"The Man Who Awoke" by Laurence Manning

2011-11-18T22:39:00.001-06:00

For a short novel published in 1933 and written by some guy I've never even heard of "The Man Who Awoke" is imaginative as fuck, well-written and ahead of it's time.

Norman Winters has mastered (or so he hopes) suspended animation. He sneaks into his top secret lead encased lair and sets the alarm clock for the year 5000! He wakes up to find that the suburbs of New York City are gone and everything is covered in trees and humans live in villages in the forest in a green society gone insane. After some exciting adventures he barely escapes with his life back to his lead lair and his sleep machine.

In the year 10,000 he discovers a world much like George Orwell described 16 years later in his masterpiece "1984". In this world everything is controlled by The Brain, an incredible supercomputer that controls everything and keeps humans in line, not with an iron fist, but with pleasure. Anybody who doesn't like this way of life is killed.

15,000 is completely mind blowing because even though it predates THE MATRIX by 66 years the idea is very similar. Winters finds the world empty. He finally discovers a massive group of buildings (dream palaces) that stores over a million sleepers watched over by a small group of technicians. In this city of sleep people voluntarily hook themselves via surgery to these sleep computers that attach to their nerve endings and they dream about anything they want: sex, violence, happiness, lost loved ones, whatever. Problem is with everybody hooked to these machines there hasn't been a child born in over 7 months.

20,000 genetic experiments have created an age of anarchy where people (what few there are left) travel around in huge mechanical devices and fight like fucking crazy and destroy the shit out of everything.

Skip forward some to 22,000 where peace has finally been achieved and humans have colonized Mars and Venus. 25,000 immortality has been achieved, so Winters travels not only the world, but the solar system and the universe itself for hundreds of thousands of years just hanging out talking to people and discovering the secrets of the universe.

I'm not a regular science fiction reader, so maybe I'm completely wrong in saying this is a unique and imaginative book, but I thought it was great and have actually read it more than once. If you can find a copy, I say check it out! It's a fun read.

"Tales of Woe" by John Reed

2011-11-18T22:36:00.002-06:00

When MTV Press sent me this bo....wah? MTV has a publishing house?! Hahahahahahaha!!!! You're telling me the sellout shitlickers that made "Jersey Shore" and "Carmen: A Hip Hopera" actually publish books too?! What a fucking joke. Oh well, they were nice enough to mail me this book, so let's check it out.

It's called "Tales of Woe" by some dude named John Reed and it promises on the back cover to be "True stories of totally undeserving suffering. Spectacularly depressing. Nobody gets their just desserts. Crushing defeats. No happy endings. Abject misery. Pointless, endless grief." So, I guess, this book is about people who actually watched "Carmen: A Hip Hopera"? LOL. No, just blandly written (think newspaper article quality) stories about random shitty things happening to normal people. You got a kid dying slowly while being trapped at home with his recently dead mother; a guy slowly crushed to death at a bowling alley; teenagers being forced into prostitution and maybe killed; guy getting shot to death while driving a car; etc. none of the stories really stand out as overly interesting, but even worse is they are all written with the excitement of a obituary.

The price of the back says $20 and that's fucking insane. I wouldn't give $2 for this collection of weakness. If you're in the market for some misanthropic tales of fucked up shit then you have to first go to the Holy Grail of that kind of shit: "Answer Me!" 1 - 4 by Jim and Debbie Goad. I can't even tell you how many countless hours I spent as a teenager reading and re-reading and re-reading those magazines until I pretty much have them all memorized. If you want some depressing tales of woe written by a true antihuman asshole then just get issue #4 "The Rape Issue", truly a highpoint in the English language and the freedom of speech. And don't forget #3's "Top 100 Suicides of All-Time". Amazing stuff.

Also another extremely depressing book is the photograph book "Death Scenes: A Homicide Detectives Scrapbook" by Katherine Dunn which, trust me, is a fucking downer. The pictures I found most unsettling:

Pg. 58 -59 children who played with dynamite.
Pg. 102 two week old boy with head cut off by mother.
Pg. 73 fifteen year-old boy suicide with gun
Pg. 132 severely mutilated woman
Pg. 137 husband looking at 74 year-old wife who was raped and murdered.

Don't overlook John Marr's excellent, I mean fucking excellent(!!!) "Murder Can Be Fun" fanzine which to me is one of the most beloved things I own. I've read them all dozens of times.

If that's too much for you then check out the highly entertaining "Final Exits" by Michael Largo which explains all the different ways a human being can die with examples of each way. Despite the grim subject matter Largo keeps it mostly upbeat. Example: the story about "Mr. Hands" (from the infamous horse/man love video) is entitled "The Beast Within". LOL.

Whatever you don't waste you're hard earned money on "Tales of Woe". It's fucking weak and watered down as fuck...just like you would expect from MTV.

Sample page of "Answer Me!" #4

Vampire Unicorn

"The Man Who Awoke" by Laurence Manning

"Tales of Woe" by John Reed