Slan by A. E. van Vogt
255 pages
Published 1946 (originally serialized 1940)
Read from April 18 to April 29
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
A classic of the Astounding-curated "Golden Age" of science fiction, Slan (according to the blurb on the back cover of this reprint edition) "was considered the single most important SF novel" throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Read now, it's something of an absurd relic, approximately on the same level of storytelling, character depth, and prose quality as a contemporary pulp movie serial, the kind that get riffed on MST3K. The tale begins with a slan (a mutant superhuman with psychic powers and superstrength) mother artlessly dumping exposition on the reader, reminding her young son of what they are, what their powers are, and what risks they run among hostile humanity. "As you well know" exposition is a sure way to turn me off a novel, and Slan is packed full of it, ranging from conversations between veteran secret police agents to long-winded expository orders broadcast on the radio. It's all so stiff and awkward that the only way I could persevere through the first few pages was for my reading voice to adopt a vintage radio announcer's Mid-Atlantic cadence.
The plot is pure B-movie grade, stuffed with disintegration rays and super x-rays and the marvelous power of the atom. The first two-thirds of the novel devotes nearly equal time to two viewpoint characters: a rugged, effortlessly competent slan inventor-hero, and a sheltered, usually helpless, occasionally crafty slan damsel in distress. If you don't mind spoilers for a seventy year old book, the two cross paths at last, falling immediately in love thanks to their psychic communication abilities... only for the woman (who, again, has occupied half the foregoing pages just to get to this point) to end up fridged just as immediately, in order to further the man's character development. She gets brought back later thanks to some silly pseudo-science, but not until the very last page. It's rather cringe-inducing, on top of the garbage prose and the other absurd pulp twists of the narrative. Showing an interesting kinship with his contemporary author, Robert Heinlein, van Vogt dips his narrative toe into incest and polygamy, too. Something must have been going around in the Astounding air.
Sunday, April 29, 2018
Monday, April 23, 2018
2018 read #11: Walking with Spring by Earl V. Shaffer.
Walking with Spring: The First Thru-Hike of the Appalachian Trail by Earl V. Shaffer
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
154 pages
Published 1983
Read from April 18 to April 23
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
It's been a while since I read a hiking narrative; the last one I completed was apparently in March 2016. Part of the reason for that is I've already read most of the ones currently in print. While you would expect the success of Wild to have cleared the way for a spate of copycat publications, I haven't seen any new ones in a while, at least none available through my library system. Maybe the more recent "classes" of thru-hikers have been concentrating their efforts on YouTube and Instagram, rather than dead tree publication.
As overexposed and overloved as all the big trails have become, there's a bit of a culture shock in reading early accounts of the AT. Shaffer's famous (and occasionally contested) 1948 thru-hike took him along a trail essentially abandoned, whole sections of it gobbled up by timber sales or lost to the broader dislocations of the war years. The conservation ethos as a whole was a different beast back then, with officers appointed by forest districts to eliminate natural predators. I'd love to see a thoroughly researched history of the co-evolution of the AT and of conservation principles in the American consciousness.
That hypothetical book is, of course, far beyond the scope of what we have here. Shaffer writes of his journey with mechanical descriptiveness, enumerating landmarks and meals and incidents of travel with only slightly more passion than a checklist. It is interesting as a primary document of sorts, but scarcely a classic of the genre.
Wednesday, April 18, 2018
2018 read #10: A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer.
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
380 pages
Published 1994
Read from April 9 to April 18
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
A common motif you'll find in my reviews is my perennial search for "lost classics," by which I generally mean pretty good (or even great) fantasy and science fiction books from decades past, books that, for one reason or another, seem to have been forgotten. It has always baffled me how the likes of the Wheel of Time, or the Shannara series, or even the festering garbage pile of the Sword of Truth, could have become, and remained, so popular, becoming almost the default entry-point books for two generations of nerds, when they weren't even that good by the fantasy standards of their time. (Let alone by the standards of today, when fantasy and serious literature overlap so beautifully. Why on Earth would anyone read Wizard's First Rule in 2018? If someone makes a Best Fantasy Novels of All Time list and it isn't 50% books published after 2000, odds are it was written by some grognard who uses "social justice" as a pejorative. Or maybe they just don't like beautiful prose in their fantasy.)
The question of how certain IPs become popular while others languish has always fascinated me; it seems to be an intersection of what promotional effort publishers are willing to invest initially, and a certain tendency in pop culture to conflate bestsellerdom with merit. The default example of this is, of course, the Twilight/Fifty Shades cluster, but the fact that male nerds zero in on these instead of, say, Shannara demonstrates a certain level of misogyny... all of which is getting pretty far from whatever point I was trying to make.
The flipside of the popularity equation -- why certain books that are demonstrably better than the Jordans, Goodkinds, and Salvatores never become bestsellers and are ultimately lost to the pulp pile -- is closer to what I'm investigating here. I have a certain fondness for the underdog, and an admitted tendency toward "Oh, you hadn't heard of that one?" hipsterdom. Few book-reading experiences satisfy me as much as getting my hands on some forgotten fantasy novel from the 1980s or 1990s and discovering that it's pretty darn good. War for the Oaks is my default example, but I could also single out Wizard of the Pigeons, Sideshow, Pavane, Thomas the Rhymer, and really, anything at all by Ellen Kushner. (Where is my Swordspoint HBO series?)
Joining this august company is A College of Magics. Unlike Swordspoint and War for the Oaks, which you might find on internet best-of lists if you dig deep enough, I'd never even heard of College until I was browsing a local library and noticed the distinctive '90s Tor font on the spine. (Caroline Stevermer, on the other hand, has appeared in my reviews before; she co-wrote "The Vital Importance of the Superficial," one of my favorite stories in Queen Victoria's Book of Spells.) It is, for its first third or so, a tale of a magical finishing school, where young ladies from all over Europe are educated in deportment, classical literature, and the Balance of the Spheres in a coastal stronghold inspired by Mont Saint-Michel. There is a blond, aristocratic bully who uses her magic to torment the hero; a wise, intimidating, ultimately compassionate headmistress dressed in green robes; an adjoining town where the students sneak out for pastries; and banter exchanged among a core group of friends in a commonroom. Leaving aside the most obvious point of comparison, the only clue that College is NOT a young adult novel from the last ten years is the fact that every character in the book is white and straight.
Also dating the book: A scene in which our hero, held captive, is kissed against her will by a weaselly and manipulative resistance leader -- and decides that she "likes" the kiss, despite her own personal revulsion toward him. The '90s were a time when authors demonstrated their feminist bona fides with sex positivity at all costs; the importance of consent as a basic concept has only recently infiltrated fantasy fiction.
Our hero Faris speeds through her magical education at Greenlaw, covering three years in 126 pages. Which is a pity, as that section was thoroughly charming. What follows, according to a jacket blurb summary, is "a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe," if a Grand Tour of an imaginary Europe consists of a Paris hotel room, a train ride, and political machinations in some vaguely sketched nation-states. The broader setting (outside of the lovely expanses of Greenlaw) is so hazily defined that it wasn't until the gang raced around Paris in a motorcar that I realized the setting was 1908, rather than the Regency period.
The political machinations were the weakest part of the story, I think. Fantasy politics requires investment in character, and Faris stands alone as the one semi-developed character in the book. Her unfailingly helpful companion Jane is fun, her bodyguard and inevitable love interest Tyrian is just another iteration of stoic competence; between the two of them, Faris never seems to be in real danger. Even her wicked uncle Brinker strains to make enough of an impression to become hateable. In some ways, it's not that hard to figure out why College appears on no best-of lists.
Nonetheless, despite all these flaws, I just can't help but be charmed by this book. Greenlaw ranks nearly equal to Hogwarts on the list of homey magical schools, and the magical wardens of the Earth were an interesting fantasy concept, rendered memorably. The climax, when Faris must undo the magical error of her grandmother, is a bit wobbly, yet has a taste of Studio Ghibli in its vivid imagery of lions and crystal stairways. This is a world I would love to see explored more thoroughly, and Faris was an agreeable companion for the brief Grand Tour we received.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
2018 read #9: The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5
I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:
Some substantial spoilers ahead.
I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.
And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.
Introduction by Kingsley Amis
186 pages
Published 1908
Read from March 24 to April 3
Rating: 3 out of 5
I honestly don't know how to approach this book. I rarely make pretensions to actual literary criticism, relying more on a metric of whether I liked a book or not, mixed with rambles of doubtful relevancy. But this is one of those meaningful, allegorical novels that (spoilers!), despite the "it was all a dream" ending alluded to in the subtitle, demands some level of critical analysis just to unpack its authorial meaning. The politics of the novel are distasteful: heteronormative family, religion, and "duty" are, at least in the eyes of our viewpoint character, the building blocks of any "free" society, whereas radical progressivism (including such modernist fancies as philosophy, feminism, and vegetarianism) is posited as the antithesis of "sane." Yet the depiction of the anarchist menace (however quaint that sounds now) carries with it some insights that still seem startlingly perceptive today:
"Mere mobs!" repeated his new friend with a snort of scorn. "So you talk about mobs and the working classes as if they were the question [source of concern]. You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always been objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats are always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' war."The true menace of Trumpism, one might say, would lie in the coup scored by the rich in getting the (white) working classes to embrace and worship a particularly kleptocratic form of anarchism that undermines the very government the working classes rely upon. Chesterton's insight here has current resonance, even though one gets the impression that the nebulous "aristocrats" he has in mind align more with the 21st century fantasies of George Soros using his wealth to suborn family, religion, and duty, rather than the actual oligarchic catastrophe sweeping the planet.
Some substantial spoilers ahead.
I thought myself clever when I deduced, not even a third of the way through the book, that the "Council of Anarchists" (each named for a day of the week) were all police detectives recruited by the monstrous Sunday for some subtle scheme. The days of the week all fell in line with my guess, sure enough. What I did not anticipate was the whole thing taking a hard left turn into biblical symbolism and allegory, as the days of the week all returned to Sunday's feasting table during a fantastic masquerade, each day representing their respective associations from Genesis, with Sunday himself the embodiment of the vast "peace of God." There was something (borrowed from the Christ myth) about the forces of creation, or the archangels, or the "guards of Law," or whatever it was that the days were supposed to represent, experiencing "suffering" in order to fully understand, and thereby counter, the modernist complaints against society. It was a heady scene, one with much to unpack, and an especially bizarre way to cap what amounts to a comic spy caper or surreal detective novel.
And then, true to the subtitle, it turns out to have all been a dream.
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