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.
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