The Institute (2019) by Stephen King: Novel: Stephen King returns to the world of psychic children in his new novel with mostly positive results.
The eponymous Institute kidnaps children and puts them to work doing... what? Well, if I told you, I'd spoil the novel. Suffice to say that the people behind the Institute believe that the ends justify the means and that they're the good guys.
They really must think they're the good guys because they've been killing a whole lot of children for decades. And their families. King remains fairly ruthless throughout the novel, making things seem more plausible. There's a heck of a death toll, both depicted and implied, and the vast majority of those deaths are children between the ages of about 8 and 14.
But soon after the novel begins, the Institute makes one mistake -- they kidnap a boy genius. They didn't kidnap him because he's a boy genius. Human intelligence is irrelevant to their aims. Well, until it interferes with them.
King plays a bit with structure in the novel, beginning with a secondary protagonist -- a former police officer who goes walkabout and ends up as the Night Knocker in a small Southern town. After about 50 pages, we jump to our primary protagonist. A beginning writer would probably be told not to do this shift. But King can do what he wants -- and the structure does cause suspense insofar as we wonder how events in demon-haunted Maine (where the Institute is located) and the Southern whistle-stop will dovetail.
In all, it's enjoyable and fairly tight. The characterization of the children is typically astute. And the characterization of the assorted antagonists, while occasionally one-note, makes sense when one considers that they're people doing terrible things for what they believe is a noble cause. That's going to disconnect one from empathy -- or require people with low empathy from the get-go. It's also the only King novel I can think of in which probability calculations play a major role. Recommended.
Science Fiction Omnibus: edited by Groff Conklin, containing the following stories: "A Subway Named Mobius" by A.J. Deutsch; "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft; "The Star Dummy" by Anthony Boucher; "Homo Sol" by Isaac Asimov; "Kaleidoscope" by Ray Bradbury; "Plague" by Murray Leinster; "Test Piece" by Eric Frank Russell; "Spectator Sport" by John D. MacDonald; "The Weapon" by Fredric Brown; "History Lesson" by Arthur C. Clarke; and "Instinct" by Lester Del Rey (Collected 1956): Enjoyable, idiosyncratic anthology of mostly 1940's and 1950's science fiction from the once ubiquitous and always good Groff Conklin.
The two most-anthologized stories here are the Lovecraft and Bradbury offerings. John D. MacDonald, best known for his Travis Magee mystery novels, was also a prolific science-fiction writer in the 1950's, and his short-short story anticipates virtual reality in a startling and prescient way. Somewhat bizarrely, the Boucher story anticipates Alf! The rest of the stories are solid, with the Arthur Clarke offering probably having the funniest ending, as Venusians make some extremely wrong conclusions about the now-extinct Earth society based on one surviving film strip. Recommended.
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick: edited and with an introduction by Jonathan Lethem; containing the following stories: "Beyond Lies the Wub"; "Roog"; "Paycheck"; "Second Variety"; "Impostor"; "The King of the Elves"; "Adjustment Team"; "Foster, You're Dead!"; "Upon the Dull Earth"; "Autofac"; "The Minority Report"; "The Days of Perky Pat"; "Precious Artifact"; "A Game of Unchance"; "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"; "Faith of Our Fathers"; "The Electric Ant"; "A Little Something for Us Tempunauts"; "The Exit Door Leads In"; "Rautavaara's Case"; "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" (aka "Frozen Journey") (Collected 2002):
Any Dick short-story collection will be pretty good, as he wrote very few stinkers during his prolific career. Lethem leans a bit too much towards the science-fictional here, including one truly minor story ("The Exit Door Leads In", an unusually defeatist story, even for Dick) and excluding two of Dick's best horror stories, the stunning "The Father Thing", which I'd nominate as at least one of the 20 scariest stories ever written in English, and the creepily droll "The Cookie Lady", a Dickian exercise in dark Bradburyian whimsy.
I'd also have included Dick's hilarious 1950's story in which Scientology has become the world's leading religion. If you keep score of these things, pretty much every Dick short story ever adapted into a movie is represented here ("Paycheck"; "Second Variety" (as Screamers and its sequels) ; "Impostor"; "Adjustment Team" (as The Adjustment Bureau); "The Minority Report" and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (twice as Total Recall)). Highly recommended, though the collection may whet your appetite for a more comprehensive survey of Dick's writing. Thankfully, he's pretty much entirely in print.
