Two Bleak Futures: David Ratte’s ‘Toxic Planet’ and ‘Ball Peen Hammer’ by Adam Rapp and George O’Connor
Everything is going to hell. Everything is always going to hell, and always has been, of course, but
it’s going to hell even more now than it ever has been, and quicker, too. And
so we get ever more stories about those hells – like these two very different
books that I have to talk about today. They even both have people with gas
masks on the cover!
David Ratte
Yen Press, August 2009, $12.99
Sometime in the future, the world is so crowded and polluted
that everyone wears gas masks all of the time, and the natural world is
essentially forgotten. Toxic Planet is a
satire – and a broad, obvious one at that – so there’s no point to asking what
kind of food these people eat; it’s not designed to show how this world
actually works, but to make obvious points about our own world.
Our hero is a factory worker named Sam; his blonde wife and
aged grandmother are never named, but that’s OK; they’re all such broad
characters that real names are superfluous anyway. Other characters include an
unnamed owner of the plant and his young son, the President of the United
Global States, who is an odd combination of Bush and Sarkozy, and the union rep
Tran, who gets to be the voice of reason (reason here being very much a
relative concept). Later on, Sam’s long-lost parents – they’re ecologists,
which is about as popular and mainstream in this society as a combination of
Muslim, Communist, and child molester would be in darkest Alabama – return from
the countryside (yes, the world is completely polluted everywhere, and yet
there’s still an unspoiled “countryside,” but don’t ask), with his younger
sister Orchidea, and they get to be the even more obvious voices of reason.
Toxic Planet is funny
here and there, and dull and axe-grinding equally as often. And it’s really
much, much too long for the message – yes, we all agree that polluting the
entire planet, declaring war on defenseless countries, and similar things are
Really Bad, but we don’t need to keep seeing heavy-handed double-reverse
sermons on the subject over and over for more than a hundred pages. Ratte’s
world isn’t clever or interesting; he just wants to make it dirty and
unpleasant, and he succeeds. The one interesting part of watching the axes
grind are the times when Ratte’s French ideas of what’s obvious and true – so much
so that he doesn’t have to say them, just have his characters parroting whatever
he considers the opposite – aren’t at all clear to a North American audience,
and so the reader can’t quite tell what he’s so worked up about.
Ratte’s art almost makes up for that, even
laboring under the constraints his writing has given it – no faces, only gas
masks, and characters who have to be differentiated mostly by hairstyle and typical
clothing – with an appealing lightness and energy. But Toxic Planet is the kind of book that can make a reader want to
drive a SUV to McDonald’s for lunch and then go prospect for oil in a
wilderness, just out of spite. (more…)
Quick Picks for a slow Sunday:
kicked off the summer season and much of the film review that follows originally appeared on my blog. This past week, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment released the movie on DVD and Blu-ray, both containing a digital copy as has become standard these days. Since his introduction in 1974 through 2000, people were fascinated by Wolverine. He was a feral, edgy character at a time few other costumed crime fighters were. There was a tragic element to him since he could not recall his past. Through the years, writers teased us with bits and pieces about him, letting us know he was long-lived and had gotten around. But, just where did this Canadian come from?
They’re quick, they’re…picked, they’re the stuff we didn’t get to today:
Freshly picked from only the finest and most pedigreed blog bushes, here’s the stuff we didn’t get to yesterday:
, 
Just in from the AP
Jesse Ventura was elected governor, so why couldn’t a costumed mystery man serve in the U.S. Senate?
