Fantastic!

 

I was talking with my friend Eric about comics the other day. (Well, we were actually talking about superheroes, which are increasingly divorced from comics, but comic books are still my frame of reference for the characters.) He said that he was more of a DC guy (DC being the company that publishes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman) than a Marvel guy (Spiderman, the X-Men and the Avengers). I suppose I am too, but I've always loved a particular Marvel property, the Fantastic Four.

It's really more than the sum of its parts and there's so many little details that I love about them. Foremost, they're superheroes, but they're also a family. You don't see that dynamic a lot with superheroes. I mean, who's the next most famous family of Super-people? The Power Pack? The Bionic 6? (The Incredibles, as great as they are, don't count because they're so strongly influenced by the FF.)

The characters are Reed Richards, aka Mister Fantastic, Susan Storm Richards, the Invisible Woman, her brother Johnny, the Human Torch, and Ben Grimm, the Thing. I'm not going to go into exhaustive detail here, because they are fairly well known and those people who are interested in reading this are those who who are likely already familiar with them.

Mister Fantastic is the smartest guy in the universe. (Also, he stretches.) How smart is he? Doctor Doom invented a time platform in one his early adventures, and when the FF needed a time machine, they just stole Doom's. That's smart! He's also a loving dad and husband and a really nice, if somewhat preoccupied guy.

Sue Storm, aka the Invisible Woman is his wife. She turns invisible and projects force fields and it's generally agreed that she's the most powerful member of the Fantastic Four. She's the mama bear to the team, and the archetype of the super-mom.



Her brother Johnny is the Human Torch, but he's rarely called that. (In fact, I'm more likely to call each of the characters by their actual names than by their superhero names, but especially so in his case.) He's all into fast cars and showing off. He does have his hidden depths, though.

And Ben Grimm is the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing. I think he's everybody's favorite. He's probably one of two Jewish superheros most people can name (Kitty Pryde being the other). Lily likes to play him on Superhero squad. There's a model of him in a tuxedo, and each of the characters says something when they arrive on the map. Tuxedo Thing says, "I say ol' chap, it appears to be time for clobberin'."

"Thing-Ring do your thing!"

(Too soon?)

More than the fact than they're each unique personalities, they interact with each other in unique ways, in that Reed is very different when with Johnny than he is with Sue.I like that. They really feel like a family, people who might not like each other every minute of every day, but who love each other deeply.

I didn't like the grim & gritty Ultimates line (Doom's name is not Van Damme! Do you see him doing the splits?!) but I loved the Marvel Knights line, which told more personal stories that were still in mainstream continuity.

I thought the movie was terrible, but Chris Evans was great as Johnny Storm and I could certainly see why Ramona would go on to date him. Also, the Silver Surfer looked plenty neat.

I like how the series evolved. It recently celebrated its 50-year anniversary and back in the 60s, all the big Marvel heroes (the DD, Spider-man, the Hulk) received their power through exposure to radiation. Back in that era, radiation was essentially magic. (Kind of like nano-technology is now, and I think genre series dealing heavily with nanotech will age about as gracefully as the 50s and 60s radiation stories.)

 I think there have been attempts to explain this. The one with which I'm most familiar is that powerful aliens tinkered with mankind's genetic structure and it's not the radiation itself that gave these folks their powers, but instead it's the catalyst that causes the exhibition of the previously latent powers. Fine, whatever. That's as good a handwave as anything. I only bring it up because it gives me a chance to quote an unnamed research scientist who was interviewed by Marvel on the effects of radiation. "I've zapped a lot of bugs with radiation in the lab. Some of them lived, most of them died, but none of them ever shots laser beams out of their eyes."

Rather than ignoring the fact that it was a pretty careless mistake to forget radiation shielding, it's addressed in the comics and is even one of the more enduring arcs. (Doctor Doom forges a copy of Reed's journal, suggesting that Reed thinks the world needs super-powered protectors, so he'll intentionally mutate his friends through cosmic ray exposure in order to manufacture them.)

The 60s were a period of unparalleled creativity for the comics medium. Lee and Kirby were at the height of their power, and produced an incredible amount of material that went on to define the field. Yeah, not all of it was great, but most of it was, and they were so prolific. Unstable molecules, the Fantasticar (flying bathtub), the Baxter building, Roberta the robot receptionist, Franklin, Valeria, the Negative Zone, the skrulls, Galactus and his heralds, and their exhaustive array of villains of all stripes.

Everybody knows that a good villain can make or break a hero. They are, after all the yardstick by which the heroes are measured. I'm one of the biggest Superman boosters out there and even I admit his Rogue's Gallery is garbage. Yeah, Lex Luthor is iconic, and Braniac just keeps getting better and General Zod is all kinds of ruthless alien menace. And Darkseid is great, though overexposed, and he's not really a Superman villain exclusively.  And, um, well, Doomsday is there. And who else? Conduit? The Toyman?

The one thing I'll give Batman over Superman is that at least his villains are memorable.

(I didn't say they were good, Jer. I said they were memorable.)

And perhaps even eclipsing the FF themselves is their greatest adversary, perhaps even the greatest comic book villain period.

The Mad Thinker's "Awesome Android"!

I would assume the title was bestowed ironically

No, Paste Pot Pete!

(All right, I already admitted that Lee and Kirby had a couple stinkers)

Obviously, it's Doctor Doom.

"Doom: Eloquent in its simplicity — magnificent in its implied menace."

Stan Lee declared Doom his favorite villain, saying "[Doom] could come to the United States and he could do almost anything, and we could not arrest him because he has diplomatic immunity. Also, he wants to rule the world and if you think about it, wanting to rule the world is not a crime."

Stan Lee is rightly, a legend, but he occasionally says some stupid things. The problem with arresting Doom isn't because he has diplomatic immunity, but because he'll kill you with the death rays that shoot out of his power armor if you try it. And, yeah, wanting to rule the world isn't a crime, but he's probably going to commit any number of offenses in pursuit of that goal if he's really serious about it.

(Also, I thought he was exaggerating the protections given by diplomatic immunity, but they're really pretty comprehensive. Wikipedia has the following account of the Burmese Ambassador to Sri Lanka who murdered his wife, built a pyre to burn her in his back yard, and when confronted about this, told the local authorities that he had diplomatic immunity and slammed the door on them.)

Kirby's contributions to the FF have been overshadowed by Stan Lee's. However, Kirby contributed my very favorite bit of Doctor Doom trivia.

Doom was Reed Richards' roommate in college, and he had whipped up a machine to communicate with his dead mother, instead of, I don't know, playing beer pong. Reed happened to see some small errors in Doom's calculations and pointed them out, and Doom was all like "You're just jealous of my genius!"

So the machine explodes, and Doom claims Richards sabotaged it. He also says he's hideously disfigured for life, so he drops out of college, (That's right, "Doctor" Doom never earned his undergraduate degree, though presumably he at least has an honorary one from Latveria) finds a bunch of monks, has them forge him some armor to cover his hideously disfigured face and puts the mask on while it's still hot.

The kicker is that as far as Kirby was concerned, Doom only had a tiny scar on his face. And I think his inability to cope with that imperfection is the best insight anyone has ever had into the forces that drive him.

There have been a number of different interpretations of Doom over the years, and I'd like to talk about Mark Waid's for a little bit.

Waid didn't like John Byrne's interpretation of Doctor Doom, who, while a villain, had a veneer of nobility about him. Waid was tired of people saying that Doom was an honorable villain, so he wrote a story where he was a monster with no redeeming traits, so he could point to that story and say, "Look, he is a bad guy!" which I felt was something of a cheap trick.

I liked Chris Clairmont's run on the series. Not only am I the only person who seems to like it, I seem to be the only person who is willing to admit it happened. It was great, goshdarnit!

I personally like Jonathan Hickman's Doom. He's evil, yes, but not unreasonably (and perhaps not even irredeemably so) and while he's small and governed by his pride, sometimes that pride can push him to great deeds.

The World's Greatest Heroes cartoon on Netflix is kind of okay. Lily likes it a lot, though I'm not thrilled about the anime look to it.

Alicia Masters is African American, which is a departure from her comics appearance, but god knows comics won't be poorer with one less pretty blonde. Lily wanted to watch it all the time for a while.  She expecially likes the episode where Ben is restored to his human form, "The Cure" She's all like, "Can we watch the Cure?" and I'm like, "Young lady, in this house, we ask 'Can I listen to The Cure?"

I actually like that episode too, because with Ben as a human they need a new strong guy, so they hold open auditions, which is a trope I happen to like. They dig out one of my favorite silly Silver Age characters, Captain Ultra, who has this crazy panoply of super-powers, but who is deathly afraid of fire and faints at even the sight of a candle flame. Also, his costume has to be seen to be believed.

Lily really likes the Franklin Richards stories, which recount the misadventures of Franklin Richards, the son of Reed and Sue, done by way of Calvin and Hobbes. They are really pretty fun and I wish there were more all ages books like this.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

I've recently become interested in history. I'm kind of going about it lackadaisically, listening to pop history books in half-hour long chunks when I'm taking a walk at lunch, but it's a start.

Ever since I was a little kid, I've always wanted to know why things are as they are. I just like working backwards and seeing how something came to be, how, given the proper circumstances, how what had happened was not just likely, but inevitable, a natural consequence of its antecedents.

And the study of history would seem like a natural fit for that mindset, but I was never interested in history as a kid, or really, up until a couple years ago. Indeed, I dreaded it. History was always my worst subject. (Except for spelling. Part of the reason I worked to develop an expansive vocabulary was so that I could find single-syllabled synonyms for hard to spell words.)

And the reason, I think is that, grade school through college, I've never had a good history teacher. I've had plenty of good teachers covering all aspects of English, from lit to composition, and I grew up with a hunger for the subject, and maybe even a little bit of an aptitude. Same with science. My best friend's stepfather is a chemist, and he's one of those multidisciplinary mad genius types that knows everything about everything. So I grew up with a healthy respect for science in general. I never realized how much those early teachers shaped the person I would become. The science and the writing are a strong part of how I see myself.

But the same was never true of history. It was always rote memorization of names and dates, with no discussion of the wider context. It was about as engaging as those Old Testament lists of begats. We never looked at why anything happened.  In the words of Milhouse Van Houten, "First it started to fall over. Then it fell over."

Also, I'm still annoyed that my history teacher in high school marked this wrong.

Q: Who was Barbarossa?

A: Willie Nelson's character in the film of the same name. Also, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I.

Come on, Mrs. Skoog! Which part of that is wrong?!

I was talking about  the NPR radio show, This American Life, with my friend Greg one time. He had listened to an episode of which I had spoken highly, and he said that while he enjoyed it, it didn't strike him as particularly balanced. I said that I didn't think that it was their goal to present a balanced look at the topic, but rather to tell a story about it. So, while it was factual, different facts were given different emphasis in service of the narrative they had crafted. (And I do think they are pretty good about addressing rather than ignoring points that would undermine their thesis.)

And I find a similar sensibility at work in Sarah Vowell's work. She's not attempting to give a comprehensive overview, but rather, to make a point, to tell a story. And all the while through, she'll pepper it with digressions, and anecdotes and how she sees its relevance to events occurring in the world today, a technique I naturally find appealing, in that I employ it myself.

And that's the kind of history teacher I never had, the kind that showed me why I should care. . I went to a teeny-tiny grade school, but we had some really phenomenal teachers who worked wonders on a shoestring budget.  Her school experience is going to be very different than mine was, but I hope Lily has that kind of teacher. Because a good teacher will change your life.

Thoughts on NPR's list of of best Young Adult books...EVER!!!!

Hot on the heels of their SF/Fantasy list, we have NPR's list of the top 100 best ever teen novels.

Take it, Comic Book Guy!

Okay. All right. We wouldn't be fans of the written word if we weren't belly-aching about this list. NPR recognizes that fact, with this other list they published. 
 
So, with that, my thoughts on the top ten:
 
1. Harry Potter(series), by J.K. Rowling: I'm going to recycle my comment on the Lord of the Rings trilogy taking the top spot in the Fantasy/SF list, because I think it also applies here: "I think I would have been very surprised if this had been anything else. I used to listen to WXPN, a college station out of Philly, and after they had their fundraisers, they would have the countdown. Since they broadcast at 88.5, their countdowns were always the top 885 artists/albums/songs, and it was usually pretty meaningless, because a list that big is too large to have any kind of meaning, and you knew the top three was going to be either Beatles/Dylan/Stones or Beatles/Stones/Dylan. But it probably deserves the slot. It's been hugely influential on almost everything in fantasy that came afterwards. If a fantasy series wasn't emulating the Potter series, then it was deliberately subverting elements of it."
 
I was too old to be swept up in Harry Potter as a cultural phenomenon. I first heard of the series when Terry Gross was interviewing then then-obscure author when I was driving home from work one day shortly before the U.S. release of the first book in 1998. I thought, hey, this sounds kind of neat, and I kind of filed it away. And then, in the coming years, it would have been impossible not to hear of it. My wife and I started reading them out loud to each other and we read the whole series this way. It's the only time I've ever spoken until my voice was hoarse. We went to midnight openings (in costume. Did I say that I was too old to be swept up in the phenomenon?) Just the other day, my daughter asked about watching Harry Potter. I asked her "Wouldn't you rather read the book?" (inside of which Jen had written an inscription to her before she was even born) and she said, "Nah. Movies are better."
 
I think the series peaked with The Prisoner of Azkaban, which, in my opinion, is one of the all time great novels in children's literature. Goblet of Fire wasn't as good, but I think that's more a function of regression to the mean than anything else. And while I thought Order of the Phoenix was a bit flabby in parts, we read the final 100 pages in one sitting, staying up until 3:00 AM on a work day to do it, because that ending was phenomenal and Rowling shrewdly exploited the publicity with lots of fake outs in the final fight. 
 
I've complained about the long, slow decline of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I think the Potter series fell into the same trap in the final books, when Rowling stopped being critical of her own creations and started scripting things so that Harry could do no wrong. As MightyGodKing said: " all this congratulatory isn’t-Harry-awesome party after seven hundred-odd pages of Potter Fucks Up Again (to say nothing of previous books) needs to not happen!"
 
Despite that, it was very good for a long time, and it deserves this spot.
 
2. The Hunger Games (series), by Suzanne Collins: Since I quoted myself the first time around, I'll quote Kovacs for this one: "these are lists of popularity and not necessarily enduring quality or enduring popularity. I'm reminded that The Bay City Rollers outranked The Beatles more than once on some lists of "best rock music or bands of all time" -- and if you don't recognize the band's name or believe that it was possible, that just confirms my point. Today it would be Justin Bieber."
 
Does anyone not think the recent high profile movie has anything to do with this ranking?
 
I talk about my friend Karen sometimes. (I know a bunch of Karens, and this is the one who loves giraffes.) I met her about ten years ago when we were both temping at the same terrible job and I saw that she was reading David Sedaris on her downtime. We struck up a conversation, and later a friendship, because of that similar taste in books. 
 
She was pestering me about the Hunger Games last year in October, asking what I thought of it, and I kept giving her sarcastic non-answers, until she finally got fed up and said, "I was going to buy you the books for your birthday, but you blew it!" and there may be a lesson to be learned here. But I don't know. Karen liked the David Sedaris, but she also reads Twilight, so her taste is sometimes questionable. 
 
Ummm...I don't actually know anything else about this book. Apparently Jennifer Lawrence is in the movie, and I liked her in X-Men:First Class.
 
3. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee: It's been a while since I've read this book and I remembered Scout as being older. It's a great book, and really a timeless one and not one I particularly consider a children's book. (I know, it's officially a young adult list, but there's no denying that Harry Potter skews lower than To Kill a Mockingbird.) Atticus Finch is consistently ranked among the greatest of movie heroes, and canonically, To Kill a Mockingbird is Superman's favorite movie. 
 
"If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it", is some darn good advice.
 
4. The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green: I have never heard of this book until right now, so I have no opinion. The title sounds like the first line of a haiku. I see this author appears several times, and this is his most recent book, so it's probably bleed-over popularity from a currently trending book.
 
5. The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien: 
 

I like the Hobbit as a stand alone work. I like it less as a prelude to The Lord of the Rings and even less in the context of The Simarallion. I thought Tolkien did a reasonably good job in Unfinished Tales of reconciling the lighter tone ("Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody") and apparent contradictions of the Hobbit with the larger series (If you go by what is written in the early part of the Fellowship, it apparently takes Gandalf the better part of a century to figure out that Bilbo's ring might be the One Ring, but in reality, he suspected it for a long time, but the Shire was as safe a place as anywhere in Middle Earth, and there was nothing to be gained by telling Bilbo about it any earlier than he did) but it still feels like a retcon.

Honestly, I don't think it belongs on this list, and the only reason it's here is because of the Lord of the Rings and the upcoming movies. It's a fine book, but not a classic on its own, and I think it should have been bundled in with Tolkein's larger body of work, were it included at all, and this is speaking from someone who dearly loved the Rankin-Bass movie as a kid.
 
6. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger I think my experience with the book is similar to many. I loved the book's conversational style, and I thought, "Hey, Holden knows what it's like to be me!" And then, as I grew a little older and returned to it, I was much less charitable towards Holden, and saw his excuses for what they were, which in turn led to some thoughts about the person I was when I read it. I still think it's a brilliant book, and that coming to terms with self-delusion is an important part of growing up. It reminds me of the Wonder Years. (Yes, Yes, it should be the other way around, with the Wonder Years reminding me of Catcher in the Rye, but I encountered the Wonder Years first, I'm sad to say.) Kevin Arnold, the character was an asshole. Quick to judge, shallow, spiteful. Not unusual for a kid, but asshole just the same, and while I disliked the character, I liked the show. Same with Holden. He's the biggest phony of them all, but that takes away nothing from the book.
 
7. The Lord of the Rings (series), by J.R.R. Tolkien: Oh, hello, Lord of the Rings! It's so nice to see you again! Shall we make a date to meet this time next year, on NPR's list of Top 100 Romance Novels? 
 
8. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury This is another one I find pretty questionable. Like LotR, it was on the Top 10 in the earlier list, and while I would not have voted for its inclusion on that list, I think that its status as a Sci-Fi classic at least entitles it to consideration. However, while young adults might read this book and maybe it's even been marketed as such, I don't think that it is primarily a young adult book, and I don't think it belongs here. 
 
9. Looking for Alaska, by John Green I've never heard of this one, and while the synopsis doesn't make it seem all that special, the brilliance may be in its execution. (Or it could just be something that is currently popular) Despite that, the subject matter does seem definitively Young Adult, and it seems to belong here more than Fahrenheit 451. 
 
10. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak: I'm not familiar with this one either, but it seems more interesting and it's been consistently lauded since its publication.
 
They have received some criticism for the books omitted and books included on the list and they attempt to address it here:
 
However, I'm not entirely satisfied with their answers. Their criteria seem arbitrary, and releasing them after the judging has been concluded gives it the appearance of a post-hoc justification. If someone asked me to create a list of the best young adult books, my first question would be "How are we defining 'young adult'?" and the second would "How are we defining 'best'?" because I really think that some sort of weighted average is in order so as not to skew it towards trends of the moment.

Were you wondering what Josh thought about Chick-Fil-A?

I was thinking about Chick-Fil-A recently. When I started this blog, I covered a somewhat broader array of topics than I do now (the scope of which has now pretty much narrowed to the occasional cartoon review, Roger Zelazny post or story about Lily). I have a tag for politics but I doubt I've used it in over a year. (I will note that I observed that the Citizen's United ruling would have a poisonous influence on our electoral system, but you didn't exactly need to be Earl Warren to see that one coming.)

Part of it is because I missed the give and take that goes along with these things. I wasn't getting a lot of comments back then, so there wasn't much point in talking about politics if the only thing I did was post a screed that sounded like it came straight from the pen of Billy Joel's angry young man.

Anyway, for those of you not following at home, Chick Fil-A's chief operations officer came out in support of traditional marriage.

No, let's back it up a bit.

I'm in support of a traditional marriage, in that it's worked well for me. I love my wife very much, and she loves me.  It's a relationship based on mutual respect. It's given us a daughter we love as much as we love each other. We've been married almost fifteen years and we will hopefully be married for a long time after that.

However, we have single friends and gay friends a straight friends and unmarried friends with children, friends who have been married for a long time with no children, friends who have been in a monogamous relationship for years but never married, friends who didn't find the right person until they had married the wrong one. It takes all kinds. So when I say I support traditional marriage, I mean as one option among many.

When Dan Cathy, the COO of Chick-Fil-A, says he's in support of traditional marriage, he doesn't mean the same thing I do. He does not support traditional marriage; he opposes anything but traditional marriage.

He has the right to hold whatever opinions he wants. There are no thoughtcrimes here. First Amendment, Voltaire, etc, etc. He can say whatever he wants. We could ignore him as we do to loudmouth jerks every day if Chik-Fil-A had not spent over $2,000,000 donating to the following organizations, with the express purpose of disenfranchising their fellow human beings.

The Eagle Forum is notorious for its opposition to equal rights for women. Also, they're part of the anti-vaccination movement, which is a particular pet peeve of mine.

Focus on the Family, which  advocates school sponsored prayer and supports corporal punishment and strongly opposes LGBT rights.

Family Research Council, which advocates against LGBT rights, abortion, divorce, embryonic stem-cell research, the theory that global warming is the result of human activity. The Family Research Council is listed as a Hate Group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

I know some people were aware of Chick-Fil-A's politics prior to this, but these recent events brought them into sharp relief. The thing is, they do make really yummy chicken and the thing that really kept me away from eating there was the long lines as much as my awareness of where they stood.

There was a backlash against Chick-Fil-A for their statements, followed by a groundswell of support. Former Governor Mike Huckabee organized Chick-Fil-A appreciation day, and you probably know what happened. The company broke all sorts of sales records.

But, I think that means we're going to win.

I think the one enduring legacy of this is that the Chick-Fil-A brand is henceforth going to be associated with bigotry. People who followed this kind of thing already associated Chick-Fila-A with bigotry, but now that view is mainstream. It's out of dog whistle territory now.  And while you get the occasional out-and-out racist who opens his racist rants with "I'm not racist, but...", most people don't want to be seen as bigots. Even bigots. Especially bigots. They need a fig leaf. Most people want to see themselves as a good person. 

Every now and again, I get an email telling me that somebody is organizing some sort of boycott against gas stations to send a message to someone about something, so don't buy gas on a given date. And I shrug and delete it. Because it's a stunt. I need to fill up my gas tank about once a week. If I don't do it on boycott day, then I'm going to do it on boycott day +1 or boycott day -1 and they're going to get my money either way.

And the same principle applies here. They got a short term boost, but that is going to be outweighed by the people who are never going to eat there again.  One good day is not going to make up for the next few year of bad ones. By this time next month, none of the people who ate at Chick-fil-A on "appreciation day" are going to think about this again.

But those who are boycotting will still be boycotting. As Peter David wrote, under slightly different circumstances, when asked how he can nurse a grudge, "I have tough nipples."

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Deadboy Donner and the Filstone Cup

I wasn't familiar with the name Damon Runyon, but the language in Deadboy reminded me of Guys & Dolls, which makes sense, as it turns out that Guys & Dolls is based on two of Runyon's short stories. (Feel free to laugh at me, but as I've mentioned elsewhere, the  embarrassing gaps in my education occasionally reveal themselves.)  

The imagery I associate with the story is that of the Running Man, an animated short about a race driver who dies on the track, but continues on Flying Dutchman-like after his death.

(Here's a link if you want to watch it) 

The fact that Zelazny deliberately emulated another author's characteristic style reminds me of Naked Matador, which was written after the fashion of Hemingway's prose and which I also happen to like. It also reminds me of Chris DeVito's Anise, because the word Deadboy makes me think of the artificially sustained humans.

And the fourth thing the story reminds me of is Ghost in the Shell, for reasons that should be obvious to those familiar with it.

I think I'd still like the story quite a bit even without all these pleasant associations. It tells an interesting story, but the real joy is how he puts the words together to tell it. Take the opening sentence.

I am standing in front of Vindy's and cannot read the racing stix because of the brownout which is the worst I can remember, when Crash Callahan comes by and the light is not so bad that I cannot see the bulge beneath his racing jacket, a thing I suspect to be malignant though not a tumor .

Nice. Punchy. Fun.

and  "And I awaken," he tells me, "in this place which is like the inside of a videogame, leading me to believe that I have passed on and the next world is a kind of Cyberbia. There are all these algorithms putting the make on pixels, and programs champing at bits and sub routines moving about in simpleminded, reliable ways, as is their custom."

 

and "Then several days pass, and the race is nigh, and Donner will not give me the time of day if 6:47 will save my life,"

and "So I lay his bets and I lay my bets and I await the race with the honest pleasure of a man who knows that the fix is in."

You get the picture. 

Deadboy Donner is a racing pilot in Upper Manhattan who suffered some damage to his immune system during a solar flare in a race two years ago. He doesn't have a lot of time left to him, so he became a deadboy, spending most of the year on ice, and thawing out only to participate in races.

Hey, come to think of it, now the story reminds me of the Graveyard Heart!

But Donner is up and about earlier than he should be, which intrigues our nameless narrator, because he's got a lot of money riding on Donner winning the Filstone Cup. Donner is acting very strange, and we soon learn it is because the AI that runs Upper Manhattan told Donner it would see to it that that he would win the cup if it could inhabit his body on alternate days. They would switch places and Donner would see to the business of running Upper Manhattan while the AI was in the flesh.

Donner turns out to have a knack for the duties of the AI, which is more than can be said for the AI, which gets his body into all sorts of trouble. When the AI refuses to return the body, Donner hijacks the body of his competitor Crash Callahan in order to track himself down in the physical world.  "He finds them there, but the AI departs by a side exit and leads him on a chase, both of them careless of all bodies in the vicinity as they discharge with great noise and small accuracy the weapons they have with them."

I especially liked that turn of phrase.

There are one or two more twists, but it's all explained in the denouement. It's not one of Zelazny's all time great short stories like Divine Madness or Comes Now the Power, but it is a fun, clever little tale. Nevertheless, I'm glad it's the only one he wrote of its kind, because part of the appeal is the novelty.