My Insect Brain

In the department of processing events through the narrow lens of my own experience: I read the news of the latest terrorist threat and couldn't help being overwhelmed by the horror...of making a transatlantic flight with small children and absolutely no carry-on luggage. Sure, they're saying that on most flights formula and juice are allowed, if the parents take a sip first, but what about those flights where you can only carry on a passport and cash in a plastic bag? Please tell me that there's room for a diaper or two in that bag as well.

Of course, given that I both read Perdido Street Station and watched V for Vendetta yesterday, I may be suffering from an inordinately high level of paranoia already, and my brain is just focusing on these practical indignities as a kind of self-preservation. Neither work can I especially recommend or condemn; both suffer from a surfeit of aesthetic sophistication and a generally weakened plot. This is especially true of PSS, which has perhaps the greatest differential of interesting set-up to profoundly boring and skimmable pay-off of any book I remember reading. At its best it only appeals to a certain narrow sphere of horror/fantasy/alternative history connoisseurs: the plot follows the travails of a maverick scientist and his lover (who just happens to be of a race called khepri, with a female body and an insect head, causing much icky sex scene description involving the words "carapace" and "head-legs"), who accidentally release a giant moth that destroys human consciousness using its psychotically attractive wing-patterns and can only be stopped by a combined assault from bio-engineered humans with their heads on backwards, frog-like water people, cactus people, a disgraced and de-winged bird person, a trans-dimensional spider, and a sentient rubbish-heap, and....did I mention the perpetual motion machine that gets invented along the way? The setting has been identified by critics as a "Dickensian London," which, given the previous plot summary, should be understood in only an extremely general sense: a lot of people are poor and beleaguered, some people are rich and corrupt, and a very few are mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

Right now, for various reasons, I'm interested in what happens when people take Victorian fiction and sprinkle it with crazy juice, but PSS was a bit over-marinated, I'd say. According to the book jacket the author was a grad student at LSE when he wrote this, and a lot about the book feels kind of grad-studentish--bizarre for the sake of it, not for any reason of social or narrative interest. Which is not to say that I find sentient rubbish heaps inherently uninteresting, just that, if a book is going to give me (or anyone) the strength to live through a time when mothers are forced to drink a sample of the breast milk they're carrying to prove it's not a liquid explosive, my fantasy literature needs to give me a little more to go on than the relentlessly odd. The nightmares I can conjure all on my own now; it's the way out of them that I need more help with.