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the complete review - fiction

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

by
Tsutsui Yasutaka

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : wild and often fun ideas and twists, but not enough beyond that

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Readers can expect an equally strange, magical journey." - Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "Salmonella Men on Planet Porno bursts with wildly surreal situations." - Ed Park, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "These stories are also, as the title telegraphs, very weird. Tsutsui frequently writes in (or borrows from) sci-fi, fantastic or metafictional modes (.....) But the distance of three decades creates a different strangeness, an air of 1970s-era sexism that's almost more bizarre than the situations and plots." - Thomas Israel Hopkins, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "Tsutsui is a shrewd satirist whose targets, at times, are toppled with a bit too much force (.....) More potent are those stories where the author eschews genre pyrotechnics and reveals the strangeness and horror of the ordinary" - Pedro Ponce, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "In addition to the occasional awkwardness in this British translation, and the unevenness of the stories (some seem little more than sketches, or riffs on time machines or over-the-top anti-smoking regulations), this collection was written in the 1970s, so Tsutsui's satire and sexual politics are often too predictable. We have developed a certain comfort with the conventions of the uncanny, with the intrusion of the fantastical into the quotidian, which makes Tsutsui's sensibility, albeit often marvelously wacky and psychologically insightful, not unfamiliar." - Abby Pollak, San Francisco Chronicle

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Tsutsui Yasutaka's stories are, if nothing else, very creative flights of fantasy. Though many are grounded in fairly realistic descriptions and situations, almost all make at least one big leap into the fantastical -- and some considerably more. The stories are also marked by Tsutsui's willingness to add yet another sharp turn, anywhere -- and, often, then another, final twists that take the often surreal stories in yet another direction.
       Tsutsui keeps the reader guessing. Even when you can see what might be coming, Tsutsui tends to take it to a different level -- as in 'Bad for my Heart', where a man gets posted to an island by his company, his greatest concern being that he has a supply of medicine for his heart ailment (one which nobody else is very convinced of), his desperation ruining pretty much everything else in his life.
       Sometimes the most effective story-telling comes in the holding back from that final leap: 'Bear's Wood Main Line' is an enjoyable detour, a man finding himself off the beaten track (and on a railway line that's being illegally run by the locals, after the railway company shut it down). The narrator describes his odd but believable experiences among the locals, who eventually get a bit carried away. When he joins in the local song-and-dance things go ominously -- but not too obviously -- wrong, the story closing with only the feeling of catastrophe, rather than it actually happening.
       Elsewhere Tsutsui is willing to show the darkest of visions, as in the family-tale 'The Very Edge of Happiness', the narrator and his family going -- like everyone else, it seems -- on a beach-outing which turns into an eerie lemming-like march out into the sea.
       'The Last Smoker' envisions a world where smoking bans have gotten out of hand (a step further than even Benoît Duteurtre imagined in The Little Girl and the Cigarette), while 'Commuter Army' is a comic twist on modern warfare. There's fairly conventional science fiction -- 'Don't Laugh' is little more than a time-machine scene -- and even close to straightforward fiction, as in the effective 'Hello, Hello, Hello !' about a very driven "Household Economy Consultant" (Tsutsui's most compelling character-invention) badgering a whole neighbourhood to watch their money more closely, who turns out not to be quite what he seems.
       Among the most enjoyable stories is 'Rumours about Me', about an average Joe who suddenly finds himself at the centre of a great deal of media attention, the newspapers reporting on his every move ("MORISHITA BUYS ANOTHER PAIR OF SOCKS (BLUE-GREY, 350 YEN)" screams one headline ...). And 'The Dabba Dabba Tree' is an entertaining overlayering of dreams and reality (with a good dose of sex to liven things up)
       One character in the title story tries to explain Planet Porno:

But things aren't always normal on this planet, or to be more exact, things tend to veer from the normal towards the obscene, if anything.

     Mozart was born at the age of three. The reason for this is not known. He was born in his father's house in Salzburg -- probably because he didn't have a mother.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Alma Books publicity page

• armchairinterviews
• Bookfox
• Entertainment Weekly
• Geek Pie
• hackwriters.com
• The Harvard Crimson
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Los Angeles Times (1) (scroll down for review)
• The Los Angeles Times (2)
• The Last Page
• PopMatters
• Publishers Weekly
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Tongues of Speculation
• Two Dudes in an Attic
• The Unstoppable Force

• Official site

• Bullseye !
• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
• Hell
• The Maid
• Paprika

• See Index of Japanese literature
• See Index of Science Fiction and Fantasy books

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About the Author:

       Popular Japanese author Tsutsui Yasutaka (筒井 康隆) was born in 1934.

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