Recently I was asked to write the foreword to a book of poetry written by female pilots. The editor, American Airlines captain Linda Pauwels, knew of my work as a journalist writing about aviation. I hadn’t read much beyond the first pages before I realized Pauwels’s book included one jaw-dropping contributor: Among the poems written across a century of flight are several previously unpublished pieces by the most famous aviatrix of them all, Amelia Earhart.
Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written about Earhart, arguably the patron saint of women fliers. But I was not alone in my ignorance of Earhart’s secret desire to have her poems published. Despite her many accomplishments, she disappeared in 1937 not having achieved that goal.
The bit was evenhanded because we made fun of both points of view. No one ended up being offended by that scene, and all audiences loved it. They still do. But in today’s market, if I pitched a studio executive a comedy in which a white lady has to translate the speech of black people; in which an eight-year-old girl says, “I like my coffee black, like my men”; or an airline pilot makes sexual suggestions to a little boy (“Billy, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”), I’d be told, in Studioese, “That’s just fantastically great! We’ll call you.”
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Today, we’re faced with social and political pressures that are tearing our country and our families apart. Not that I couldn’t do without some family members anyway, but the point is, we live in the most outrageous period in our recent history, when the need for humor is greatest, and yet we seem to be losing our ability to laugh at ourselves and our world.
Most of us paper-based people accumulated our fair share of these cabinets, which held, as such things do, a carefully organized history of one’s past: artwork, by grade; camp letters, by year; cards, birthday; cards, Valentine’s Day; cards, other; insurance forms; house deeds; medical records. Birth certificates, tax receipts, diplomas, fading photocopies of Social Security cards. Who knew when one scrap or another might prove useful?
Fan Fiction begins with a pig penis. It ends with a killing. And in between it touches on murder, obsession, Frank Sinatra, quaaludes, Hollywood, series television, fandom and the early years of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It isn't great literature, but it is weird (which counts for a lot) and fun (which also counts for a lot), might be an elaborate prank being played by the author, and it is absolutely a book that could've only been written by Brent Spiner — Lt. Commander Data of TNG fame, working here on the page for the very first time (with help from co-author/ghostwriter Jeanne Darst).
Reading Destroyer of Light is a disorienting experience. As with so much of the best science fiction, the details of its worldbuilding sound crazy and arbitrary if you just summarize them flatly — as I will be compelled to do at least to a certain extent in this review. And yet these details coalesce into compelling and disturbing patterns as you read the novel as a whole and reflect upon the implications not just of its plot, but also of the overall environment that it renders.