"Illuminations: Stories" by Alan Moore (2022)

"One major problem seemed to be that nearly everyone working in the business - artists, writers, editors and publishers - was a promoted comic fan who though they might know everything about King Bee, had no original or viable ideas of their own that might conceivably alleviate the comic world's near-terminal condition."

Alan Moore is a noted writer of comic books who began writing fiction in the late 90s.  He first came to widespread attention through his work at DC Comics, where he wrote a celebrated run on Swamp Thing, and where he then created the groundbreaking limited series Watchmen with artist Dave Gibbons.  Since his heyday in the 80s he's bounced around quite a bit, penning a number of comic book titles for a number of different publishers.

My personal (?) relationship with Moore goes back to that run on Swamp Thing in the early 80s.  I liked that character prior to Moore taking on writing duties, but it was Moore's innovations on that title that made me a genuine fan.  From Swamp Thing it was an easy leap to Watchmen, another series I loved, but after that seminal work I largely lost track of Moore, only reading a handful of the comics he wrote for Image later on.

This said, I have made jokes at his expense.  A few years ago I came across a quote by Moore, something to the effect of people becoming the thing they dread.  As part of this quote Moore explained that he'd become a wizard, and for years now I've been warning people of the perils of going to bed and waking up as a wizard, encouraging them to guard against such transformations.  This joke only ever lands with one friend who's also familiar with the same quote, but I still insist on repeating it from time to time, as if its repetition will make the reference any less obscure.  "I went to pay for my latte at Starbucks," I'll say, "And damned if I didn't become a wizard once the change hit the counter."

Alan Moore, to put it another way, takes himself incredibly seriously, and he probably thinks that you and I should too.  While briefly researching this short story collection, for example, I ran across an interview with him in which he explains the literary devices he uses in the writing of his stories - in case, you know, the rest of us are too slow on the uptake.  In the interview he seems nice enough about it, but yeah, he is in this respect far from unsassuming.

Anyway, on to the stories.

1. Hypothetical Lizard

This story starts off promising but goes nowhere fast.  I really liked the bit about the "whore of sorcerers" and the procedure employed in the creation of such a being, but the overall narrative is an extremely pedestrian tale of sexual jealousy which fails to utilize an excellent opening.

2. Not Even Legend

One of the better stories here.  A group investigating the paranormal meets and runs afoul of all the spirits which normally exist outside of their investigations.  It's a little like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button meets a detective story.  It works well.

3. Location, Location, Location

A pointlessly sexual story involving a real estate transaction and the end of the world.  I'm really not sure where Moore was trying to go with this one, and I don't think he's entirely sure either.

4. Cold Reading

A psychic gets on the wrong side of the supernatural.  It's a solid story that would have worked well as a horror comic.  Anything more than that would have involved a deeper dive into the characters.

5. The Improbably Complex High-Energy State

One of the most pretentious things I've ever read, and keep in mind that I've struggled through books like Gravity's Rainbow and Finnegan's Wake.  This story is best described as a kind of fantasia (or phantasmagoria) involving entities existing in a quantum substrate.  It tries to be amusing, occasionally succeeds, but I found reading it to be a real chore.

6. Illuminations

An older man pays a heavy price for nostalgia.  This is far and away the best story in this collection, and I assume it leans heavily on the author's memories of younger years.  The ending isn't altogether unexpected, but the various plot elements click together nicely in the end.

7. What We Can Know About Thunderman

This novella is the centerpiece of this short story collection, and serves as Moore's grand statement on the (American) comic book industry.  By turns pointless and confusing, this sprawling... thing really puts the "T" in "turgid."

In case, as Moore is likely to suspect, you're too slow to catch the symbolism, "Thunderman" is a stand-in for Superman, "American" is a stand-in for DC, and "Massive" is a stand-in for Marvel.  Having endured Moore's dismissing vignettes of various figures within the comic book industry, I can understand why more current creators are often so cryptic in their descriptions of interactions with him.  He's probably not a pleasant individual to deal with.

8. American Light: An Appreciation

What's more pretentious than a Beat poem which places various Egyptian deities in the context of San Franciscan history?  Its author supplying footnotes to this same Beat poem for the edification of his less literate readership!  Hey, at least it's short!

9. And, at the Last, Just to be Done with Silence

Don't ask me, I don't know.  Maybe it's about the devil?

Whatever it's about, it's the last story in this collection, and I felt like I'd just completed a marathon after finishing it.  Getting through Illuminations wasn't easy, and I have no desire to repeat the experience through any of Moore's other books.  Alan Moore has certainly written some excellent comic books, but I doubt the rest of his fiction is worth locating.

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"The Crowded Universe" by Alan Boss (2009)

"All the evidence gathered to date by over ten years of planet hunting implies that Earth-like planets should be common in our neighborhood of the galaxy of the Milky Way and, by inference, in other galaxies as well.  But how common is common?  Will essentially every nearby Sun-like star have a habitable world, or only 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, or 1 in 1000?"

Alan Boss is an American astrophysicist.  He worked for NASA on the Kepler Mission.  He has been part of the search for Earth-like planets since the 1980s.

The subtitle of this book is "The Race to Find Life Beyond Earth," but this subtitle is misleading.  This is not a book that mentions SETI or the efforts of similar groups, but rather a book about recent developments in Astronomy and Astrophysics, extending from the late 80s to the year this book was published.  It also describes a lot of the infighting and budget troubles which precluded the discovery of exoplanets.

It doesn't make for the most compelling reading, even though the author does everything he can to keep the tone light and humorous.  Listing off dozens of planets that might be planets, all of which have names like EXO 7896549 or CoRoT 4567883 5a, doesn't make for the most engaging discourse on Astronomy, and a lot of this book is bogged down by definitions of controversial terms within the discipline.

Those seeking an answer to the question of life on other planets will find this book less than illuminating, but those with an interest in Astronomy will probably like it.  As for myself, I liked certain sections, but on the whole the book felt like a false promise.  No one buys a book about "Life Beyond Earth" wanting to read about NASA politics or telescope malfunctions, and aside from such earthly troubles this book has little else to offer.

"The World Without Us" by Alan Weisman (2007)

"The Rocky Flats asphalt where drums of radioactive oil spilled was also scraped and shipped to South Carolina, along with three feet of soil.  More than half of its 800 structures were razed, including the infamous 'Infinity Room,' where contamination levels rose higher than instruments could measure.  Several buildings were mostly underground; after the removal of items like the glove boxes used to handle the shiny plutonium disks that triggered A-bombs, the basement floors were buried."

What would happen if everyone on Earth disappeared tomorrow?  How would nature go about repairing all the damage that we've caused?  Could endangered animals repopulate themselves in a world without humans?  And what sort of human artifacts might they encounter in our absence?

In "The World Without Us" author Alan Weisman attempts to answer all of these questions, and in so doing assess the impact humans have had on the natural world.  Most of the chapters conclude with a kind of eulogy for the city, infrastructure project, or type of environmental damage that will "vanish" in the wake of humankind, and this eulogy also suggests how the biosphere might regenerate itself without us.

"The World Without Us" is a well written book, but as an argument it leaves a lot to be desired.  Many of the details surrounding the degradation of cities, factories, and dwellings were of course unknown to me, but learning about these details wasn't very enlightening.  I suppose that I now know which parts of my house will survive a mass human extinction, but what of it?

Maybe I am just too anthropocentric for my own good, but I fail to see the point of "The World Without Us."  Perhaps there is a certain poetic fascination in this kind of speculation, but to me it all seems rather morbid.  As a human being, it is only a future containing human beings that I can relate to.

A world without us is something I'd prefer to avoid, and this book offers neither plans nor suggestions that might help us avoid such a tragic fate.  It is for this reason that I consider "The World Without Us" to be a rather pointless exercise, devoid of the hope for humanity that might have given it greater import.