Daimler Announces Electric Smart for 2010

image: Mr. Thomas

A few months ago Daimler reported that they were testing 100 electric versions of its Smart car in London, and that if all went well they would work on putting the car into production for the general population to buy. Well, now Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche has said that all did go well. This means that the company will release its EV Smart in 2010, the same year the Chevy Volt is scheduled to come out.

Personally, I find it funny that Daimler can go from no electric car to a firm release date so easily and with so little fanfare, while the blogosphere seems poised to trip over every word that comes out of Bob Lutz’s mouth about the not-even-EV Chevy Volt. But, that’s really a story for another post.

No price has yet been released for the EV to be. Because the Smart is known not only as a fuel efficient car, but a cheap car, Daimler is deciding whether it wants to sell the batteries with the car or lease them. Leasing has the advantage of a lower up-front cost, but will also mean continued cost of ownership.

Also, no mention was made of whether or not the Smart EV would be released in the US. Seeing as how the car just made the jump across the pond, it’s likely that the first incarnation will be a Europe-only affair.

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Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk is talking dirty

The Times review by Chris Ayres

You learn a lot from lunch with Chuck Palahniuk. For example, I now know that Adolf Hilter invented the blow-up sex doll. True fact, apparently. While the soon-to-be Führer was working as a messenger between the trenches in the First World War, he was appalled to see his fellow Aryans sloping off to French brothels. So he came up with the idea of an inflatable Fräulein. But Hilter didn't get around to manufacturing the doll until near the end of the Second World War when the factory was destroyed by the Allied firebombing of Dresden.

Thus it remains a little-known fact that Adolf Hilter invented the blow-up sex doll.

Palahniuk (“Puh-LAH-nick”) loves this kind of stuff. Tales that may or may not be taller than average. With his breakthrough 1996 novel Fight Club, you were never quite sure what was true and what was made up. Was there a real Fight Club? Was it the same thing as the Cacophony Society (organiser of the annual “Santa Rampage”, which involves pranks and drunkenness) to which the author allegedly belonged? No one knew. That was the genius.

Twelve years and eight books later, Palahniuk, 46 and now openly gay, remains something of an enigma. When I offer to fly to Portland, Oregon, to interview him about his new novel, Snuff, he suggests getting it over with at the airport, because he's going there anyway “to buy tickets”. Who the hell goes to an airport to buy tickets?

In the end I meet him in a burger joint by the departures lounge. He is dressed in upscale hikewear and I spend much of the meal wondering if he has a roll of duct tape and a power saw in his knapsack. He is outwardly calm but his right leg jiggles, and his face has the toxic hue of pencil lead. When he tells me that cheeseburgers always make for reliable airport food - “there's not a lot of variables” - he does so in the methodical tone of an IT helpdesk operator.

All of which serves to heighten the shock value of the author's subject matter.

Snuff, for example, is a typically pulpy affair, concerning the making of an epic gangbang video (“600 dudes, one porn queen”), in which the author's descriptions of bodily excretions are matched in number only by his relentlessly inventive porn-movie puns (Catch Her in the Eye, A Tale of Two Titties, World Whore One: The Whore To End All Whores, etc etc).

The book was inspired by Annabel Chong's real-life performance in The World's Biggest Gangbang, a movie in which she set an industry record by having sex with 70 men in a single ten-hour session. Anyone who has ever wondered about the biological logistics of such a feat will find Snuff endlessly fascinating - the story is told from the perspectives of the male performers Mr 72, Mr 137 and Mr 600 respectively - so long as they can make it through the bits about vaginal embolisms.

I ask Palahniuk how he goes about compiling such queasy research. “Before I start a book, I tell people I'm collecting stories,” he says. “So you send out this request for a certain type of information and it creates this kind of party game, a way of people being together, and they call you and they reward you. A lot of the time we don't know what to say to each other, so this gives us a kind of shared purpose.”

For a novelist it's an unusually collaborative way to work. Not for Palahniuk, however. When he was still undiscovered and working as a Portland lorry mechanic, he got hooked on writers' workshops.

“I decided, when I wasn't being paid [for writing], that I could do it and still do all those normal social things, rather than sit at home and throw my life away, being alone,” he says. “Also, I saw the value in people's stories, and I wanted to preserve all these quirky and funny-albeit-sometimes sad anecdotes that people were telling me.” Some of the anecdotes in Snuff were supplied by a physically deformed porn actress who came to one of Palahniuk's book readings.

And the book readings, of course, are infamous. Like a kind of literary circus freak, Palahniuk delights in delivering material that frequently causes his fans to pass out (he stopped counting the casualties at 72). His only concern about this phenomenon is that his most shocking prose might be now overfamiliar. Hence the reason he replaced it for a while with material that instead made people cry. That also proved troublesome. “It's really difficult to salvage an event when everyone starts crying,” he says, matter-of-factly. “You just can't bring the energy back up, it's impossible”.

Disgust is a big theme with Palahniuk. The author says that it's a function of trying to attract the kind of readers who would otherwise never pick up a book (ie, men). He cites studies which suggest that less than 10 per cent of human communication is actually done through words - the rest through sights, smells, etc. Yet the sheer visceral repulsion in Snuff suggests that something else is going on. I ask Palahniuk if he thinks that porn is inherently damaging. “Only if it's done right!” he blurts, with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. Composing himself, he continues: “Porn is the adult version of the fairytale. There's a real comforting sameness to it. It's never going to end badly. In that respect porn is really no different than any other coping mechanism that people have, whether it's being funny, or being pretty, or being smart. At some point they just do too much of it and it no longer serves them, it enslaves them.”

Then again, perhaps Palahniuk is attracted to the extreme simply because that's what he has always known. He grew up in a half-abandoned town that had been moved, brick by brick, to make way for a new dam. His father, Fred, worked for the railroad. The most interesting fact about Fred Palahniuk was that, at the age of 3, he had watched his own father shoot dead his mother and then take his own life.

The story of Fred Palahniuk turned out to be no less tragic. Having taking early retirement after a back injury, he became obsessed first with entering mail-order contests and then with replying to personal ads. The woman he ultimately met had a jealous ex-boyfriend, who stalked the couple then shot them dead before burning their bodies.

Fred was hugely proud of his son's success with Fight Club - he had been a boxer in the navy - but never knew the truth about his sexuality. “Maybe because he chose not to,” concludes Palahniuk. “But we just, y'know, never brought it up. It's not something I can really affect, so it's not something I choose to really consider.” If Palahniuk failed to get acceptance from his father, he has also in some ways failed to get it from the literary establishment. His book tour stunts and his deliberately lurid prose have turned him into a kind of white trash anti-Martin Amis.

Indeed, the two men met at a literary festival recently, and by the sounds of it they despised each other. “Boy, I wish he'd start drinking again,” says Palahniuk. “He was in such a foul mood all the time, I just found myself wishing he'd just have one glass of wine. I think he was still smoking, but people said he was in this bad mood because he wasn't drinking any more.”

Palahniuk's verdict on Amis as a novelist is simply that he writes “beautifully padded sentences”. “We're living in a different world than Charles Dickens lived in,” he says. “My perception is that my readers just don't have that kind of patience. They're a lot more sophisticated.”

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk
Cape, £12.99 Buy the book here

Five other writers who went on the offensive by Iain Finlayson

1. D.H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover - written in 1928 - provided the first big test of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act.

2. Vladimir Nabokov
Copies of Lolita were seized by UK Customs and condemned by the Sunday Express as “filthy”.

3. Brett Easton Ellis
American Psycho was withdrawn from publication after protests about its alleged misogyny.

4. Gore Vidal
The New York Times was so shocked by the content of The City and the Pillar that it refused to review his next five novels.

5. Allen Ginsberg
Howl was declared by the courts to possess redeeming social importance after being banned for obscenity.

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Great Opening Sentences From Science Fiction

You can tell a lot about a science fiction book from its first sentence. Those first few words (or few dozen, in some cases) have to pull you into the story and bring you into a whole alternate world. A good first sentence "hooks" you, pulling you into the story with a quick jolt of action and mystery. But a great first sentence does way more than that — it establishes a tone, it sticks in your mind, and it's like a little otherworldly koan, confounding your expectations. And maybe freaking your shit a little. Here are our favorite science fiction opening sentences.

Having looked through a few thousand opening sentences at the bookstore and online — no exaggeration — I can generalize a bit. There are a lot of opening sentences that announce the start of a rollicking yarn, with an action sentence. Like this, from Dan Brown's Angels & Demons: "Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own." Boom! A guy's flesh is burning. It's exciting! A slight variation is the juxtaposition of the mundane activity with the exciting thing that interrupts it, sort of like, "I was hanging some kitchen shelves when the cyber-rhinoceros burst through my floor, tusks exploding with brilliant fire."

And then there are tons of opening sentences that are just quirky, or rambling, letting you know the author is settling in to tell a long, rumbly bulldozer of a story. And honestly, most of the opening sentences I looked at were either very business-like, or not very interesting. Or both.

Here are the ones which actually stuck with me and lodged in my brain a bit:

"'I've watched through his eyes, I've listened through his ears, and I tell you he's the one.'" — Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card. Starting a story, let alone a novel, with a piece of dialog is a bold choice, and most of the time it's super cheesy. I really like this line, though, because it's so intriguing and it drops in a lot of info. How have they been watching through his eyes? Listening through his ears, and what's "the one"?

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." — William Gibson, Neuromancer. People always cite this as a great opening line, and it's easy to see why. It's such a vivid image.

"They set a slamhound on Turner's trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair." — Count Zero by William Gibson. Okay, come on. This is just so fun. It's got the wacky jargon: "slamhound," "slotted," and the idea that it can be tied to random things like hair color and pheromones. And it's crackling with energy!

"The morning after he killed Eugene Shapiro, Andre Deschenes woke early." — Undertow by Elizabeth Bear. This is almost the mundane/exciting juxtaposition, but it's more than that, because the mundane comes after the exciting. And it makes you curious about Andre Deschenes and how he can sleep after killing a guy. And who Eugene Shapiro is. I was reading Undertow a while back, and this sentence sucked me in.

"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets." — Rudy Rucker, The Hacker And The Ants, Version 2.0. Surreal — transreal, even — and garish and weird. And the fact that there are 21 real estate agents just makes it that much better.

"I lived long enough to see the cure for death; to see the rise of the Bitchun Society, to learn ten languages; to compose three symphonies; to realize my boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World; to see the death of the workplace and of work." — Cory Doctorow, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom. I like a nice brisk opening. Again, the wacky jargon (the "Bitchun Society") and the weird longevity, and then the personal suddenly gives way to the larger picture, with the death of the workplace.

"He woke, and remembered dying." — Ken MacLeod, The Stone Canal. I don't really think I need to explain why this is a great opening. It's spare and intriguing. And no adjectives or adverbs. Yay!

"The manhunt extended across more than one hundred light years and eight centuries." — Vernor Vinge, A Deepness In The Sky. This is pretty close to being your standard brisk, action-packed opening. Except for the huge scope of it, coupled with the precision.

"Two glass panes with dirt between and little tunnels from cell to cell: when I was a kid I had an ant colony." — Samuel R. Delany, The Star Pit. It's almost a poem, and it zooms outwards in a lovely way, from the dirt tunnels to the ant colony. For a moment, you think it could be an alien zoo or something.

"The five small craft passed from shadow, emerging with the suddenness of coins thrown into sunlight." — Scott Westerfield, The Risen Empire. This one, I was on the fence about. It's a little adjective-heavy, and it has the passive construction at the end. But I really liked the coins thrown into sunlight, it's a lovely image and it's about the last thing that comes to mind when you think about spaceships emerging from somewhere.

"At the end, the bottom, the very worst of it, with the world afire and hell's flamewinged angels calling him by name, Lee Crane blamed himself." — Theodore Sturgeon, Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea. Again, it's got great energy, and even though it has my pet peeve — the random "it" occupying the space where a real world should be — it's got the Blakeian imagery, and then you absolutely have to know why Lee Crane blames himself.

"In the summer of his twelfth year — the summer the stars began to fall from the sky — the boy Isaac discovered that he could tell East from West with his eyes closed." — Axis, Robert Charles Wilson. It's got so much going on, what with the coming-of-age thing and the stars falling. But then you get that human-compass thing, which is intriguing and fascinating. And this is a nice, spare sentence, with no excess clutter. It's snappy!

"Today is the two-hundredth anniversary of the final extinction of my One True Love, as close as I can date it." — Saturn's Children, Charles Stross. It's like the start of a romance novel, except for the mention of 200 years and the word "extinction." They stick out like jagged little spurs, amidst the shmoopy "One True Love" jargon.

Oh, and I came across one opening sentence that stuck in my mind afterwards, but then I couldn't find it again. It was something like, "He did not often think about kidnapping his daughter and stealing the spaceship." But there was more to it than that. What am I thinking of?

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