Legend of Lost Earth by G. McDonald Wallis
133 pages
Published 1963
Read from June 28 to June 30
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The sci-fi "double" novel of yore is thoroughly charming. I bought this original Ace Double edition in order to obtain Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett, but was almost equally excited to discover this unknown book by an unknown (to me) author, potentially a lost pulp classic for all I knew. Buying a book because it's by an author you like, and getting a second book by a "new" author you might be glad to discover, feels close to the very spirit of sci-fi readership. It's a shame that, despite some attempts at revival, the double never caught back on with more modern readership.
Legend of Lost Earth, despite an atmospheric setting and some Celtic flavor setting it apart from more formulaic fare of the time, was disappointingly mediocre. It begins as a dollar store knockoff of 1984 set, ostensibly, in space, which is entertaining enough while it lasts. But the big "Everything is not what you thought!" twist is a mash of half-baked ideas, mingling vague words about a sentient Earth choosing who will live on it, something about multiple Earths overlapping each other, and the power of good vibes to escape a totalitarian hellhole and find a green and grassy Eden that's been there all along. A soupçon of biblical doctrine is in there somewhere as well. Frankly, it becomes a bit of a mess.
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Sunday, June 28, 2015
2015 read #30: Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett.
Alpha Centauri—Or Die! by Leigh Brackett
121 pages
Published 1963 (a fixup of two stories published in 1953 and 1954, respectively)
Read from June 26 to June 28
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Kind of a midcentury standard pulp space adventure, in which a libertarian man's man rebels against the computerized nanny state in order to be manly and play with his rocket. The exquisitely felt humanity of Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is absent here. Our hero's noble Martian wife gets him out of one scrape by play-acting shrewish and hysterical, but that merely bolsters his status as a superior grade of man; the wives of his co-conspirators nag and complain because that's all they're permitted to do in this type of story. A moderately entertaining but ultimately disposable piece -- the best part of it is the title.
121 pages
Published 1963 (a fixup of two stories published in 1953 and 1954, respectively)
Read from June 26 to June 28
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
Kind of a midcentury standard pulp space adventure, in which a libertarian man's man rebels against the computerized nanny state in order to be manly and play with his rocket. The exquisitely felt humanity of Brackett's The Long Tomorrow is absent here. Our hero's noble Martian wife gets him out of one scrape by play-acting shrewish and hysterical, but that merely bolsters his status as a superior grade of man; the wives of his co-conspirators nag and complain because that's all they're permitted to do in this type of story. A moderately entertaining but ultimately disposable piece -- the best part of it is the title.
Friday, June 26, 2015
2015 read #29: The Mount by Carol Emshwiller.
The Mount by Carol Emshwiller
233 pages
Published 2002
Read from June 24 to June 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
High-concept soft science fiction in fine form. Emshwiller brings a gentle but sure hand to her prose, finding unexpected conviction and sensitivity, and ambiguity of feeling, in her tale of alien invaders using human beings as, and breeding them for, riding stock, and employing the conceit as a lens to examine concepts of freedom, self-determination, civilization, and mutualism as a survival strategy. The novel benefits from the breadth of these questions, but I wasn't left convinced that I'd gained any new insight into these topics after reading it. There's an awkward absence of representation in the Hoot-dominated breeding stock, with black-haired white people and red-haired white people forming the bulk of extant humanity, which even in Emshwiller's preferred setting of the Sierra Nevada seems to be omitting some folks.
Just as in her The Secret City, Emshwiller treats the Sierra as a central character in the novel, lingering on views and the palpable exertion of climbing up and down rocky passes, pausing to huddle under and then admire a high-altitude hailstorm.
233 pages
Published 2002
Read from June 24 to June 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
High-concept soft science fiction in fine form. Emshwiller brings a gentle but sure hand to her prose, finding unexpected conviction and sensitivity, and ambiguity of feeling, in her tale of alien invaders using human beings as, and breeding them for, riding stock, and employing the conceit as a lens to examine concepts of freedom, self-determination, civilization, and mutualism as a survival strategy. The novel benefits from the breadth of these questions, but I wasn't left convinced that I'd gained any new insight into these topics after reading it. There's an awkward absence of representation in the Hoot-dominated breeding stock, with black-haired white people and red-haired white people forming the bulk of extant humanity, which even in Emshwiller's preferred setting of the Sierra Nevada seems to be omitting some folks.
Just as in her The Secret City, Emshwiller treats the Sierra as a central character in the novel, lingering on views and the palpable exertion of climbing up and down rocky passes, pausing to huddle under and then admire a high-altitude hailstorm.
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
2015 read #28: On the Beach by Nevil Shute.
On the Beach by Nevil Shute
279 pages
Published 1957
Read from June 19 to June 24
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Expertly mixing tragedy with tangents of utter boredom, this classic of nuclear fallout makes human extinction a banal, inexorable process of fly fishing, auto racing, brandy drinking, and garden improvements. The quotidian details make for an insidious apocalypse, but also tend to pad out an otherwise affecting novel.
279 pages
Published 1957
Read from June 19 to June 24
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Expertly mixing tragedy with tangents of utter boredom, this classic of nuclear fallout makes human extinction a banal, inexorable process of fly fishing, auto racing, brandy drinking, and garden improvements. The quotidian details make for an insidious apocalypse, but also tend to pad out an otherwise affecting novel.
Saturday, June 20, 2015
2015 read #27: Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell.
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
438 pages
Published 2013
Read from June 5 to June 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
At what point this year will I learn to quit when I'm just not feelin' a particular book? At this rate I doubt I'll be able to finish even sixty books by the end of the year. A sad state of affairs.
Fangirl was all right, really. The problem was my inability to get invested in anything lately that doesn't immediately grab my interest. The first fifty or so pages were off-putting because, frankly, the central character reminded me too much of me when I was 18. Representation in fiction is vital, but Cath represented 18 year old Rick a little too well. That paralyzing social avoidance and panic is not something I wish to revisit. Even when the viewpoint character had begun to adjust, I found my interest in her growing love affair outstripped by my concern about her grades and her writing assignment. Hardly the stuff of a swooning romance, not at all as well-observed and deeply-felt as the central relationship in Rowell's Eleanor & Park.
I did enjoy the snippets from Rowell's fictional Harry Potter pastiche, as well as Cath's fanfic of the same -- I especially liked the fact that both were written in subtly but noticeably different voices.
438 pages
Published 2013
Read from June 5 to June 19
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
At what point this year will I learn to quit when I'm just not feelin' a particular book? At this rate I doubt I'll be able to finish even sixty books by the end of the year. A sad state of affairs.
Fangirl was all right, really. The problem was my inability to get invested in anything lately that doesn't immediately grab my interest. The first fifty or so pages were off-putting because, frankly, the central character reminded me too much of me when I was 18. Representation in fiction is vital, but Cath represented 18 year old Rick a little too well. That paralyzing social avoidance and panic is not something I wish to revisit. Even when the viewpoint character had begun to adjust, I found my interest in her growing love affair outstripped by my concern about her grades and her writing assignment. Hardly the stuff of a swooning romance, not at all as well-observed and deeply-felt as the central relationship in Rowell's Eleanor & Park.
I did enjoy the snippets from Rowell's fictional Harry Potter pastiche, as well as Cath's fanfic of the same -- I especially liked the fact that both were written in subtly but noticeably different voices.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
2015 read #26: Magnificat by Julian May.
Magnificat by Julian May
431 pages
Published 1996
Read from May 25 to June 3
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The concept of a science fiction trilogy exploring the personal and political lead-up to a galactic conflict, rather than the conflict itself, is an intriguing one. Goodness knows there are enough stories of space battles and interplanetary conflict, both romanticizing and deconstructing the concept and practice of war; a story that traces root causes instead could be a bold and illuminating new angle. Once I was reconciled to the fact that May's trilogy about a Galactic Rebellion would dawdle along with dinner parties and sex with disembodied brains, and devote at most a chapter to the actual conflict, I could have been mollified by this perspective -- but only if the groundwork for the rebellion had not been so thoroughly ridiculous.
I don't like the SF crutch of "evil" characters. When there must needs be hostilities and bloodshed, I would much prefer that the antagonists reached their respective positions legitimately, through the workings of character and circumstance and ideology. Marc Remillard, "Angel of the Abyss" and paramount-metapsychic leader of the Rebellion, arrives at his position not through flaws in his character or a sincere conviction of humanity's need for "freedom" from alien oversight, but because a devil, more or less, had been whispering in his ear while he slept. Our two good guys, meanwhile, after getting built up during their two respective titular volumes, get shuffled off to the sidelines until they're shoved into place for the denouement. That devalues the central conflict from a confrontation of character with tangible stakes to an author-directed deus ex machina to get the pieces where they need to be (for a resolution we've known since the third book of the Saga of Pliocene Exile, published thirteen years previously). It is also, in psychological terms, facile and unsatisfying.
For approximately one entire page (slightly less than that, but I'm being generous), Magnificat hints at the sort of story I wanted all along, summarizing the coadunate reactions of the various Milieu species to the human Rebellion. I like the universe May has set up, for the most part; I wish we had spent less time regurgitating the same back-and-forth on Teilhardian unanimization (and far less time on factory-grown metapsychic embryos corrupted in utero by mustache-twirling evil), and more time in the company of the delightful Poltroyans and the intimidating but kindly Krondaku. The only things I'll miss about May's Galactic Milieu are her aliens. I think back fondly to the Saga of Pliocene Exile, but almost all of my nostalgia there is likewise bound up with the setting.
As Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless admonished in the climax, I persevered. And now I'm done. Thank the All in all.
431 pages
Published 1996
Read from May 25 to June 3
Rating: ★★ out of 5
The concept of a science fiction trilogy exploring the personal and political lead-up to a galactic conflict, rather than the conflict itself, is an intriguing one. Goodness knows there are enough stories of space battles and interplanetary conflict, both romanticizing and deconstructing the concept and practice of war; a story that traces root causes instead could be a bold and illuminating new angle. Once I was reconciled to the fact that May's trilogy about a Galactic Rebellion would dawdle along with dinner parties and sex with disembodied brains, and devote at most a chapter to the actual conflict, I could have been mollified by this perspective -- but only if the groundwork for the rebellion had not been so thoroughly ridiculous.
I don't like the SF crutch of "evil" characters. When there must needs be hostilities and bloodshed, I would much prefer that the antagonists reached their respective positions legitimately, through the workings of character and circumstance and ideology. Marc Remillard, "Angel of the Abyss" and paramount-metapsychic leader of the Rebellion, arrives at his position not through flaws in his character or a sincere conviction of humanity's need for "freedom" from alien oversight, but because a devil, more or less, had been whispering in his ear while he slept. Our two good guys, meanwhile, after getting built up during their two respective titular volumes, get shuffled off to the sidelines until they're shoved into place for the denouement. That devalues the central conflict from a confrontation of character with tangible stakes to an author-directed deus ex machina to get the pieces where they need to be (for a resolution we've known since the third book of the Saga of Pliocene Exile, published thirteen years previously). It is also, in psychological terms, facile and unsatisfying.
For approximately one entire page (slightly less than that, but I'm being generous), Magnificat hints at the sort of story I wanted all along, summarizing the coadunate reactions of the various Milieu species to the human Rebellion. I like the universe May has set up, for the most part; I wish we had spent less time regurgitating the same back-and-forth on Teilhardian unanimization (and far less time on factory-grown metapsychic embryos corrupted in utero by mustache-twirling evil), and more time in the company of the delightful Poltroyans and the intimidating but kindly Krondaku. The only things I'll miss about May's Galactic Milieu are her aliens. I think back fondly to the Saga of Pliocene Exile, but almost all of my nostalgia there is likewise bound up with the setting.
As Diamond Mask and Jack the Bodiless admonished in the climax, I persevered. And now I'm done. Thank the All in all.
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