to Persia, or what is now called Iran.

His main interest was Islamic architecture, and one of his goals was to reach the ancient river of Oxus (now called the Amu), which at the time marked the boundary between Afghanistan and the former USSR.

His description of this journey has been called the first modern travel book for its unique combination of humour, erudition, and splendid writing. His influence on Bruce Chatwin is immediately obvious.

One of my favourite passages, which even my schoolboy French was able to comprehend, takes place in Damascus:

“Guide, Monsieur?” Silence. “Qu’est-ce vous désirez, Monsieur?” Silence. “D’où venez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Où allez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Vous avez des affaires ici, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Baghdad, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Téhéran, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous faites, Monsieur?” “Je fais un voyage en Syrie.” “Vous êtes un officier naval, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?” “Je suis homme.” “Quoi?” “HOMME.” “Je comprends. Touriste.”

It's a silly passage, but a good example of Byron's irrepressible wit, which runs throughout the book.

Sadly, the places he visited (Iran under Reza Shah, Afghanistan with Russia menacing the border) are no less volatile today. When he learns a rumour is circulating that he works for the Secret Service, he remarks prophetically, "Next time I do this kind of journey, I shall take lessons in spying beforehand. Since one has to put up with the disadvantages of the profession anyhow, one might as well reap some of its advantages, if there are any."

Back in England he spoke out loudly against the policy of appeasement, and in 1941 agreed to work for British Intelligence. The ship he set out on to return to the Middle East was torpedoed before it arrived. He was only 36.

The edition of The Road to Oxiana pictured above contains excellent introductions by Rory Stewart and Paul Fussell, as well as maps and several B&W photos of the buildings that Byron sought out.

If you enjoy travel writing, read this book.