Somehow, Your Humble Blogger was unaware that Walter Mosley (of Easy Rawlins fame) wrote specfic. I had actually drifted over to that library shelf to somewhat reluctantly pick up a mystery (I only enjoyed one of the two of his I’d read), and discovered two specfic books, and chose Futureland, thinking it was a collection of short stories. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s one of those novels by short stories thingies; I’m sure there’s a name for it. You know, where the main character of one story shows up as a minor character in two or three more, and where it turns out that there is a plot arc, of sorts, carrying through all the stories. At the end of it, I was thinking of it more as a single book than a collection; I have no idea how this would affect its possible nomination for various awards, but it doesn’t seem to have come up. I think that with a first-printing date of November 2001 it would have been in the class for the 2002 awards, which was a brutal year for Hugo novel competition, with American Gods taking the award over Curse of Chalion, Perdido Street Station, Passage, and two books I haven’t read, The Chronoliths and Cosmonaut Keep. Of the ones I’ve read, I think I would put this one third or so, above Passage and Perdido Street Station, which I liked but found frustratingly flawed. Well, I found all of the books frustratingly flawed, except Curse of Chalion, which was less ambitious, and therefore presumably less of an achievement even if actually, you know, achieved. Oh, and the Nebulas more or less the same; I haven’t read Bones of the Earth, The Other Wind, Picoverse, or Solitaire, which seem to be in the right time period. As for the short stories, novellas, etc., I haven’t read any of the Hugo or Nebula nominated ones, and haven’t any sense of which categories the nine stories in this book would sort into.
Anyway, I somehow doubt that the nominees read this book, weighed it against the others, and found it lacking. I suspect they missed this book, mostly because, you know, I did, and I was dropping into Pandemonium once or twice a week that year. I wonder if it was marketed as a non-specfic book? As litchratchoor? As a mystery? Not at all? Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Mosley suspects that it has something to do with his blackness, and I suspect he’s not far wrong. Not that Pandemonium or any other store is making up racist orders, but that Mr. Mosley writes about race in a way that he, his publishers, and their marketers expected not to sell to regular readers of specfic, and their expectations were likely rewarded. If fact, one of the most interesting things about the book was saying ‘ah, this is how somebody who writes about race in the way Mr. Mosley does would write specfic’. Rather differently than Octavia Butler does, you know. For instance, what emerges as the novels plotline is the growth of a neo-Nazi movement, that movement’s relationship with the powerholders of the Brave New World, and the viability of race-based biological weapons, culminating in a magnificently paranoid story called “The Nig in Me”, which (although, yes, frustratingly flawed) seems to me about as “important” (vadevah dot means) as any specfic short story I’ve read from the last five years. During which time, I must admit, I have read perhaps twenty or even as many as forty short stories; Gentle Readers will be aware that I tend to the novels.
And, you know, one of the things I hate is when somebody who knows nothing about a field wonders why people familiar with the field disregard something that he has no way of knowing whether they regard highly. So I’m curious, Gentle Readers: is this book well-known and well-discussed? Is this Walter Mosley’s next specfic book (should he write one) much anticipated? Or did everyone read the book (or some of it) and they just weren’t impressed? Or what? Because, for YHB, as much as I enjoyed reading the four Hugo nominees that year, none of them were even remotely as provocative as Futureland, and three of them have pretty much altogether faded from memory, while the fourth is a well-thumbed comfort book. Futureland may fade from memory as well in three years, but I don’t think so.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.