Divide and Rule by L. Sprague de Camp
94 pages
Published 1939
Read from December 29 to December 30
Rating: ★★ out of 5
After Gold Fame Citrus, I needed something light and fun. This close to the end of the year, too, I didn't want to start something I might not finish before the ball drops -- I'm weirdly particular about making sure each year's reads stays entirely within that year. Besides, it was my last opportunity to beef up the tally for 2015.
Divide and Rule came bundled with my copy of The Sword of Rhiannon (has it really been since July that I read that one?), part of a presumably brief attempt on the part of Tor to revive the "science fiction double" circa 1990. Divide was originally published, much like de Camp's own oft-reprinted "The Gnarly Man" (read and reviewed here), in the short-lived but seemingly ahead of its time magazine Unknown. The period between the scientific romances of Wells (which shifted more and more in the direction of didactic utopias by the early 1910s) and the classic post-war pulp of the Silver Age is a blank spot in my SF history, one I'm eager to fill in. Divide, alas, rather neatly fit my desire for frivolous adventure, and offered nothing of the precocious urban fantasy of "The Gnarly Man." What could be more fun than armored knights and boastful cowboys crossing paths in the Hudson Valley, joining the Adirondack resistance to overthrow Earth's alien overlords? What could be cornier than the means with which humanity finally liberates its planet from the dastardly space-kangaroos? (Spoiler: It's fleas.) There's even a love triangle around the sole female character. The first half of the novella is the best -- it's pretty much de Camp playing around with knights and cowboys in New York -- while the remainder kind of just peters out from the lack of substance. A cute trifle, really, which may have been exactly what I wanted at this moment, but adds nothing to my picture of sci-fi's purported Golden Age.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
2015 read #74: Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins.
Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 25 to December 29
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The first third or so of this book is the sort of near-future climate change misery-porn that has, over the last couple years, shifted my interest away from current science fiction and toward the escapist luxuries of fantasy. Harrowing, depressing, a bleak reminder of tough times almost certainly ahead for everyone of my generation, worse still for those after -- it's stuff that needs to be written, no doubt, but I get enough of it in news and science articles. I don't need it in my entertainment.
But then for a little while, the novel swerves into post-apocalyptic nature writing, beautiful and prickly, the near-future successor, perhaps, of The Field Guide to Getting Lost or The Last Cheater's Waltz. From there Gold Fame Citrus takes another detour into cults, polygamy, paranoia, conspiracy theories, Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste, mole-men. There's even a brief "primer" booklet on the supposed "neo-fauna" of the ever-growing dune sea, like something straight out of Dougal Dixon. The novel is wildly uneven, but forms a sort of microcosm of the modern West, painful and urgent and sprawling in several directions at once.
342 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 25 to December 29
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
The first third or so of this book is the sort of near-future climate change misery-porn that has, over the last couple years, shifted my interest away from current science fiction and toward the escapist luxuries of fantasy. Harrowing, depressing, a bleak reminder of tough times almost certainly ahead for everyone of my generation, worse still for those after -- it's stuff that needs to be written, no doubt, but I get enough of it in news and science articles. I don't need it in my entertainment.
But then for a little while, the novel swerves into post-apocalyptic nature writing, beautiful and prickly, the near-future successor, perhaps, of The Field Guide to Getting Lost or The Last Cheater's Waltz. From there Gold Fame Citrus takes another detour into cults, polygamy, paranoia, conspiracy theories, Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste, mole-men. There's even a brief "primer" booklet on the supposed "neo-fauna" of the ever-growing dune sea, like something straight out of Dougal Dixon. The novel is wildly uneven, but forms a sort of microcosm of the modern West, painful and urgent and sprawling in several directions at once.
Friday, December 25, 2015
2015 read #73: Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin
280 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 22 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This now might be second only to The Left Hand of Darkness as my favorite Le Guin novel -- which makes it all the more melancholy that it may well be her final novel. I've always had a difficult time articulating how and why Le Guin's work excels the way it does; my reviews of her books always seem to be shorter than the books merit. I go on and on about the tender humanity of Peter S. Beagle's stories, when the same words would be equally apt with Le Guin. And Le Guin's social conscience, anthropological bent, and consideration of the larger human dimension surrounding her characters and stories expand the humanity of her work beyond anything I've seen of Beagle's thus far. Yet that scope, that inclusivity, that acceptance, that note of personal hope in universal tragedy -- it's hard to figure out anything to add to Le Guin's words, and I think, subconsciously, I leave her books to speak for themselves.
I had avoided Lavinia until now because, well, the publisher's blurb on the book jacket doesn't do it anything like justice. I picked it up several times, wavering, and put it back each time with the impression that it was a bit of YA trifle, something to be saved for after I'd gotten Le Guin's more essential titles behind me. (For instance, I have yet to read Orsinian Tales, Always Coming Home, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, or even Tales of Earthsea.) I only checked it out this time in order to have a short novel on hand to help with my final effort to pad out my book numbers for the year. Almost from the first page, however, the gentle, inexorable tragedy of Lavinia -- a self-aware literary creation, visited by her poet in his dying dreams, never given a voice but possessed of one regardless -- swept me in, rich and aching with the consolation of heartbreak and the fragility of joy. I didn't bawl as openly as I did at the climax of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but it was a close race. The ending of Lavinia was just about as perfect an ending as I've ever read -- loss and release, life and its poetic imitation mingled in such a way that I couldn't stop crying, without being able to say precisely why.
280 pages
Published 2008
Read from December 22 to December 25
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
This now might be second only to The Left Hand of Darkness as my favorite Le Guin novel -- which makes it all the more melancholy that it may well be her final novel. I've always had a difficult time articulating how and why Le Guin's work excels the way it does; my reviews of her books always seem to be shorter than the books merit. I go on and on about the tender humanity of Peter S. Beagle's stories, when the same words would be equally apt with Le Guin. And Le Guin's social conscience, anthropological bent, and consideration of the larger human dimension surrounding her characters and stories expand the humanity of her work beyond anything I've seen of Beagle's thus far. Yet that scope, that inclusivity, that acceptance, that note of personal hope in universal tragedy -- it's hard to figure out anything to add to Le Guin's words, and I think, subconsciously, I leave her books to speak for themselves.
I had avoided Lavinia until now because, well, the publisher's blurb on the book jacket doesn't do it anything like justice. I picked it up several times, wavering, and put it back each time with the impression that it was a bit of YA trifle, something to be saved for after I'd gotten Le Guin's more essential titles behind me. (For instance, I have yet to read Orsinian Tales, Always Coming Home, The Wind's Twelve Quarters, or even Tales of Earthsea.) I only checked it out this time in order to have a short novel on hand to help with my final effort to pad out my book numbers for the year. Almost from the first page, however, the gentle, inexorable tragedy of Lavinia -- a self-aware literary creation, visited by her poet in his dying dreams, never given a voice but possessed of one regardless -- swept me in, rich and aching with the consolation of heartbreak and the fragility of joy. I didn't bawl as openly as I did at the climax of Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, but it was a close race. The ending of Lavinia was just about as perfect an ending as I've ever read -- loss and release, life and its poetic imitation mingled in such a way that I couldn't stop crying, without being able to say precisely why.
Tuesday, December 22, 2015
2015 read #72: The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff.
The Witches: Salem, 1692 by Stacy Schiff
427 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 11 to December 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Throughout my read of The Witches, I could not extricate my sense of Schiff's exhaustive research and narrative dexterity from an increasingly fixed idea that the story of Salem's witch trials -- as told here with all its murky details of interpersonal discord, a culture of repression and its psychological toll, the politics of multiple nationalities and religions across two continents, and putative sorcery -- could be the basis of an excellent modern fantasy trilogy. No doubt dozens of fantasy novels of varying quality have been foisted upon the world with the 1692 panic as their inspiration, but the mix of politics with the personal in particular lodged itself in my brain as the sort of thing that would do well in a Game of Thrones vein.
This idée fixe interfered with any even-handed assessment of the merits of The Witches as a standalone work of history and scholarship. (Seriously, over the last week or so I've been coming up with any number of potential story kernels, all of them sprouting from the witch-loam of seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay.) Schiff's prose is brisk and dryly humorous, in what seems to be the current pop-history mode, and the multitude of participants (accusers, accused, judges, and assorted commentators) and lack of a thorough primary record (seemingly elided in the post-panic morning-after embarrassment) are to blame for whatever difficulty I had in keeping track of who was whom (or, rather, my year-long case of reduced attention span is to blame, and the foregoing factors merely exacerbated it). I appreciated Schiff's refusal to ascribe the panic to a single "cause" -- pop history, especially, could always stand to feature more ambiguity and complexity -- though her eventual case for adolescent "hysteria" brought on by an oppressive, repressive community and culture, while plausible, feels a bit vague, and certainly not as flashy as, say, others' hypotheses of ergot poisoning. Flash isn't necessarily a positive attribute of scholarship, however, so Schiff's advance of conversion disorder (while excessively Freudian in her description) is perhaps as plausible an explanation for the outbreak as we're ever going to get.
427 pages
Published 2015
Read from December 11 to December 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Throughout my read of The Witches, I could not extricate my sense of Schiff's exhaustive research and narrative dexterity from an increasingly fixed idea that the story of Salem's witch trials -- as told here with all its murky details of interpersonal discord, a culture of repression and its psychological toll, the politics of multiple nationalities and religions across two continents, and putative sorcery -- could be the basis of an excellent modern fantasy trilogy. No doubt dozens of fantasy novels of varying quality have been foisted upon the world with the 1692 panic as their inspiration, but the mix of politics with the personal in particular lodged itself in my brain as the sort of thing that would do well in a Game of Thrones vein.
This idée fixe interfered with any even-handed assessment of the merits of The Witches as a standalone work of history and scholarship. (Seriously, over the last week or so I've been coming up with any number of potential story kernels, all of them sprouting from the witch-loam of seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay.) Schiff's prose is brisk and dryly humorous, in what seems to be the current pop-history mode, and the multitude of participants (accusers, accused, judges, and assorted commentators) and lack of a thorough primary record (seemingly elided in the post-panic morning-after embarrassment) are to blame for whatever difficulty I had in keeping track of who was whom (or, rather, my year-long case of reduced attention span is to blame, and the foregoing factors merely exacerbated it). I appreciated Schiff's refusal to ascribe the panic to a single "cause" -- pop history, especially, could always stand to feature more ambiguity and complexity -- though her eventual case for adolescent "hysteria" brought on by an oppressive, repressive community and culture, while plausible, feels a bit vague, and certainly not as flashy as, say, others' hypotheses of ergot poisoning. Flash isn't necessarily a positive attribute of scholarship, however, so Schiff's advance of conversion disorder (while excessively Freudian in her description) is perhaps as plausible an explanation for the outbreak as we're ever going to get.
Friday, December 11, 2015
2015 read #71: The War in the Air by H. G. Wells.
The War in the Air by H. G. Wells
231 pages
Published 1908
Read from December 10 to December 11
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Many of Wells' early novels are remarkable in my memory for their dynamic openings. Take The Time Machine, his first novel: "The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us." The first three words are sufficient to form an irresistible hook. The Invisible Man is not so direct, but the mystery of the heavily-garbed "stranger" is developed -- and the hook is placed -- within the space of a page. The War of the Worlds, of course, is famous for the power of its opening lines: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
The War in the Air, serialized some ten years after Worlds, comes at a point in his career during which Wells' interest in the didactic, allegorical possibilities of "scientific romances" had begun to crowd out his skill at telling a good story. It opens with a protracted caricature of middle class life in the suburbs of London, entire chapters (only two, but plural chapters all the same) of petty buffoonery and rendered dialect before much of anything happens to our central character, who is named (with some obviousness) Smallways. Wells goes to such pains to develop the petty-minded, provincial, incompletely "civilised" man of the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century because it supplies one of his central themes, spelled out in the depiction of Smallways as a representative of a society (or "civilisation," in Wells' Edwardian terminology) lagging behind morally and socially while its technology, and military technology in particular, raced ahead beyond all rational conception:
Anyone watching the xenophobic mass delusions of our modern, Trump-cheering Smallways will realize how little progress our "civilisation" has made toward adapting to a complex, crowded world.
While rendering excellent service to Wells' overarching point, the characterization and depiction of Bert Smallways sets up tonal dissonance throughout the novel. Bumbling head-first into an absurd plot contrivance, and from thence carried passively through the horrors of airborne warfare and the complete collapse and dissolution of "scientific civilisation," the comic career of Smallways is at odds with the gravity and enormity of events around him. The narrator here is not a survivor mixed up in the action, but rather a detached future historian, forever shaking his head at the foibles and small thinking of the twentieth century. Gone is the tension and immediacy of The War of the Worlds, although certain plot beats -- Smallways is marooned at Niagara Falls while society begins its collapse all around the world, much like the unnamed narrator is trapped with the curate while the Martians solidify their grip on southern England -- are recycled nearly wholesale. Wells' prognostications are to the point, even today, but the story suffers from this detachment.
I will mention that (spoilers!) the sudden turn into a postapocalyptic narrative, barely two decades on from After London and already fully formed and recognizable to modern expectations, was surprising but welcome.
231 pages
Published 1908
Read from December 10 to December 11
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Many of Wells' early novels are remarkable in my memory for their dynamic openings. Take The Time Machine, his first novel: "The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us." The first three words are sufficient to form an irresistible hook. The Invisible Man is not so direct, but the mystery of the heavily-garbed "stranger" is developed -- and the hook is placed -- within the space of a page. The War of the Worlds, of course, is famous for the power of its opening lines: "No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."
The War in the Air, serialized some ten years after Worlds, comes at a point in his career during which Wells' interest in the didactic, allegorical possibilities of "scientific romances" had begun to crowd out his skill at telling a good story. It opens with a protracted caricature of middle class life in the suburbs of London, entire chapters (only two, but plural chapters all the same) of petty buffoonery and rendered dialect before much of anything happens to our central character, who is named (with some obviousness) Smallways. Wells goes to such pains to develop the petty-minded, provincial, incompletely "civilised" man of the British Empire at the dawn of the twentieth century because it supplies one of his central themes, spelled out in the depiction of Smallways as a representative of a society (or "civilisation," in Wells' Edwardian terminology) lagging behind morally and socially while its technology, and military technology in particular, raced ahead beyond all rational conception:
Great Britain spent upon army and navy money and capacity that, directed into the channels of physical culture and education would have made the British the aristocracy of the world. Her rulers could have kept the whole population learning and exercising up to the age of eighteen and made a broad-chested and intelligent man of every Bert Smallways in the islands, had they given the resources they spent in war material to the making of men. Instead of which they waggled flags at him until he was fourteen, incited him to cheer, and then turned him out of school to begin that [comically inept and disastrous] career of private enterprise we have compactly recorded. France achieved similar imbecilities; Germany was, if possible worse; Russia under the waste and stresses of militarism festered towards bankruptcy and decay. All Europe was producing big guns and countless swarms of little Smallways.In short, Wells is spelling out the social and technological circumstances that would shortly lead to what proved to be the First World War. Wells' increasing bitterness in the respective prefaces to the 1921 and 1941 editions of The War in the Air climaxes with the curt despair of "Is there anything to add to that preface now? Nothing except my epitaph. That, when the time comes, will manifestly have to be: 'I told you so, you damned fools.' (The italics are mine.)"
Anyone watching the xenophobic mass delusions of our modern, Trump-cheering Smallways will realize how little progress our "civilisation" has made toward adapting to a complex, crowded world.
While rendering excellent service to Wells' overarching point, the characterization and depiction of Bert Smallways sets up tonal dissonance throughout the novel. Bumbling head-first into an absurd plot contrivance, and from thence carried passively through the horrors of airborne warfare and the complete collapse and dissolution of "scientific civilisation," the comic career of Smallways is at odds with the gravity and enormity of events around him. The narrator here is not a survivor mixed up in the action, but rather a detached future historian, forever shaking his head at the foibles and small thinking of the twentieth century. Gone is the tension and immediacy of The War of the Worlds, although certain plot beats -- Smallways is marooned at Niagara Falls while society begins its collapse all around the world, much like the unnamed narrator is trapped with the curate while the Martians solidify their grip on southern England -- are recycled nearly wholesale. Wells' prognostications are to the point, even today, but the story suffers from this detachment.
I will mention that (spoilers!) the sudden turn into a postapocalyptic narrative, barely two decades on from After London and already fully formed and recognizable to modern expectations, was surprising but welcome.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
2015 read #70: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from December 8 to December 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
In the review for my previous Lisa See novel, China Dolls, I groused about how artificial and Mad Libs-ish I found literary fiction's reliance upon "secret traumas leading to horrible betrayals" between friends as an engine of plot and conflict. Left unstated in that review was my doubt that feelings could become so fierce and passionate in a "mere" friendship. High emotions and bitter conflicts I could well understand within the context of family -- I could write a whole series of novels rooted in the bad feeling and betrayals I knew growing up within an abusive situation. Equally well could I sympathize with the heartbreaks and confusion of romantic love and sexuality, of which I've also experienced plenty. Intense, passionate friendship is a blank space on my emotional map, however. I didn't have the opportunity to make childhood friends, and during the hormonal tumult of adolescence, I was living in a car, as far removed from the social passions of high school as can be imagined.
In the months since that review, however, I've had time to think and to reject my prior attitude. Just because I don't have any particular experience with intense friendship doesn't mean that it's an invention or affectation of literary authors. Openness toward and acceptance of the experiences of others is a paramount virtue, and I have to admit that my instinctive attitude was arrogant and lacking in empathy.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan turns upon another such misunderstanding between passionately attached friends, one more elegantly and believably rooted within the lives and personalities of its two tragic leads than was the case, I felt, in China Dolls (which was an effective and affecting book in its own right). Snow Flower made me bawl more freely than any book I can summon from recent memory, in fact. And that doesn't even get into the authoritative skill See brings to sympathetically depicting a culture and an outlook that would be, to most of her readers, unfamiliar at best, repugnant and vicious at worst. Scenes graphically detailing the process of footbinding were intense enough that I had to put the book down every couple of paragraphs to cringe and shudder, yet See depicts customs and assumptions and daily life with humanity, tenderness, and feeling.
259 pages
Published 2005
Read from December 8 to December 10
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
In the review for my previous Lisa See novel, China Dolls, I groused about how artificial and Mad Libs-ish I found literary fiction's reliance upon "secret traumas leading to horrible betrayals" between friends as an engine of plot and conflict. Left unstated in that review was my doubt that feelings could become so fierce and passionate in a "mere" friendship. High emotions and bitter conflicts I could well understand within the context of family -- I could write a whole series of novels rooted in the bad feeling and betrayals I knew growing up within an abusive situation. Equally well could I sympathize with the heartbreaks and confusion of romantic love and sexuality, of which I've also experienced plenty. Intense, passionate friendship is a blank space on my emotional map, however. I didn't have the opportunity to make childhood friends, and during the hormonal tumult of adolescence, I was living in a car, as far removed from the social passions of high school as can be imagined.
In the months since that review, however, I've had time to think and to reject my prior attitude. Just because I don't have any particular experience with intense friendship doesn't mean that it's an invention or affectation of literary authors. Openness toward and acceptance of the experiences of others is a paramount virtue, and I have to admit that my instinctive attitude was arrogant and lacking in empathy.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan turns upon another such misunderstanding between passionately attached friends, one more elegantly and believably rooted within the lives and personalities of its two tragic leads than was the case, I felt, in China Dolls (which was an effective and affecting book in its own right). Snow Flower made me bawl more freely than any book I can summon from recent memory, in fact. And that doesn't even get into the authoritative skill See brings to sympathetically depicting a culture and an outlook that would be, to most of her readers, unfamiliar at best, repugnant and vicious at worst. Scenes graphically detailing the process of footbinding were intense enough that I had to put the book down every couple of paragraphs to cringe and shudder, yet See depicts customs and assumptions and daily life with humanity, tenderness, and feeling.
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
2015 read #69: The Light of Lilith by G. McDonald Wallis.
The Light of Lilith by G. McDonald Wallis
123 pages
Published 1961
Read from December 4 to December 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Where do I even start with this one? It was all over the goddamn place, a B-movie in book form crammed with half a dozen plot directions, each discarded as soon as it was tried on, a muddled Biblical allegory of evolution, flailing toward profundity with absurd technobabble, mingling MST3K-worthy ridiculousness with moments of sheer awesome. Lilith was a hot mess, but I take back what I said in my review of The Sun Saboteurs: G. McDonald Wallis never produced any unfairly forgotten classics (in fact, I seem to have read every book she ever published, aside from a handful of young adult adventure stories), but here, at least, she showed a glimmer of potential. I could easily imagine the general gist of this book working like gangbusters in the hands of Zelazy (in full Roadmarks mode) or even Le Guin (as one of the lesser Hainish novels).
Spoilers, if you care...
So, we start out with a "reporter" (a sort of galactic inspector-bureaucrat) named Russ Mason landing on Lilith, an "experimental planet," the star and atmosphere of which together produce unusual optical phenomena. A few giant leaps of technobabble take us from "the real center of light itself" (whatever the hell that means) to experiments in mutating life, a big no-no in this particular Federation -- hence why humans (that nefarious breed) keep the experiments secret, and the official reporters largely ignorant of the science involved. Our hero Russ Mason lands in the aftermath of an accident at the lab, which mangled one scientist and picturesquely atomized another: even more reams of technobabble bring us the memorable image of this scientist's component parts -- his metal watch, his still-beating heart -- attracting concentric circles of sympathetic color, which gives us one of the very best (read: pulpiest) pulp covers ever. These color circles give Mason visions of the future. In the first, he enters the mind of a Black man "ten thousand million years" into the future of Earth, a time sufficiently distant, perhaps, that a white writer in 1961 could dare to imagine that a Black man could be a sympathetic and intelligent scientist hoping against hope to save the now-mature and wise human race, isolated in its dying solar system for its long-ago crimes against the Federation.
(My "Yay, a central character of color!" was quickly shut down with the passage, "His race endured the shimmering waves of heat better than most. The last people to come out of the earth and win their place among men, the last to find their place in the sun, and now the last to die under that sun." I mean, I think that qualifies as a sympathetic view by the standards of the time, but not even ten billion years in the future could a Black character escape 1961 racial "theory.")
That's enough, surely, for a book of this length: planetary romance, fantastic new spectra of light, secret weapons base, beating hearts in concentric rings of magenta, Dying Earth shenanigans, and oh, there's a Himalayan mystic showing the future scientist a vision in the vision of Russ Mason. But that's all by page 34.
Lilith, honestly, peaks with Mason's visions of the future and his escape into the jungles of the experimental planet, certain the next ten billion years of galactic history depend on him. After he gets picked up by his ship (which of course he does), the momentum dies and whatever potent shit Wallis has been smoking up to this point is evidently exhausted. The dude gets a ride to Supreme Court Planet, literally strolls into the correct building by chance, and immediately gets aided by a friendly alien who happens to know everything Mason needs to know. There's another B movie plot twist with the continued radiation experiments resulting in reptilian pig monsters nearly wiping out the lemuroid critters whose distant descendants will rescue the worthy future humankind from their dying sun, but then the planet's star has a random solar storm which causes a recapitulation of Noah's Flood, and basically not a damn thing our time-tripping hero does has any real effect on anything, because the damn solar storm would have happened anyway. Oops.
Shaky plotting, endemic prejudices of the time, weak characterization, some of the crummiest technobabble I've ever seen or heard, massive anticlimax, the fact that none of it even mattered in the context of the story's universe -- I'm not sure why I like this book as much as I do. That first half was just what-the-fuck enough to be tremendously entertaining, and generated enough good will, I guess, to bear me through to the end. Now I'm a little sad, though, that it wasn't written by Zelazny.
123 pages
Published 1961
Read from December 4 to December 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Where do I even start with this one? It was all over the goddamn place, a B-movie in book form crammed with half a dozen plot directions, each discarded as soon as it was tried on, a muddled Biblical allegory of evolution, flailing toward profundity with absurd technobabble, mingling MST3K-worthy ridiculousness with moments of sheer awesome. Lilith was a hot mess, but I take back what I said in my review of The Sun Saboteurs: G. McDonald Wallis never produced any unfairly forgotten classics (in fact, I seem to have read every book she ever published, aside from a handful of young adult adventure stories), but here, at least, she showed a glimmer of potential. I could easily imagine the general gist of this book working like gangbusters in the hands of Zelazy (in full Roadmarks mode) or even Le Guin (as one of the lesser Hainish novels).
Spoilers, if you care...
So, we start out with a "reporter" (a sort of galactic inspector-bureaucrat) named Russ Mason landing on Lilith, an "experimental planet," the star and atmosphere of which together produce unusual optical phenomena. A few giant leaps of technobabble take us from "the real center of light itself" (whatever the hell that means) to experiments in mutating life, a big no-no in this particular Federation -- hence why humans (that nefarious breed) keep the experiments secret, and the official reporters largely ignorant of the science involved. Our hero Russ Mason lands in the aftermath of an accident at the lab, which mangled one scientist and picturesquely atomized another: even more reams of technobabble bring us the memorable image of this scientist's component parts -- his metal watch, his still-beating heart -- attracting concentric circles of sympathetic color, which gives us one of the very best (read: pulpiest) pulp covers ever. These color circles give Mason visions of the future. In the first, he enters the mind of a Black man "ten thousand million years" into the future of Earth, a time sufficiently distant, perhaps, that a white writer in 1961 could dare to imagine that a Black man could be a sympathetic and intelligent scientist hoping against hope to save the now-mature and wise human race, isolated in its dying solar system for its long-ago crimes against the Federation.
(My "Yay, a central character of color!" was quickly shut down with the passage, "His race endured the shimmering waves of heat better than most. The last people to come out of the earth and win their place among men, the last to find their place in the sun, and now the last to die under that sun." I mean, I think that qualifies as a sympathetic view by the standards of the time, but not even ten billion years in the future could a Black character escape 1961 racial "theory.")
That's enough, surely, for a book of this length: planetary romance, fantastic new spectra of light, secret weapons base, beating hearts in concentric rings of magenta, Dying Earth shenanigans, and oh, there's a Himalayan mystic showing the future scientist a vision in the vision of Russ Mason. But that's all by page 34.
Lilith, honestly, peaks with Mason's visions of the future and his escape into the jungles of the experimental planet, certain the next ten billion years of galactic history depend on him. After he gets picked up by his ship (which of course he does), the momentum dies and whatever potent shit Wallis has been smoking up to this point is evidently exhausted. The dude gets a ride to Supreme Court Planet, literally strolls into the correct building by chance, and immediately gets aided by a friendly alien who happens to know everything Mason needs to know. There's another B movie plot twist with the continued radiation experiments resulting in reptilian pig monsters nearly wiping out the lemuroid critters whose distant descendants will rescue the worthy future humankind from their dying sun, but then the planet's star has a random solar storm which causes a recapitulation of Noah's Flood, and basically not a damn thing our time-tripping hero does has any real effect on anything, because the damn solar storm would have happened anyway. Oops.
Shaky plotting, endemic prejudices of the time, weak characterization, some of the crummiest technobabble I've ever seen or heard, massive anticlimax, the fact that none of it even mattered in the context of the story's universe -- I'm not sure why I like this book as much as I do. That first half was just what-the-fuck enough to be tremendously entertaining, and generated enough good will, I guess, to bear me through to the end. Now I'm a little sad, though, that it wasn't written by Zelazny.
Friday, December 4, 2015
2015 read #68: The Sun Saboteurs by Damon Knight.
The Sun Saboteurs by Damon Knight
101 pages
Published 1961
Read December 4
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are in December, and I haven't even read seventy books yet. By this date last year, I'd read 115 books; by this time in 2013, I was working on my 148th. After this September, when I'd finally managed to read a respectable twelve titles in the space of a month, I'd dared to hope that I could consume a hundred books by the end of the year, but alas -- September was an anomaly, and my attention span remains as tenuous and unreliable as it has been throughout this year.
Well, time to artificially pad out my numbers while I still can!
The Sun Saboteurs is half of an old Ace Double, which I had bought early this summer to get my hands on G. McDonald Wallis' The Light of Lilith. At that point I had yet to read Wallis' Legend of Lost Earth, and harbored some groundless notion that she might be some forgotten and unfairly overlooked past master of sci-fi. Reading Legend dispelled that idea quickly enough, but by that point this volume was already in my hands. The Light of Lilith has a totally sweet pulp cover, though, so it wasn't entirely a waste.
I've encountered Damon Knight's short fiction in a handful of retrospective anthologies, including "The Country of the Kind" (reviewed here) and "I See You" (reviewed here), which gave me a general impression of him as a Silver Age author, big into ideas and allegories, thought-provoking but unlikely to ever number among my favorites. The Sun Saboteurs seems to conform to this predicted pattern, attempting to wrestle with concepts of human nature and the violence seemingly implicit within it, touching on aging and mortality and written with a galaxy-wide streak of nihilism. The framework of the story was interesting, with the human survivors of a global collapse either eking out peasant livelihoods on a decrepit Earth or musing upon the slow extinction of humanity from ghettos on a hundred alien planets. Perhaps what this novel needed was some space to breathe; the tight-packed pace and get-the-job-done prose of the Ace Double era (if I may make so sweeping an assertion after reading a mere three samples of the product) resists the cultivation of anything like character or nuance. I could imagine a larger, more indulgent, more psychologically and emotionally adept novel making much better use of these materials to tell a much more affecting and provocative tale, in the right hands. As it is, Saboteurs was a hundred-page slip of a book that I sped through in one evening, and it read like one.
101 pages
Published 1961
Read December 4
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are in December, and I haven't even read seventy books yet. By this date last year, I'd read 115 books; by this time in 2013, I was working on my 148th. After this September, when I'd finally managed to read a respectable twelve titles in the space of a month, I'd dared to hope that I could consume a hundred books by the end of the year, but alas -- September was an anomaly, and my attention span remains as tenuous and unreliable as it has been throughout this year.
Well, time to artificially pad out my numbers while I still can!
The Sun Saboteurs is half of an old Ace Double, which I had bought early this summer to get my hands on G. McDonald Wallis' The Light of Lilith. At that point I had yet to read Wallis' Legend of Lost Earth, and harbored some groundless notion that she might be some forgotten and unfairly overlooked past master of sci-fi. Reading Legend dispelled that idea quickly enough, but by that point this volume was already in my hands. The Light of Lilith has a totally sweet pulp cover, though, so it wasn't entirely a waste.
I've encountered Damon Knight's short fiction in a handful of retrospective anthologies, including "The Country of the Kind" (reviewed here) and "I See You" (reviewed here), which gave me a general impression of him as a Silver Age author, big into ideas and allegories, thought-provoking but unlikely to ever number among my favorites. The Sun Saboteurs seems to conform to this predicted pattern, attempting to wrestle with concepts of human nature and the violence seemingly implicit within it, touching on aging and mortality and written with a galaxy-wide streak of nihilism. The framework of the story was interesting, with the human survivors of a global collapse either eking out peasant livelihoods on a decrepit Earth or musing upon the slow extinction of humanity from ghettos on a hundred alien planets. Perhaps what this novel needed was some space to breathe; the tight-packed pace and get-the-job-done prose of the Ace Double era (if I may make so sweeping an assertion after reading a mere three samples of the product) resists the cultivation of anything like character or nuance. I could imagine a larger, more indulgent, more psychologically and emotionally adept novel making much better use of these materials to tell a much more affecting and provocative tale, in the right hands. As it is, Saboteurs was a hundred-page slip of a book that I sped through in one evening, and it read like one.
2015 read #67: Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange.
Betsey Brown by Ntozake Shange
207 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 29 to December 3
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Recently I read an opinion piece on "How I learned to stop writing for old white men." It was a dispiriting read, as epiphanies often are, exploring the usual imbalances, biases, and disparities of social power within our "mainstream" society, a society in which the very definition of "mainstream" is delineated and enforced by the proverbial "old white men" (or at least a particular social and economic class with disproportionate power, largely populated by said old white men). Happening to pick up this book at approximately the same time, I was struck by how very few books I've ever read that weren't, in Claire Vaye Wakins' terminology, written for me. I have always been poor -- during the late '00s, there was a stretch when I was lower middle class, but that was a personal peak -- but I don't bother to read novels of Napa Valley weddings and architects investigating the suspicious deaths of their fathers, and I have yet to run out of things to read that nonetheless conform to certain expectations of worldview. A book like Mat Johnson's Pym might be a pointed satire of "whiteness," but it is a reaction to (and a dialogue with) a minor classic of the white American literary canon. White readers were clearly as much in Johnson's mind as Black readers.
Betsey Brown is the first book I've read, really, that didn't feel like its author had a white audience in mind. Researching Shange and her other writings (usually categorized as "post-Black Arts") suggested that my perceptions are potentially way off -- Shange has been criticized (possibly as a reaction against her feminist perspective) for "capitulating" to a mainstream (white) aesthetic. Yet this is the first book I've read that, say, presents segregation and Black separatism as positives, or at least as conditions and states of mind worthy of nostalgia and reevaluation. I'm pretty much a pampered little baby when it comes to serious critical theory, much less wholly new perspectives, so I'm not qualified to do much more than make a note of that. Even going that far from my sheltered world of fantasy wizards and rocketships leaves me feeling vulnerable, my toes skittering on the bottom of the pool as the water threatens to inch over my head.
The story itself is light and sweetly told for all its heavy racial and political text and subtext, a lovingly rendered series of vignettes on early adolescence and adult regrets in a relatively prosperous Black household in 1950s St. Louis. It was fascinating and left me wanting more, as well as filling my head with a dull awareness of my own ignorance, so I'd say that, as a novel, it works on several levels.
207 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 29 to December 3
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Recently I read an opinion piece on "How I learned to stop writing for old white men." It was a dispiriting read, as epiphanies often are, exploring the usual imbalances, biases, and disparities of social power within our "mainstream" society, a society in which the very definition of "mainstream" is delineated and enforced by the proverbial "old white men" (or at least a particular social and economic class with disproportionate power, largely populated by said old white men). Happening to pick up this book at approximately the same time, I was struck by how very few books I've ever read that weren't, in Claire Vaye Wakins' terminology, written for me. I have always been poor -- during the late '00s, there was a stretch when I was lower middle class, but that was a personal peak -- but I don't bother to read novels of Napa Valley weddings and architects investigating the suspicious deaths of their fathers, and I have yet to run out of things to read that nonetheless conform to certain expectations of worldview. A book like Mat Johnson's Pym might be a pointed satire of "whiteness," but it is a reaction to (and a dialogue with) a minor classic of the white American literary canon. White readers were clearly as much in Johnson's mind as Black readers.
Betsey Brown is the first book I've read, really, that didn't feel like its author had a white audience in mind. Researching Shange and her other writings (usually categorized as "post-Black Arts") suggested that my perceptions are potentially way off -- Shange has been criticized (possibly as a reaction against her feminist perspective) for "capitulating" to a mainstream (white) aesthetic. Yet this is the first book I've read that, say, presents segregation and Black separatism as positives, or at least as conditions and states of mind worthy of nostalgia and reevaluation. I'm pretty much a pampered little baby when it comes to serious critical theory, much less wholly new perspectives, so I'm not qualified to do much more than make a note of that. Even going that far from my sheltered world of fantasy wizards and rocketships leaves me feeling vulnerable, my toes skittering on the bottom of the pool as the water threatens to inch over my head.
The story itself is light and sweetly told for all its heavy racial and political text and subtext, a lovingly rendered series of vignettes on early adolescence and adult regrets in a relatively prosperous Black household in 1950s St. Louis. It was fascinating and left me wanting more, as well as filling my head with a dull awareness of my own ignorance, so I'd say that, as a novel, it works on several levels.
Thursday, November 26, 2015
2015 read #66: Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle.
Giant Bones by Peter S. Beagle
273 pages
Published 1997
Read from November 24 to November 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
It's been a while since I read and reviewed a collection of short stories, hasn't it? (Ignoring Dandelion Wine, which was a fixup and accordingly not reviewed chapter by chapter, it's been nine months and almost sixty books since my last dalliance with the short form.) I'm no stranger to Beagle's short stories -- I read one of his collections last year, in addition to sundry inclusions in various best-of anthologies -- but this book takes an odd tack, presenting six new stories set in the world of The Innkeeper's Song. When I recall that book, I think of its multiplicity of perspectives and the vividness of many of its characters. What doesn't spring to mind is, well, the world. I remember the inn well enough, but the rest is a minimally defined map of rather basic fantasy terrain: the bucolic home village, some woods or something, a river in a gorge, the villain's fortress on a crag -- and I'm not even certain of some of those details. As Beagle himself says in his introduction, the "world" of Song "was never supposed to be more than a backdrop, a stage-set. It wasn't intended to last." Only one story here concerns characters from Song itself. So heading into these tales, I'm skeptical of the collection's premise -- what, exactly, makes any of these stories a certain part of the Innkeeper's world? -- although I have trust in Beagle as a storyteller: even his most mediocre stories have been reliably tender and intimate, sentimental (in the positive reading of that term), very human, as I've emphasized in past reviews.
Onward to the stories!
"The Last Song of Sirit Byar." The magic of song is one of the hoariest fantasy cliches out there. I tend to give Beagle the benefit of the doubt, and he did manage to squeeze a sweet little tale out of a hackneyed general premise, but I'd rate this as far from his most affecting venture. As soon as the titular bard went into the "songs have power" line, then opened up about the dangling loose end of his tragic backstory, it all became pat and predictable, albeit spun along its inevitable course with Beagle's signature softness and humanity.
"The Magician of Karakosk." A perfectly pleasant little fable with a surprisingly old school fantasy feel -- this would have been right at home in the sword 'n' sorcery days of the 1970s, except, of course, for being far better written than almost any of those stories. It stirred some nostalgia for Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies, though this was better than 90% of what I read in those all-too-often garbage volumes. Think of this story as the fantasy equivalent of a classy chef doing his rendition of pub grub: tasty and comforting, with less of the grease, and fewer stomach pains.
"The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players." A passable exercise in escalating farce, with outsize villains upstaged in a theater plot by an unassuming bit player, all structured quite tidily but lacking a certain oomph. Somewhat of a forgettable piece, honestly.
"Lal and Soukyan." Thus far the uniting thread through all of these stories (as well as The Innkeeper's Song itself) is not so much the setting as a certain style of narration, each tale (or chapter, in the original novel) related, ostensibly orally, in the first person by a personable narrator. This, the only story in Giant Bones involving characters from Innkeeper, eschews this stylistic uniformity in favor of third person. It fits the story, a sweetly melancholy spin on the old school fantasy staple of two mismatched adventurers, finding Lal and Soukyan reuniting for one last journey, a quest for a sense of atonement in their twilight years. Soukyan's motivation -- to apologize to the son of a prison guard Soukyan shamed in front of him, forty years before -- never quite feels solid to me; the idea that this one incident in a long and checkered career of near escapes and mercenary violence would plague him near the end of his life seems on the shaky side, especially as everything resolves very tidily when Soukyan is made to understand that other people benefited from that long-ago jailbreak, which is so damn obvious it makes Soukyan appear stupid. The stuff in between, with the geriatric pair intervening to save an escaping slave from his vengeful captor and the former slave's fixation on finding the ghost of his father -- is satisfying, albeit never operating at the level of brilliance and affect Beagle is capable of at his best. I've been craving old school fantasy infused with a more modern sense of emotional complexity, so I have no real complaints, even if (like the rest of the stories so far) "Lal and Soukyan" is content to hit the obvious beats.
"Choushi-wai's Story." A cute little just-so story about a clever peasant girl abducted to be the bride of a kindly old king, the talking fish she befriends, and their escape with the aid of a thief called the Thief. Winsomely narrated but insubstantial.
"Giant Bones." Another sweet but slight tale. Not a lick wrong with it on a technical level, and deft and kindly as Beagle's stories tend to be, but, like essentially every story in this volume, it doesn't bother to transcend sweetly-sad to become anything deep or affecting or heartbreaking, not like Beagle's best efforts do. I mean, it does become unexpectedly moving toward the end, with that sweet humane acceptance of mortality that pervades Beagle's work, but even if I were to say this is the best story in the collection (which it might very well be), that doesn't elevate it to Beagle's upper tier. Perhaps it's too much to expect a particular author to crank out the equal to A Fine and Private Place or "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here) anytime he chooses; perhaps if this were any other author, I might be more lenient with the overall rating (though they're all arbitrary, every one of them). But none of these stories (with the possible exception of this one -- it's much too soon to tell) seem likely to really linger with me, not the way I expect Beagle stories to do. None of them were really great -- merely amiable, and sweet, and a little melancholy, and pretty good, like this collection as a whole.
273 pages
Published 1997
Read from November 24 to November 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
It's been a while since I read and reviewed a collection of short stories, hasn't it? (Ignoring Dandelion Wine, which was a fixup and accordingly not reviewed chapter by chapter, it's been nine months and almost sixty books since my last dalliance with the short form.) I'm no stranger to Beagle's short stories -- I read one of his collections last year, in addition to sundry inclusions in various best-of anthologies -- but this book takes an odd tack, presenting six new stories set in the world of The Innkeeper's Song. When I recall that book, I think of its multiplicity of perspectives and the vividness of many of its characters. What doesn't spring to mind is, well, the world. I remember the inn well enough, but the rest is a minimally defined map of rather basic fantasy terrain: the bucolic home village, some woods or something, a river in a gorge, the villain's fortress on a crag -- and I'm not even certain of some of those details. As Beagle himself says in his introduction, the "world" of Song "was never supposed to be more than a backdrop, a stage-set. It wasn't intended to last." Only one story here concerns characters from Song itself. So heading into these tales, I'm skeptical of the collection's premise -- what, exactly, makes any of these stories a certain part of the Innkeeper's world? -- although I have trust in Beagle as a storyteller: even his most mediocre stories have been reliably tender and intimate, sentimental (in the positive reading of that term), very human, as I've emphasized in past reviews.
Onward to the stories!
"The Last Song of Sirit Byar." The magic of song is one of the hoariest fantasy cliches out there. I tend to give Beagle the benefit of the doubt, and he did manage to squeeze a sweet little tale out of a hackneyed general premise, but I'd rate this as far from his most affecting venture. As soon as the titular bard went into the "songs have power" line, then opened up about the dangling loose end of his tragic backstory, it all became pat and predictable, albeit spun along its inevitable course with Beagle's signature softness and humanity.
"The Magician of Karakosk." A perfectly pleasant little fable with a surprisingly old school fantasy feel -- this would have been right at home in the sword 'n' sorcery days of the 1970s, except, of course, for being far better written than almost any of those stories. It stirred some nostalgia for Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy anthologies, though this was better than 90% of what I read in those all-too-often garbage volumes. Think of this story as the fantasy equivalent of a classy chef doing his rendition of pub grub: tasty and comforting, with less of the grease, and fewer stomach pains.
"The Tragical Historie of the Jiril's Players." A passable exercise in escalating farce, with outsize villains upstaged in a theater plot by an unassuming bit player, all structured quite tidily but lacking a certain oomph. Somewhat of a forgettable piece, honestly.
"Lal and Soukyan." Thus far the uniting thread through all of these stories (as well as The Innkeeper's Song itself) is not so much the setting as a certain style of narration, each tale (or chapter, in the original novel) related, ostensibly orally, in the first person by a personable narrator. This, the only story in Giant Bones involving characters from Innkeeper, eschews this stylistic uniformity in favor of third person. It fits the story, a sweetly melancholy spin on the old school fantasy staple of two mismatched adventurers, finding Lal and Soukyan reuniting for one last journey, a quest for a sense of atonement in their twilight years. Soukyan's motivation -- to apologize to the son of a prison guard Soukyan shamed in front of him, forty years before -- never quite feels solid to me; the idea that this one incident in a long and checkered career of near escapes and mercenary violence would plague him near the end of his life seems on the shaky side, especially as everything resolves very tidily when Soukyan is made to understand that other people benefited from that long-ago jailbreak, which is so damn obvious it makes Soukyan appear stupid. The stuff in between, with the geriatric pair intervening to save an escaping slave from his vengeful captor and the former slave's fixation on finding the ghost of his father -- is satisfying, albeit never operating at the level of brilliance and affect Beagle is capable of at his best. I've been craving old school fantasy infused with a more modern sense of emotional complexity, so I have no real complaints, even if (like the rest of the stories so far) "Lal and Soukyan" is content to hit the obvious beats.
"Choushi-wai's Story." A cute little just-so story about a clever peasant girl abducted to be the bride of a kindly old king, the talking fish she befriends, and their escape with the aid of a thief called the Thief. Winsomely narrated but insubstantial.
"Giant Bones." Another sweet but slight tale. Not a lick wrong with it on a technical level, and deft and kindly as Beagle's stories tend to be, but, like essentially every story in this volume, it doesn't bother to transcend sweetly-sad to become anything deep or affecting or heartbreaking, not like Beagle's best efforts do. I mean, it does become unexpectedly moving toward the end, with that sweet humane acceptance of mortality that pervades Beagle's work, but even if I were to say this is the best story in the collection (which it might very well be), that doesn't elevate it to Beagle's upper tier. Perhaps it's too much to expect a particular author to crank out the equal to A Fine and Private Place or "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here) anytime he chooses; perhaps if this were any other author, I might be more lenient with the overall rating (though they're all arbitrary, every one of them). But none of these stories (with the possible exception of this one -- it's much too soon to tell) seem likely to really linger with me, not the way I expect Beagle stories to do. None of them were really great -- merely amiable, and sweet, and a little melancholy, and pretty good, like this collection as a whole.
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
2015 read #65: Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner.
Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner
269 pages
Published 1987
Read from November 20 to November 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
With its languid nobles, dashing rogues, Louis Quatorze meets Sir Walter Raleigh esthetic, bisexual eroticism, ritualized violence, political scheming, and plots-within-plots denouement, Swordspoint could be seen as the grand-mère of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart -- though Kushner's sensual sensibilities here hew closer to Thomas Canty than to Fetlife. The schemes of nobility require a deeper cast list, perhaps, than the page count can support. The only two characters that seem adequately fleshed out are the central swordsman, Richard St. Vier, and his enigmatic boyfriend Alec; the rest of the players are sketches only, deftly enough drawn, suggesting depths but never revealing them. I would have liked to know more about the Duchess Tremontaine and Katherine Blount, who seem like they could have supported novels in their own right had the focus been on them -- they certainly have the presence of leading characters, even if they lack much in the way of development. (Perhaps the various Riverside sequels will serve them better? I honestly have no idea what to expect from the ensuing volumes; the fifteen year gap between Swordspoint and The Fall of the Kings suggests either a brilliant new direction or a desperate cash-grab.) One-note characters aside, this was a lush and quite fetching novel, and I can only hope the rest of the series lives up to it.
Also, let's spare a moment to mention just how remarkable it is that a mainstream fantasy novel would have several openly bisexual characters -- in 1987!
269 pages
Published 1987
Read from November 20 to November 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
With its languid nobles, dashing rogues, Louis Quatorze meets Sir Walter Raleigh esthetic, bisexual eroticism, ritualized violence, political scheming, and plots-within-plots denouement, Swordspoint could be seen as the grand-mère of Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Dart -- though Kushner's sensual sensibilities here hew closer to Thomas Canty than to Fetlife. The schemes of nobility require a deeper cast list, perhaps, than the page count can support. The only two characters that seem adequately fleshed out are the central swordsman, Richard St. Vier, and his enigmatic boyfriend Alec; the rest of the players are sketches only, deftly enough drawn, suggesting depths but never revealing them. I would have liked to know more about the Duchess Tremontaine and Katherine Blount, who seem like they could have supported novels in their own right had the focus been on them -- they certainly have the presence of leading characters, even if they lack much in the way of development. (Perhaps the various Riverside sequels will serve them better? I honestly have no idea what to expect from the ensuing volumes; the fifteen year gap between Swordspoint and The Fall of the Kings suggests either a brilliant new direction or a desperate cash-grab.) One-note characters aside, this was a lush and quite fetching novel, and I can only hope the rest of the series lives up to it.
Also, let's spare a moment to mention just how remarkable it is that a mainstream fantasy novel would have several openly bisexual characters -- in 1987!
Friday, November 20, 2015
2015 read #64: Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan.
Unseemly Science by Rod Duncan
380 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 18 to November 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The first volume of Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, was sustained by its zippy prose, which flung from one incident to the next with enjoyable velocity, if nothing else. Unseemly Science, the second installment, unfortunately lacks that same sense of propulsion. The titular mystery doesn't become evident until halfway through the book -- the first half, instead, is taken up with incidents of disguise, pursuit, and incarceration that serve as a muddled postscript to the events of the first book, without adding anything particularly new to the overarching plot (which promises nothing short of global revolution and the smashing of class hierarchies), nor even any beats that weren't already hit in Daughter (which saw our heroine similarly disguised, pursued, and jailed). When the "unseemly science" finally makes itself visible, our investigators fail to notice clues that, for the reader, may as well have neon arrows pointing at them -- never a good state of affairs in what is ostensibly a novel of mystery and investigation. The climax lands with a thud, Duncan's former skill at maintaining momentum getting gummed up with a succession of sadistic heavies and mad scientists who struggle to maintain one dimension to their characterizations, let alone two, and action sequences that stumble and clunk rather than swerve and stab. As a whole, Science is mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad, I suppose, but given that I've been waiting about four months to get my hands on a copy, that's more than enough to leave me disappointed.
380 pages
Published 2015
Read from November 18 to November 20
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The first volume of Duncan's Fall of the Gas-Lit Empire series, The Bullet Catcher's Daughter, was sustained by its zippy prose, which flung from one incident to the next with enjoyable velocity, if nothing else. Unseemly Science, the second installment, unfortunately lacks that same sense of propulsion. The titular mystery doesn't become evident until halfway through the book -- the first half, instead, is taken up with incidents of disguise, pursuit, and incarceration that serve as a muddled postscript to the events of the first book, without adding anything particularly new to the overarching plot (which promises nothing short of global revolution and the smashing of class hierarchies), nor even any beats that weren't already hit in Daughter (which saw our heroine similarly disguised, pursued, and jailed). When the "unseemly science" finally makes itself visible, our investigators fail to notice clues that, for the reader, may as well have neon arrows pointing at them -- never a good state of affairs in what is ostensibly a novel of mystery and investigation. The climax lands with a thud, Duncan's former skill at maintaining momentum getting gummed up with a succession of sadistic heavies and mad scientists who struggle to maintain one dimension to their characterizations, let alone two, and action sequences that stumble and clunk rather than swerve and stab. As a whole, Science is mediocre and forgettable rather than outright bad, I suppose, but given that I've been waiting about four months to get my hands on a copy, that's more than enough to leave me disappointed.
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
2015 read #63: Illywhacker by Peter Carey.
Illywhacker by Peter Carey
600 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 4 to November 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You wouldn't think it would take me two weeks to read a Peter Carey novel, but here we are. Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America was among the first of my new favorite books, barely two weeks into my vow to read more and to blog about it; I loved (was, in fact, "amazed" by) its "delightful frolic of language used well." Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I read later that same year, didn't reach the same exuberant ecstasy of wordcraft, but the hardy eloquence and rough poetry of its vernacular was quite impressive. Illywhacker, Carey's second novel, published fourteen years before Parrot & Olivier, lacks much in the way of distinctive prose, relying more on shuffled timelines and unreliable narration to earn its modern lit cred. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in sheer length -- I think the damn thing just goes on too long.
The first 200 pages or so, if excised and allowed to breathe on their own, would make for a slim but outstanding novel following a small-time conman in 1910s Australia, a zippy through-line from the crackup of his airplane to his increasingly grandiose schemes to his rooftop love affair with his patron's daughter, Phoebe. The succeeding 200 pages are something of a step down, interest-wise, but seeing the conman and his new family scraping through the Depression by sleeping in a car and doing magic shows had quite a bit of potential. The final third of the novel is where it lost me, abandoning the energetic presence of its heretofore central character for the thicker, duller tale of his alienated son's reach for respectability in the international pet trade, and the sort of literalizing of domestic tensions (his wife Emma finds herself most fulfilled living in a cage!) that could be clever but more often feels silly and try-hard. Except that, in the end, it all ties back together (this talk of cages, mirroring -- I had essentially forgotten it before the last few pages reminded me -- Phoebe building a figurative birdcage for herself in the first third of the novel; it's actually quite clever) into some vast, inelegant metaphor for Australian dependence on and inferiority complex toward Britain and America.
If I had the energy for it, and could remember the earlier sections better, I could unpack something about what seems to be a current of misogyny throughout the novel, mostly Phoebe's scheming and Emma's cowlike placidity in the cages, but I don't recall how Carey's other novels portrayed women, and honestly I wouldn't know what to say about it beyond pointing it out before moving on.
600 pages
Published 1985
Read from November 4 to November 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
You wouldn't think it would take me two weeks to read a Peter Carey novel, but here we are. Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America was among the first of my new favorite books, barely two weeks into my vow to read more and to blog about it; I loved (was, in fact, "amazed" by) its "delightful frolic of language used well." Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang, which I read later that same year, didn't reach the same exuberant ecstasy of wordcraft, but the hardy eloquence and rough poetry of its vernacular was quite impressive. Illywhacker, Carey's second novel, published fourteen years before Parrot & Olivier, lacks much in the way of distinctive prose, relying more on shuffled timelines and unreliable narration to earn its modern lit cred. Where it fails, in my estimation, is in sheer length -- I think the damn thing just goes on too long.
The first 200 pages or so, if excised and allowed to breathe on their own, would make for a slim but outstanding novel following a small-time conman in 1910s Australia, a zippy through-line from the crackup of his airplane to his increasingly grandiose schemes to his rooftop love affair with his patron's daughter, Phoebe. The succeeding 200 pages are something of a step down, interest-wise, but seeing the conman and his new family scraping through the Depression by sleeping in a car and doing magic shows had quite a bit of potential. The final third of the novel is where it lost me, abandoning the energetic presence of its heretofore central character for the thicker, duller tale of his alienated son's reach for respectability in the international pet trade, and the sort of literalizing of domestic tensions (his wife Emma finds herself most fulfilled living in a cage!) that could be clever but more often feels silly and try-hard. Except that, in the end, it all ties back together (this talk of cages, mirroring -- I had essentially forgotten it before the last few pages reminded me -- Phoebe building a figurative birdcage for herself in the first third of the novel; it's actually quite clever) into some vast, inelegant metaphor for Australian dependence on and inferiority complex toward Britain and America.
If I had the energy for it, and could remember the earlier sections better, I could unpack something about what seems to be a current of misogyny throughout the novel, mostly Phoebe's scheming and Emma's cowlike placidity in the cages, but I don't recall how Carey's other novels portrayed women, and honestly I wouldn't know what to say about it beyond pointing it out before moving on.
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
2015 read #62: Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente.
Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente
432 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 29 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Metafiction, to my tastes, is best enjoyed in small, measured doses, rather like children's medicine that, no matter how sweetened, has to be choked down with reluctance. Honestly, I admire it more often than I enjoy it. And really, short fiction (rather than novels) seems best suited to experiments with form and presentation. It took almost one hundred pages before I began to concede that Radiance might have something of its own to say, rather than repeating (at much wordier length) the essential points of Valente's short fiction masterpiece, "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" (which I read and reviewed here). Perhaps it took so long because chunks of "The Radiant Car" are recycled in Radiance, once or twice crammed verbatim, with little regard for speech rhythms, into the mouths of side characters. Further, the bulk of Radiance is comprised of film scripts, interrogation transcripts, gossip columns, cargo manifests -- none of which permit Valente's intoxicating prose to reach its full strength, as it does in The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World.
Beyond those first hundred or so pages, however, as Radiance found its own momentum and swung a dizzying, decopunk parabola beyond the constraints of "The Radiant Car," I found myself quite satisfyingly drunk with it. Radiance earned a rare distinction, becoming the first book in recent memory that I've wanted to reread while still barely half done with it. Part of that urge had to do with writing a better review: I had found myself what I considered a clever and perceptive angle upon the concepts and layered perspectives of Valente's novel, but then, after a weekend break for trick-or-treating and hiking, couldn't scrounge up so much as a crumb of my supposed insight from the messy desk of my memory, and I wanted to go back and sniff it down again from the first page. But even without that case of the missing exegesis (I never did recall what I had been so proud to figure out), Radiance is a book that would reward a second read -- and certainly a more careful immersion than my usual page-a-minute pace.
As with the original short story, Radiance is a work of style-as-substance. Layers of perspective, re-shoots and second takes, revisions and outright fabrications are all we are given of the story at its heart. And disregarding the quite lovely digressions and spectacular subplots, that story remains little more substantial than it was in "The Radiant Car," pinned on some kind of quantum foam / matrix of reality stuff that would have seemed hoary in the 1990s (though told with such elegantly baffling Valente-esque vigor). But the style! Disappeared filmmaker Severin Unck's final film is projected onto the naked bodies of fair-goers. Her father, filmmaker Percival Unck, struggles with his writing partner to craft a fitting end for her story, a proper cinematic ending, and the genre zigzags from noir to Gothic to fairy tale to a locked room mystery, its final reveal sung by a tapdancing cartoon octopus and mongoose. There's a religious play enacted by players dressed as Uranus and its moons, spoken in a pidgin of Valente's own devising. It's fantastic. It's fanatical. It's heady. It's dizzying and delirious and delightful.
432 pages
Published 2015
Read from October 29 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
Metafiction, to my tastes, is best enjoyed in small, measured doses, rather like children's medicine that, no matter how sweetened, has to be choked down with reluctance. Honestly, I admire it more often than I enjoy it. And really, short fiction (rather than novels) seems best suited to experiments with form and presentation. It took almost one hundred pages before I began to concede that Radiance might have something of its own to say, rather than repeating (at much wordier length) the essential points of Valente's short fiction masterpiece, "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew" (which I read and reviewed here). Perhaps it took so long because chunks of "The Radiant Car" are recycled in Radiance, once or twice crammed verbatim, with little regard for speech rhythms, into the mouths of side characters. Further, the bulk of Radiance is comprised of film scripts, interrogation transcripts, gossip columns, cargo manifests -- none of which permit Valente's intoxicating prose to reach its full strength, as it does in The Habitation of the Blessed and The Folded World.
Beyond those first hundred or so pages, however, as Radiance found its own momentum and swung a dizzying, decopunk parabola beyond the constraints of "The Radiant Car," I found myself quite satisfyingly drunk with it. Radiance earned a rare distinction, becoming the first book in recent memory that I've wanted to reread while still barely half done with it. Part of that urge had to do with writing a better review: I had found myself what I considered a clever and perceptive angle upon the concepts and layered perspectives of Valente's novel, but then, after a weekend break for trick-or-treating and hiking, couldn't scrounge up so much as a crumb of my supposed insight from the messy desk of my memory, and I wanted to go back and sniff it down again from the first page. But even without that case of the missing exegesis (I never did recall what I had been so proud to figure out), Radiance is a book that would reward a second read -- and certainly a more careful immersion than my usual page-a-minute pace.
As with the original short story, Radiance is a work of style-as-substance. Layers of perspective, re-shoots and second takes, revisions and outright fabrications are all we are given of the story at its heart. And disregarding the quite lovely digressions and spectacular subplots, that story remains little more substantial than it was in "The Radiant Car," pinned on some kind of quantum foam / matrix of reality stuff that would have seemed hoary in the 1990s (though told with such elegantly baffling Valente-esque vigor). But the style! Disappeared filmmaker Severin Unck's final film is projected onto the naked bodies of fair-goers. Her father, filmmaker Percival Unck, struggles with his writing partner to craft a fitting end for her story, a proper cinematic ending, and the genre zigzags from noir to Gothic to fairy tale to a locked room mystery, its final reveal sung by a tapdancing cartoon octopus and mongoose. There's a religious play enacted by players dressed as Uranus and its moons, spoken in a pidgin of Valente's own devising. It's fantastic. It's fanatical. It's heady. It's dizzying and delirious and delightful.
Thursday, October 29, 2015
2015 read #61: The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen.
The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.
But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.
At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.
With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?
And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.
435 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 21 to October 29
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Between October 11, when I finished China Dolls, and October 21, when I began this book, I don't think I read so much as a dozen pages. Part of the reason for that was my fruitless attempt to read Holly Black's Tithe -- for whatever reason, it just wasn't grabbing me, nixing my confident plan to breeze through Black's Faery Tale trilogy to beef up my book numbers for the month. But most of the blame can be laid with one word: Minecraft. Downloading and playing it for the very first time on October 7, I got hooked bad for a while there, playing literally every free hour of the day, and dreaming in cubes at night.
But I kept on accumulating books from the library, books I was eager to have read but couldn't quite get myself to read, if that makes sense. What I wanted was a book of old school high fantasy, a fun, pulpy adventure through what-the-fuck that would make me feel like I was inside a Roger Dean painting. But I wanted it packaged with adequate prose and some semblance of modern progressive ethics and values.
At first The Queen of the Tearling seemed to fit my order exactly, a straightforward fantasy of a young queen emerging from hiding and getting shit done, written in prose that didn't make me cringe or toss it across the room. But within a couple chapters, I saw signs that Queen was, if anything, too old school -- and in fact, it proved to be aggressively formulaic. There's the rightful heir, raised in seclusion, bookish and idealistic! There's the technomagical Macguffin, the power of which our queen learns to access exactly when she needs it! The technomagical Macguffin allows her to see visions and shoot bolts of electricity, but its use might cost her! There's the stoic and competent guard captain with a troubled past! There's a dashing and handsome and mysterious King of Thieves! There's the spidery secondary bad guy! There's the evil ruler of evil, her rooms curtained in crimson, who uses and disposes of sex slaves nightly! The evil ruler of evil even calls herself the Red Queen of Mortmense, for fuck's sake, and calls upon the power of a shadowy being who feeds on the blood of children. It's as if every high fantasy series of the '80s and early '90s regurgitated into a bowl, and watered the mixture down to yield this mess.
With the author mentioning her sense of social justice in the acknowledgements, and the central hero being a self-conscious and chubby 19 year old woman who kicks ass and holds onto her idealism, you'd think that Tearling would at least satisfy my desire for progressive ethics and values. One book into a trilogy, with much of the history and background of the setting intentionally left mysterious (for example, is it set on an alien planet, the tale of a founding space voyage corrupted into a myth of a sea voyage, or is it set on an Earth modified by magic, and the Tearling founded with an actual sea voyage across a magically expanded sea?), perhaps it's too early to tell which elements of Tearling society were chosen by the author to make a point, and which slipped in from unconscious bias. Whichever way the Tearling was founded, it was envisioned as a socialist utopia, breaking free from the corruption and near-feudal oligarchy of modern day or near-future America. So why is everyone white? When a brown or black character appears for a page or two, their existence is commented upon as a curiosity, which doesn't explain why they're so rare. Is this a deliberate choice on Johansen's part, to be explored in detail in following volumes? Was William Tear a racist piece of shit? Or did Johansen just neglect to imagine that a utopian colony drawn together by socialist idealism from modern Americans would be considerably darker and more diverse than she depicts here?
And why, oh why, would a girl raised in total isolation by a kindly old man and a strict, in-command woman be obsessed with her looks? Why would she emerge from a vision of horror and invasion and be able to think only of stroking the bare chest of her guard? A sex-positive heroine is still a novelty in fantasy literature, a chubby one still rarer, but honestly, at times Kelsea felt less like a progressive new figure and more like the blushing, looks-obsessed damsels of old school fantasy.
Sunday, October 11, 2015
2015 read #60: China Dolls by Lisa See.
China Dolls by Lisa See
384 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 7 to October 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I think I'll always need genre training wheels on my literature. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at times I see it as a personal failing as a reader that I so rarely seek out, much less enjoy, what might be styled "conventional" literary fiction. I've talked before about my disdain for the "Napa Valley wedding" novel, the sort of dreadfully boring yet eternally popular upper-middle class verisimilitude in which rich people bruise each other's feelings and, like, ride horses or something. If a book is mired in dull realism, is set in the present day, and deals nigh-exclusively with class-privileged folks, I just can't bring myself to carry it so much as an inch closer to the library checkout counter. The only thing more boring to me would be some inane murder mystery for the protagonist to unravel -- and the two overlap far more often than I would have credited before I began combing my library's stacks for new things to read.
Almost every entry on my literary fiction tag falls into some additional category that spiced it up for my palate: YA, much of which features protagonists specially crafted to appeal to bookish, socially awkward types of any age; historical fiction, which, with its exotic and often educational settings, is essentially genre fiction in its own right; vague, softball psychological horror, which tends to be much less interesting than the publisher's plot description or the cover art; some surreal or fantastical element, as with the works of Murakami or Oyeyemi, which I won't hesitate to label fantasy (as an inverse of those "fantasy" novels of the mid-'80s and early '90s, such as The Doubleman and Briar Rose, which have nothing whatsoever fantastical about them). Far too infrequently, there is another category I've been known to enjoy: literary fiction set more or less in the present that deals with places or peoples I know nothing about, or lifestyles and situations I have no experience of. One of the few books I read in 2012, before beginning this blog, was The Geometry of God by Uzma Aslam Khan, which impressed me very much at the time; I'd love to read more works like that, excellent fiction that, however minutely, expands my cultural and social horizons.
China Dolls (recommended to me by my friend Francesca) is set primarily within the (so-called) "Oriental" nightclub scene in the years before and during World War II. It's a time and a social environment I know little about, so it appeals to me not only as a historical novel but also as a horizon-expanding exposure to a social context seldom discussed in our current mainstream (white, affluent) culture. Yet much of the actual plot follows the fortunes, friendships, secrets, and ongoing betrayals of its three central characters -- the sort of thing that would feel so dreadfully dull had it been set amongst the vineyards and inheritance lawyers of Napa Valley. The whole literary schtick about "secret traumas lead to horrible betrayals among friends or family members" can feel artificial, a fill-in-the-blank plot starter kit -- nowhere near as egregious as "parent/old friend/estranged sibling dies in mysterious circumstances, and architect/lawyer/novelist protagonist must open old wounds and confront family/town secrets to uncover the truth," but off-putting nonetheless. In China Dolls, those at-long-last-revealed secrets are devastating and pack an emotional heft, which renders the betrayals and melodrama of earlier chapters far more affecting in retrospect, but before that point, which came (of course) at the climax of the book, I found my attention wandering, despite the fascinating historical milieu. Hence me musing about my need for genre training wheels to get me through just about every book, no matter how good the book itself might be.
To be fair, my attention would have been wandering anyway, divided between YouTube videos of thru-hikes and a payday impulse-purchase of Minecraft. For two or three nights now I've been dreaming in cubes.
384 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 7 to October 11
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I think I'll always need genre training wheels on my literature. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at times I see it as a personal failing as a reader that I so rarely seek out, much less enjoy, what might be styled "conventional" literary fiction. I've talked before about my disdain for the "Napa Valley wedding" novel, the sort of dreadfully boring yet eternally popular upper-middle class verisimilitude in which rich people bruise each other's feelings and, like, ride horses or something. If a book is mired in dull realism, is set in the present day, and deals nigh-exclusively with class-privileged folks, I just can't bring myself to carry it so much as an inch closer to the library checkout counter. The only thing more boring to me would be some inane murder mystery for the protagonist to unravel -- and the two overlap far more often than I would have credited before I began combing my library's stacks for new things to read.
Almost every entry on my literary fiction tag falls into some additional category that spiced it up for my palate: YA, much of which features protagonists specially crafted to appeal to bookish, socially awkward types of any age; historical fiction, which, with its exotic and often educational settings, is essentially genre fiction in its own right; vague, softball psychological horror, which tends to be much less interesting than the publisher's plot description or the cover art; some surreal or fantastical element, as with the works of Murakami or Oyeyemi, which I won't hesitate to label fantasy (as an inverse of those "fantasy" novels of the mid-'80s and early '90s, such as The Doubleman and Briar Rose, which have nothing whatsoever fantastical about them). Far too infrequently, there is another category I've been known to enjoy: literary fiction set more or less in the present that deals with places or peoples I know nothing about, or lifestyles and situations I have no experience of. One of the few books I read in 2012, before beginning this blog, was The Geometry of God by Uzma Aslam Khan, which impressed me very much at the time; I'd love to read more works like that, excellent fiction that, however minutely, expands my cultural and social horizons.
China Dolls (recommended to me by my friend Francesca) is set primarily within the (so-called) "Oriental" nightclub scene in the years before and during World War II. It's a time and a social environment I know little about, so it appeals to me not only as a historical novel but also as a horizon-expanding exposure to a social context seldom discussed in our current mainstream (white, affluent) culture. Yet much of the actual plot follows the fortunes, friendships, secrets, and ongoing betrayals of its three central characters -- the sort of thing that would feel so dreadfully dull had it been set amongst the vineyards and inheritance lawyers of Napa Valley. The whole literary schtick about "secret traumas lead to horrible betrayals among friends or family members" can feel artificial, a fill-in-the-blank plot starter kit -- nowhere near as egregious as "parent/old friend/estranged sibling dies in mysterious circumstances, and architect/lawyer/novelist protagonist must open old wounds and confront family/town secrets to uncover the truth," but off-putting nonetheless. In China Dolls, those at-long-last-revealed secrets are devastating and pack an emotional heft, which renders the betrayals and melodrama of earlier chapters far more affecting in retrospect, but before that point, which came (of course) at the climax of the book, I found my attention wandering, despite the fascinating historical milieu. Hence me musing about my need for genre training wheels to get me through just about every book, no matter how good the book itself might be.
To be fair, my attention would have been wandering anyway, divided between YouTube videos of thru-hikes and a payday impulse-purchase of Minecraft. For two or three nights now I've been dreaming in cubes.
Sunday, October 4, 2015
2015 read #59: Imago by Octavia E. Butler.
Imago by Octavia E. Butler
264 pages
Published 1989
Read from October 3 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Some general spoilers for the entire Xenogenesis Trilogy ahead.
One thing I particularly admire throughout this series is Butler's choice of viewpoint characters. Dawn followed a human woman awakening after nuclear apocalypse to find herself aboard a vast alien vessel, chosen to be the "Judas goat" aiding the aliens in their assimilation of humanity. Adulthood Rites was the maturation and coming-of-age of the first Oankali-human hybrid male, born as an experiment to see if such a configuration could be psychologically stable, used during his childhood as another scapegoat of sorts, his Oankali progenitors manipulating him into a choice they were biologically incapable of making for the remnant of "resister" humanity. Imago is the story of the first Oankali-human hybrid ooloi, a third biological sex with the capacity to absorb, manipulate, and recombine genetic information -- an experiment neither hybrids nor Oankali believe is safe. The progression from book to book is inevitable in retrospect, but Butler's handling of the different facets of her social/biological thought experiment is assured.
For much of its length I felt that Imago was a step above the two preceding volumes, Butler totally confident within her story universe and her narration. If I'm being honest, I found my interest flagging at times when I read both Dawn and Rites; Imago, by contrast, was zippy and riveting almost to the very end. The ending, alas, felt a bit rickety and incomplete, every plot obstacle and conflict resolved by, essentially, having the hybrid ooloi narrator smell really, really good. Perhaps it's an especially olfactory twist on the standard sci-fi messiah figure storyline, or perhaps Jodahs (again with the Judas imagery?) is merely the physical embodiment of "Life finds a way."
Having read all of Butler's novels (with the exception of Survivor, which I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to read unless one day $90 means a lot less to me than it does now), it's interesting to be able to connect them thematically. For the most part, the Xenogensis Trilogy avoids Butler's seeming fixation on young women characters getting romantically involved with substantially older men (though there were hints of that in Dawn). But more seriously, Xenogenesis joins the Patternist series as well as (to a slightly lesser extent) the Parable books and even (arguably) Fledgling in exploring Butler's enduring interest in humanity evolving beyond and above its current sorry state. The amplification of social bonds (including but not limited to the expansion or redefinition of the family group) is her general means of accomplishing this evolution -- via alien biology and five-way sex in Xenogenesis, via underage sex and vampire saliva in Fledgling, via psychic powers and immortality genes in the Patternist books, via a new religion of cooperation and hard work in Parable. This focus on social factors makes the anthropologist in me nod in agreement, even if much of the time Butler seems to take a fatalist view that stronger social bonds and higher social understanding are impossible with humanity's biology. The Parable books, the one series that posits pure social evolution without recourse to fantastic biochemistry, happen to be some of the most depressing fiction I've ever read.
Kindred is the outlier, in the sense that broader questions of human evolution aren't considered, but even then, familial links once again dominate Butler's thinking.
One could comment as well upon other themes, such as survivorship and Butler's strongly anti-hierarchical bent, but at that point I'd just be quoting her Wikipedia page, so I won't strain my limited critical faculties further.
I still have one or two short story collections to read, but for now, a moment of silence for a marvelous mind and body of work ended much too soon. (I'm not good at this maudlin stuff.)
264 pages
Published 1989
Read from October 3 to October 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Some general spoilers for the entire Xenogenesis Trilogy ahead.
One thing I particularly admire throughout this series is Butler's choice of viewpoint characters. Dawn followed a human woman awakening after nuclear apocalypse to find herself aboard a vast alien vessel, chosen to be the "Judas goat" aiding the aliens in their assimilation of humanity. Adulthood Rites was the maturation and coming-of-age of the first Oankali-human hybrid male, born as an experiment to see if such a configuration could be psychologically stable, used during his childhood as another scapegoat of sorts, his Oankali progenitors manipulating him into a choice they were biologically incapable of making for the remnant of "resister" humanity. Imago is the story of the first Oankali-human hybrid ooloi, a third biological sex with the capacity to absorb, manipulate, and recombine genetic information -- an experiment neither hybrids nor Oankali believe is safe. The progression from book to book is inevitable in retrospect, but Butler's handling of the different facets of her social/biological thought experiment is assured.
For much of its length I felt that Imago was a step above the two preceding volumes, Butler totally confident within her story universe and her narration. If I'm being honest, I found my interest flagging at times when I read both Dawn and Rites; Imago, by contrast, was zippy and riveting almost to the very end. The ending, alas, felt a bit rickety and incomplete, every plot obstacle and conflict resolved by, essentially, having the hybrid ooloi narrator smell really, really good. Perhaps it's an especially olfactory twist on the standard sci-fi messiah figure storyline, or perhaps Jodahs (again with the Judas imagery?) is merely the physical embodiment of "Life finds a way."
Having read all of Butler's novels (with the exception of Survivor, which I doubt I'll ever have the opportunity to read unless one day $90 means a lot less to me than it does now), it's interesting to be able to connect them thematically. For the most part, the Xenogensis Trilogy avoids Butler's seeming fixation on young women characters getting romantically involved with substantially older men (though there were hints of that in Dawn). But more seriously, Xenogenesis joins the Patternist series as well as (to a slightly lesser extent) the Parable books and even (arguably) Fledgling in exploring Butler's enduring interest in humanity evolving beyond and above its current sorry state. The amplification of social bonds (including but not limited to the expansion or redefinition of the family group) is her general means of accomplishing this evolution -- via alien biology and five-way sex in Xenogenesis, via underage sex and vampire saliva in Fledgling, via psychic powers and immortality genes in the Patternist books, via a new religion of cooperation and hard work in Parable. This focus on social factors makes the anthropologist in me nod in agreement, even if much of the time Butler seems to take a fatalist view that stronger social bonds and higher social understanding are impossible with humanity's biology. The Parable books, the one series that posits pure social evolution without recourse to fantastic biochemistry, happen to be some of the most depressing fiction I've ever read.
Kindred is the outlier, in the sense that broader questions of human evolution aren't considered, but even then, familial links once again dominate Butler's thinking.
One could comment as well upon other themes, such as survivorship and Butler's strongly anti-hierarchical bent, but at that point I'd just be quoting her Wikipedia page, so I won't strain my limited critical faculties further.
I still have one or two short story collections to read, but for now, a moment of silence for a marvelous mind and body of work ended much too soon. (I'm not good at this maudlin stuff.)
Saturday, October 3, 2015
2015 read #58: Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint.
Jack the Giant-Killer by Charles de Lint
210 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 2 to October 3
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I've been looking forward to the novels of Charles de Lint for almost an entire decade, ever since I saw the hardback debut of Widdershins on the shelves at Borders. During the years of this blog, I've read three of de Lint's short stories -- "The Conjure Man" (reviewed here), "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" (reviewed here), and "The Bone Woman" (reviewed here) -- all of which I've enjoyed but found pleasant and unsurprising rather than bold or indelible. But I had yet to get to any of his novels, largely because I had never bothered to look up which book opened his Newford series, and kept buying or checking out volumes from somewhere near the middle of the continuity, which of course just wouldn't do as starting places. (I've remedied my ignorance with Wikipedia, and The Dreaming Place is fairly high on my to-read list, but I doubt that I'll get to it before next year.)
A few weeks ago, I chanced upon Jane Yolen's Briar Rose on the shelves of my library, and from there, even though the book in hand wasn't even fantasy by my definition, I began tracking down the rest of the Terri Windling-helmed Fairy Tale Series of novels. My library also happened to have de Lint's entry, Jack the Giant-Killer (though no library in the county seems to have its follow-up volume, Drink Down the Moon). What better place to begin with de Lint than an almost-standalone novel from the crib years of modern Adult Fantasy? From the very first paragraph, alas, which introduces our heroine, gazing at her reflection in numb disbelief after she's hacked off her hair and gone on an Ottawa-style bender after her boyfriend of three months leaves her for being too boring, Jack gets mired in the bog of lazy urban fantasy cliches. De Lint's tendency to be warmly formulaic in his short stories metamorphoses at novel length into a losing struggle with mediocrity. There's a painfully generic Unseelie Court, halfway between an orc horde and the muppets from Labyrinth (but failing at either one), stealing power and territory from a waning Seelie Court on the streets and suburbs of Ottawa; there's a no-nonsense best friend who tries to wisecrack through every situation; there are some cardboard-cutout versions of "good" faeries; there are paragraphs of location details that would make sense only to locals and do nothing to advance the story. The very same year in which Emma Bull made similar (essentially identical) cliches seem fresh and full of pep in War for the Oaks, de Lint seems to be coloring by numbers in a subgenre still barely past the blueprint stage.
There's nothing bad or unpleasant about de Lint's tale here, and Jack is not without its charms, like when Jacky finds her pluck and drives a hard bargain with the fey fiddler Kerevan, but overall, this book is rather thorough in its unremarkableness.
210 pages
Published 1987
Read from October 2 to October 3
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I've been looking forward to the novels of Charles de Lint for almost an entire decade, ever since I saw the hardback debut of Widdershins on the shelves at Borders. During the years of this blog, I've read three of de Lint's short stories -- "The Conjure Man" (reviewed here), "Uncle Dobbin's Parrot Fair" (reviewed here), and "The Bone Woman" (reviewed here) -- all of which I've enjoyed but found pleasant and unsurprising rather than bold or indelible. But I had yet to get to any of his novels, largely because I had never bothered to look up which book opened his Newford series, and kept buying or checking out volumes from somewhere near the middle of the continuity, which of course just wouldn't do as starting places. (I've remedied my ignorance with Wikipedia, and The Dreaming Place is fairly high on my to-read list, but I doubt that I'll get to it before next year.)
A few weeks ago, I chanced upon Jane Yolen's Briar Rose on the shelves of my library, and from there, even though the book in hand wasn't even fantasy by my definition, I began tracking down the rest of the Terri Windling-helmed Fairy Tale Series of novels. My library also happened to have de Lint's entry, Jack the Giant-Killer (though no library in the county seems to have its follow-up volume, Drink Down the Moon). What better place to begin with de Lint than an almost-standalone novel from the crib years of modern Adult Fantasy? From the very first paragraph, alas, which introduces our heroine, gazing at her reflection in numb disbelief after she's hacked off her hair and gone on an Ottawa-style bender after her boyfriend of three months leaves her for being too boring, Jack gets mired in the bog of lazy urban fantasy cliches. De Lint's tendency to be warmly formulaic in his short stories metamorphoses at novel length into a losing struggle with mediocrity. There's a painfully generic Unseelie Court, halfway between an orc horde and the muppets from Labyrinth (but failing at either one), stealing power and territory from a waning Seelie Court on the streets and suburbs of Ottawa; there's a no-nonsense best friend who tries to wisecrack through every situation; there are some cardboard-cutout versions of "good" faeries; there are paragraphs of location details that would make sense only to locals and do nothing to advance the story. The very same year in which Emma Bull made similar (essentially identical) cliches seem fresh and full of pep in War for the Oaks, de Lint seems to be coloring by numbers in a subgenre still barely past the blueprint stage.
There's nothing bad or unpleasant about de Lint's tale here, and Jack is not without its charms, like when Jacky finds her pluck and drives a hard bargain with the fey fiddler Kerevan, but overall, this book is rather thorough in its unremarkableness.
Friday, October 2, 2015
2015 read #57: Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler.
Adulthood Rites by Octavia E. Butler
277 pages
Published 1988
Read from September 29 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this middle entry in the Xenogenesis Trilogy is how alien yet natural the biology and the mental processes of the Oankali and their hybrid constructs feel. Butler makes the construction and depiction of an alien species seem effortless. As for the story itself, it was a neat little coming of age tale in the usual science fiction adventure style, and I find myself pleased with it for the most part, but have little to say about it that feels substantial.
Rites was written at a time when the cultural-scientific idea of nature vs. nurture had swung strongly back in the direction of nature, after the precocious peak of flower-child psychology in the '60s; much of the book is predicated upon the idea that humanity's doom, our primate heritage of "hierarchical behavior," is linked particularly and inextricably with biological maleness. Certainly male-dominated societies, historical as well as modern, don't have a positive record with this whole "treating human beings with dignity and respect" thing. But this "biology is destiny" approach to gender feels overly broad and clumsy now, through no fault of Butler's. It was just what people kind of accepted to be true at the time, I think, though it fit well with Butler's generally pessimistic view of human nature, her whole "We could achieve great things if we didn't kill each other over petty shit" message, best seen in Parable of the Sower.
277 pages
Published 1988
Read from September 29 to October 2
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of this middle entry in the Xenogenesis Trilogy is how alien yet natural the biology and the mental processes of the Oankali and their hybrid constructs feel. Butler makes the construction and depiction of an alien species seem effortless. As for the story itself, it was a neat little coming of age tale in the usual science fiction adventure style, and I find myself pleased with it for the most part, but have little to say about it that feels substantial.
Rites was written at a time when the cultural-scientific idea of nature vs. nurture had swung strongly back in the direction of nature, after the precocious peak of flower-child psychology in the '60s; much of the book is predicated upon the idea that humanity's doom, our primate heritage of "hierarchical behavior," is linked particularly and inextricably with biological maleness. Certainly male-dominated societies, historical as well as modern, don't have a positive record with this whole "treating human beings with dignity and respect" thing. But this "biology is destiny" approach to gender feels overly broad and clumsy now, through no fault of Butler's. It was just what people kind of accepted to be true at the time, I think, though it fit well with Butler's generally pessimistic view of human nature, her whole "We could achieve great things if we didn't kill each other over petty shit" message, best seen in Parable of the Sower.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
2015 read #56: Dawn by Octavia E. Butler.
Dawn by Octavia E. Butler
249 pages
Published 1987
Read from September 26 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I kept delaying this one because it begins my final trilogy of Octavia E. Butler novels. Once I finish Adulthood Rites and Imago sometime next month, I'll only have the short story collection Bloodchild, and then I'll have read every book Butler ever wrote. (Aside from Survivor, which apparently so dissatisfied Butler that she kept it out of print, and now costs $90 used on Amazon.) Which is a sad milestone I'd like to put off if I could. But it's also kind of silly to avoid reading a major chunk of an author's career out of sentimental reasons. So here we are.
My thoughts on Dawn are ambiguous and conflicting, as I'm sure Butler intended. I was repulsed less by the ostensible body horror of aliens manipulating one's brain chemistry and genotype, which sounded pretty cool if I'm being honest (I don't have a single "Keep my humanity intact!" bone in my body), but the iffy way Butler portrays how the aliens ignore verbal consent. There are two scenes of near-rape between human survivors, which are unequivocally presented as Bad Things people should not do to one another. But when the ooloi step in with their neural manipulators and sensory organs and override verbal refusals because human characters' bodies say something else, in literal "I know what you really want" interactions, I'm not sure how to interpret the scenes, or for that matter how Butler intended the scenes to be read. I'm pretty sure some measure of discomfort is intended, with the two attempted sexual assaults a consciously placed point of comparison, but unlike human-on-human dominance and aggression, it feels like the manipulations of the Oankali are meant to be seen as both good and bad, neither wholly positive nor entirely negative.
The rest of the book is quite good, as far as alien contact scenarios go -- in other words, this is far from my favorite subgenre (which is why, of all Butler's novels, I'm reading these last), but Butler makes it interesting and somewhat fresh.
249 pages
Published 1987
Read from September 26 to September 29
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I kept delaying this one because it begins my final trilogy of Octavia E. Butler novels. Once I finish Adulthood Rites and Imago sometime next month, I'll only have the short story collection Bloodchild, and then I'll have read every book Butler ever wrote. (Aside from Survivor, which apparently so dissatisfied Butler that she kept it out of print, and now costs $90 used on Amazon.) Which is a sad milestone I'd like to put off if I could. But it's also kind of silly to avoid reading a major chunk of an author's career out of sentimental reasons. So here we are.
My thoughts on Dawn are ambiguous and conflicting, as I'm sure Butler intended. I was repulsed less by the ostensible body horror of aliens manipulating one's brain chemistry and genotype, which sounded pretty cool if I'm being honest (I don't have a single "Keep my humanity intact!" bone in my body), but the iffy way Butler portrays how the aliens ignore verbal consent. There are two scenes of near-rape between human survivors, which are unequivocally presented as Bad Things people should not do to one another. But when the ooloi step in with their neural manipulators and sensory organs and override verbal refusals because human characters' bodies say something else, in literal "I know what you really want" interactions, I'm not sure how to interpret the scenes, or for that matter how Butler intended the scenes to be read. I'm pretty sure some measure of discomfort is intended, with the two attempted sexual assaults a consciously placed point of comparison, but unlike human-on-human dominance and aggression, it feels like the manipulations of the Oankali are meant to be seen as both good and bad, neither wholly positive nor entirely negative.
The rest of the book is quite good, as far as alien contact scenarios go -- in other words, this is far from my favorite subgenre (which is why, of all Butler's novels, I'm reading these last), but Butler makes it interesting and somewhat fresh.
Saturday, September 26, 2015
2015 read #55: Briar Rose by Jane Yolen.
Briar Rose by Jane Yolen
190 pages
Published 1992
Read September 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I was unduly proud of myself when I sussed out a connection between this series of "Adult Fantasy" novels (The Fairy Tale Series, created by Terri Windling) and the annual anthology collection begun in 1988 by Windling and her frequent editorial collaborator, Ellen Datlow. The connection isn't that hard to discern; in addition to the direction of Windling, the series (or at least this installment) features the cover art of Thomas Canty, perhaps the artist of late '80s/early '90s Romantic fantasy covers, and has an introduction by Windling, who earnestly (and rather quaintly, from the perspective of fantasy-rich 2015, when seemingly every cable network is pushing its own adult fantasy "prestige" series) makes a case for fairy tales as a mature and adult and grown-up and not at all childish medium. The clincher was the inclusion of a bibliography of "recommended reading," listing not only the other titles in this series (which, naturally, I jotted down in my to-read list) but also chapbooks and original anthologies and works of non-fiction dealing with the lore of faery. That was so in-line with the Datlow-Windling Year's Best Fantasy methodology that I could almost imagine that this series was a direct editorial off-shoot or progeny of that anthology, despite not having read the intervening volumes of the collection.
As for Briar Rose as a book, I found it amply competent, though as with C. J. Koch's The Doubleman, praised to Fairyland and back in one of the interminable introductions to the 1988 anthology, I personally wouldn't classify it as a work of fantasy. Instead Briar Rose is literary fiction borrowing imagery from the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty" as a sort of scaffolding for a tale of the Holocaust and of incorporating its unspeakable horrors into modern memory and understanding of the past. Regrettably, I've read little that touches upon the Holocaust (a deficit I aim to remedy), so I can't compare Briar Rose to any other attempt to make sense of it through fiction. The most I can say is that it was a good effort that worked well for the most part, without overthrowing my heart with literary brilliance.
190 pages
Published 1992
Read September 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I was unduly proud of myself when I sussed out a connection between this series of "Adult Fantasy" novels (The Fairy Tale Series, created by Terri Windling) and the annual anthology collection begun in 1988 by Windling and her frequent editorial collaborator, Ellen Datlow. The connection isn't that hard to discern; in addition to the direction of Windling, the series (or at least this installment) features the cover art of Thomas Canty, perhaps the artist of late '80s/early '90s Romantic fantasy covers, and has an introduction by Windling, who earnestly (and rather quaintly, from the perspective of fantasy-rich 2015, when seemingly every cable network is pushing its own adult fantasy "prestige" series) makes a case for fairy tales as a mature and adult and grown-up and not at all childish medium. The clincher was the inclusion of a bibliography of "recommended reading," listing not only the other titles in this series (which, naturally, I jotted down in my to-read list) but also chapbooks and original anthologies and works of non-fiction dealing with the lore of faery. That was so in-line with the Datlow-Windling Year's Best Fantasy methodology that I could almost imagine that this series was a direct editorial off-shoot or progeny of that anthology, despite not having read the intervening volumes of the collection.
As for Briar Rose as a book, I found it amply competent, though as with C. J. Koch's The Doubleman, praised to Fairyland and back in one of the interminable introductions to the 1988 anthology, I personally wouldn't classify it as a work of fantasy. Instead Briar Rose is literary fiction borrowing imagery from the fairy tale of "Sleeping Beauty" as a sort of scaffolding for a tale of the Holocaust and of incorporating its unspeakable horrors into modern memory and understanding of the past. Regrettably, I've read little that touches upon the Holocaust (a deficit I aim to remedy), so I can't compare Briar Rose to any other attempt to make sense of it through fiction. The most I can say is that it was a good effort that worked well for the most part, without overthrowing my heart with literary brilliance.
2015 read #54: Earth Abides by George R. Stewart.
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
312 pages
Published 1949
Read from September 22 to September 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I got to thinking about a pair of contradictory attitudes I hold. On one hand I consciously abhor the sort of self-satisfied sociopathy young males in our culture (and Republican voters of every age and gender) cherish, the Randian delusion that I am an enlightened, important being in the midst of sheep. On the other, I have to admit to being something of a self-satisfied elitist myself: Look at all these ignorant beings around me who never notice the sky or the trees or the rocks underfoot, and have no concept of time and space and the scale of existence. The former aspect of my outlook found Earth Abides' thematic and narrative through-line that not all human beings can think or lead or create rather troublesome. The latter part of me remembered that most people are pretty dull, at least to all outside appearances, and reluctantly agreed that a random pool of survivors from a globally lethal pandemic wouldn't behave all that differently, in all probability, from Stewart's depiction. Perhaps I can resolve my internal conflict, at least in terms of this book, by rejecting all notions of inborn ability rooted on gender and racial constructs and class, and citing sociological and psychological data on how it's the way you were raised that largely determines your abilities and outlook, rather than some icky Randian chosen-one narrative.
The first third or so of this book, which begins with a variant on the proverbial "waking up in an abandoned hospital" device (and possibly invented it for this type of global depopulation narrative, for all I know) and follows our hero Ish through the first days and weeks of discovering the aftermath of the contagion, is good stuff. The wires hanging up the scenery are a bit obvious -- you can tell Stewart really, really wanted to show off his ideas of how each region of the country would appear after 99.999% of humanity got wiped out -- but it worked for me. The ending, a brief coda which sees our now superannuated survivor, "the Last American," observing what his little Tribe has become in the succeeding three generations, is also quite evocative, making me long for a sequel of some sort to explore this future society in greater depth. The stretch in between, however, gets dull and repetitive at times, as our hero spends much of his time in his own head, worrying at problems he thinks no one else around him is intellectually inclined to discuss with him (or capable of grasping, for that matter). The philosophical meat here, whether "man" pushes back more at his surroundings or his surroundings push more against him, is a basic rhetorical question in sociology, and I never felt that Stewart gave his own answer sufficiently well, given how many times it gets chewed in Ish's ruminations.
So, here we have about half of a quite good book, bookending a rather dry and directionless middle. Earth Abides is interesting as one of the earliest examples of the post-apocalyptic narrative -- I only know of After London and Mary Shelley's even older The Last Man coming before this one, though I really should have googled for others before publishing this review. Oh well. I'll google it later and give myself some more things to add to my to-read list.
312 pages
Published 1949
Read from September 22 to September 25
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I got to thinking about a pair of contradictory attitudes I hold. On one hand I consciously abhor the sort of self-satisfied sociopathy young males in our culture (and Republican voters of every age and gender) cherish, the Randian delusion that I am an enlightened, important being in the midst of sheep. On the other, I have to admit to being something of a self-satisfied elitist myself: Look at all these ignorant beings around me who never notice the sky or the trees or the rocks underfoot, and have no concept of time and space and the scale of existence. The former aspect of my outlook found Earth Abides' thematic and narrative through-line that not all human beings can think or lead or create rather troublesome. The latter part of me remembered that most people are pretty dull, at least to all outside appearances, and reluctantly agreed that a random pool of survivors from a globally lethal pandemic wouldn't behave all that differently, in all probability, from Stewart's depiction. Perhaps I can resolve my internal conflict, at least in terms of this book, by rejecting all notions of inborn ability rooted on gender and racial constructs and class, and citing sociological and psychological data on how it's the way you were raised that largely determines your abilities and outlook, rather than some icky Randian chosen-one narrative.
The first third or so of this book, which begins with a variant on the proverbial "waking up in an abandoned hospital" device (and possibly invented it for this type of global depopulation narrative, for all I know) and follows our hero Ish through the first days and weeks of discovering the aftermath of the contagion, is good stuff. The wires hanging up the scenery are a bit obvious -- you can tell Stewart really, really wanted to show off his ideas of how each region of the country would appear after 99.999% of humanity got wiped out -- but it worked for me. The ending, a brief coda which sees our now superannuated survivor, "the Last American," observing what his little Tribe has become in the succeeding three generations, is also quite evocative, making me long for a sequel of some sort to explore this future society in greater depth. The stretch in between, however, gets dull and repetitive at times, as our hero spends much of his time in his own head, worrying at problems he thinks no one else around him is intellectually inclined to discuss with him (or capable of grasping, for that matter). The philosophical meat here, whether "man" pushes back more at his surroundings or his surroundings push more against him, is a basic rhetorical question in sociology, and I never felt that Stewart gave his own answer sufficiently well, given how many times it gets chewed in Ish's ruminations.
So, here we have about half of a quite good book, bookending a rather dry and directionless middle. Earth Abides is interesting as one of the earliest examples of the post-apocalyptic narrative -- I only know of After London and Mary Shelley's even older The Last Man coming before this one, though I really should have googled for others before publishing this review. Oh well. I'll google it later and give myself some more things to add to my to-read list.
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
2015 read #53: The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black.
The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black
328 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 18 to September 22
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Comparing and contrasting books with vaguely similar works I'd reviewed before seems to be my default rhetorical device these days. In that spirit, the obvious parallel to be drawn here, at least in the early chapters, is with the fantasy output of Michael Swanwick. If The Hunger Games is babby's first 1984, then Black's scene-setting, with small-town high school students getting drunk and breaking bottles over the casket of a sleeping faery prince, is like babby's first The Iron Dragon's Daughter, mixed with a soupçon of "The Edge of the World" (reviewed here). Black's fey tourist trap (however literal that might be) lacks the near-Soviet nihilism of Swanwick's milieu, but also feels closer in spirit to the old-time faery lore I love so well, rather than just search-and-replacing modern social ills with magical equivalents (which was one reason The Iron Dragon's Daughter was, for me, an almost-classic, rather than a mindblowing masterpiece, as it possibly should have been).
Once the setting is established, The Darkest Part of the Forest shifts away from that Swanwickian flavor and, to my mind at least, settles into a more conventional YA fantasy mold, albeit a pleasingly progressive sort of YA in which the central protagonist is a girl who likes to kiss lots of different boys, and her brother is matter-of-factly gay, and high school kids drink and curse a lot. (It is implied, unfortunately, that the only reason the girl makes out with lots of boys is her parents' neglect and absentee habits.) The book as a whole is satisfying, full of winsome touches and humor, though the emotional beats lacked punch, I felt, and the action scenes were a bit on the choppy side. The setting was perhaps the most memorable facet of the book, and that, of course, was pretty much just another variation on the modern fantasy interpretation of the Unseelie Court, a very New England-ish spin on the concept that could be compared to the witch-tourism of Blithe Hollow in the movie ParaNorman. If, you know, I were the sort of reviewer to shoehorn random comparisons into my reviews.
And no, it hasn't escaped me that this is the sixth book in a row to receive a mildly positive, I-liked-it-but-won't-commit-to-loving it grade of three and a half stars. It's all arbitrary anyway.
328 pages
Published 2015
Read from September 18 to September 22
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Comparing and contrasting books with vaguely similar works I'd reviewed before seems to be my default rhetorical device these days. In that spirit, the obvious parallel to be drawn here, at least in the early chapters, is with the fantasy output of Michael Swanwick. If The Hunger Games is babby's first 1984, then Black's scene-setting, with small-town high school students getting drunk and breaking bottles over the casket of a sleeping faery prince, is like babby's first The Iron Dragon's Daughter, mixed with a soupçon of "The Edge of the World" (reviewed here). Black's fey tourist trap (however literal that might be) lacks the near-Soviet nihilism of Swanwick's milieu, but also feels closer in spirit to the old-time faery lore I love so well, rather than just search-and-replacing modern social ills with magical equivalents (which was one reason The Iron Dragon's Daughter was, for me, an almost-classic, rather than a mindblowing masterpiece, as it possibly should have been).
Once the setting is established, The Darkest Part of the Forest shifts away from that Swanwickian flavor and, to my mind at least, settles into a more conventional YA fantasy mold, albeit a pleasingly progressive sort of YA in which the central protagonist is a girl who likes to kiss lots of different boys, and her brother is matter-of-factly gay, and high school kids drink and curse a lot. (It is implied, unfortunately, that the only reason the girl makes out with lots of boys is her parents' neglect and absentee habits.) The book as a whole is satisfying, full of winsome touches and humor, though the emotional beats lacked punch, I felt, and the action scenes were a bit on the choppy side. The setting was perhaps the most memorable facet of the book, and that, of course, was pretty much just another variation on the modern fantasy interpretation of the Unseelie Court, a very New England-ish spin on the concept that could be compared to the witch-tourism of Blithe Hollow in the movie ParaNorman. If, you know, I were the sort of reviewer to shoehorn random comparisons into my reviews.
And no, it hasn't escaped me that this is the sixth book in a row to receive a mildly positive, I-liked-it-but-won't-commit-to-loving it grade of three and a half stars. It's all arbitrary anyway.
Friday, September 18, 2015
2015 read #52: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
378 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 17 to September 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The obvious point of comparison here, in my (limited) reading experience, is Maria McCann's excellent As Meat Loves Salt, another historical romance with a gay couple at its heart. McCann's masterwork is more ambitious, couched in marvelously fluent prose suggestive of (but not overwhelmed by) the English usage of its time, its narrator a tragic and violent antihero who nonetheless remains sympathetic throughout most of his self-destructive arc. Miller's debut is "safe" in comparison, built around one of the classical romances of antiquity (regardless of how Homer may have intended their relationship to be understood), and her narrator Patroclus, though caught in a love doomed by fate and prophecy as well as Achilles' tragic nature, is himself a model of a sympathetic romantic lead, made an outsider by upbringing and circumstance but fundamentally a relatable reader proxy. Miller's prose never quite reaches the exquisite heartbreak pitch of McCann at her best, but is satisfyingly sensuous and moving as needed. Certain episodes can feel less than fully fleshed out; Miller breezes through the instruction of Chiron as if it were a brief woodsy idyll rather than suggesting the ancient strangeness of Chiron's existence and identity, and while she attempts to portray Thetis as an uncanny, other-than-human being, none of the mythological elements really clicked for me, spoiled as I am by a wealth of excellent otherworldly fantasy. Nonetheless, this was a novel of above-average competence, even if it doesn't quite aspire to (or reach) the heights of my rather arbitrary point of comparison.
378 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 17 to September 18
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The obvious point of comparison here, in my (limited) reading experience, is Maria McCann's excellent As Meat Loves Salt, another historical romance with a gay couple at its heart. McCann's masterwork is more ambitious, couched in marvelously fluent prose suggestive of (but not overwhelmed by) the English usage of its time, its narrator a tragic and violent antihero who nonetheless remains sympathetic throughout most of his self-destructive arc. Miller's debut is "safe" in comparison, built around one of the classical romances of antiquity (regardless of how Homer may have intended their relationship to be understood), and her narrator Patroclus, though caught in a love doomed by fate and prophecy as well as Achilles' tragic nature, is himself a model of a sympathetic romantic lead, made an outsider by upbringing and circumstance but fundamentally a relatable reader proxy. Miller's prose never quite reaches the exquisite heartbreak pitch of McCann at her best, but is satisfyingly sensuous and moving as needed. Certain episodes can feel less than fully fleshed out; Miller breezes through the instruction of Chiron as if it were a brief woodsy idyll rather than suggesting the ancient strangeness of Chiron's existence and identity, and while she attempts to portray Thetis as an uncanny, other-than-human being, none of the mythological elements really clicked for me, spoiled as I am by a wealth of excellent otherworldly fantasy. Nonetheless, this was a novel of above-average competence, even if it doesn't quite aspire to (or reach) the heights of my rather arbitrary point of comparison.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
2015 read #51: The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington.
The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century by Joel F. Harrington
256 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 15 to September 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The understandable (but nonetheless frustrating) tendency among historians and other social scientists is to tease out any number of speculations and possible interpretations from thin skeins of evidence. Naturally, we want to build up as full a picture as possible from the primary sources at hand, but this almost guarantees that the resulting narrative will say more about our own (or at least the author's) values and cultural assumptions than it does about the worldview of the historical subject. Harrington stresses the "empathy" and "disgust" alternately discernible in the laconic, otherwise impersonal journal of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg in the sixteenth century, emotional responses Harrington uses to shore up his depiction of Schmidt as a man obsessed with honor (personal and familial) and social status. But Harrington surmises Schmidt's visceral reactions based on the number of words and amount of detail Schmidt devotes in his journal to each of the punishments he notates, e.g. Schmidt was appalled by breaches of the social contract in cases wherein servants rob their masters or destitute women kill their newborns. This is perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but as far as interpretive methodologies go, it seems especially flimsy, and Harrington's "honor and shame" storyline is rather simplistic. Hitching the interpretive narrative to one conceptual through-line is common enough, in academic works ranging from doctoral dissertations to popular paperback histories, but it is less than satisfying.
The Faithful Executioner makes up for its lack of nuance (which, admittedly, is largely concomitant with the lack of primary sources) by examining several fascinating and extremely underrepresented topics: the life and aspirations of common people, the activities and words of the underclass, and (let's be honest) the salacious details of long ago crime. Harrington's prose is dry but readable. I would have appreciated something like an appendix translating Schmidt's writings without Harrington's selective quotation, which perhaps could have bolstered what I felt were Harrington's more tenuous claims of Schmidt's perceptions and reactions (or perhaps not).
256 pages
Published 2013
Read from September 15 to September 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
The understandable (but nonetheless frustrating) tendency among historians and other social scientists is to tease out any number of speculations and possible interpretations from thin skeins of evidence. Naturally, we want to build up as full a picture as possible from the primary sources at hand, but this almost guarantees that the resulting narrative will say more about our own (or at least the author's) values and cultural assumptions than it does about the worldview of the historical subject. Harrington stresses the "empathy" and "disgust" alternately discernible in the laconic, otherwise impersonal journal of Meister Frantz Schmidt, executioner for the city of Nuremburg in the sixteenth century, emotional responses Harrington uses to shore up his depiction of Schmidt as a man obsessed with honor (personal and familial) and social status. But Harrington surmises Schmidt's visceral reactions based on the number of words and amount of detail Schmidt devotes in his journal to each of the punishments he notates, e.g. Schmidt was appalled by breaches of the social contract in cases wherein servants rob their masters or destitute women kill their newborns. This is perhaps not wholly inaccurate, but as far as interpretive methodologies go, it seems especially flimsy, and Harrington's "honor and shame" storyline is rather simplistic. Hitching the interpretive narrative to one conceptual through-line is common enough, in academic works ranging from doctoral dissertations to popular paperback histories, but it is less than satisfying.
The Faithful Executioner makes up for its lack of nuance (which, admittedly, is largely concomitant with the lack of primary sources) by examining several fascinating and extremely underrepresented topics: the life and aspirations of common people, the activities and words of the underclass, and (let's be honest) the salacious details of long ago crime. Harrington's prose is dry but readable. I would have appreciated something like an appendix translating Schmidt's writings without Harrington's selective quotation, which perhaps could have bolstered what I felt were Harrington's more tenuous claims of Schmidt's perceptions and reactions (or perhaps not).
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
2015 read #50: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
213 pages
Published 1999
Read September 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
If Jo Walton's Among Others is as close to a narrative of my own teen years as I've ever encountered in fiction (albeit seen through a genre filter), The Perks of Being a Wallflower is pretty much an examination of what I might have been like had I actually gone to high school. The correspondence between teenage me and epistolary narrator Charlie isn't as exact as it was between me and Walton's narrator Mori -- if anything, Charlie was far more outgoing, socially skilled, and eager for new experiences than I was at his age. You might say I would have been more of a wallflower than Charlie. I certainly wouldn't have tried LSD at a party, I have never been tempted to smoke cigarettes, and at 32 years old, I've yet to try weed (though I have no firm personal policy against it). But I related to Charlie's social confusion and tendency to observe from the side of things, and to sacrifice his own desires out of some misguided idea of friendship.
I liked how Charlie's prose style improved somewhat after his initial "letters," though I might ask if it improved enough, realistically speaking, given that he was taking an intensive English class and writing regularly (letters and essays both) for a year. But that's a small quibble. I was left somewhat unsatisfied by how on-the-nose some of the plot twists and psychological revelations were (multiple characters have internalized various mental pathologies as a result of childhood molestation), but this is a YA book from the tail end of the '90s, so that's to be expected, really. I do want to take the time to praise Chbosky for even talking about molestation (not to mention condemning rape, emphasizing consent, and normalizing homosexuality) in a YA book from the '90s. It wasn't that long ago, but in terms of sexual identity and acceptance, 1999 may as well have been in another millennium. (Not my best witticism, sorry about that. I haven't been sleeping well in recent weeks.)
213 pages
Published 1999
Read September 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
If Jo Walton's Among Others is as close to a narrative of my own teen years as I've ever encountered in fiction (albeit seen through a genre filter), The Perks of Being a Wallflower is pretty much an examination of what I might have been like had I actually gone to high school. The correspondence between teenage me and epistolary narrator Charlie isn't as exact as it was between me and Walton's narrator Mori -- if anything, Charlie was far more outgoing, socially skilled, and eager for new experiences than I was at his age. You might say I would have been more of a wallflower than Charlie. I certainly wouldn't have tried LSD at a party, I have never been tempted to smoke cigarettes, and at 32 years old, I've yet to try weed (though I have no firm personal policy against it). But I related to Charlie's social confusion and tendency to observe from the side of things, and to sacrifice his own desires out of some misguided idea of friendship.
I liked how Charlie's prose style improved somewhat after his initial "letters," though I might ask if it improved enough, realistically speaking, given that he was taking an intensive English class and writing regularly (letters and essays both) for a year. But that's a small quibble. I was left somewhat unsatisfied by how on-the-nose some of the plot twists and psychological revelations were (multiple characters have internalized various mental pathologies as a result of childhood molestation), but this is a YA book from the tail end of the '90s, so that's to be expected, really. I do want to take the time to praise Chbosky for even talking about molestation (not to mention condemning rape, emphasizing consent, and normalizing homosexuality) in a YA book from the '90s. It wasn't that long ago, but in terms of sexual identity and acceptance, 1999 may as well have been in another millennium. (Not my best witticism, sorry about that. I haven't been sleeping well in recent weeks.)
2015 read #49: Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa.
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria by Noo Saro-Wiwa
311 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 10 to September 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I know next to nothing about Nigeria. I know of Shell Oil's corruption and the pollution in the Niger Delta. I have a simplistic notion of Delta natives struggling against an all-powerful international corporation to save their homes, their livelihoods, and their health. I have an even sketchier picture of a long series of corrupt presidents and dictators and military coups going back to independence from the UK. Before the British, all I have to go on is a series of barely remembered masks and statues and bronzes seen in the Met, all blurred together under a mental "West African" label. In short, I know much more about Nigeria than most White Americans do, but my store of knowledge has never inched above pathetic.
Looking for Transwonderland is a hybrid between the memoir of a woman raised in England revisiting Nigeria many years after the political murder of her activist father, and a comic tourist narrative of the frustrations and hidden charms of traveling the country. For the most part, Saro-Wiwa tends to avoid digging deep into the economic and political complexities of Nigeria, offering a general gloss on its system of profiteering and kickbacks, opportunities and potential lost to greed and cronyism, but I feel like I only gleaned about an article's worth of geopolitical and humanitarian insight from this entire volume. The tourism sections were interesting in their own right, and introduced me to locations and historical events that I enjoyed reading up on via Wikipedia. But never having read much in this genre (and that mostly limited to the internet), I don't have anything to compare it to, and not much to say about it.
311 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 10 to September 14
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I know next to nothing about Nigeria. I know of Shell Oil's corruption and the pollution in the Niger Delta. I have a simplistic notion of Delta natives struggling against an all-powerful international corporation to save their homes, their livelihoods, and their health. I have an even sketchier picture of a long series of corrupt presidents and dictators and military coups going back to independence from the UK. Before the British, all I have to go on is a series of barely remembered masks and statues and bronzes seen in the Met, all blurred together under a mental "West African" label. In short, I know much more about Nigeria than most White Americans do, but my store of knowledge has never inched above pathetic.
Looking for Transwonderland is a hybrid between the memoir of a woman raised in England revisiting Nigeria many years after the political murder of her activist father, and a comic tourist narrative of the frustrations and hidden charms of traveling the country. For the most part, Saro-Wiwa tends to avoid digging deep into the economic and political complexities of Nigeria, offering a general gloss on its system of profiteering and kickbacks, opportunities and potential lost to greed and cronyism, but I feel like I only gleaned about an article's worth of geopolitical and humanitarian insight from this entire volume. The tourism sections were interesting in their own right, and introduced me to locations and historical events that I enjoyed reading up on via Wikipedia. But never having read much in this genre (and that mostly limited to the internet), I don't have anything to compare it to, and not much to say about it.
Thursday, September 10, 2015
2015 read #48: The Martian by Andy Weir.
The Martian by Andy Weir
369 pages
Published 2014 (originally published as an ebook 2011)
Read from September 9 to September 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I will say this for The Martian: I haven't been this hooked on turning pages since All Clear by Connie Willis, way back in January. Actually, considering that I read 369 pages in a matter of ten hours, this may be my fastest reading pace of the year so far (which, admittedly, isn't saying much -- it's been a bad year for my reading pace). Easy readability is not the same as high literature, however. Weir's narrative voice for his stranded astronaut's logs (and occasional verbal recordings, which mysteriously possess the same cadence and sentence structure the character uses in writing, which must make him a bore at parties) is the snarky geek voice familiar from a thousand tech and science blogs, which no doubt contributes to the internet's seemingly universal esteem for this book. Unfortunately, the astronaut's log gets interrupted by boilerplate scenes of technicians discovering problems and administrators holding meeting after meeting in conference rooms, scenes which felt wholly out of place, more suited for a Crichton-esque airport thriller. Perhaps those interruptions were added to "polish" Weir's self-published manuscript for the Big Time? They certainly felt tacked on, as did all the faceless technician and bureaucrat characters that fill out the scenes.
Nevertheless, what Weir produced here is an excellent example of its type, and I'm eager to see how thoroughly Matt Damon botches the central role in the movie version next month.
369 pages
Published 2014 (originally published as an ebook 2011)
Read from September 9 to September 10
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
I will say this for The Martian: I haven't been this hooked on turning pages since All Clear by Connie Willis, way back in January. Actually, considering that I read 369 pages in a matter of ten hours, this may be my fastest reading pace of the year so far (which, admittedly, isn't saying much -- it's been a bad year for my reading pace). Easy readability is not the same as high literature, however. Weir's narrative voice for his stranded astronaut's logs (and occasional verbal recordings, which mysteriously possess the same cadence and sentence structure the character uses in writing, which must make him a bore at parties) is the snarky geek voice familiar from a thousand tech and science blogs, which no doubt contributes to the internet's seemingly universal esteem for this book. Unfortunately, the astronaut's log gets interrupted by boilerplate scenes of technicians discovering problems and administrators holding meeting after meeting in conference rooms, scenes which felt wholly out of place, more suited for a Crichton-esque airport thriller. Perhaps those interruptions were added to "polish" Weir's self-published manuscript for the Big Time? They certainly felt tacked on, as did all the faceless technician and bureaucrat characters that fill out the scenes.
Nevertheless, what Weir produced here is an excellent example of its type, and I'm eager to see how thoroughly Matt Damon botches the central role in the movie version next month.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
2015 read #47: Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury.
Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury
184 pages
Published 1957
Read from September 5 to September 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When better to read a book of summer heats and magic and an idyll of small town childhood than in the grip of a September heatwave? I'm afraid I have nothing inspired to say in response to this "fixup" (as they used to call them in the science fiction industry) of short stories and vignettes, but when has a lack of anything interesting to say stood in the way of my reviews before? There's the obvious critique that Bradbury's idealized Midwest town is as white as its late summer skies, that this is a book of privileged upbringing and miraculous grandmothers and grand old houses, but depicting a monomyth of American childhood is sort of Bradbury's thing, and as one-dimensional as that depiction might be, he excels at it. The prose could be a type specimen of the adjective Bradburyesque, dripping with sensory juices and glints of brilliance. I was a little disappointed by how little of the fantastic made its way into these pages, but heck, that's as silly a critique as I ever put down on this blog.
184 pages
Published 1957
Read from September 5 to September 9
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When better to read a book of summer heats and magic and an idyll of small town childhood than in the grip of a September heatwave? I'm afraid I have nothing inspired to say in response to this "fixup" (as they used to call them in the science fiction industry) of short stories and vignettes, but when has a lack of anything interesting to say stood in the way of my reviews before? There's the obvious critique that Bradbury's idealized Midwest town is as white as its late summer skies, that this is a book of privileged upbringing and miraculous grandmothers and grand old houses, but depicting a monomyth of American childhood is sort of Bradbury's thing, and as one-dimensional as that depiction might be, he excels at it. The prose could be a type specimen of the adjective Bradburyesque, dripping with sensory juices and glints of brilliance. I was a little disappointed by how little of the fantastic made its way into these pages, but heck, that's as silly a critique as I ever put down on this blog.
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