MoPOP: The Museum of Pop Culture

Posted on July 4, 2026 by John Walters

I decided to take a bus to the Seattle Center, the former site of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, to visit the Museum of Pop Culture, commonly known as MoPOP. When Paul Allen, the Microsoft billionaire, founded it in 2000, it was called the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, or the EMP Museum.

When I first heard about the EMP Museum, I was living in Greece, but a longing to visit it immediately erupted in me. After a long hiatus, I had begun to write again, and the stories that naturally burst into my mind were tales of science fiction and fantasy.

I had read some works of speculative fiction when I was a teen; on one Christmas my maternal grandmother gave me a boxed set of Robert Heinlein novels, and on another Christmas she gave me a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings trilogy. These were some of the basics, of course, but I never truly understood how dynamic the field was in the early seventies until on a whim, while attending the University of Santa Clara for my first and only year, I enrolled in a course devoted to science fiction as literature. I didn’t really understand what I was getting into. I spent most of my time in those days stoned on marijuana and/or psychedelics, and I thought that it would be trippy to get college credits to read science fiction. The text was The Mirror of Infinity: A Critic’s Anthology of Science Fiction edited by Robert Silverberg, and it was brimming with brilliant, cutting-edge stories by old masters and also rising stars in the so-called New Wave, which was sweeping the field at the time. Many of the stories devastated me with their originality, acumen, depth, contemporary relevance, and linguistic precision, but the one that hit me the hardest was “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison. Before I even finished reading that story I knew – I was fully convinced – that there was nothing else on Earth for me but to be a writer.

When I returned to Seattle, I haunted the public library nearest our house searching for more science fiction, and that’s when I came across anthologies showcasing the Nebula Awards presented by the Science Fiction Writers of America. From these volumes I became acquainted with the works of Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delaney, and numerous other writers that were breaking through traditional genre constraints and writing literary works using elements of science fiction and fantasy as lenses to analyze contemporary society. I too wrote stories and submitted them to magazines, but in those days of yore I never had any success selling them. Later I became interested in memoir-like novels such as On the Road and Tropic of Cancer, and I put science fiction aside. Still, when my Greek wife and I settled in Thessaloniki to raise our family and I resumed writing, it seemed natural to turn to science fiction and fantasy for inspiration. And I had matured, and I had a better idea of what I wanted to say, and I began selling those stories, and they began to appear in magazines and anthologies. I joined Science Fiction Writers of America (now known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association), which became a link to the field in my faraway location.

You can see, then, why I became so excited when I heard of MoPOP.

As I wandered about this latest time, my mood was a bit melancholy. After all, in the past I had usually gone with one or more of my sons, and their thrilled appreciation and sense of wonder amplified the experience for me.

The first vivid memory I have of exploring the museum and perusing the exhibits is from shortly after I moved back to Seattle with my youngest son, who was in middle school at the time. I still have a picture from that visit of him sitting in the mock bridge of the Starship Enterprise. On that occasion we focused on the science fiction and fantasy sections and gave only cursory glances to the displays in the music section. On another occasion, my son and one of his uncles became enthralled and spent an inordinate amount of time in the newly opened horror section while my sister and I waited nearby. On yet another foray to MoPOP we discovered the room in which visitors could play various indie video games, and my son wanted to spend a lot of time in there trying out the multitudinous options.

During this latest tour, my solo visit, I meandered through the fantasy section and the science fiction section. The horror section was closed for renovations, but I didn’t miss it that much; horror is more my son’s thing than mine. I then walked through the Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana exhibits and the rest of the rooms in the music culture wing, and finally I took a look at the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

I hadn’t been there for years, but nothing much had changed, which contributed to my feeling of melancholy and nostalgia. Despite the futuristic appearances of the items on display, it was like a personal journey into the past.

Nearby MoPOP are the Space Needle and the Seattle Center terminal for the monorail, which was built for the World’s Fair but is still operational. These landmarks caused me to remember visiting the World’s Fair with my family back in 1962; I would have been nine years old. A blast from the more distant past.

*     *     *

I returned to MoPOP recently, but this time my intention was to focus on the pop culture and music side of the museum, which I had usually neglected on past visits. My kids and relatives and I would spend a long time exploring the realms of science fiction and fantasy and give a cursory glance at the other side at the end. This time, I never even made it to the science fiction and fantasy side.

I started out by visiting the exhibit called “Massive: The Power of Pop Culture.” It offers far more than a mere collection of objects; in fact, it is an attempt to explain the origins, importance, appeal, and fandom of pop culture through not only displays but also multimedia presentations. One of my favorites involves a chair with a panel on one arm that allows you to choose a year, and an enormous video display opposite shows the pop culture highlights from the selected year. For instance, when I clicked on 1969, the display showed video clips from the Apollo moon landing and from the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair.

I then entered the exhibition space called “Nirvana: Bringing Punk to the Masses,” but this time I spent more time therein than I had in the past. In particular, I paused to watch a video about the grunge movement. Nirvana’s brief but brilliant ascendancy to fame and Seattle’s emergence as an important oasis for grunge music happened while I was living overseas, first on the Indian Subcontinent and then in Europe, and as a result I had known little about Nirvana’s impact on pop culture. From the Nirvana exhibit I moved next door to the Jimi Hendrix room. This exhibit mainly consists of posters, guitars, and a few items of memorabilia, but it offers a unique opportunity to listen to Hendrix’s idiosyncratic guitar play in an enclosed soundproof space.

I think that I did the right thing in concentrating on one wing of the museum instead of spreading out my attention too thinly. In the future, I may take this approach with other massive museums I have previously visited; that is, to first focus on the areas I usually leave until last.

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On Rereading The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur by Arthur Hoyle

Posted on June 27, 2026 by John Walters

Before I begin this review, I have a confession to make: When I picked this book off the shelf on one of my rare forays to the Seattle Central Library downtown, it slipped my mind that I had already read it several years ago. Considering how many books I read (as of this writing I’ve already published four thick volumes of reviews) it’s not surprising that I might forget one now and then, although admittedly this rarely happens. It is one of several Miller biographies I have read, others being Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller by Mary V. Dearborn and Henry Miller: The Paris Years by Brassai. No biography I have read so far comes close to Miller’s own accounts of his adventures in his autobiographical novels, but then in these it is difficult to know what actually happened and what is hyperbole or surrealistic riffing.

A Seeker in Big Sur, in fact, is not straightforward biography; it is mainly commentary and synopses of his books and letters. It is slow going in parts as it goes on for page after page summarizing books that I have already read and reread. I persisted, though, because I found the story of Miller’s sojourn at Big Sur fascinating, especially his dysfunctional relationships and his decades-long battle with the American censors, which prevented the publication of his most important works: Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. He eventually prevailed, with the assistance of a multitude of powerful admirers of his work, but fame and fortune only confused and discombobulated him. He was happier by far as a mendicant in Paris back in the 1930s than he was in the sixties when he became a literary icon.

Miller’s is another example of writers who have created great books, but their personal lives, in contrast, are confused and unfocused. As Hoyle points out, Miller had several wives at various times, who would function as muses and provide some stability in his otherwise chaotic life, but after he would finish a stretch of important work, he would abandon them and move on to something and someone else. He was also terrible at practical matters such as money management, which reminded me of the pecuniary shortcomings of another writer who was also one of my profound influences, Jack London. This emphasized, or perhaps I should say re-emphasized, the often jarring difference between artists and their work. Artistic inspiration exists apart from everyday well-being and comfort. Often deep dark experiences bring forth the greatest masterpieces. You would think that Miller’s artistic exuberance as displayed in his best work would have carried on in his personal life, but instead, as time went on his life got increasingly confusing and stressful.

In his books, Miller makes himself an invulnerable, larger than life character, but this vision does not translate to reality. He was in truth very insecure and self-centered. There is much to admire in his artistry but much to criticize in his day to day life – as is true with many of us. Still, his story is of a man determined to go his own way and break new ground in literature, and in this he succeeded. His works, once let loose on the world, inspired many other fledgling writers to remain dissatisfied with imitation and instead seek their own voices. And that includes yours truly.

*     *     *

As a postscript, I would like to mention that pondering Henry Miller’s life while reading this book caused me to meditate on the differences in the way I approached reading when I was young with the way I read now. Back in the early 1970s, after I had realized that I was first and foremost a writer, I attacked new books with the passion of a starving predator. As Irving Stone relates of the struggling author in Jack London: Sailor on Horseback (one of my significant early reading experiences): “Jack London about to tackle a new volume upon which he had stumbled in a wilderness trail was like an abysmal brute, a starving wolf poised to spring. He sank his teeth into the throat of the book, shook it fiercely until it was subdued, then lapped up its blood, devoured its flesh, and crunched its bones until every fiber and muscle of that book was part of him, feeding him its strength.” Often I didn’t even know what I was looking for as I groped my way through the literary wilderness, but first subconsciously and then more and more with purpose, I devoured books I came across that, whether fiction or nonfiction, rang with truths that I needed to hear to light my own unique literary pathway. So it was with Walden by Henry David Thoreau, the individualist and free thinker; so it was with On the Road by Jack Kerouac, the ode to the open highway that leads to unknown destiny; and so it was with Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, which exploded upon my consciousness like no other book ever had. At that stage of my life I was not interested in the authors themselves and their imperfections and foibles – except for the decisions they made and the adventures they had that directly contributed to the outflow of their art. Each of these writers – London, Thoreau, Kerouac, Miller – plunged into life and lived it robustly, and then used their experiences to fuel the flames of their artistic passions, displaying life with all its fervor, pleasures, pains, beauty, ugliness, raunchiness, honesty, deceit, violence, love, hatred – in short, whatever raw emotional truth they encountered on their various odysseys. I was desperately hungry too, when I set out on my decades-long road journey, to discover these truths for myself so that I could convert them into art through my writing. The books I read during this time were part of the process.

Now, having lived life for over seventy years and having written almost forty books, over one hundred fifty short stories, and countless essays and book reviews, I approach my reading with a more nuanced perspective. I am no longer a hungry young wolf in the wilderness. I am still hungry, but my hunger manifests in different ways. Not long ago, I reread Tropic of Cancer for the fourth or fifth time, but it did not strike me as viscerally as it had before. As I wrote in my review: “To be honest, I found it somewhat disappointing, but in all fairness, Miller’s words have not changed, I have.” When I was young, I virtually idolized the authors who helped shape my own literary vision, but as I grew more accomplished and mature as a writer, I realized that though the works for which they are known are splendid, the writers themselves have feet of clay. And even the works, when viewed from various stages of life, evolve in significance. They will never lose their importance as milestones, but I will also never be able to approach them again from the same standpoint as when I was young, lean, and ravenous for inspiration.

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Book Review:  A Resistance History of the United States by Tad Stoermer

Posted on June 20, 2026 by John Walters

This is a very emotional book. As the author explains resistance movements and principles from early American history, he does not claim impartiality. It is clear that he is all for resistance against unjust governmental policy. In fact, at the end of the book he offers “A Resistance History Toolkit,” which is a step-by-step guide to applying the tactics described in the book’s main section to the injustices of our modern era.

Each of the nine chapters deals with various struggles of oppressed peoples against domineering powers. The first, for instance, concerns Native Americans in New England and their helpless battles to retain their homelands when confronted with overwhelming hordes of settlers. This is followed by an account of the Salem witch trials, in which Stoermer clarifies that convictions and subsequent executions had nothing to do with evidence but rather with a dominant hierarchy of white males who wanted to preserve their oppressive system at all costs. There is a chapter on the Boston Tea Party, which was a reaction to the British authorities attempting to mitigate the losses of the British East India Company by taxing colonists. Another chapter concerns the difficulties in getting the Bill of Rights amendments affixed to the Constitution.

Subsequent chapters focus on various resistance movements against Black slavery, the legality of which was a founding principle that the new American government sought to preserve at any cost. That’s why during the revolution Black slaves fled to British lines, and many of them managed to escape to live lives of freedom in England or its worldwide colonies. Stoermer says: “This was a mass movement, a resistance facilitated by the British that freed tens of thousands in the greatest act of abolition in America before the Civil War.” The British passed a law forbidding slavery throughout its empire. In contrast, George Washington, the first U.S. president, was a slave owner and, using the notorious Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, relentlessly pursued slaves that escaped from his estate; he was steadfast in regarding slaves, his and others, as property rather than people. The author describes Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to support slavery by paying taxes and his subsequent jail time as an inspiration for his essay “Civil Disobedience,” one of the most important resistance documents of all time, which influenced such luminaries as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. And there is a fascinating look at the Underground Railroad, an elaborate network set up by abolitionists to assist runaway slaves in fleeing to Canada.

In all of these examples, as I mentioned above, Stoermer does not attempt to be impartial. Instead, he takes the resistance standpoint that unjust authority must be opposed, nonviolently if possible but violently if not. And indeed, the nefarious deeds that he depicts as worthy of fervent resistance are truly evil: genocide of Native Americans, execution of freethinking colonists by accusing them of witchcraft, and, of course, the capture and buying and selling of human beings as if they were commodities. Several of the stories in this books were eye-openers for me. I had heard most of them before, but the way they are presented here, with the authoritarian justifications expunged, makes them more powerful and pressing. It is impossible to read this without considering its lessons in terms of our modern era, as the author obviously intends.

One caveat I have about this book is that there is no citation of sources, which is unusual in what appears to be a well-researched historical work. There are no notes; there is no bibliography; there are no listings at all of where the author obtained the information he is imparting in his text. There is also no index. It all rings true; it all has verisimilitude, but a listing of sources allows scholars to easily find further information that piques their interest. Also, the author tends to get a bit repetitious and longwinded in parts where he is trying to press points. These slow bits don’t last long, and ultimately they are minor reading impediments. And this book is a valuable tool for uncovering some of the uncomfortable truths of American history and for putting our modern struggles against injustice in historical perspective.

*     *     *

In all honesty, when I wrote the above I had not quite finished reading the book, so I would like to now add some final thoughts. The last two chapters are about John Brown’s raid of the armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and the passage of the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution at the conclusion of the Civil War. In these chapters Stoermer clarifies his stance that violence is often a necessary part of civil resistance. Up to this point I was fervent in my support of most of what he had been expounding, but when he began to discuss violence as an essential element in a resistance movement, I backed away. I took particular objection to the way he used Thoreau’s admiration of John Brown as a tacit assumption that Thoreau advocated violent rebellion. In singling out this one example of Thoreau’s rhetoric, I think he makes an unfounded presumption without considering the greater body of Thoreau’s works, which are much deeper and more nuanced. Walden, “Life Without Principle,” and yes, “Civil Disobedience” were essential texts for me in my early years, when I was formulating my own philosophy of life. And though Thoreau fervently believed in the duty of disobedience to an unjust government, in none of his writings does he advocate taking up arms against it. In fact, Thoreau’s writings, particularly “Civil Disobedience,” were instrumental in the adoption of nonviolent tactics by Gandhi and King. It reminds me of a quote from the film Gandhi, which may be a paraphrase of what he actually said but which effectively sums up what he and King and other nonviolent leaders advocated: “For this cause I too am willing to die, but there is no cause for which I am willing to kill.”

In the conclusion, “The American Way of Resistance,” in the epilogue, “The Return of the First Republic,” and in “A Resistance History Toolkit” the author veers from the retelling of American history into historical interpretation and his own personal opinion. He becomes quite judgmental and dogmatic, presenting his perspective as if it is the only one possible. I have to admit that my eyes tended to glaze over a bit as I read these sections. I understand that he is using analogies to the past to provide guidelines for the present, but I feel that he sets his parameters in too rigid a framework, as if his conclusions and no others must be adhered to, as if ongoing history has no choice but to follow the patterns he delineates and those attempting to resist evil must conform to his expostulated axioms. The word nuance comes back to me again. Stoermer makes it clear that to him, a resister that does not precisely follow his outline is a failure. However, as individual human people we are all different. We each have our own separate backgrounds, skills, and strengths, and we each must follow our consciences the best we can.

In closing, I would recommend the nine chapters in the main body of this book as powerful reminders of courageous people who resisted evil authority in the past. (Although I reiterate that I sorely miss a list of sources to back up the stories.) As for the end matter, it is fervent, powerful, opinionated rhetoric that you should balance against your own conscience and beliefs.

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Book Review:  Digital Inc: From Print to E-Book – Inside the Transformation of the Book Industry by Richard Curtis

Posted on June 13, 2026 by John Walters

In this fascinating volume, Curtis tells of the radical transformations within the publishing industry over the past several decades: the transition from mass market paperbacks to trade paperbacks; the absorption of hundreds of independent publishers into a few publishing conglomerates; the growth of behemoth bookstore chains and their superstores and their subsequent collapse as Amazon began to dominate the industry; the rise of e-books and audio books; the changes in manuscript submission and distribution procedures with the rise of the internet; the effect of e-books and print-on-demand technology on independent publishing; and the devastating impact of artificial intelligence on the creative arts. He alternates between a historical account of these changes and a memoir of his own experiences as an agent and publisher. His perspective as a publishing insider and as an advocate for writers makes him well-qualified to tell this story.

His account of this tumultuous era in the book business clarified for me some of the background to what I was going through in my own experiences as a writer from the mid-1990s to the present. After a hiatus of almost two decades, I started writing again when my young family settled in Thessaloniki, Greece. At first I had to type up my stories, print them out, and send paper copies to markets in the States and the U.K. When they sold, I would receive paper checks in the mail. Later, when we got our first internet connection with a noisy modem that hooked up to our phone line, I was able to forego the paper copies and send digital stories to editors electronically. Still later, after Amazon set up the CreateSpace print on demand self-publishing platform, I studied blog posts and how-to books by pioneers such as Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch and learned to publish my own books. During this time I was aware of the changes the publishing industry was going through, but I was far removed from it, at the eastern edge of Europe, and could only catch snippets of the background details.

Digital Inc served me up a whole heap of nostalgia, as I was reminded of those challenging days when I was selling my first stories and publishing my first books. It clarified for me some of the history I only obscurely realized back then due to my perspective from overseas. It also brought back a lot of fun memories of those exciting times.

The most valuable aspect of this book for me personally, though, is Curtis’s lucid explanation of what transpired during those tumultuous, uncertain years. It is helpful to be able to put it all in perspective as a writer and a hybrid publisher and to perceive at a deeper level where the publishing industry is today and how it got that way. The wild card at present is, of course, the intrusion of AI into a field that relies heavily on human creativity. Near the end, Curtis mentions lawsuits that creators have brought against the owners of large language models for copyright infringement, but some of these suits are still pending, so the book leaves this topic hanging. All in all, though, Digital Inc is a well-written, well-organized study of the modern book industry, and I recommend it to both writers and readers – to anyone who comprehends the inestimable value of books.

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The Library of Seattle

Posted on June 6, 2026 by John Walters

Although the ancient Library of Alexandria is the most famous library in history and the United States Library of Congress in Washington D.C. is the largest library in the modern world, for me personally the Seattle Public Library system is also worthy of legendary status. It has served me well in several stages of my life, including the present stage, during which I have scant resources to be able to buy books but my appetite for reading is as ravenous as ever. I am profoundly grateful that my local branch is within walking distance; I usually go there at least a few times a month, and sometimes as often as once a week in my insatiable quest for reading material.

This infatuation began when I was a child. Once I learned to read, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t crave books. I would receive them sometimes as gifts on birthdays and at Christmas, but my main source was the local public library, where my parents would take me and my siblings with fair frequency so we could browse the shelves and check out books to bring home. Back then the system was not digitized, of course; to find specific books we would have to go through large cabinets containing the library’s catalogs; each book had its own typed index card entry. Paper sleeves were glued into the books; these contained a card that the librarian would stamp with the date of return. As a child my tastes were eclectic, but I especially enjoyed reading about ancient animals such as dinosaurs and modern animals such as tigers. My preferences continually evolved, though, and later, after I discovered my destiny as a writer during my one abortive year of college at the University of Santa Clara, after returning home I was thrilled to find a shelf at my local branch containing several volumes of Nebula Awards anthologies issued by the Science Fiction Writers of America (now known as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association).

Recently I have been exploring Seattle and its environs in an attempt to rediscover its multifarious wonders. This weekend I had planned to wander through an outdoor sculpture park near the waterfront; however, the forecast called for wind, rain, and lightning storms, so I instead searched for an indoor activity. And then it struck me: I was in need of some new books to read; instead of going to the local branch, why not head downtown to the Central Library and browse its vast collection? I hadn’t been there for a long time, and the building itself, with its ornate architecture, is like an ostentatious palace, worthy of exploration even if I didn’t find any books to check out.

The light rail system was undergoing repair, so I had to take a long, tedious bus ride and then hike up some steep hills to the library entrance. No matter. It’s all part of the experience. Realizing that I could not possibly browse more than a tiny portion of the library’s immense collection, I decided to focus on four areas: the Friends of the Library bookshop, the Peak Picks display of newly arrived books, the biography section, and the travel section.

Within the jewel-like multi-windowed edifice there are ten levels connected by elevators, escalators, stairs, and ramps. Just inside is the entrance to a spacious auditorium where on numerous occasions (before COVID) I had attended author readings. The Peak Picks section was near the entrance too, but I quickly realized that it was leaner than the one at my local library, probably because of the many more visitors the central branch received. I tried to orient myself by studying the signage, but I eventually had to (several times) ask librarians for assistance.

Before commencing my exploration I thought I would use the public facilities after my long sojourn on the bus; however, the library had just opened and the ground floor men’s room was crowded with homeless people. This didn’t upset me; I have been homeless myself, and I’m glad that the library permits those in need to use the restrooms. Later I found an emptier men’s room upstairs.

A long escalator took me to the Friends of the Library bookstore. It is set off to the side in a corner of the Fifth Avenue lobby. In the past, the Friends of the Library would hold enormous warehouse-sized book sales of all the excess volumes that the library didn’t need. For a time these were held near Magnuson Park in the neighborhood of Sand Point just down the hill from our apartment in Wedgwood. My youngest son and I would grab backpacks and hike down the steep incline, spend hours browsing for used books and DVDs, and then hike back up the hill as we staggered under the weight of our purchases. Later the sales were held at an enormous auditorium at the Seattle Center. In recent years, though, these sales have ceased. I asked an attendant at the bookshop about this, and she told me that the library no longer gave the Friends its excess books; she wasn’t sure what was done with them.

This visit renewed my joy of browsing. When I asked a librarian where the biography and travel books were, he told me but then asked for more specifics of what I needed. I said I was looking forward to being overwhelmed. “Well,” he said, “then you’ve come to the right place.” He wasn’t wrong. My local branch has a shelf or two of travel books, but at the central branch were aisles and aisles of shelves filled top to bottom with travel memoirs and guidebooks to any place on Earth you can imagine. For a time I wandered, amazed, but in fact there was no way I’d be able to browse every title even in the travel section alone, so I aimed for regions and countries I was especially interested in. I did the same in the vast biography section, aiming for books on specific people I was especially interested in reading about.

After I’d located a few books I thought I’d check out, I took the elevator to the tenth floor reading room. The entire exterior of the library is a multifaceted window that somewhat reminded me, as I looked out from the inside on the downtown buildings and the streets far below, of how things must appear to a fly with its compound eyes.

I hope that you’re a bibliophile like I am; I can’t imagine life without books. But even if you’re not in need of reading material, a visit to the Seattle Public Library Central Branch is a marvelous thrill in itself because of its unique architecture and elaborate, maze-like interior. Then again, books are the mystic portals to the knowledge and imagination of humankind. Be sure to pick up a few while you are there.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words.  I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible.  If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories. To send a one-time or recurring donation, click here. You can also donate via my Patreon account. Thanks!

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Book Review:  Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Posted on May 30, 2026 by John Walters

If there is such a thing as literary comfort food, this science fiction novella qualifies. It tastes good and goes down smooth and easy. Ostensibly it’s a dystopia; after all, California has recently broken away from the rest of America, and after a brutal war it has formed its own independent country. Four sentient robots have been abandoned in a closed-down restaurant, and when they awaken after months of inactivity they must learn to fend for themselves without human assistance. Their plan? To get the restaurant up and running again featuring hand-pulled, or rather robot-pulled, noodles. The mechanical heroes encounter their share of difficulties, including internet trolls who try to inundate their establishment with one-star online reviews, but the dangers seem to be superficial. The story never loses its cute, cuddly, feel-good vibe.

Besides being an ode to the power of friendship, it is also a tribute to San Francisco. Despite its partial destruction in the war, the city comes across as warm and nurturing to its human and robotic survivors. Newitz notes, in the acknowledgments section at the end, that “many of the places, businesses, and institutions I love in present-day San Francisco managed to survive the war of independence to flourish in these pages.” I can understand the sentiment. San Francisco used to be one of my favorite cities too, especially back in the early seventies when I frequently hitchhiked up and down the West Coast. At the time, the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood was still bursting with countercultural anarchism, and the rock venues featured some of the greatest bands of all time; I’ll never forget, for instance, experiencing the Grateful Dead live at Fillmore West in 1971. For me, San Francisco was magical. It lost its allure, though, when nearby Silicon Valley blossomed into existence, prices skyrocketed, and I couldn’t afford to visit anymore. Still, Newitz’s descriptions, even of the partially ruined city, brought on a wave of nostalgia for the city I once loved.

One issue that comes up again and again in the story is robot rights, something that I find difficult to take seriously at face value. It is difficult to surmise whether the author does either, or whether instead the robots are anthropomorphic representations of disenfranchised human minorities. Either way, it is easy to ignore these subtleties and relax into the story – as if watching a feature-length cartoon. I don’t mean this as a criticism, either. Escapism is a valuable thing; it’s fun to get lost in a tale of unlikely heroes who, despite the obstacles and difficulties, you just know are going to be all right in the end.

And Newitz is a fine writer. One reason I picked up this book is because I had so much pleasure reading their earlier effort: The Terraformers, a complex exercise in world-building that features all sorts of non-human characters. I would recommend Automatic Noodle, then, as a light, fun read – perfect for when you want to escape into a future that is radically different in some ways and yet in other ways is uncannily similar to our own time. We need more uplifting stories like this to offset the gloom in this poor, sad world of ours.

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Book Review:  On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor

Posted on May 23, 2026 by John Walters

This book was not what I expected. Going by the title alone, I supposed that it would be a travelogue in which the author describes his adventures on some of the world’s great hiking paths. There is some of that, but Moor also spends much time discussing the philosophy of trails. To accomplish this, it seems to me that he often veers widely away from the subject at hand. It starts with a bang in a long prologue in which the author tells of his through-hike on the Appalachian Trail. The walk from Georgia to Maine takes him several months, and he shares gems such as this: ” Some days, after many miles, I would slip into a state of near-perfect mental clarity – serene, crystalline, thought-free. I was, as the Zen sages say, just walking.” In fact, the book begins and ends with descriptions of the Appalachian Trail: the United States version in the prologue, and the International Appalachian Trail, a new concept under construction, in the chapter before the epilogue. For me, these were the most riveting sections of all.

After his fascinating account of hiking the Appalachian Trail, Moor dives deep, deep into the past with a study of the first blob-like prehistoric creatures to form pathways. From there he moves forward to trail-making ants and caterpillars. In the course of detailing the trail predilections of sheep, deer, and other animals, he devotes long sections to his immersive research into herding sheep on a Navaho reservation, stalking deer with a dedicated lifelong hunter, and visiting a rural Tennessee elephant sanctuary and a Six Flags safari zoo. One fascinating section deals with preserving indigenous culture by discovering and mapping old trails leading to significant places in personal or tribal memories. At first I was disappointed by most of these digressions, but then I realized that as a reader I had to take the author on his own terms. That’s Moor’s style: to start out on track and then take off down any side-paths that strike his fancy.

On Trails introduced me to the International Appalachian Trail, a concept I had never heard of before. In the 1990s it was first proposed to extend the U.S. trail into Canada. Later the trail was expanded even further to include remnants of the Central Pangean Mountains, of which the Appalachians formed a segment before the supercontinent Pangaea broke up and drifted apart. There are now chapters of the IAT in Greenland, Scotland, England, and continental Europe, culminating in Morocco. The author describes a guided hike through the Atlas Mountains in Morocco searching for the appropriate location for the IAT trail terminus.

On Trails is a mixed bag. As I explained above, there are some parts of it I enjoyed and savored more than others. It helps if you approach it not as a traditional travel book, but rather as a hodgepodge of philosophy, travel, history, paleontology, and nature study. Moor is a good writer, and part of the pleasure of the book is the frequent uncovering of gems of little-known esoterica. It is as if you are hiking along a trail and keep discovering all sorts of things that you’ve never heard of before.

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Book Review:  Vigil by George Saunders

Posted on May 16, 2026 by John Walters

This new piece of fiction by George Saunders is marketed as a novel, but it is shorter than most novels and it reads more like a novella – or a short story that got out of control. And that’s a good thing. Saunders is a master of the short story. I always look forward to his collections, of which I have read and enjoyed several, including Liberation Day: Stories, Pastoralia: Stories and a Novella, and Tenth of December: Stories, not to mention the brilliant master class on short Russian fiction A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Vigil takes place in a single night. A spirit named Jill Blaine, the narrator of the tale, is sent to Earth, to Dallas, Texas, to comfort a dying billionaire, K.J. Boone, who made his fortune in oil. Although the world is manifesting the extreme effects of global warming, Boone is unrepentant despite his aggressive business tactics contributing in a significant way to the current disasters. It is not Blaine’s purpose to castigate or punish Boone, but rather to make his transition to the next stage easier. In fact, she empathizes with his plight and is able to see things from his viewpoint. She says: “My charge had been born him. But had never chosen to be born him. That just happened to him.” And of his multifarious business misdeeds: “It did not seem strange to me but inevitable. An inevitable occurrence upon which it would be ludicrous to pass judgment.” But numerous spirits that seem trapped in a limbo-like state between life and death do appear and pass judgment. They arrive, sometimes one by one and sometimes in groups to confront Boone (who in his coma-like state can mentally communicate with them) with what they consider his grievous sins.

More than once, Blaine gets fed up with Boone’s recalcitrance and leaves; she even makes a trip to her hometown, several states away, where she died as a young woman of twenty-two. However, it seems injurious in a sense for spirits like her to delve too deeply into their pasts; it distracts her from her current assignment.

The main theme of Vigil is environmental degradation caused by corrupt business practices, but the sermonizing is expertly cloaked by the entertaining fantasy. The underworld of ghosts in various stages of the afterlife reminded me of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Even more, though, it reminded me of the novella An Earth Day Eulogy by my son Nestor Walters, published in 2024, in which various spirits castigate the main character on Earth Day for his indifference to environmental issues.

At first I found Vigil a bit befuddling. You have to give it some time so that you become accustomed to the ground rules of the afterlife Saunders is presenting. But if you persevere past the initial confusion, you soon get into the flow of things and it becomes a lot of fun. Saunders, in this seemingly light fantasy replete with all sorts of idiosyncratic characters, cloaks a powerful message of the class differences in America and the obliviousness and callousness of the upper class to the damage they are causing to the rest of humankind. What could be better? You get a fun fantasy and a moral tale in a succinct, easy to absorb story. Highly recommended.

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Wake Up!

Posted on May 9, 2026 by John Walters

It all starts with mental comparisons of the present time with the late sixties and early seventies when I was growing into manhood. There was a war then: the Vietnam War, just as there is a war now. Until American troops were withdrawn in 1973, the conflict split the nation, just as the nation is split now.

It is a myth that politicians are among our finest people. Throughout human history this has almost never been so. Humankind has most often created its great religions, institutions, ideas, and works of art despite political situations, not because of them.

In the sixties, for instance, a renaissance of great music, literature, and social movements erupted in the midst of the chaos. The world’s greatest artistic masterpieces have often been born out of despair, trauma, warfare, persecution, poverty, oppression, injustice, discrimination, and intolerance.

I’m not making sense. At least not enough sense. Nevertheless I will continue, albeit senseless.

I’m not only talking about art, either; I’m talking about spirituality, about the awakening of consciousness. Why is it that insight often arises out of deep dark experiences?

It’s not that the world is more full of evil than it has been in the past; evil has always existed. The difference is that now, in this era, we have the ability to obliterate everyone and everything, to eliminate all life on Earth. And some folks would rather do that than share what they have, or what they crave, with others.

In the greatest darkness light shines clearer. I am watching for that light. From whence will it emerge?

We cannot control what happens in the higher echelons of government. They have their own agendas, which often do not align with the needs of the people they are supposed to be serving. But we have control of our own psyches, our own minds and hearts.

A perennial nomad travels in thought as well as on foot. The spirit roams freely even if restrictions are placed upon the body.

But that’s not all of it. The analogy that comes to me is of childbirth. “A woman when she is in travail has sorrow, because her hour is come; but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembers no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.” Is humankind in the throes of childbirth or on the verge of apocalyptic disaster? Or both?

As Yeats wrote in his poem “The Second Coming”: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” So it often seems as “the worst,” with fervor and force, are hell-bent on leading us to inglorious destruction. But this cannot be the final word. What we wait for, then, is an awakening of truth, of righteousness, of gentleness, of peace, of prosperity for all and not just for those brandishing the most powerful weapons.

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On Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, One Battle After Another, and Pseudo-Profundity

Posted on May 2, 2026 by John Walters

What prompted this rereading of Vineland was director/screenwriter Paul Thomas Anderson’s assertion that the Oscar-winning film One Battle After Another was based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel. I had read Vineland several years ago, and I couldn’t see the similarity. For one thing, in the book the character that Leonardo DiCaprio plays is very minor; he shows up for the first fifty or so pages (of an almost four hundred page book) and then is scarcely mentioned again until the end. He never embarks on a quest to find his daughter; that’s a Hollywood add-on. I’m not going to go into a point by point comparison of the book and the film; the differences are too vast and too numerous. Suffice it to say that Anderson took some of the hip, bizarre, flamboyant, outlandish, zany, and anachronistic elements from Pynchon’s novel and used these ingredients to create something with a more traditional, streamlined plot line. The names of people, locations, and groups are all different, and though Pynchon’s story alternates between the sixties and the eighties, the time period of Anderson’s tale is not as evident. In fact it is best, for me at least, to see the novel and the film as two separate entities that have a few things in common but ultimately are only vaguely related.

One Battle After Another has a clear, strong story line, while Pynchon’s appeal is not so much the story as all the intricate gags and wordplay he throws out along the way. And these are the bits that are ultimately not filmable. In my previous review of Vineland, I compared the novel to an extended Cheech and Chong skit, a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, a series of sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Saturday Night Live, and Doc Brown in Back to the Future throwing anything at all into his time machine, even garbage, to make it go. Pynchon’s style is all of that and more. And, as I wrote in my previous review: “In a way, the style of writing also reminds me of the works of Henry Miller. Especially in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, Miller takes a description or a topic and makes an art form of adding details, one after the other, phrase after phrase, on and on, long after other writers would have given up and gone to the next plot point. That’s what Pynchon often does in Vineland: he’ll tell you what’s happening, and then add a detail, and then another, and that thought gives way to another, all in a very stream-of-consciousness sort of way. He does this with individual sentences, in paragraphs leading one into another, and sometimes with entire passages. A description of one character leads to their entire life story, and then the life story of another casually mentioned side character, and on and on it goes.”

This time around, even though I’d read the book before, I still sometimes got lost trying to keep track of Pynchon’s wildly eccentric characters. (It was obviously a good film decision to drastically trim these digressions.) I kept going in fascination, spellbound by Pynchon’s dazzling prose expertise, even though a lot of it didn’t seem to make sense. In some parts I can’t even say that it was a pleasure to read; it was more like being on an acid trip, enduring the exaggerated sights and sounds, helpless to break away until I came down.

The phrase pseudo-profundity came to me a few days ago while I was listening to a hit song from the seventies that seemed to have very deep and intricate lyrics. I eventually realized that the lyrics were bullshit; they didn’t make any sense at all. But they had verisimilitude; in other words, they gave the impression of depth and significance without imparting any kind of real worthwhile message. And then I realized that Vineland had a similar sort of pseudo-profundity. Much of it is a kind of literary slapstick, like early Charlie Chaplin before he burst out with masterpieces such as Modern Times.

Would I recommend Vineland? That depends. If you are into gags and wordplay and an idiosyncratic look at the sixties and eighties, maybe. Personally, I found some parts obscure and some parts easier to follow, and I have to confess that I enjoyed the most coherent parts best. I also have to say, though, that in my opinion, there are enough literary gems to make the mining of them worthwhile.

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