#540 Malaria- Michael Byers

#540 Malaria- Michael Byers

Orlando was living an OK life in college. He had a girlfriend that he could not imagine living without. “I wasn’t headed anywhere on any fast track, that was plain even then, and I didn’t have any kind of natural flair, but I had Nora, and it felt to me like a fair exchange.”

When he went to visit her parents he met Nora’s brother, George. After playing tennis together, George told Orlando that he had Malaria. It was an obvious lie and it stuck in Orlando’s head. He didn’t tell Nora and life went on. Later that year George began showing signs of mental instability. He felt guilty about not mentioning the Malaria lie, thinking it might have been an early warning sign. It wasn’t, it had nothing to do with him or what lie he was told.

As Orlando and Nora broke up, and things went forward, he learned about creating or finding his own identity. “I think this summer was also the period when I first struck on the idea of ambition, that I could be something in particular, rather than just myself in general.”

All this time, however, he couldn’t stop thinking about George. This one person, with one moment taking up an unfair amount of importance to Orlando, trying to find meaning where none existed.

Rating: 7-8-7-7 Total= 29

#398 Children of the Sun

#398 Children of the Sun

Even tough kids gets sad at the dying of a dog. Jubal, Nathan, Hoodoo, and Lance take Nathan’s dog into the woods to bury him. They are silent and reflective. At times they almost fall into their normal jovial, juvenile behavior, but are struck at the seriousness of the situation.

“As…we stood there trying to pretend we were grownups having a very proper funeral, something…caught us and halted us, drained us of all the horseplay and laughing and made us look at what we were really doing. How could  a group of kids know about the terror and pain of dying…and yet we did know, we did sense something.”

Rating: 8-7-8-8 Total= 31

#159 Dream Cargoes- J.G. Ballard

#159 Dream Cargoes- J.G. Ballard

This is an interesting work of speculative fiction. What if a cargo ship of dangerous chemicals leaks into the ocean and creates a chemical reaction, a perfect cocktail akin to the primordial ooze of early creation on earth?

Johnson, a hapless seaman had been duped into joining a mission to illegally dump Organo-Phosphates into the ocean. It was supposed to be a quick trip, but once the word of their existence got out there was nowhere to set port. Three years later they were still cruising around the Carribean looking for a place to dump:

“For months they had cruised forlornly from one port to another, boarded by hostile maritime police and customs officers, public health officials and journalists alerted to the possibility of a major ecological disaster.”

One by one, the crew and eventually the captain abandoned the ship, leaving Johnson to his own devises, now by default as captain of a poisonous sinking vessel.

“All his life he had failed to impose himself on anything…He had always reacted to events, never initiated anything on his own. Now for the first time, he could be the captain…and master of his own fate.”

He found an old island used during WW II just north of Puerto Rico where he beached the ship. As the chemicals seeped into the lagoon causing amazing bloom in new vegetation, he meets a biologist who is studying the island herself.

“Everywhere a deranged horticulture was running riot.”

“By now, four months after his arrival…the one-time garbage island had become a unique botanical garden, generating new species of trees, vines and flowering plants everyday. A powerful life-engine was driving the island.”

She begins using Johnson’s exposure to the new eco-system as part of her studies. She feeds him new fruit, make shim trap new birds, and even becomes pregnant with his child, one she is sure will be a new, stronger human species. Johnson in turn falls to delusion, and long bouts of hallucination.

“You’re learning to control time.”

“There is no time anymore—everything is too beautiful for time.”

Things become untenable and the authorities are brought in to destroy the failing new mutant island, including Johnson himself. The child still grows within Christine but with little hope of surviving, for with all the new species:

“The life of the individual becomes the entire life of the species.”

Rating: 8-7-8-7 Total= 30