First, let me thank J. Scott Morrison, fellow Amazon.com reviewer, for bringing this collection of short stories by Carter Scholz to my attention. The title story, "The Amount to Carry," resonates with me to a degree to which Scott is fully aware. And, since this title story is not only one to which I can personally relate, but also the best story in an anthology of excellent stories overall, I'll save a good portion of my commentary for an in-depth discussion of this story, for the end.

Scholz's stories are both genre-bending and mind-bending. The "credits" page states that a number of them had previously been published in various science fiction magazines and anthologies. Since these are publications that I don't routinely read, Scholz arrives at my reading desk as a brand new (to me) author. And he is a fascinating writer; make no mistake about it.

One is hard-pressed to describe the type of writer that Scholz is, other than, perhaps, post-modernist experimental. No one story in this book could ever serve to pin him down; they cover too much ground for that to happen. Suffice it to say that Scholz has an imagination that runs wild. Further, it should be said that he is a tremendously gifted writer, even in those stories that do not resonate strongly with the reader.

If there is an overarching theme to his writings here - and I have my doubts about this - it is his use of irony, combined with his ability to play games with the nuances of time and the physics of the real world, in the sense of what these attributes mean in reality. (The results are often more surreal than real, needless to say.) But each story is so different from the others, and each is such a unique standalone setpiece, that it is an ill-begotten attempt on my part to categorize the uncategorizable through oversimplification.

Some stories remind one of what was so great about Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" series of tales. "Altomira," for example, places the current-day narrator, one Bernard Vogel, an art historian struggling to make his academic bones, in the time frame and world of Jan van Eyck. Vogel's labors to understand the identities and placement of two background subjects in one of Eyck's most famous paintings has a nice, but unpredictable, twist of an ending. Similarly, "Mengele's Jew" is a rather manic take-off on the famous "Schroedinger's cat" paradox. (This is the famous "gedanken" ["thought"] experiment of Erwin Schroedinger regarding whether a cat, placed inside a box with a radioactive pellet which, when it decays, will kill the cat, is at any given moment "dead or alive" in the absence of observing the cat's state directly. The paradox lies in the meaning of the terms "observation" and "measurement" as they relate to quantum physics.) Suffice it to say that Mengele, in this revisionist approach to history, is treated rather poetically in the final analysis. Those readers having some quantum physics knowledge are sure to have their own wavefunctions collapse in roars of laughter at the twist Scholz gives this "paradox."

The stories not particularly amenable to the "Twilight Zone" setting can be equally mind-stretching. In "Travels," we meet up with the spirit of Marco Polo, as the spirit's thoughts travel outward in the galaxy, carrying on a conversation with a sentient computer lodged on a small planet in orbit about a dead star. The computer's gain is Polo's loss all the while the colloquy carries on. In "The Nine Billion Names of God," Scholz places himself at the crossroads of science fiction history, having a dialog with his editor over whether or not his retelling of the famous Asimov story is "original" work.

Scholz has chosen to save the best until last, as have I: the title story, "The Amount to Carry." This is as fine a flight of fancy as I think I've ever read, and the extent to which it resonated with me is incalculable. I can only consider Scholz as a "kindred spirit" in the matter of Charles Ives for having both the imagination and the knowledge of biographical detail that makes the story "work" for me the way it does.

The story finds Ives, Franz Kafka and Wallace Stevens in Berlin in 1921, for a convention of insurance executives. It is a matter of fact that all three - composer, writer and poet - "put food on the table" by working in the insurance industry. (In point of fact, Ives became very wealthy in his day job as insurance executive, and his pamphlet "The Amount to Carry" was the origin of what we call "estate planning," using whole life insurance as the means for building annuities.)

But this insurance convention is merely a plot device for Scholz to take an ultimate flight of fancy into the realm of sheer conjecture regarding Ives's fortunes as a composer during his active composing life. Kafka is there for the purpose of bringing to Ives's attention the Munich performance, ten years earlier, of Ives's Third Symphony, conducted by Gustav Mahler. (Stevens's role in the story is less essential, but nonetheless wry in its own way.)

Only someone deeply interested in the full story of this particular "twist of fate" would have the audacity to fold it into a story. And only one with an intimate knowledge of all the facts - about both Ives and the Mahler connection, and about Ives's personal life - could fold into the story such a wealth (and warmth) of detail that Scholz has. (There are only one or two very minor solecisms. Given Scholz's research, even this small number comes as a mild surprise.) The story succeeds on every level, and leaves me with the thought that Scholz and I somehow inhabit parallel universes. Or perhaps the same universe, save for the fact that we have yet to meet.

Carter Scholz, call home. I'll be glad to take your call.

The story appears interesting but is plagued by overemblellishment of the language and infatuation with the dictionary.
Having come from the background the author uses for his story (High Energy Physics, research labs, grants and academia) and sharing some of his thoughts and fears, I found the notion compelling. Alas, the lassitude caused by the lack of measure in how far a sentence can be carried before stupor ensues, tired me out at page 75. Long sentences - a page-and-a-half long sentences! - without proper punctuation, meant to match the carelessness of badly constructed speech turn irritating after a while. Long, multi-person dialogs without proper indication of who says what are confusing. And speech snippets overheard during the beeline departure of the protagonist from a party (two-page-long fragments of non-sensical sentences!) are infuriating: you read them hoping for a ray of purpose to only find the meaninglessness of the whole thing.
Bottom line, opt for the Cliff notes of this book as the story may be good but the story telling is awkward and irritating.

Radiance, if you didn't know better, could sound a lot like a Tom Clancy novel (man works at nuclear lab, man finds invalid data, man blows whistle, etc.) but nothing could be further from the truth. This book is all about the prose.

Reading previous reviews of this novel, you may be lead astray. The story here is quite well developed, and Scholz's obvious knowledge of the Nuclear/Defense community seems quite valid. But the story is told more as a pseudo-perspective of a data-stream mind. Characters come and go, relationships come and go--some quite rapidly. But even though this is a tale of manipulation and dominance, it is its lyrical content that makes it worth reading.

However - while the story keeps its grip through the unique story-telling, it seems labored and, at times, taken too far. I had to read some pages a few times because the stream-of-consciouness riffs actually made me drone out.

It's worth reading, and worth noting Scholz as a writer who not only shows great promise, but may define a new style in the upcoming years.

The novel takes place in a Department of Energy laboratory somewhere in California. The laboratory had been working in nuclear weapons research but with the end of the cold war it must find new missions to justify itself and keep the funding coming. The physicists who work there find themselves getting away from science and into politics and becoming more and more disillusioned. Every day they have to fight their way through protestors to get to work. And the protestors also find themselves disillusioned, getting nowhere. That is the plot in a nutshell. But the author executes it with intensity, energy, and a painful probing of the human spirit.
Scholtz has a remarkable style--a kind of acoustic reality, I would call it--in which conversations are reported exactly as they sound, without quotation marks, words broken off, sentences broken off, hard to tell who is talking. The effect is like wandering into a large crowd of people and being inundated with fragments of speech. It is like actually being in the story as opposed to being told the story.
I must say this was not an easy book to read, and I would not like to read a book of this intensity very often. Nor is there a happy ending to lighten things up. The characters are complex but dark, idealists who have lost hope in their ideals, searching frantically for something (or someone)to believe in, but never finding. A dark, painful, difficult book, but well worth reading!