Tag: the moon down to earth

Oddtober 2024: Plastic Soul by James Nulick

Book: Plastic Soul

Author: James Nulick

Type of Book: Fiction, science fiction

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: It answers questions that science fiction has tried to address for years, among them: What fuels the desire for humans to clone themselves and what do the clones really think about the experience? Nulick takes us from the collective soul to the plastic soul and it’s eerie.

Availability: This book is available for pre-order for both an “artist” edition as well as a “jank” edition.

Disclosures: James Nulick is a friend of mine.

Comments: James Nulick has spent the last few years traveling down two different paths. He first introduced readers to his Drake® world in his short story collection, Haunted Girlfriend in the short story, “Body by Drake.” Set in the not-too-distant future, Drake® Corp is almost as important as the government and exists in a world that is only dystopian because it so resembles how we currently live taken to its logical conclusions of ecological destruction, sociological quagmires, and a growing separation between the rich and poor. We saw more of this world in the short story collection Lazy Eyes, a familiar but uncomfortable sense that the roiling inequities that plague us now will take root so deeply that our futures are cast in stone before the calendar pages even get a chance to turn.

As he created Drake® world, James was also exploring an interesting idea that human beings are cosmically linked to one another in ways we don’t often see and seem impossible. In his novel, The Moon Down to Earth, unlikely characters share the same thoughts. A super-morbidly obese Hispanic female shut-in, a mixed race young man who wants to be a rapper, an elderly racist widower living in a trailer – their thoughts at times mirrored each other in a way that pointed toward the mystical, almost as if the much-derided “hive mind” was at play. He later expanded these connections in Lazy Eyes, where animals and humans began to exhibit those cosmic links with each other. The dead live, the voiceless communicate, and the lines of human and animal experiences are blurred.

These two paths meet in Nulick’s latest novel, Plastic Soul. When I first read this novel, the realization that Nulick had been world-weaving all this time, culminating in this unique, frightening yet strangely hopeful novel, was humbling. For years James Nulick has been tossing crumbs for his readers to follow, world-weaving in a manner that in itself seems as magical as the tendrils he sees that hold us together. It’s tempting at times to discuss the existential questions this novel raises, but it almost seems like an insult to me to explore this novel with a larger philosophy to guide you. Philosophy has little place in magic, I think. Any real philosophical examination of this novel would necessitate the use of quantum theory and I am not Richard Feynman. This novel made me feel, at times, as if I were one of the apes who found the obelisk at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and now I feel the urge to make tools.

I decided to discuss this book for Oddtober 2024 because it is, at times, so very creepy. This novel is cinematic, the sort of book that creates profound visuals. A medical facility that cloaks unethical activities behind a veneer of sterile luxury juxtaposed with the sort of secretive suburban childhood familiarized in early Spielberg films. Fleets of cars chauffeured by a slender, attractive Asian man named James (private car ownership has been banned in the Drake®-driven universe). A wealthy home with grounds devoted to bee cultivation. A thrift store with couture-priced designer labels. This novel fairly cries out for a cinematic adaptation.

The novel introduces the reader to a world wherein the rich can clone themselves in order to ease their loneliness, only to realize that the human will is no less forceful in medically manufactured human beings. There is a cloying creepiness that is reminiscent of the more clinical elements of David Cronenberg films (if Dead Ringers comes to mind when you read this novel, we can be friends), there is a nervous anticipation as the reader waits to see what will happen when clones are shipped to live with their genetic donors, and a sickening feeling that Nulick is showing us how easily we will be victimized by the very technology we hope will save us, both us and the other living creatures we create.

Ultimately, in science fiction, we’ve learned that even with the best intentions fueling our actions, there is never a good outcome where human clones are concerned. Even when cloning is cloaked with the idea that it benefits mankind, we still have human beings we classify as The Other so we can justify harvesting their organs, forcing them to do dangerous work, or, in the case of Plastic Soul, being used to cure the loneliness their DNA donors experience in their wealthy, exclusionary lives.

To inject a little bit of humor into this very serious discussion, this novel also addresses the age old question of what it is human beings do with their clones: Would you have sex with your clone or robotic replicant if you were able to? James also answers the mostly unasked question of how the clones feel about the option even being on the table in the first place.

If I seem like I am dancing around what is happening in this novel, it is because I am doing just that. To discuss the reasons why people do what they do in Plastic Soul, the real, deep, evolutionary reasons, will absolutely spoil the novel. But I can convey the visuals and give an overall sense of theme by following the book’s layout and telling you a bit about the characters whose names are the chapters in the book.

“MRS NARCISSUS/Sylvie Biusom,” sets up the visuals and overall tone of the novel. Sylvie was named for Sylvia Plath, but unlike her namesake, she lived with her father and was abandoned by her mother. Of course Sylvia Plath’s father, Otto, did not abandon her – he died – but Sylvia as a child interpreted his absence as an abandonment and it affected her for the rest of her life. Sylvie, who was actually abandoned, also carries the impact of that abandonment and it has thwarted her. She does not like people, she loathes being touched, but for all that she adores her father, she still longs for companionship outside of just his company. Her father, a very wealthy man, likes to keep bees, much as Otto Plath did, and Sylvie helps him as much as she can with beekeeping.

Sylvie’s haughty officiousness hides a deep loneliness even as she denies experiencing any sort of sexual attraction because she so dislikes human connection. So how does a person like Sylvie achieve any sort of happiness in life? Watching the Blip – a future means of watching visual media – she sees an ad from The Chrysalis Institute. The ad features a woman sitting across from a mirror image of herself, and asks the question:

How much would you pay to have an honest conversation with yourself?

It turns out she would be willing to pay a lot, and she sends for a driver to take her to the Institute so she can pay outrageous sums so she can recreate herself and in eighteen months have an honest conversation. At a clinical but luxurious facility, she is treated deferentially and given all the details she will need to clone herself. It takes about a year, using proprietary nutrients and chemicals, to grow a clone to adulthood, and another six months to train the clone in language. The clone also has all her memories, which means, presumably, the clone will know all of Sylvie’s motivations in creating a clone in the first place.

There are three extremely important things those who commission clones must understand. The first is that all clones must be older than twelve years old when they leave the Institute to ensure no one creates a clone to engage in pedophilia, an arbitrary age cut-off that seems significant only to those who created the rule. The second is that they must not ever have sex with their clones. The third is that all clones are outfitted with a sort of kill switch so they can be terminated at will should the need arise. It is extremely expensive to commission a clone so generally one assumes that people would not want to kill a clone unless they were billionaire psychopaths, and it should also sow a bit of unease that there is some worry that a clone might need to be killed for some reason, necessitating a kill switch in the first place.

The place on the clones’ bodies where the kill switches are located should also sow unease. A lot of it.

Sylvie names her clone Jenny, a name with a heavy biological implication. Sylvie also notices that the driver who ferries her around is somehow always the same man, an Asian man named James. When Jenny is finally delivered to Sylvie, their meeting is touching and glorious but… There’s always a but in stories like this. Jenny states plainly the real difficulty in commissioning a clone.

When you created all this, without asking, of course, did you ever consider what I might want?

How can it possibly occur to a “woman born” human that an exact replica of themselves, with their memories and equal intellect, will not want to have that conversation The Chrysalis Institute promotes?

“BRO BOT: Joey Osbium” is the most important chapter in the book and therefore the one I will discuss the least because the scope of his life cements how terrible the new world really is. After a childhood spent sharing a room with his older sister, creating a deep bond with her, and falling in love with his best friend who was heterosexual and likely never picked up on Joey’s adoration and sexual attraction, Joey becomes a grown-up orphan. His parents die, his sister marries and seldom bothers with her younger brother, and when Joey begins to fall in love with his fellow partner at his law firm, he more or less retires. His family left him with an extraordinary amount of money so he does not need to work, and when his loneliness becomes too much to bear, he too decides he would like to have a conversation with himself.

The end of Joey’s chapter is so uniquely considered and beautifully-executed that it is almost impossible to describe.

“PLASTIC SOUL/Daria Moore Thompson, M.D.” is the most disturbing chapter, and Dr. Thompson is a deeply loathsome woman. Though at the end of the book she comes very near to experiencing an upswing in her character arc, her innately disgusting nature taints the small amount of good she manages to bring to the table. Dr. Thompson has a husband who adores her, a fairly nice life and income, and a wardrobe of designer clothing, but she is appalled that she is aging and her unrequited love for one of the founders of The Chrysalis Institute warps her psyche so profoundly that she inflicts disturbing harm on one of the clones who lives at the Institute, a clone made in the image of her beloved.

Yes, founders of the Institute cloned themselves and permit those clones to be used for research or as unpaid labor, and likely do not care what happens to their mirror images when the lights go out. A huge clue as to what is happening comes from Dr. Thompson:

Honeybees are the most perfectly socialized beings on the planet, and we can learn a lot from them…

“THE PERFECT BODY/Iyama Siyos” is the final chapter and it is through Iyama’s eyes that we finally see the genuine evil being wrought at the Institute. Iyama represents the good that man does in spite of himself and is far better than those who created him. In his late teens, he is a clone who must remain at the Institute, as he is a clone made for research. He knows he is made in the image of an Institute bigwig, he knows he has “siblings” born naturally to his DNA donor, and slowly understands his role in a technological machine that does not endow him with the same humanity as those who are “woman born.”

Iyama is in love with James, the slender Asian driver, and it is through his genuine emotional and sexual attachment to James that influences how Iyama finally decides to deal with his lot in life. Nulick deviates from the cinematic nature of the novel by showing a realistic escape attempt. No massive explosions. No gunfights. No final speech from the mad scientist. Just a naive, scarred-up boy, who is human regardless of what “woman born” scientists think about him, trying to take control of what happens to him, endowed with a youthful hopefulness that steers him away from simple compliance.

It is through Iyama that the horrors become clear through the eyes of a teen who feels unease when he should feel rage, who feels genuine love rather than self-serving lust, who at the end may not really know that he has, indeed, suffered.

Throughout the novel, the not-so-distant future element is grounded by framing it with current events. Dr. Thompson was born the day the Challenger exploded. 2020 is referred to as a “difficult year” and the events of that year described as a specific attempt to control ecological problems. In its way, these revelations are humorous, compared to the rest of the text. Nulick also gives us several stories of people who used body parts obtained from Chrysalis clones that are darkly hilarious. Sometimes having a conversation with yourself cannot solve your problems so imagine the issues that may arise when a new tongue does not make you feel better about yourself.

As you read this novel, there may be moments wherein you think Nulick needed an editor with a heavier hand to eliminate repetition in these individual stories. The repetition is not a bug, it’s a feature, and it is necessary to spell out what is really happening in Nulick’s world. The experiences at The Chrysalis Institute are nearly identical. There is a common interest in expensive labels and designer clothes. The color orange is important. And the bees. Drones, queens, many-chambered hives.

When I step back and look at the way Nulick meticulously set up the two paths of work that led to this common destination, it makes me feel something akin to jealousy because it is impossible not to marvel at this sort of long term vision. This is a book I highly recommend and hope this discussion does it justice. You really need to read this and when you do, please come back and tell me what you think. And always remember, as we learn in Sylvie’s chapter, with all apologies to Jane’s Addiction, we’ll make great pets.

Lazy Eyes by James Nulick

Book: Lazy Eyes

Author: James Nulick

Type of Book: Fiction, literary fiction, experimental fiction, transgressive fiction, short story collection

Why Do I Consider This Book Odd: Because it straddles very fine lines that separate literary fiction from experimental fiction from transgressive fiction from outright strangeness.

Availability: Published in 2022 by ExPat Press, you can get a copy here.

Disclaimers: You will find my name in the “thanks” section in this collection, and I have edited works for James in the past. I also like James and consider him a friend and the readers of this discussion may have to decide for themselves if I like James so much because his writing is amazing or if I am fondly disposed toward his work because he’s so likeable. Safest bet is that it is probably both but as usual I will make my case.

Comments: James Nulick is one of the most under-rated writers working. There are a handful of names I frequently say this about, including Ann Sterzinger and Hank Kirton, and it never fails to baffle me that each one of them isn’t far better known. Each book James writes should be the book that makes his name, so to speak, and this short story collection is no different.

I think one of the reasons that James has yet to achieve the renown he deserves is because it is very hard to pin down his style. Part autobiographic, part utter fiction, his work combines a direct, often visceral confessional tone that he mixes with magical realism. His unflinching look at the worst people can do is balanced with his keen insight into why bad people are unexpectedly good, and why good people so often fail morally. He marries that unyielding yet sympathetic gaze with otherworldly examinations of life and death that are so fantastic that they are akin to fairy tales or alternative takes on religion. His work is complex yet accessible, dark and hopeful, discrete and irreal, and in a literary world where people need writers and their works summed up in a couple of sentences, it can be hard for the genuinely innovative and interesting to reach the audience their talent is due.

Lazy Eyes seems to me to be a continuation of James’s 2021 novel, The Moon Down to Earth. Moon is a remarkable work in which James took the stories of three very unlikely people – an Hispanic super-morbidly obese, bed-bound woman, a white elderly widower, and a young mixed race aspiring musician – and showed the cosmic threads that wove them into a common human tapestry. The invisible strings that connect all the characters can be small things, like common cultural touchstones, to larger issues of coping with loss and abuse. James honors their individual natures while also showing an almost Jungian commonality that removes barriers of sex, gender, race, and age from the inner lives of extremely different people.

In Lazy Eyes, James picks up the central theme of unlikely connections and takes it a step further. No longer bound to the physical, human-dominated world, James created a universe wherein the line between animal and human experience is erased, one where death isn’t the end of personal growth and achievement, and one in which we create our own haunted lives. Cats dream of ascendance, the dead don’t die, and mannequins become sons in James’s strange but instinctively familiar world. Graphic and emotional, visceral and ethereal, relentless and sympathetic, the way James writes is so sui generis that it can only be called Nulickian.

It’s somewhat difficult to discuss these stories the way I prefer. I don’t want to spoil them, of course. There’s also a challenge that comes when one is presented with a series of stories that handle concepts of ceaseless transformation. It’s altogether more difficult when those stories need to be read together in order to understand James’ conceptual world-building. And then you need to bear in mind that I guarantee you there will be one or two elements from these stories that will haunt you or will intrigue you as you try to understand the numerology (and possibly angelology as I believe there are hierarchies among the spirits in these stories) that James salts throughout. I personally found myself ferreting out the meanings behind the numbers nine and fifty-seven, and want to talk about it in depth but am exercising rare restraint. I also never want to see a stick of beef jerky ever again. If you read this collection – and I think you should – please let me know the plot points, meaningful details or strange cosmic filaments that remained with you long after reading.

Since I am trying very hard not to spoil these stories, I am going to limit myself to the pieces that spoke to me the most. There isn’t a clunker among the ten stories in this collection, covering varied topics like alien (species) invasion, dark and fatal magic, or the difficulties of coming of age when one is different or anxious to be different. The stories that stuck with me the most were those that demonstrated the most world-building, verging almost into slipstream as James takes the mundane and makes it fantastic while never leaving behind the very specific, emotional literary effort that defines his style.

My favorite story in the collection is “Doe,” a heartbreaking look at how the dead never really go away, not even when they are nameless, not even when an argument can be made that they never really lived. Having no name and being literally dead on arrival, however, do not mean that the dead don’t stop growing after death. There is a balance in life and death, in body and soul, summed up in the best line in the story:

God is, if anything, symmetrical.

What is remarkable in this particular story is how grounded in reality it is – sadly it is very much a story that can be said to be ripped from the headlines over and over again – while also dabbling in ideas of what it means to be haunted, of why the dead may be both unwilling and unable to lie down. “Doe” makes no distinction between crushing guilt and spiritual revenge, and in fact I wonder if the point of this piece was to give a new insight into human conscience and what is behind our inability to shed the negative emotions we carry after we’ve done terrible things. We may create our own psychological prisons but we may not be the jailer who holds the key to freedom. This story also challenged my sense of what I supposed was my own moral stance regarding life and death, forcing me to consider the idea that simply not being does not mean not existing and wondering who, if anyone, has the right to make decisions regarding life and death when conscious existence may continue forever. This story reminded me a lot of Stewart O’Nan’s The Night Country, a book about dying young and how those left behind can be haunted in vastly different ways.

“The Black Doberman” would be hard for me to discuss even if I were not resolute regarding spoilers in this discussion. Because it disturbed me, I reread it a few times to try and define the uneasiness I felt. This is the story from which the title is derived, as the titular Doberman is named Lazy Eyes. This story is a gut punching combination of Bret Easton Ellis-style empty materialism, post-feminist yearning for traditional domestic titles, and a subtle sort of Freaky Friday role-switching as a character eliminates a rival in her romantic relationship only to take on the moral and social worth of her defeated foe. Best line in the story:

My entire life has been an unattended funeral.

The female character in this story is despicable while also being very pathetic, which then made her even more despicable because the god in my own symmetrical heart wants those who feel pain to be kind, strong, and brave. There is an intelligence that comes from personal misery that allows people to see how others feel the same way, yet this character refused to see the link between herself and that which she hated. There was a similar disconnect at play in “Doe” and it feels very much as if the unattended funeral is the end result of not seeing the tendrils of connection. Being deliberately cut off from the ebb and flow of life and how it affects conscious experience is itself a lonely death in the world James created.

“Dark Web” surprised me with how much more I took away from it after a second read. I suspect most of the stories in this collection will offer up more and more with additional reads. Anil and Ridhi are a couple working at home during the Covid shutdowns that closed many offices. Each stake their claim in the house – Anil becomes a chronic masturbator in the basement as he toggles back and forth between Pornhub and work, and Ridhi works in the kitchen in between her forays onto Reddit. James took a basic story, that of the couple who grows apart when forced to be very close, and subtly embroidered the theme of connection into it. When something genuinely strange happens that disrupts the tiresome routine that Anil is frantically trying to break free from in unseemly ways (like masturbating in public near other joggers while walking his dog), the loss of routine and real intimacy ensures that Anil finds himself just as haunted as those who suffered genuine deaths in this collection.

Beyond that, James draws attention to certain bestial elements of Anil’s viewpoint that closely mirror other, very different minds in this collection. Specifically, he imagines his wife’s ass and thighs, but refers to them, tellingly, as “hind quarters.” Anil is not diminishing his wife, nor is he a closet zoophile. Rather, James is showing the ways that the bestial and the humane can become intertwined because, in the magical world in Lazy Eyes, the animals think as humans do, and their thoughts, betrayals, and desires are very similar to those of humans. Anil is protective of his dog, lamenting planting trees that could poison her so he keeps her safe, creating a close connection with his dog. Not so much with his wife and when it may be too late, he merges the protective love he has for his dog with the protective love he wished he had had for his wife.

This, by the way, is an excellent example of what happens when you dig around in these stories a few times. I can’t think of a book with similar characterization and handling of plot wherein subtle phrases and descriptions reveal a yarn-like skein of connection. It’s genius.

“Strange Captive” broke my heart. It ended on a very hopeful note, but it’s still a rough story. The dark revelation of this story is that you read it in one of two ways, depending on that which horrifies you the most. This isn’t a wishy-washy piece, speaking of dark things without the courage to describe them accurately from the mind of the captive, but rather another example of the commonality between experiences that is the backbone of this collection. The hell of it is, even though the events in the story are specific and defined, I still ended the piece wondering what it was I had really read. The final paragraph and exacting details do not equivocate but my own personal horrors made it less clear.

“The Beautiful Sister” is a surprisingly unpleasant look at a teen girl who strikes out at her older sister in an absolutely calculating way. She’s seeking redress for years of what she considers abuse and dismissal and I was surprised at how much her anger shocked me. Was the revenge she sought so terrible if an adult and her boyfriend did not shrink away from helping her? This is a connection I may not understand, having been raised an only child. Perhaps the tension between siblings can result in such reactions. We have plenty of examples of it, with this story standing as a sort of witchy Cain and Abel update, but my experiences lack that specific tendril attachment. With that in mind, it might be interesting to read this book to see what you don’t connect with as much as what you do.

I won’t mention too much about “Spiders” because I genuinely cannot think of a way to discuss the story without completely spoiling it, but I want to mention that I read this story not long after reading articles about how it is that octopuses give human beings the best way to examine alien minds that we can find while confined to this planet. I had also recently seen the 2015 film Evolution, a minimalist horror story demonstrating the way humans could one day find themselves exploited for the benefit of a completely different, though somewhat visibly familiar species. Both media examples colored how I reacted to this story.

In fact, it was interesting how many of these stories, very unique in world-building and theory-creation, I read on the heels of or alongside media that traveled similar paths. The 2021 film Lamb comes to mind, as well as lower-rent movies on Shudder about angry teen girls who avail themselves of darker magic that seems a bridge too far considering the slights that caused them to lash out. I find coincidences like that meaningful though I seldom can pin down the meaning. Interesting nonetheless.

It’s a very rare short story collection when more than half of the stories are each worth the price of admission, as I like to put it. This collection is definitely worth reading and I highly recommend it.