Spaceman Blues, by Brian Francis Slattery [Library of Babel]

I’ve gotten out of the book-logging habit, but Spaceman Blues is good enough that I feel compelled to write about it. I had heard of the book some time back– I believe I recall Patrick Nielsen Hayden saying nice things about it at some con or another– but the packaging didn’t really give me a clear idea of what it was like, so I never got around to buying it until Tor offered it as a free e-book. I’ll buy a paper copy soon, though, and probably pick up his new book as well.

It’s hard to fault the copy writer, though. This is a really difficult book to describe. The promotional site name-checks the obvious people– Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins– but the problem with that is that every halfway literary SF book out there has those names plastered all over the marketing. They don’t really tell you much beyond what category of reader the book is being aimed at.

Those comparisons really are valid, though. The other work that leaps to mind, for me, is Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin (which in turn connects to John Crowley’s Little, Big). They’re very different books in a lot of ways, but they both have a mad love for an alternate version of New York City that’s bigger and weirder than the real thing, but somehow still true. And they both glory in a certain headlong rush of language.

There’s really no way to explain it without a lengthy quotation, so here’s a bit from the chapter introducing Lucas Henderson:

Lucas was born into the Lunar Temple, a group of Americans, most from the Southwest, whobelieved that the Moon was a part of the Earth that was broken off in an ancient cataclysm, and that humans were devloved from more pure creatures who now lived in vast, spiral cities below the satellite’s surface. These beings were building monstrous engines two hundred miles across on the dark side of the Moon that, on the Day of Joining, they would use tobring the Moon hurtling back to Earth. The Lunar Temple calculated that the first point of contact between the two bodies would be one of the peaks in the upper range of the Sierra Nevadas; the Founder built their compound there so that, on the Day, they could tilt their heads skyward and be the first to kiss the heavenly body and welcome it home. The first twelve years of Lucas’s life were spent eating, sleeping, and, in the last few months, mating in that place, watching from his window every night while the first generation of the Temple wandered around out in the yard staring up at the Moon, mouths open like chickens in the rain.

Two months before Lucas’s thirteenth birthday, as he was about to make it with the Founder’s fifteenth daughter, a great light descended from above. Alarms sounded, people shouted, the Day was at hand, and everyone clustered within the circle the Founder had drawn at the summit and assumed the position they had drilled: back straight, up on tiptoes, neck craned, lips puckered. But the approaching light and noise turned out to be an FBI helicopter, followed by several more carrying men in riot gear who arrested the Founder on charges of illegal arms possession, corrupting minors, and aggravated assault. The compound was razed; in its place the state built four wooden benches and a concession stand.

Of the second half of his life, the years after deprogramming and before Red Hook, Lucas says nothing. They are incidental to the foundation of my personality, which has been cheated the sweet oblivion of apocalypse, he has said. He has trouble getting dates. Women back away, hands out, defensive. But this matters little, for Lucas knows how to throw parties.

“In every second, mass death by the millions, has been averted by the slightest margin,” he explains. “For this reason, it is important that every party be of the highest quality.”

(That’s a lot of quoted text, I realize, but it needs to be there to give you the flavor of the thing. This isn’t a book that works well in short bursts of reading, but fortunately, it’s compelling enough to make it hard to shake yourself out of it once you get going.)

Plot-wise, it’s a book about love, obsession, and the end of the world. Manuel Rodrigo de Guzmán González disappears, and his lover Wendell Apogee decides that he’ll do whatever it takes to find out where he went and why. In the process, he’s transformed from a mild-mannered fellow into something much larger, bordering on the mythic. The novel moves between Wendell’s story and those of several of his friends and acquaintances, and the shadow of the coming apocalypse hangs over the whole book.

There are eccentric characters, shady deals, fights, and parties of the highest quality. There’s love, music, death, and a sort of redemption. There are great bits of scenery– an entire underground city hidden beneath Manhattan– and the Church of Panic, who really do know when the End is coming.

It’s a brilliant piece of work, and I probably haven’t done a better job of describing it than the people behind the cover copy (incidentally, Irene Gallo talks about the cover design at Tor.com). If the excerpt above appeals to you, though, go find a copy and read it.