Amnesia Moon
Jonathan Lethem
249 pages
published in 1995

Jonathan Lethem is one of those writers who, though he got his start in science fiction, I can't really think of as a science fiction writer, the way Robert Heinlein is a science fiction writer. (The opposite is the case with Neal Stephenson, who has arguably written more non sf books than sf books, but who I still think of as a science fiction writer.) It is not that he has become snobbish about science fiction, the way some writers used once they broke out of the sf "ghetto" (he admits in print that he still likes Marvel comics, fer chrissakes!), but rather that like Samual Delany before him, he has always had more interests than just science fiction and has pursued those interests.

This was already noticable in his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, which was a Raymond Chandler/Dashiell Hammett hardboiled detective pastiche in a bizarre science fiction setting which itself was a fusion of elements form the more outrageous "Golden Age" sf writers (Van Vogt say) with the more absurd of New Wave social sensibilities. Someswhat postmodern and old fashioned at the same time.

With his second novel, Amnesia Moon, took as his template Philip K. Dick and especially his 1957 novel Eye in the Sky. Lethem's novel has clearly taken its narrative structure from Eye in the Sky: both stories are in essence journeys through a series of dreamscapes and nightmares towards ultimate reality. The protagonists in Dick's novel had an accident which caused them to have to travel through their respective mental landscapes back towards the real world, whereas in Amnesia Moon Chaos, the hero, finds out his post-apocalyptic existence in Hatfork, Wyoming is fake and sets out to a quest to discover the truth, only to end up in a series of ever weirder constructed realities, each unaware of the others.

The second quality the two novels share is the feeling of paranoia both induce by showing reality as a condstruct. There is however a difference between Eye in the Sky's paranoia and that in Amnesia Moon. Whereas the first is genuine, the product of a political and sociological environment that genuinely induced paranoia, heightened by Philip K. Dick's own fears, the second is ersatz, bogus, drenched in nostalgia. There is as much paranoia in Lethem's story because it is genuinely paranoia inducing as there is because it is expected for this sort of story. Lethem also misses the intense personal writing of Philip K. Dick; his wiriting is cool and detached and as such loses much of its impact.

In the end, this makes Amnesia Moon less interesting, less engaging then it could've been. It is undoubtly more sophisticated than Dick's earlier novel, but it loses more in conviction than what it wins in sophistication. It feels like a literary exercise, like an assignment for a class of creative writing. Which means that if you want to sample Jonathan Lethem at his best, avoid this book and read his first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music.