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The Ultimate Mallworld
Here collected together for the first time are all the short stories, ads, and illustrations for S. P. Somtow's Mallworld. Included in The Ultimate Mallworld are all the original stories (and the one story left out of the Starblaze trade edition), all the ads for the Mallworld products (left out in the TOR mass market re-printing), and all the original artwork by Karl Kofoed (the artwork was not included in the TOR edition). This edition will also contain two new Mallworld stories written by Somtow along with their new interior illustrations by the original artist Karl Kofoed. The Selespridar have locked us, the planet Earth, part of our solar system, and our sun up in a force field because the rest of the Galaxy plain and simple does not want to associate with us. Do we care? Not really. We have Mallworld, the shopping center almost the size of a planet. So come along and play human pinball at the arcades, order your custom-designed baby at Storkways, Inc., experience your ultimate death at the Way Out Suicide Parlors-death by vampire is a special way to go and just one of the three-hundred ways you can decide to end your life.
344 pages, Paperback
First published April 15, 2000
24 people are currently reading
49 people want to read
About the author
S.P. Somtow
180 books156 followersCalled by the Bangkok Post "the Thai person known by name to most people in the world," S.P. Somtow is an author, composer, filmmaker, and international media personality whose dazzling talents and acerbic wit have entertained and enlightened fans the world over.
He was Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul in Bangkok. His grandfather's sister was a Queen of Siam, his father is a well known international lawyer and vice-president of the International Academy of Human Rights. Somtow was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and his first career was in music. In the 1970s (while he was still in college) his works were being performed on four continents and he was named representative of Thailand to the Asian Composer's League and to the International Music Commission of UNESCO. His avant-garde compositions caused controversy and scandal in his native country, and a severe case of musical burnout in the late 1970s precipitated his entry into a second career - that of author.
He began writing science fiction, but soon started to invade other fields of writing, with some 40 books out now, including the clasic horror novel Vampire Junction, which defined the "rock and roll vampire" concept for the 80s, the Riverrun Trilogy ("the finest new series of the 90's" - Locus) and the semi-autobiographical memoir Jasmine Nights. He has won or been nominated for dozens of major awards including the Bram Stoker Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Somtow has also made some incursions into filmmaking, directing the cult classic The Laughing Dead and the award winning art film Ill Met by Moonlight.
He was Somtow Papinian Sucharitkul in Bangkok. His grandfather's sister was a Queen of Siam, his father is a well known international lawyer and vice-president of the International Academy of Human Rights. Somtow was educated at Eton and Cambridge, and his first career was in music. In the 1970s (while he was still in college) his works were being performed on four continents and he was named representative of Thailand to the Asian Composer's League and to the International Music Commission of UNESCO. His avant-garde compositions caused controversy and scandal in his native country, and a severe case of musical burnout in the late 1970s precipitated his entry into a second career - that of author.
He began writing science fiction, but soon started to invade other fields of writing, with some 40 books out now, including the clasic horror novel Vampire Junction, which defined the "rock and roll vampire" concept for the 80s, the Riverrun Trilogy ("the finest new series of the 90's" - Locus) and the semi-autobiographical memoir Jasmine Nights. He has won or been nominated for dozens of major awards including the Bram Stoker Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award.
Somtow has also made some incursions into filmmaking, directing the cult classic The Laughing Dead and the award winning art film Ill Met by Moonlight.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 21, 2020
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Trigger warning: for discussion of pedophilia & child sex slavery.
Urgh. These tales have not aged well.
S.P.Somtow (aka Somtow Sucharitkul, his byline in the 1980s) was one of my favorite writers in the 1980s. His tale "The Rainbow King" (part of his High Inquest tales) was in the very first SF/F magazine I purchased on my own (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1981). While the High Inquest was his space opera/high drama/"profound" series, the Mallworld stories were lighter & definitely un-serious: far into our future, the highly-advanced Selespridar have decided that humanity is too immature to be allowed openly into the galaxy & have shoved us into a pocket universe consisting of our solar system and nothing else. One of the constant running theme of the tales was the missing stars & how humans yearned to have the stars back in our sky -- the pocket universe sky is empty & black, save for various asteroids, our sun, & the planets (as of the 1980s, before Pluto was de-ranked). Somtow also makes fun of humanity's rampant commercialism/capitalism, religion, history, gourmet cooking, art -- very little escaped Mallworld's cultural parody.
That's one of the big problems with these tales. Everything is a parody or satire. With so much rampant parody, outdated pop-culture references & supposed-to-be-funny stuff, it wears very thin, very fast. There's very little un-humor to give us a breather, and the moments that are meant to be dramatic & serious are undone by the rampant funny-stuff around them. Bluntly, even back in the '80s, the Mallworld humor wasn't very funny -- granted, I was only a teenager then, but the humor hasn't become funny now, either. It doesn't help that Somtow has a bad case of SF-jargon & Calling-a-Rabbit-a-Smeerp in these tales; they're overrun with made-up jargon for everything, no matter how small. Usually the context helps define whatever Somtow's talking about, but the overuse of the jargon for even simple concepts still gets irritating: paycomp, creditcomp, transmat, demat booths, plasticloth, interport, comsim, p-suit, fastclone nutrient baths, motorbooths, n'huat, ug'unnieth, obsolized, monopole skating, crazi-gravi, n'urdef, nullgrav, cross-booth, magno-footware, levitol -- that's just in the first quarter of the first story, even before the whole concept of the Selespridar's complicated life cycle gets brought in for the plot.
On top of that, Somtow has a bad habit of combining words & names & concepts into twisted neologisms that drown you in more meaningless parody. For example, the first story, A Day in Mallworld, has a Dadmom robot, Buckerogeroo's Steak House, Reconstructionist Neo-Amish-Buddheo-Krishna-ologisticism, Kharmadharmadevaphasa, Donnyandmarie (the ancient truth singers)...etc etc etc.
And again, in the first paragraph of the story "Rabid in Mallworld":
"Flickersparklepinpoints dervish-dancing through darkness. Whorls, whirls and swirls of fiery stipple dust. Giddy worlds wheeling on unseen slings. Starspills out of cosmic salt-and-pepper shakers..."
You see what I mean.
That's not even getting into all the ideologies, dated pop-culture references, theology, philosophies, history, and iconography that get the same treatment: parodied, smushed together, & twisted into a huge un-funny mess. The whole concept behind the Mallworld stories is that it's so far into the future that everything from our current world is no longer recognizable; it all devolved in a giant millennia-long cross-cultural game of "telephone". If you remember David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries, this is the same idea, rocketed into the far, far future & expanded to encompass the entire solar system.
There's a huge, glaring problem with this concept, though: reading & writing exist. "Mall of the Mysteries" was set in a far-future where nothing of our current society remained, due to a global catastrophe. Mallworld, though, makes a point in several of its tales that while reading & writing are considered outdated concepts in Mallworld, they still exist & are taught. The Selespridar didn't destroy human culture; the humans are locked in with it, lock-stock-barrel. Earth still exists. With so much of today's culture & pop-references written down, computerized, & archived in thousands of books & records & computer servers -- even back in the pre-WorldWideWeb 1980's -- it's impossible to believe that things have been mistranslated & misunderstood so thoroughly. Motel of the Mysteries worked because society was gone & all cultural knowledge vanished with the catastrophe. In Mallworld, nothing was destroyed. It's just the future. Suspension of disbelief gets tossed out the window, especially when current archeology and science techniques are able to tell so much about ancient cultures, in detail, from the smallest things left behind, even without the preponderance of written, photographic, & video/audio recording evidence we have now.
When current scientists are able to scan and read a rolled-up scroll recovered from a Pompeii library that's been charred to near-ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius close to 2000 years ago, I can't believe that Mallworld is so completely clueless about things from our time. When thousands of books & magazines & records are so readily available, when so much documentation is preserved in multiple places, the futuristic Mallworld has little excuse for its ignorance & misunderstandings of Earth history. Hell, when our scientists are able to analyze ancient human feces left behind in Pompeii toilets & determine diets, food-sources, diseases, economic classes, etc, the reasoning behind Mallworld's ignorance evaporates.
I get that it's humor. I understand that it's supposed to be parody. But there still has to be some basis in reality as a foundation. This isn't a disbelief in Mallworld's cultural melting pot & future society -- sure, I'll accept that Hare Krishna & the Amish & the Buddhists combined at some point in the future, that wearing clothes is considered shockingly obscene, that a huge planet-sized shopping mall sits past Jupiter's orbit, and that the aliens treat us like a giant ant farm. My disbelief is in its ignorance & willful mistranslation of history, with no justification for it.
To top it all off? The tales are just not funny. The collection is an okay read: nothing heavy, nothing serious, short tales that can easily be read during a bus ride or bathroom run. It's a good glimpse of the science-fiction scene of the early 1980s. Some things made me smile, as I've gotten old enough to realize what Somtow was referring to. But nothing here is laugh-out-loud funny, not even chuckle-to-self funny. There's parts that are flat-out disturbing -- a child trying to bribe an adult with an offer of sex, a young runaway told to pick up tricks for money-- the sexualization of children is a horrible norm in Mallworld.
So, yeah, if you're looking for an easy read that's mostly entertaining, give this collection a try.
Edit: In re-reading, I discovered something that's either new to this re-publication or that I simply missed -- Somtow has added fake advertisements for Mallworld's various businesses in between the stories & the framing tale. Most of them are the same unfunny parodies & mashed-up pop-references of the short stories. Then the last one hit: "SEX SO REALISTIC IT ALMOST FEELS VIRTUAL".
The following is straight from the text:
"Young human beings -- from Earth itself, so that they are close to the primal essence of the human condition -- are captured from their native villages. They undergo a rigid training process from childhood, with porno-bedtime stories, cybersimu-orgies, and massive doses of Leviton, placing them in a heightened, almost computer-like state of sexual readiness by the time they are ready to work..."
Somtow is trying to make a goddamned joke of KIDNAPPING CHILDREN INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY. We are supposed to LAUGH at the idea of children being kidnapped, drugged, & continually raped.
The two "disturbing" examples I listed above, right before this edit? Those aren't presented as funny; it's a horrible reality to runaways & abused children, but they pass as part of the background detail, with no humor expected. But these ads?? Dear fuckin' GOD.
Somtow is originally from Thailand (he's a minor member of its royal family, in fact), which is notorious for its human trafficking and as a destination for pedophilic sex-tourists. You read that right: pedophiles visit Thailand specifically to molest & rape children, who have been forced into slavery in its sex industry.. Somtow is not making that up -- what he describes in that "ad" is what happens to children in Thailand's sex industry: kidnapping, drugging, rape.
SOMTOW. THINKS. CHILD. SEX. SLAVERY. IS. FUNNY.
HE IS PRESENTING CHILDREN GETTING KIDNAPPED AND RAPED AS "HUMOR".
FUCK YOU, SOMTOW. JUST...FUCK. YOU.
rating reduced to one star. If I could give it negative stars, I would.
Trigger warning: for discussion of pedophilia & child sex slavery.
Urgh. These tales have not aged well.
S.P.Somtow (aka Somtow Sucharitkul, his byline in the 1980s) was one of my favorite writers in the 1980s. His tale "The Rainbow King" (part of his High Inquest tales) was in the very first SF/F magazine I purchased on my own (Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 1981). While the High Inquest was his space opera/high drama/"profound" series, the Mallworld stories were lighter & definitely un-serious: far into our future, the highly-advanced Selespridar have decided that humanity is too immature to be allowed openly into the galaxy & have shoved us into a pocket universe consisting of our solar system and nothing else. One of the constant running theme of the tales was the missing stars & how humans yearned to have the stars back in our sky -- the pocket universe sky is empty & black, save for various asteroids, our sun, & the planets (as of the 1980s, before Pluto was de-ranked). Somtow also makes fun of humanity's rampant commercialism/capitalism, religion, history, gourmet cooking, art -- very little escaped Mallworld's cultural parody.
That's one of the big problems with these tales. Everything is a parody or satire. With so much rampant parody, outdated pop-culture references & supposed-to-be-funny stuff, it wears very thin, very fast. There's very little un-humor to give us a breather, and the moments that are meant to be dramatic & serious are undone by the rampant funny-stuff around them. Bluntly, even back in the '80s, the Mallworld humor wasn't very funny -- granted, I was only a teenager then, but the humor hasn't become funny now, either. It doesn't help that Somtow has a bad case of SF-jargon & Calling-a-Rabbit-a-Smeerp in these tales; they're overrun with made-up jargon for everything, no matter how small. Usually the context helps define whatever Somtow's talking about, but the overuse of the jargon for even simple concepts still gets irritating: paycomp, creditcomp, transmat, demat booths, plasticloth, interport, comsim, p-suit, fastclone nutrient baths, motorbooths, n'huat, ug'unnieth, obsolized, monopole skating, crazi-gravi, n'urdef, nullgrav, cross-booth, magno-footware, levitol -- that's just in the first quarter of the first story, even before the whole concept of the Selespridar's complicated life cycle gets brought in for the plot.
On top of that, Somtow has a bad habit of combining words & names & concepts into twisted neologisms that drown you in more meaningless parody. For example, the first story, A Day in Mallworld, has a Dadmom robot, Buckerogeroo's Steak House, Reconstructionist Neo-Amish-Buddheo-Krishna-ologisticism, Kharmadharmadevaphasa, Donnyandmarie (the ancient truth singers)...etc etc etc.
And again, in the first paragraph of the story "Rabid in Mallworld":
"Flickersparklepinpoints dervish-dancing through darkness. Whorls, whirls and swirls of fiery stipple dust. Giddy worlds wheeling on unseen slings. Starspills out of cosmic salt-and-pepper shakers..."
You see what I mean.
That's not even getting into all the ideologies, dated pop-culture references, theology, philosophies, history, and iconography that get the same treatment: parodied, smushed together, & twisted into a huge un-funny mess. The whole concept behind the Mallworld stories is that it's so far into the future that everything from our current world is no longer recognizable; it all devolved in a giant millennia-long cross-cultural game of "telephone". If you remember David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries, this is the same idea, rocketed into the far, far future & expanded to encompass the entire solar system.
There's a huge, glaring problem with this concept, though: reading & writing exist. "Mall of the Mysteries" was set in a far-future where nothing of our current society remained, due to a global catastrophe. Mallworld, though, makes a point in several of its tales that while reading & writing are considered outdated concepts in Mallworld, they still exist & are taught. The Selespridar didn't destroy human culture; the humans are locked in with it, lock-stock-barrel. Earth still exists. With so much of today's culture & pop-references written down, computerized, & archived in thousands of books & records & computer servers -- even back in the pre-WorldWideWeb 1980's -- it's impossible to believe that things have been mistranslated & misunderstood so thoroughly. Motel of the Mysteries worked because society was gone & all cultural knowledge vanished with the catastrophe. In Mallworld, nothing was destroyed. It's just the future. Suspension of disbelief gets tossed out the window, especially when current archeology and science techniques are able to tell so much about ancient cultures, in detail, from the smallest things left behind, even without the preponderance of written, photographic, & video/audio recording evidence we have now.
When current scientists are able to scan and read a rolled-up scroll recovered from a Pompeii library that's been charred to near-ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius close to 2000 years ago, I can't believe that Mallworld is so completely clueless about things from our time. When thousands of books & magazines & records are so readily available, when so much documentation is preserved in multiple places, the futuristic Mallworld has little excuse for its ignorance & misunderstandings of Earth history. Hell, when our scientists are able to analyze ancient human feces left behind in Pompeii toilets & determine diets, food-sources, diseases, economic classes, etc, the reasoning behind Mallworld's ignorance evaporates.
I get that it's humor. I understand that it's supposed to be parody. But there still has to be some basis in reality as a foundation. This isn't a disbelief in Mallworld's cultural melting pot & future society -- sure, I'll accept that Hare Krishna & the Amish & the Buddhists combined at some point in the future, that wearing clothes is considered shockingly obscene, that a huge planet-sized shopping mall sits past Jupiter's orbit, and that the aliens treat us like a giant ant farm. My disbelief is in its ignorance & willful mistranslation of history, with no justification for it.
To top it all off? The tales are just not funny. The collection is an okay read: nothing heavy, nothing serious, short tales that can easily be read during a bus ride or bathroom run. It's a good glimpse of the science-fiction scene of the early 1980s. Some things made me smile, as I've gotten old enough to realize what Somtow was referring to. But nothing here is laugh-out-loud funny, not even chuckle-to-self funny. There's parts that are flat-out disturbing -- a child trying to bribe an adult with an offer of sex, a young runaway told to pick up tricks for money-- the sexualization of children is a horrible norm in Mallworld.
Edit: In re-reading, I discovered something that's either new to this re-publication or that I simply missed -- Somtow has added fake advertisements for Mallworld's various businesses in between the stories & the framing tale. Most of them are the same unfunny parodies & mashed-up pop-references of the short stories. Then the last one hit: "SEX SO REALISTIC IT ALMOST FEELS VIRTUAL".
The following is straight from the text:
"Young human beings -- from Earth itself, so that they are close to the primal essence of the human condition -- are captured from their native villages. They undergo a rigid training process from childhood, with porno-bedtime stories, cybersimu-orgies, and massive doses of Leviton, placing them in a heightened, almost computer-like state of sexual readiness by the time they are ready to work..."
Somtow is trying to make a goddamned joke of KIDNAPPING CHILDREN INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY. We are supposed to LAUGH at the idea of children being kidnapped, drugged, & continually raped.
The two "disturbing" examples I listed above, right before this edit? Those aren't presented as funny; it's a horrible reality to runaways & abused children, but they pass as part of the background detail, with no humor expected. But these ads?? Dear fuckin' GOD.
Somtow is originally from Thailand (he's a minor member of its royal family, in fact), which is notorious for its human trafficking and as a destination for pedophilic sex-tourists. You read that right: pedophiles visit Thailand specifically to molest & rape children, who have been forced into slavery in its sex industry.. Somtow is not making that up -- what he describes in that "ad" is what happens to children in Thailand's sex industry: kidnapping, drugging, rape.
SOMTOW. THINKS. CHILD. SEX. SLAVERY. IS. FUNNY.
HE IS PRESENTING CHILDREN GETTING KIDNAPPED AND RAPED AS "HUMOR".
FUCK YOU, SOMTOW. JUST...FUCK. YOU.
rating reduced to one star. If I could give it negative stars, I would.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Displaying 1 of 1 review