RIP Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012

TODAY The Misread City mourns the death of Ray Bradbury. He was the first science-fiction writer, and the first Los Angeles writer, many people read. I still remember devouring the stories from The October Country and The Martian Chronicles in elementary school.

In a rush of emotion and recollection, I wrote my first piece for Zocalo Public Square on Bradbury's complicated relationship with Los Angeles. Here it is. I may be unusual in preferring The Martian Chronicles to Fahrenheit 451, as important as that novel remains.

Some really strong pieces in the press today.

Here is The New York Times' obit, and here is an excellent LA Times piece by my friend Lynell George. And Ted Gioia wrote a very fine piece on Salon on how Bradbury made science fiction respectable.

Brother Ray's legacy will live on.

Imagining Mars

WHATEVER the faults of John Carter, the new film based on the early work of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we're happy to have the chance to head back to Mars. Given the way NASA funding is going, this may be our only chance.

As a species, we've been fascinated with the Red Planet for a long time -- the film is only the latest of a long line. Why does it draw us to it, and how has our thinking about Mars changed over the years? Those are the issues I tackled on Hero Complex; here is my story.

Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson -- whose intriguing list of favorite Mars novels is here -- talked to me about images of Mars; when we spoke, he'd not yet seen the whole film, but was impressed by the trailer, calling its stark, mountainous Wild West-like terrain among the best Martian landscape he's ever seen.

"The was the film can have a real impact is if the true star of the movie is the planet," said Robinson, a longtime environmentalist. "The shape of a landscape is something very deep in human evolution. In hunting and gathering days, the landscape was pretty much what we had. There's part of the human brain that looks at new land and says, 'Wow, what's the potential here. Boy, you could live there."

Novelist Neal Stephenson

ONE of the smartest, as well as the toughest, writers I've ever encountered in Neal Stephenson, who is somewhere between a cyberpunk writer, a science-fiction novelist and a cultural historian.

I met Stephenson, who has a new novel out, in his hometown of Seattle just before the publication of Anathem. HERE is my interview with the author of Snow Crash and The Baroque Triology.

One of Anathem's observations seems more and more true to me as we move into the future.

"That idea kept coming back to me, because it still seemed fresh," Stephenson said, "the idea that book-reading people were more and more diverging from the mainstream, that they're a separate culture invisible to media culture."


And here is a Salon review of his new thriller, Readme.

Philip K. Dick at the Movies

Tomorrow a new film based on a Philip K. Dick story, The Adjustment Bureau, opens. I’ve not yet seen the Matt Damon/Emily Blunt film yet, but the PKD fans I know are not impressed with it and don’t think it’s true to the author’s vision and thinks it's been skewed too much in a conventional-romantic direction. (Here is a mostly approving review by the NYT's Manohla Dargis.)

The film is based on a 1954 Dick short story, “Adjustment Team,” which is pretty decent for early PKD has more cinema-ready action than many; within a few pages much of the protagonist's world has crumbled to ash and he's chased with menacing minders -- "men in white robes" -- of the kind the author specialized in. Jonathan Lethem collects the piece in the 2002 Selected Stories and writes that in this story "we meet the Dick of the great sixties novels, his characters defined by how they endure more than by any triumph over circumstances." (I'm gonna take my guess as to whether it's the crashing action or the stolid endurance that plays a bigger role in this film version.)

Director George Nolfi seems to have his heart in the right place.  “Dick was really interested in the line between reality and some mental construct that could be illusion or could be another level of existence,” Nolfi told Geoff Boucher of Hero Complex. “I really wanted to take that and turn it on its head and ask, ‘What happens if you see behind the curtain and it’s unequivocally clear that is the truth?’ What you’ve seen before is only a tiny part of reality, how do you deal with that?”

Here is Geoff's whole piece.

I’m more excited about the announcement that Ubik – tight, funny, philosophical and perhaps Dick’s finest novel despite being a bit of a mess at the end – will be directed by Michel Gondry, whose Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of several fine movies that bears the author’s stamp despite not being based directly on his work. Though Gondry has stumbled lately, he’s an imaginative director with a gift for the startling image, and he loves ideas.

Dick scholar David Gill, on Total Dick-Head blog, reports himself “ambivalent” about the Gondry choice. His post here. 

And let’s not forget Radio Free Albemuth, a no-budgert indie based on an odd and sort-of-autobiographical novel with a quasi-Nixonian conspiracy: The film is not perfect, but it captures the tone of Dick’s novels as well as any adaptation I’ve seen, and the PKD community has lined up behind it. Its trailer is here. (The film's site reminds me that the author died 29 years ago yesterday, in Orange County.)


And brief news today, Friday, that Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? may inspire another movie that could be a sequel or prequel to Blade Runner.

And HERE a link to all of my posts on PKD.

Philip K. Dick in Marin Co.

RECENTLY your humble blogger ventured to Point Reyes Station, a beautiful little town on the Marin Coast, where Philip K. Dick spent several reclusive and very productive years. They were also perhaps his greatest period, during which he wrote The Man in the High Castle and began The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich.


The result is this New York Times story, which runs Tuesday and looks at a memoir/biography by his third wife, Anne Dick, called, The Search for Philip K. Dick.


In some ways, the area hasn't changed all that much since he lived there 50 years ago. West Marin is an isolated region of rolling hills, wind-swept beaches and small farms: Back then ranchers and farm workers dominated what’s become a liberal, affluent county north of the San Francisco Bay. On the street where the Dicks lived, it’s still easy to be startled by deer crossing the road, especially on nights when the fog has rolled in, and the region’s scent of redwood, fir and forest floor is strong. 

Anne described a lot of details I didn't have room for: At night the couple would play board games and Dick, who had worked at classical record stores in Berkeley in the ‘50s, would play Purcell or Schubert on the record player.


David Gill, who runs the Total Dick-head blog and wrote the book's introduction, spoke to me about "Dick's family-man period." He also observed that west Marin -- with its remoteness from civilization and tendency to shortages -- may've served as the author's model for the Mars he described in the novel Martian Time-Slip.

Our sense of an artist’s development usually involves some kind of external stimulus that knocks creativity into a higher pitch. But nobody knows where it comes from.

“Sometimes artists just do things because they’re ready to,” Jonathan Lethem told me. “But look at his life relationally: Dick was a son – an adolescent,” during his early, childless years, moving through a series of mentor relationships.

“In Marin, Anne was an adult in a different way than he was used to. Everything forced him into a role as a father as an adult. You can see the rest of his life as a running from that. But it also deepened the work.”

The Past Envisions the Future

LOOKING back at mid-century optimism is always both fascinating and depressing. All the labor-saving devices and exotic holidays -- weekends on the moon! -- we were going to get by now.


The science-fiction writer Gregory Benford, who teaches at UC/Irvine, and the editors of Popular Mechanics have put together hundreds of these predictions, from asbestos dresses to personal jetpacks, along with the original art which accompanied them in the magazine. Here is my story from Sunday's LA Times on The Wonderful Future That Never Was.


Benford, who also teaches physics, writes insightful essays that puts the whole future-looking enterprise into context. As any close reader of science fiction knows, we can tell a lot about an era by how it envisions its future.

Benford has also recently co-edited a tribute to science-fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke, whose powers of predictions, especially re satellite communication, he praises. Sentinels: In Honor of Arthur C. Clarke, edited with George Zebrokwski, includes essays on the writer himself as well as stories by Heinlein and Asimov that speak to Clarke's ambitions. (It's published by Hadley Rille Books.)

First-ever Philip K. Dick Festival

JUST a few days ago in Colorado, scholars, fans and various oddballs gathered in honor of Philip K. Dick, the eccentric visionary who is a major presence on The Misread City. Your humble blogger was not able to attend, but David Gill, the San Francisco-based savant behind the Total Dick-Head blog chronicled the gathering -- the first of its kind in the US -- for groovy sci-fi/futurism site i09.


Gill sets up a detailed report of the festival this way:


Phil Dick's science fiction often features characters alienated by the technology that surrounds them, overwhelmed by the immense absurdity of the Universe as well as the drudgery of their daily lives, but who are ultimately saved through genuine human connection. As our world grows to look more and more like a PKD novel, the adjective Dickian has come to describe the way reality seems frayed at the edges, too strained with irony and weird synchronicities to maintain its apparent stability for long.


Here is Gill's entire piece. His lecture on Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? can be found here.


Also, Dick's old friend, science-fiction writer and UC Irvine physics prof Gregory Benford, gave a funny, revealing speech about the author in the '60s and '70s at a small but intriguing panel at Irvine recently. I've linked here to the text, which includes moments like this:

As success came to him, he was generous to the poor. He told me in 1981 that he had made $180,000 that year and gave most of it to charities. Even though he lived pretty close to the street himself, he knew what it was like to be down, and tried to help people. The one person who would not have believed in the prominence of Philip Dick in our culture now was Philip Dick himself.

Ray Bradbury, Still Going at 90

THIS Sunday marks the 90th birthday of the first Los Angeles writer I ever read. I can still remember some of the images and moods in his story collection The October Country. And the yearning lyricism and use of The Red Planet as a metaphor for the American West makes The Martian Chronicles, some days, one of my 10 favorite works of fiction.

Critic Ted Gioia has a wide-ranging tribute to Bradbury on his blog Conceptual Fiction. It gets into Bradbury's earliest work, his Midwestern-to-Los Angeles life story, and his discomfort with the science-fiction genre.


HERE is a piece I wrote in 2003 that began this way:
Ray Bradbury is the first Los Angeles writer many people read. He's also the first reasonably serious writer -- someone concerned with political and moral themes -- many encounter. His early science-fiction novels and story collections have drawn readers, especially intellectually ambitious teenage boys, for a half-century now. Many of these Bradbury fans become lifetime readers, moving into all kinds of weightier fare, from the darker, more complicated science fiction of William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin and Philip K. Dick to mainstream literary work without end. He's the ultimate gateway drug.


Despite my mixed feelings for Bradbury's recent work, he's one of the finest citizens of literary L.A., and it's appropriate that Fahrenheit 451 has become, especially lately, his most talked about and read novel -- even if its meaning has changed a bit with time. 


The threat the book lays out is not so much censoriousness as ignorance -- the sense that books are relics of the past. This man with minimal formal education has been a huge advocate for reading as well as for public libraries. As the husband of a school librarian laid off (like all of her peers) by the city of Pasadena -- this will likely result in us leaving the state in the next month or two -- I can assure everyone that Bradbury has better values than those directing institutions in contemporary California.


Long may he thrive. 

Philip K. Dick at UC Irvine

ON Friday I braved some of the worst traffic in Southern California for A County Darkly, a panel on Philip K. Dick's years in Orange County.

Overall, the event was lively and fun, even without offering few genuinely new insights. (I wrote about the symposium briefly, here, on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog. And I wrote a lengthy piece on his years in SoCal here.)

UC Riverside scholar Rob Latham read a few passages from the author's OC novels ("Life in Anaheim, California, was a commercial for itself, endlessly replayed..."), and was followed by three of Dick's friends. Generally the most intriguing part of the gathering was getting people who'd really known "Phil" at the same table.

Wily writer/physicist Gregory Benford stressed how funny Dick was a person, describing him as a gifted physical comedian as well as how generous he was, giving much of his Blade Runner money away to charity and poor people he knew. "Even though he lived pretty close to the street himself, he knew what it was like to be down, and tried to help people." Benford also described Dick writing on his old Olympic typewriter on a day Dick was so obsessed with his deadline -- and speed-ed up -- that he had to drag his friend to dinner: "He was hitting the keys so hard and so fast it sounded like a motorcycle." (This took place in the late '60s, a few years before the author moved south from the Bay Area.)

Writer Jim Blaylock emphasized how hard it was to really figure out which of Dick's wild theories the writer himself believed. "He seemed to be evolving in his beliefs so constantly that it became harder to tell from one Tuesday to another," where his thinking was.

Dick told his friends about a thousands-year-old plot involving Jesus Christ and the KBG. "The other night he convinced us that the Soviets had developed a madness ray... which was aimed at Los Angeles... They'd developed the hydrogen bomb as a kind of lark -- what was really going to take us out was the madness ray."

Writer Tim Powers talks about finding Dick's thousands of pages of writing on his visitation by God -- soon to be published as The Exegesis -- while Dick was in the hospital, dying, and stashing it in a large ashtray with "Elvis is King" on it because he didn't want it falling into the wrong hands. "I started to read it, and it sounded really crazy. Out of its proper context it really sounded weird." When he spoke to the authorities after the author's death he told them, "Don't neglect the Elvis ashtray, because that's where all of his theological speculation is."

Powers also mentioned Dick's difficulty with marriage (he was married and divorced five times. "I think he could see, after all of those attempts, that he wasn't very good at marrying people. He wasn't going to do that anymore."

Many intellectual teenagers and young men have an older, eccentric friend who turns them onto weird books and ideas, exposes them to jazz or classical or experimental music, and sometimes buys them beer. (I know I did.) After Friday's session, I sorely regret not having known Philip K. Dick in his prime.

Here is the full announcement and cast of characters:

TITLE: A County Darkly:  Philip K Dick in the OC

TIME:  Friday, May 21, 12-2

PLACE: Humanities Gateway 1030, University of California, Irvine campus

PARTICIPANTS:

Science Fiction Authors:
*Gregory Benford
*Tim Powers
*James Blaylock

Science Fiction Critics
*Rob Latham
*Jeff Hicks

Moderator: Jonathan Alexander

ABOUT: This panel presentation will consider the inter-relationship of
Philip K. Dick's work and his life in Orange County.  Spending the last
ten years of his life in the OC, Dick composed some of his most important
SF works here.  In many ways, the OC is a peculiarly Dickian space, with
managed communities and a veneer of the unreal.  Conversely, Dick's late
novels (A Scanner Darkly, Valis, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer)
seem at least partly inspired by Dick's life in Orange County.  Our
panelists will explore such connections, bringing the work of the
century's most noted SF author to bear on our cultural imagination of
Orange County, while also bringing our imagination of the OC to bear on
possible interpretations of Dick's work.

Pro and Con on Ray Bradbury

THE first Los Angeles writer many people read -- I think this was true for me -- is Ray Bradbury. The fantasy and science-fiction writer, nearing his 90th birthday, gets a very fine treatment from Nathaniel Rich in Slate this week. (Here for his piece.)


I dedicated the book I co-edited, The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles, to Bradbury; my partner in crime Dana Gioia and I regarded him as a contemporary myth-maker whose Martian Chronicles stories are among the very finest work ever written about California. I still love that book and some others, such as the macabre, atmospheric The October Country.


"The best stories have a strange familiarity about them," Rich writes in his piece pegged to the Everyman Library The Stories of Ray Bradbury. "They're like long-forgotten acquaintances — you know you've met them somewhere before. "


Rich makes a real case for Bradbury as a wide-ranging talent who deals intelligently with technology, reckons with disillusionment, and put a strong stamp on the horror genre as well. I'm fond of young Mr. Rich, who recently departed the revived Paris Review; I met him in New York and wrote about his wondrous first novel here in a piece that also looked at two other first-time novelists in New York, Ed Park and Keith Gessen. (The Paris Review also has an interview with RB in its latest issue.)


But I should confess here that while my interest in science fiction and fantasy have come back to me with a vengeance over the last few years, I've been quite disappointed with most Bradbury written since the end of the '50s. One of the toughest pieces I've ever had to write was this review of an earlier career-spanning story collection. 


Why the man's output has decline so severely I can't say. I wish Bradbury well of course, and despite my feelings for his work, part of me is pleased to see the renewal of interest in his work. As I say in my piece, Bradbury's early work can serve as a powerful gateway drug to more powerful stuff and for that we're all grateful.

Philip K. Dick's "Exegesis"

It's been decades. But at long last, the thousands of pages sf visionary Philip K. Dick wrote in the aftermath of his divine visions will see the light of day as a two-volume set edited by novelist/fanboy Jonathan Lethem and Dick scholar Pamela Jackson.


(Dick was of course living in Orange County during those hallucinogenic visions of 1974, in which God supposedly spoke to him, as well as during the long days and nights when he transcribed his experiences. Here for the relevant chapter of my recent story about the author's time in the Southland.)

“The title he gave it, ‘Exegesis,’ alludes to the fact that what it really was, was a personal laboratory for philosophical inquiry,” Lethem told the New York Times, here for full story. “It’s not even a single manuscript, in a sense – it’s an amassing or a compilation of late-night all-night sessions of him taking on the universe, mano-a-mano, with the tools of the English language and his own paranoiac investigations.”

The visions came after a girl delivered some medication to Dick for dental surgery. Not long after he began seeing visions from modern painting and to realize that the Orange County landscape around him was actually First Century Rome.

“It’s something that he talked about and created a kind of amazing aura around,” Lethem said, “so that people have an image of it as if it’s some kind of consummated effort. ‘I’m working on my exegesis.’ But what he really meant was, he was turning his brain inside-out on the page, on a nightly basis, over a period of years of his life.”

David Gill, who runs the Total Dick-Head blog, tells The Misread City: "The fact that Dick's most personal writings are seeing the light of day offers the best evidence yet that it is Dick himself that fascinates readers, and that for many of us his novels are simply a way to get to better know this incredibly iconoclastic thinker. Whether or not these notes will allows us to better know him remains to be seen. In the grandest Dickian sense he is again blurring the lines between art and artifice, mixing the private and the public, as well as the spiritual quest for truth with what might very well be a descent into madness, forcing us to remember Emily DICKinson's declaration that 'Much madness is divinest sense, to a discerning eye.' "


The first of two volumes is expected from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2011.


Photo credit: Philip K. Dick Estate

Magical Prose and Rethinking Literary Realism

On Saturday I led a panel at UCLA with three writers who work in what we might call slipstream, literary fantasy, conceptual fiction, surrealism, or some other school still to be named. While the specific label isn't particularly important, the emphasis on rethinking realism, on embracing the best of genres like fantasy and science fiction, and moving into what Michael Chabon has called "the borderlands" between literary categories is at the center of much the best fiction these days, I think.

HERE is a Jacket Copy blogger's coverage of my panel, which I described as about the Gen-X rebellion against doctrinaire realism, and which included the writers Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake), Lev Grossman (The Magicians) and Victor LaValle (Big Machine).

My favorite moment was when LaValle was asked if he'd drawn from any myths or legends in developing his literary style and he mentioned how he had read the Bible all the way through -- a volume, he said, drawn from so many previous ancient sources that if functions like an anthology.

The Jacket Copy post includes a pretty sharp summary of the stakes of the conversation as well as a reasonable unflattering photo of yours truly mid-syllable.

I quoted Chabon's excellent book of criticism, Maps and Legends, praised the work of Ursula Le Guin, and referred to Ted Gioia's blog, Conceptual Fiction, which is dedicated to these very issues. I also name-dropped my first "favorite writer," J.R.R. Tolkien, whose family monogram is pictured.

The Persistence of Frank Herbert's "Dune"

THE novel Dune, started out about as unpromisingly as a novel can -- published after many rejections, on a press specializing in auto manuals. But spoke to its own time as well as to ours, and it's still the best-selling sf novel ever.

HERE is my LA Times story on the novel and its legacy in literature, ideas and film.

There are of course all kinds of connections between Dune with Star Wars and Avatar. (See "white man saves the world" subgenre.)

One thing I ran out of room for, in my story, was my conversation with Kevin Misher, one of the two producers of the upcoming film adaptation.

"David Lynch made a good David Lynch movie," he told me. "I didn't feel like it reflected my experience with the book Dune."

"I think The Lord of the Rings opened up the possibility of what you can do with classic themes and a classic work. What Peter Jackson showed is that faithful doesn't mean slavish."

On Frank Herbert: "Was was very prescient, and created a science-fiction parable: His future was our present. It was an extremely entertaining adventure that comments on our world today. The human story at the core of Dune -- the emotional story of a family trying to survive-- is what's helped it stay atop the sf charts for 45 years."

More on Dune's film adaptation on future posts of The Misread City.

The Return of LA Noir

ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist Raymond Chandler. And now, thanks to a new anthology, all that murder, deception and unpleasantness is back.

A few years back, local mystery writer Denise Hamilton (The Last Embrace) and Brooklyn's Akashic Books put together a collection called Los Angeles Noir that looked at the inheritors of the private detective line of crime fiction.

A new anthology on Akashic looks, now, at the origins of that tradition. Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics begins with a Chandler story, "I'll Be Waiting," from the '30s, and includes work from Chester Himes and James M. Cain before moving into the postwar period with Ross Macdonald and, eventually, Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. (Science-fiction fans will be intrigued by a '40s story by sf writer Leigh Brackett, called "I Feel Bad Killing You.)


HERE is my interview with Denise about that first book. It begins: 'You won't find many trench coats, fedoras or Black Dahlias in "Los Angeles Noir," an about-to-be-published anthology of 17 new short stories set in various corners of the contemporary City of Angels.'


What follows is a new interview with Hamilton on LA Noir 2. She and other contributors -- including those behind the new, Gary Phillips-edited Orange County Noir -- will make a number of appearances around SoCal. Saturday Denise, Gary and others will be at Skylight Books; next Friday some of them will be at Vroman's. Here goes:

The first volume of Los Angeles Noir was well-received. What made the time seem right for another, slightly different volume?

Akashic’s noir series follows this pattern. The first volume is new stories, the second one is classics. This was thrilling to me, as I’ve been a classic noir reader for years, and had recently re-visited the classic short stories of noir that are set here when I began working on the first volume of L.A. Noir. In my attempts to cast a broad net, I also read many stories by literary authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion (and also Nathanael West) set in Tinseldown. I wanted to steep myself in the genre and really think hard about the lineage from 1930s noir, through the hard boiled 40s and 50s and see how it influence and carried through into contemporary crime writing about Los Angeles. Because I do think there’s a continiuum, we are all dipping into the same well, the white blazing sunlight, the deep shadows cast by Hollywood, the greed, the artifice, the stunning beauty and the desperation.

Almost half of the stories here are from noir's classic period, the '30s and '40s. But some are more contemporary, including one freshly written and set on Terminal Island in 2007. What makes a story "classic."

My definition for ‘classic’ was rather loose. It couldn’t be contemporary, set in the 21st century. I also waffled greatly on whether stories set in the 1990s were ‘classic.’ But 1990 was 20 yeas ago – an entire generation has grown up since then. And certain L.A. neighborhoods have changed dramatically. In the end I opted to include several stories with a historic ‘feel.’ Jervey Tervalon’s story Reka, for instance, is set right before the L.A. Riots of 1992, when the crack and gang epidemic was in full swing. The LA Riots are certainly ‘historic’ today, and Jervey’s story, filled with bubbling anger, drugs, violence and an anguished family, captures the feel of that era. Likewise, Yxta Maya Murray’s story about ‘locas’ takes place in pre-gentrified Latino Echo Park and is a Polaroid snapshot back into history, before the area was studded with upscale eateries, galleries, cafes, clothing boutiques and petcare shops.

It seems like much of the rethinking of noir in the last decade or so has been about its racial and ethnic subtext -- looking at the black neighborhoods of cities, and their potential protagonists, or realizing that Japanese Americans weren't all gardeners.

L.A.’s cultural diversity has always struck me – even back when I was an L.A. Times reporter – as an inspiring fount for modern noir. People come to this city from around to the world to leave the past behind, reinvent themselves. They’re filled with fear and desperation. The city and its beauty seduces them like a femme fatale. They have secrets they want to stay buried. It’s a fantastic literary canvass from which to paint. But when you look at the classic tales, they’re all written by straight white guys and pretty much set in the white community where people of color, if they exist at all, serve as exotic backdrops, maids, jazz musicians and whores. So yeah, it was the natural progression to ask why that was, and then go back into the literary record and search out the hole in the donut of noir, which was all the non-white males.

I was not interested in turning in an anthology of the ‘usual suspects’ we’ve already seen in so many (good) collections, because otherwise we’re just preaching to the choir. There were vibrant Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, Russian etc communities in LA that date back to the 1800s and I wanted to showcase some authors from those communities. So while I knew I’d include the big bad boys of noir – the masters Chandler, Cain, MacDonald – it was also time to let some air into that stale cigarette-smoke room. And by the way, it’s not only ethnic and racial subtext, it’s also gender. There were some fantastic women writing noir in the 1940s – Leigh Brackett, Dorothy B. Hughes, Margaret Millar, but noir was a sexist male genre and so the gals aren’t as well known, which is a darn shame. Gays also got short shrift. If they were depicted at all it was often as exotic denizens of strange nightclubs. But I found a lovely 1970s story by Joseph Hanson, who wrote an openly gay sleuth back when this was very uncommon.

Was it hard to get the rights for these stories by the old masters? Anything you tried to get but couldn't? I've have loved to see something by Cornell Woolrich, who was here in LA briefly.

Surprisingly, we got everything we asked for thanks to Akashic publisher Johnny Temple working his magic. We even got the rights to reprint the Raymond Chandler short story “I’ll Be Waiting.” But oddly, Chandler’s estate would not allow us to put his name on the cover. SoChandler’s story leads the collection, and he’s mentioned twice on the back cover, but not on the front. Go figure.

And ah, Cornell Woolrich. I looked and looked. He wrote very few short stories set in L.A. The several that I found were not his best, in my opinion. In one, the murderer is glaringly obvious. Another is very dated and somewhat racist, especially by our modern standards. I wanted to include a CW short story called “Hot Water” that begins in Beverly Hills, but it quickly veers off to a Tijuana gambling casino and leads readers on a rollicking ride of mistaken identity, a stolen gambling stake and a car chase ride through the Mexican desert on shot-out tires and a gas tank fueled with tequila. It’s crazy Cornell at his best, but it just wasn’t LA-centric enough to warrant inclusion.

Readers of The Misread City are particularly fond of Ross MacDonald -- Can you say something about his story here, or the one by his wife, Margaret Millar?

A quick hat tip to Macdonald biographer Tom Nolan, who helped me narrow down the oeuvre to a handful of stories that fit my parameters.  Macdonald’s short stories are elegant and well-plotted, and are written in great painterly strokes that really give readers the feel of Southern California in the post-war years. That said, some critics found his wife and lamentably lesser known writer Margaret Millar to be the better wordsmith. Millar’s stories can be very introspective and they focus on psychological dread and the dynamics of troubled families. That is certainly the case with her story in L.A. Noir 2, “The People Across the Canyon,” a hair-raising little tale.

Does the noir tradition still seem to be alive and well here in Southern California?

I read the papers and watch the news, and I see the ghosts of Chandler and Macdonald and James M. Cain and Dorothy B. Hughes everywhere. Except now it’s playing out on a global stage – the protagonists and antagonists aren’t just from Sioux City and Baton Rouge, but fromYerevan and San Salvador and Chiang Mai. I think some of the best L.A. writing today in the genre reflects this diversity, and some are even taking it to other levels, incorporating paranormal and urban fantasy into their noir stories. That also seems a natural fit for a city that much of the rest of the world seems to think is only a holographic figment of our collective unconsciousness anyway.

Philip K. Dick, Consolidated

THE great, idiosyncratic writer, whose esteem has surged in recent decades, died 28 years ago this month.


HERE is the new link on Hero Complex that gets you to all six parts of my look at the author's decade in Orange County.

My series considered Dick's life and work, and tried to get at what kind of impact a conservative suburban region would have on a man who had spent most of his life in Bay Area bohemia. How did having a relatively settled period of his life change the man and his output?

I just finished rereading The Man in the High Castle, the author's first hit and sole Hugo Award winner -- a novel that looks at an alternate America in which the Axis powers win World War II, with the Nazis and the Japanese dividing most of the country between them.

I was struck by a) how well it stands up, b) how rigorous the history behind it is, c) how many different character's point of view the novel is told from, in contrast to Dick's later work.

Will be continuing to go back through the many novels and stories of this singular figure.

Overpopulation and Robert Silverberg

This week sees the reissue of The World Inside, a long-obscure science-fiction novel that could become a miniseries on HBO.

Of course, it's delicious to think of this hyper-urbanized future world -- in which people live in 800-story apartment complexes and have sex whenever they want -- serving as the setting for the next Deadwood or The Wire.

The novel's author, Robert Silverberg, is a veteran sf writer who really his his stride in the early '70s, around the time he moved to Oakland, where he still lives.

He's aways been a bit of a contrarian, and during the field's late '60s/early '70s period, much of sf was especially left wing. Silverberg has framed himself in contrast as a Burkean conservative with a respect for tradition, allegiances to traditional "high" culture and libertarian leanings.

With books like The Population Bomb and other expressions of Malthusian dread appearing in this period, Silverberg released a novel in which people have adapted to overpopulation and live with it more or less happily.

Here is my piece on The World Inside for io9, which includes a brief interview with Silverberg. And here an earlier (and broader) LA Times profile of the author, tied to the reissue of another "lost" early '70s classic, Dying Inside.

Vancouver and The Future of William Gibson

I SEEM to be hearing a lot about Vancouver these days. Not sure why, but it reminds me of my one trip to that glorious city to interview visionary novelist William Gibson. The writer often credited with foreseeing the Internet and much of hacker culture, Gibson was about to publish Spook Country, his second novel (after Pattern Recognition) to concentrate on the more-or-less present.

Gibson was as smart and easy to get along with as anyone I've ever interviewed: I was struck by his humility. HERE is my profile of him, where we talked about growing up in the conservative South, his flight to Canada, his breakthrough with Neuromancer, his clumsiness with technology and interest in rock n' roll and country music, and what a loser his friends thought he was when he started writing science fiction.

(Doug Coupland, who also lives in the city, was one of my first author interviews, back in 1994; a reader of The Misread City has just dug it up for me, here.)

And if you end up in Vancouver, the best place I ate was the Rain City Grille (where I ordered the locavore menu) and my favorite place to drink there is an indie/ retro pub called The Morrissey.

February 15 and Galileo

TODAY is an important day for Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst, composer John Adams, jazzman Henry Threadgill -- and that's just the musicians. Throw in Susan B. Anthony and Galileo, and I think it's about as good a day as there is, especially lodged as it is in the middle of the dreary month of February. (And I insist I am totally unbiased on the matter despite my Feb. 15 birthday.)

Galileo was one of my idols as a kid, coming before even, I think, John Lennon and Kurt Vonnegut. I responded not only the man's polymath genius, but his courage and resistance to the Catholic Church, which persecuted him until the very end despite his continued piety; he was an important early shaper of my religious beliefs. And just a hair over 400 years ago, Galileo discovered the moons of Jupiter.

One way I'm marking the day is to post my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Galileo's Dream, a historical novel of the future, you might say, has just come out. HERE is that piece. Robinson, of course, is the environmentalist and Central California science-fiction writer with much fine work to his credit; his Mars trilogy is considered the best example of world-building since Dune.

In any case I will hoist a glass of Cava tonight to the great Florentine and the others.

Death -- and New Life -- for Philip K. Dick

IT seems appropriate for a writer who was fascinated by religion for much of his career that Philip K. Dick's own trajectory tracks that of many a religious messiah: He died in 1982, but in the years after his death he has seemed to rise again.

HERE is the last of six pieces in the Hero Complex blog about the author's decade in Orange County. It looks at his final years, his death, and the movie Blade Runner, which started out as a bomb before becoming one of the (few) great movies of the '80s and perhaps the defining film of contemporary Los Angeles.

This week I will put up a single post that will collect all my recent writing on the author, for Hero Complex and elsewhere.  

Philip K. Dick's Late Work

MY latest piece on Philip K. Dick is the only one built of all-new material: That is, none of this appears in the LA Times story about the writer's Orange County years that ran a couple of Sundays back.

This latest piece, which just went up on the Hero Complex blog, looks at the impact Southern California had on Dick's work. Did it move him toward an interest in consumerism, religion, or change his tone? I spoke to novelist Jonathan Lethem, a local professor, a veteran of SoCal's punk scene and Dick authority David Gill to get at the question of how Orange County led PKD to VALIS, A Scanner Darkly, Timothy Archer and others.

The sixth and final piece should run tomorrow.