Black Gate

Not long ago, I came across a copy of Jonathan Lethem’s second novel, Amnesia Moon. I was curious: Lethem’s best known for his recent work in mainstream mimetic fiction, but his early novels were science fiction and he also wrote an odd take on Steve Gerber’s already-odd character Omega the Unknown for Marvel Comics in 2007. More, between 2007 and 2009, he edited three volumes for the Library of America collecting various novels by Philip K. Dick; another book Lethem edited — The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, containing extracts of a journal in which Dick recorded his visionary experiences — was published in 2011. Lethem’s also written an introduction for a recently-released collection of Dick’s short fiction and explored the influence of Philip K. Dick on his work and life in an extended essay at his web site. Given all this, I was interested in seeing what Lethem’s early science fiction was like.

Reading Amnesia Moon, the Philip K. Dick influence is immediately and strongly apparent, in setting, tone, imagery, and structure. The novel takes place in the west of a near-future post-apocalypse United States, but nobody can really remember what the apocalypse was, or how long ago it happened. Robot evangelists preach the gospel at city corners. Some characters live only as drugs, visible only after they’re injected into the veins of someone else. Dreams are communicable. But more than any of this, the book seems to restart itself at unpredictable intervals, dropping all the narrative strands to begin what at first seems a different story, which then intersects or transforms the overall tale.

Still, Lethem’s book isn’t just a rehash of earlier work. It’s strongly evocative of Dick’s writing, yes, but has a voice of its own. Its theme, I think, is the connection between people, the communities and relationships that they make. So it insists on the reality of the perceptible universe, on the otherness outside oneself, in a way that seems to me to be unlike Dick; Lethem’s asking much the same questions, but suggests different answers. As a result, though Lethem’s style is as spare and fast-moving as Dick’s, the characters have a reality and solidity subtly unlike the characters in Dick’s fiction.

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We’ve been told that we can’t judge a book by its cover, yet we do it all the time. A good cover can catch our eye and attract our interest. The art and title alone can usually tell us whether it’s gritty sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, or paranormal romance. The cover tells us more about the setting and mood of the story than even the jacket copy, and continues to influence us even after we start reading.

And unfortunately, self-published authors usually lack the budget and the specialized skills to do a great cover. Often, self-published covers look amateurish. Some authors decide to forgo a cover altogether, deciding that it’s better to have no cover than a bad cover (my wife takes this approach). This month’s novel, Avarice by Annie Bellet, is a notable exception. It’s not just that the cover is beautiful in itself, it’s that it instantly tells you what the story is about. Between the illustration and the title of the series (Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division) an experienced reader of genre fiction has a pretty good idea what this book is about. I’ll give you a moment to guess before I reveal the answer below the fold.

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