2024 read #152: Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany.

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

219 pages

Published 1966

Read from December 11 to December 15

Rating: 4 out of 5

Once again, we have a Delany number that feels two decades ahead of its time. At its core, Babel-17 is entirely 1960s: a dramatization of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis set in space, centered on the titular language, which offers world-altering clarity to those who understand it. Yet the book’s sympathies and language, its perception and maturity, all feel far removed from its contemporaries.

Delany throws everything into the creative mix, from body-modded furries to discorporated ghost crew members, from clone assassins to polyamorous navigators. He plays with language, prose, and format in ways I wouldn't expect from sci-fi of this era. This is, in short, a novel that would have felt cutting-edge even in 1986. Or at least it does right up until the end, which climaxes with a scene of logical paradox that would have been right at home on the original Star Trek.

2024 read #21: Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue.

Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, 21 December 1981 issue (5:13)

Edited by George H. Scithers

182 pages

Read from February 6 to February 8

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Following a couple years behind the October 1979 issue, we have our second Asimov’s with a prehistoric animal (…kinda) on the cover. The interior splash art for “The Time-Warp Trauma” is more promising, with a feisty Archaeopteryx menacing a schlub in a checked suit. I love me some paravian line art. It was enough to sell me on this issue, even if the tenor of the drawing suggests a humorous story to follow. Let’s give it a go!

—

“The Time-Warp Trauma” by J.O. Jeppson. A social club for psychoanalysts — “Pshrinks Anonymous” — meets in a hotel’s sub-basement dining room. The Oldest Member is perplexed by a case: Mr. Y, a retiree who is nervous about living in New York City. When Mr. Y finally makes a breakthrough, he decides to walk to his appointment through Central Park, and accidentally falls asleep in a time-warp, waking up to an Archaeopteryx in a tree. On his way to the next appointment a week later, Mr. Y experiences a La Brea tar pit scene, with an elephant and sabertooth cats. The story is mildly fun, an inoffensively humorous postmodern take on the time-warp trope, using the sci-fi concept to examine anxieties of old age and retirement. (Apparently people from previous generations who were financially and socially privileged to be able to retire felt anxiety about it? Cannot relate.) “Trauma” is far more interested in light satire of psychoanalytics than it is in its time-warp; I spent more time looking at the splash art than the story spent in its putative prehistory. Still, I will begrudgingly admit that it qualifies as dinosaur fiction. Barely. A solid enough C+

“The Gongs of Ganymede” by Martin Gardner. Damn, early Asimov’s was a weird place. I assumed this was a mediocre story about a space cult; turns out it’s a two page setup for a brain teaser math problem. Moving along.

“The Santa Clone Interview” by Valdis Augstkalns. Another humorous piece, this one constructed as an exposé interview with the Big Guy at the North Pole, who’s doing damage control after his mall Santas are revealed to be clones. It’s the kind of joke that feels like a hoary old chestnut even when you hear it for the first time. It’s fine, I guess? Except the author couldn’t resist making a crack about Medicare. Oh, the eighties. I’ll be generous and say C-

“The Jarabon” by Lee Killough. This is a moderately fun hyperspace heist caper. Kele owes everything to Sperrow, the man who recognized her thieving skills and took her off the streets. But when he sends her to steal a jarabon, an exquisitely carved jewel from an extinct civilization, and the only way to pinch it is to “ride the timewind” — staying awake during hyperspace travel, risking madness — Kele wonders if it’s worth it any longer. C+

A poem follows: “IMPROBABLE BESTIARY: The Thing in the Jar” by F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre. From browsing the tables of contents of other Asimov’s from this time, I know it’s part of a series. For a rhyming poem about a carnival “freak show” (not a promising premise), it’s pretty good. The lines have a nice singalong rhythm.

“Wrong Number” by F.M. Busby. Entry in a humorous serial about a dude with the ability to alter events after they happen. Feels awfully similar to Isaac Asimov’s Azazel series — though this installment, at any rate, is free of Asimov’s signature misogyny and grossness. Still not my cup of tea, though relatively painless. C-?

“Packing Up” by P. J. MacQuarrie. In the sanitized, minimalist future, live-in psych workers are in high demand. Bart is one such domestic, padding around the halls of his employers, the industrialist Mellewin family, making sure everyone sleeps well, keeping their neuroses under control. But Bart is approaching burnout. He fills the blank halls with his fantasies of a life and love of his own, daydreams of vacation, which get smothered by the weight of the Mellewins’ worries. It builds to Bart wondering if maybe a little anxiety, the occasional sleepless night, might be good for people. There isn’t much to this story. Its most interesting aspect is how it translates Gilded Age class norms into a soft sci-fi future. Bart isn’t a real doctor, just a specialized and trained addition to “the help.” The story’s concern with too much psychological intervention leading to coddled people who don’t know how to handle their own problems might make sense from a class-based lens. (It certainly isn’t an issue in our own society, unless you make north of six figures.) But ultimately, it feels like yet another quasi-libertarian “care makes humans too soft!” propaganda piece. Still, I didn’t dislike it. Maybe C-

“End Game” by Brian Aldiss. A palindromic story is impressive. However, between this, “The Gongs of Ganymede,” and all the humor pieces, this issue feels more like a Big Book of Puzzles & Activities than a sci-fi magazine. All gimmicks and games, not much literature. 

“A Thief in Ni-Moya” by Robert Silverberg. I forget how long ago it was — maybe 2004, 2005? — but once, I was fixated on Silverberg’s Majipoor books. I read the first three volumes as quickly as I could track them down in used bookstores. Which is how I first encountered this novella: it was collected in The Majipoor Chronicles. Revisiting it all these years later, I’m struck by how much this series informed my later tastes in cozy fantasy. The setting is richly detailed, immense, as evocative with its rain-filled bathing troughs and tooled leather pouches as it is with its teeming continents and thirty-mile-high mountains. It sucked me back in right away. Some light spoilers for the story itself: Inyanna, a young shopkeeper in a remote town, gets suckered into giving up her life savings in Majipoor’s equivalent of the old “deed to the Brooklyn Bridge” scam. She travels thousands of miles to the inconceivably vast metropolis of Ni-Moya to claim her inheritance, and falls in with helpful young thief Liloyve, who invites her into the underworld of thieves. It’s a simple, well-worn tale of a rogue’s origin, one of the most Dungeons & Dragons things I’ve ever read, but told so atmospherically that I have nothing to complain about. B

—

And that’s it! I feel a tiny bit bamboozled by this issue, between the time-warp barely playing a role in “The Time-Warp Trauma,” and half the rest of the issue falling closer to brain teasers than to stories. (I exaggerate, but still.) Nonetheless, it was nice to revisit Majipoor. After almost two decades of barely thinking about it, I’m considering running through that series again.

2019 read #4: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January/February 2019 issue (136:1-2)
Edited by C. C. Finlay
258 pages
Published 2018
Read from January 16 to February 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

I'm trying something different here: reviewing an issue of a fiction magazine as if it were a book. I've been collecting speculative fiction magazines for a number of years, all the while intending to read and review their contents here, but through the magic of procrastination and inertia, I just haven't managed to do so before now.

So what prompted me to sit down and start reading my collection? In the last few months I've written a handful of short stories and sent them like beautiful ducklings out into the world, accumulating rejection after rejection from the likes of Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and this very magazine I'm reading today. Getting a story accepted by and published in Fantasy & Science Fiction has been one of my life's goals ever since 1999, when I got a personalized rejection letter from then-editor Gordon Van Gelder for a meandering and not especially interesting novella about a contract architect building a house in the Late Cretaceous. "The time for this sort of thing is past, alas," he wrote, and my teenage ego clung to that "alas." I'd leap to publish this if dinosaur stories still sold magazines like in '93 is how I chose to read that "alas."

Over the intervening years, that imaginary bandaid for a fragile ego has evolved into a genuine appreciation for F&SF as a publication. Its two "Very Best of" anthologies (1, 2) are perhaps my favorite SF short fiction collections; the tales I like best from various yearly anthologies often turn out to be sourced from F&SF. The aesthetic of its fiction—small moments, delicate beauty, character-based storytelling, often a quiet note of melancholy—is what I aspire to in my own work. Getting so many stories rejected by F&SF in such a short period of time these last few months, while not all that surprising, has been a disappointment. I had been so certain that my stories had become worthy of the magazine I loved.

But I hadn't exactly read an issue of the magazine, had I? Anthologies, best-ofs, collections, sure—but no current issues, nothing cover-to-cover fresh off the newsstand. I'm hoping to change that now—and just maybe get a better sense of the storytelling currently sought by F&SF's current editor. It's been quite some time since I read any short SF whatsoever, so reading more stories can only help my craft, regardless.

"To the Beautiful Shining Twilight" by Carrie Vaughn. All in all, I liked this story. The opening hook compacts a wealth of setting and character detail into a brief couple of paragraphs and immediately sets the mood and feel of the entire piece. Once past that opening, however, I felt that the remainder of the story—while charming—was more workmanlike than innovative. The tale of Abby and her former bandmates receiving a visit from a Knight of Faerie, thirty years after they came to the aid of the Queen of Faerie with their music, could have been a product of the 1980s urban fantasy boom; it could easily have been a direct sequel to War for the Oaks. Airen the fae knight was a cardboard standee of an equally dated genre cliche. The theme of "what happens after the adventure" is a rather more modern preoccupation, as exemplified by Among Others and Every Heart a Doorway, but had you told me this story had been published in 1988, I wouldn't have guessed otherwise. I'm a fan of 1980s faerie fantasy, so the lack of originality didn't diminish my enjoyment, but I was a little surprised to find it here.

"The Province of Saints" by Robert Reed. This one, by contrast, seems straight out of 1998. In the near future, a new prescription drug floods the human mind with empathy—which here is framed as the human animal's best tool to manipulate others. A shocking mass death unfolds on the estate of a family of wealthy rural sociopaths. The ensuing mystery investigation Makes a Statement and Makes You Think about the human condition. I think I would have been blown away by this story around the time that I received that personal rejection letter from Gordon Van Gelder. But now, having seen more of the world, I'm far from convinced of the central conceit that empathy is just another way for humans to be selfish; without buying into that idea, the rest of the story falls apart. I'm not a fan of mysteries and murders, so that works against the story as well, at least for me. Robert Reed is an excellent craftsman of short stories, but that's almost a drawback for this particular tale—it feels, well, crafted. The artifice shows.

"Joe Diablo's Farewell" by Andy Duncan. I'm not sure how I feel about this piece, a historical slice-of-life set in 1920s Manhattan served with a garnish of ghost story. The prose quality was only average, and while I appreciated (in principle) the scene where men drawn from the various under-privileged ethnic and racial groups of interwar New York City, dressed like movie Indians for a Broadway premiere, ate chickpeas and talked about how their cultures used chickpeas, it didn't really say anything new. Overall the story felt incomplete, or perhaps pressed and shaped together from scraps of several stories (or fragments of a larger one).

"The City of Lost Desire" by Phyllis Eisenstein. I've loved the stories of Alaric the minstrel since I first encountered him like a sweet, sensitive flower while slogging through the grim mire of Lin Carter's Year's Best Fantasy. In that review I wrote, "This story showed me I've long held an unconscious desire to see high fantasy written for the aesthetic standards of F&SF." Further, reading those Lin Carter compilations, awful as they were, helped cultivate a taste for the style, mood, and rhythms of 1970s-style fantasy serials. This story ably satisfied on both counts. It's comforting to slip into a lived-in setting like Alaric's world, full of references to other adventures that may or may not have made it to print, none of which are required to understand the story at hand but make everything feel larger than one mere novella. It packs in all the rewards of an extensive epic fantasy series with none of the time investment. I enjoyed this entry quite a lot, though I will say that none of the characters aside from Alaric felt developed in any way, and the story itself went on maybe a smidgeon too long.

"The Right Number of Cats" by Jenn Reese. A tame cosmic horror microfic about learning to accept grief. Pretty good.

"Survey" by Adam-Troy Castro. My best guess about this one is that it's a third-rate retread of Ursula K. Le Guin's classic "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas," leaning hard into the shock value but offering little new to say regarding each individual's complicity in the horrors of capitalism. If the moral of the story was not "We're all complicit in the horrors of capitalism," then I'm even more lost. Did not care for this one.

"Blue as Blood" by Leah Cypress. This novelette is my favorite story in the issue so far, but it's hard to put into words why. It's an excellent example of science fiction as an avenue to explore social ideas, to examine prejudice and in-vs.-outgroup behavior from a fictional but relatable angle. "Inscrutable insectoid aliens inspire human prejudice" isn't exactly a new idea, but I loved how the social conflict was between a human girl (who absorbed the aliens' revulsion toward the color blue) and every human around her, parent and peer, which both grounded the story and provided it an extra dimension beyond the stale old trope. An engaging and effective tale.

"The Washer from the Ford" by Sean McMullen. "I should have said something sensitive and caring, but just then I was feeling like the only person on Earth who had the right to be a victim." There's just something so privileged white male about this story, and that sentence encapsulates it quite well. The narrator-hero does high-level IT support and has been cursed to be ignored by everyone around him, so despite his achievements and his PhD, he never gets the success and recognition he deserves: "...you have great talent and achieve a lot but get nowhere." The curse was inflicted upon him at the behest of a "mousy tart" he ignored in his college stud days. In the end, he wins out over the fey being who wants to take back his gift of second sight—fifteen years of involuntary celibacy have given him the fortitude to resist her sexual temptations. I liked this Melbourne-set tale of murders and supernatural bargains and counterbargains just fine—it was competently constructed, and I'm always a sucker for fey urban fantasy—but oh my lord, you couldn't write a story more tailored for the self-pitying middle-aged middle-class privileged white male demographic if you tried. There's so much to unpack here.

Being a fantasy story set in Australia, "Washer" presents a problem related but perpendicular to the one raised by Patricia Wrightson's The Ice Is Coming. Rather than appropriating local Aboriginal folklore, McMullen populates his Melbourne with creatures of European legend, erasing local beliefs altogether.

"Tactical Infantry Bot 37 Dreams of Trochees" by Marie Vibbert. A brutal yet beautiful rumination on how profitability stimulates permanent states of warfare. "War robot learns poetry and refuses to fight again" sounds like some 1960s concept-based sci-fi, but this story is effective, even though it's far from new.

"Fifteen Minutes from Now" by Erin Cashier. Akin to "Survey," this is another all-verbal piece about bloodshed and torture and techno-beaurocrats being cavalier with human lives, this time from a time-travel angle. A bit of a yawn, especially with another story so structurally and thematically similar earlier in this same issue.

"The Fall from Griffin's Peak" by Pip Coen. An amusing, unexpectedly moving, thoroughly enjoyable romp with an archetypal rogue who gets in over her head. Spoilers: I want to recycle the "glue the rogue to the chair" bit for a future D&D campaign. I think it might be tied with "Blue as Blood" as my favorite piece in this issue.

And that's it! While I know that not every story can be a winner, I was somewhat flabbergasted to read so many that just didn't do it for me. Apparently my mental picture of F&SF as the best match for my personal style was mistaken. Or maybe this was just an off issue. Either way, I have stacks of back issues I plan to read in the months and years to come.

2016 read #79: The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth.

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth
155 pages
Published 1953; originally published serially as Gravy Planet in 1952
Read from October 11 to October 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

General spoilers ahead.

This began with such promise. A brilliantly dark satire of a future America where megacorporations run the government and advertizing is the highest form of human expression, The Space Merchants is best in the first half or so, when its merchant is a steely-eyed true believer, oblivious to the horrors he narrates. Even after "the Haroun al Raschid bit" (in the words of Phil Klass, a sci-fi writer friend of Pohl's who read an early draft), when our star-class hero gets violently demoted to indentured servitude and must explore the lowest echelons of society, there are enough nauseating details (Chicken Little!) and too-close-to-home commentary on recent (and, plausibly, future) abuses of labor to make up for the sudden scattershot focus. It's in the final wind-up and climax that The Space Merchants let me down, rushing to accomplish a whole bunch of things in order for the good guys to win and escape to the fresh commercial prospects of Venus. The final third or so feels more like a standard 1950s sci-fi novel, with guns and quick thinking saving the day and the guy getting the girl (plus or minus a suicide along the way). Those first two-thirds, however, deserve classic science fiction status.

2016 read #15: The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin
264 pages
Published 2000
Read from February 24 to February 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Le Guin's Hainish novels and short stories are works of anthropological science fiction. They each begin with a fascinating what-if -- What if people were genderless? What if true anarchy were possible? How would a society built upon active non-interference with other individuals function? -- and explore the ramifications and outcomes with Le Guin's characteristic humanity and compassion. The Telling, it seems to me, grows from a less immediately compelling seed, a sort of anthropological investigation of the furtive cultural practices persisting underground after a Cultural Revolution. It juxtaposes a viewpoint character, Sutty, left psychologically wounded by religious fundamentalism on Earth, with the secular fundamentalism on the planet Aka, where Le Guin erects the sort of society sure to appeal to the instincts of a writer, with a foundation of ceaseless storytelling, a cultural communication in words of what cannot be communicated in words (to paraphrase Le Guin from some unrelated quotation). "Their culture is built upon storytelling!" seems like such a science fiction cliche to me, though to be honest, I can't point to any specific novel or story that used the gimmick before. The traditional Akan culture, despite Sutty's avowed attempt at clear, unbiased observation, comes across as utopian, too perfect by half; the occasional hints of the dangers of cultural homeostasis never amount to anything definite, and nothing really dings the perfection of old Akan storytelling-culture as Le Guin depicts it. Even its downfall, a reaction against the corruption of greedy "boss" storytellers, is shown as an aberration, an adulteration of the pure storytelling culture in the hands of a "barbaric" (uneducated and profit-minded) people in a remote province. The culture of the Telling itself is never shown to be anything less than idyllic.

There is lots to unpack from this book -- the many forms of fundamentalism, technological and ideological alienation from true community -- but I felt that the text itself skates along with little reference to the potential depths of its themes. In many ways (not least the obvious parallels with Tibet and the Chinese Cultural Revolution) it feels like a throwback to the sort of orientalist enlightenment fiction of the early 20th century. The character of Sutty is handled tenderly, movingly -- a humane anchor for the depiction of a world damaged by imitation of imported ideals -- but the end comes abruptly and resolves too neatly, its "everything will probably be all right" coda unearned.

With all those complaints, it must look like I detested The Telling, which is not the case at all. The grace of Le Guin's own storytelling is quietly marvelous as usual, and as half of an anthropologist myself, it would take a lot for a book like this not to captivate me. This is just an example of my perennial trouble: it's always easier to pick apart what didn't quite work, than to gush about what did.

2016 read #14: The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells.

The Sleeper Awakes by H. G. Wells
190 pages
Published 1910
Read from February 2 to February 24
Rating: ★ out of 5

CN: racism, sexual violence.

The works of Verne, Wells, Doyle, and other early writers of "scientific romances" are tainted with the racism of their times. In my limited experience, most of this racism has taken the form of the "Sambo" caricature, whether it be Zambo in The Lost World or Neb in The Mysterious Island -- a dehumanizing and degrading archetype, to be sure, but (in the context of contemporary popular thought) more or less a positive role, occasionally even heroic in small ways. With all my experience reading dead white dudes, however, I was not expecting the horrible racism and ugliness of the second half of The Sleeper Awakes.

The first half of the novel has occasional nasty gleams of this racial stereotyping, but I initially abandoned the read a couple weeks ago because, well, I had the flu and couldn't concentrate on jack, but also because the book was boring. Old-timey futurism is interesting in theory, but Wells' (occasional) gift for weaving interesting story through the worldbuilding fails him here. The Sleeper awakes after a trance of two centuries to find a world in some ways not far removed from our own reality. The despotic revolutionary Ostrog exults in the ascendancy of the "real aristocracy" of wealth, a two-level society of debauched and dissipated oligarchs crushing a vast, uneducated laboring class under their heel. The interests of "mercantile piety" compete for worshipers and tithe money with slogans the modern advertising industry (not to mention modern megachurches) would recognize. Automated news outlets incessantly hoot and gibber for the attention of the lowest common denominator in order to disseminate oligarchic propaganda. This would all be fascinating sociological speculation, remarkable for its prescience, if the plot had any momentum -- or, indeed, if the first two-thirds of the book involved anything more than the Sleeper observing how society has changed, first from afar on platforms and catwalks, later in disguise on the lower walkways and subterranean factories. And when Wells finally remembers to slip a plot in -- well, without exaggeration, I can say it might be the most racist shit I have ever read in a published novel. Wells' prophetic vision gets lost in an appalling glimpse of 1910.

Ostrog, to consolidate his power and forestall popular unrest in support of the Sleeper, summons a black police force from South Africa -- which immediately rouses the London populace into panic and open revolt, and shocks the Sleeper out of his inertia into his own personal rebellion. The black police, you see, look forward to "lordly times among the poor white trash": raping, terrorizing, committing bestial atrocities too horrible to print. Because they're black, and that's how Wells imagines their innate natures. "White men must be mastered by white men," the Sleeper implores Ostrog in one last appeal -- and then the climactic air battle revolves around the Sleeper delaying the African air fleet's approach to London so that the white underclass can mobilize a defense.

This is some evil shit here. We're talking The Birth of a Nation nastiness. This goes beyond the smug presumption of racial superiority in Verne and Doyle (at least in what I've read of their work). This sours me on Wells, even if, to be sadly realistic, he probably wasn't out of line with much popular white sentiment at the time.

2016 read #11: A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Introduction by Mary Doria Russell
340 pages
Published 1959
Read from February 11 to February 15
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Ugh. What a month this has been. First my spouse was in the hospital getting her appendix snipped out, then our child and I got hit by a speeding truck called the flu, and I could barely manage sufficient mental function for well over a week there in the first half of the month. I had been muddling through H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Awakes, but after several days I wasn't even halfway done, so I abandoned that (temporarily?) and picked up a book I'd been meaning to read for many years now. Even now, I can't seem to spark enough neural energy to say anything of substance in response to Leibowitz.

Canticle, I think, is preceded by a reputation that has little to do with the book itself. There's this idea floating out there, the result of some game of plot summary telephone perhaps, that Canticle is a satirical novel of a post-nuclear sect built upon the grocery list of one Isaac Leibowitz: "Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels -- bring home for Emma." This mistaken understanding of the book is promulgated by the summary on the back cover, as well as the introduction here by Mary Doria Russell. A long time ago, someone I knew sought out Canticle for that supposed plot, with its promise of satirical hijinks, and came away disappointed. I asked her not to spoil the book for me back then, so when my turn came at last, I was no wiser.

This is very much not a book about a desert sect built upon reverence of a 20th century grocery list. Canticle is actually built upon a foundation of Catholic sincerity, ripping into euthanasia and the "false god" of comfort and security, a common enough theme in mid-century sci-fi explored with passion and religious vehemence. I think you have to have something of a Christian worldview for the final sections to land for you -- all these burdens of supposed sin dating back to Adam don't compute from a humanist perspective. The need to forgive God was an interesting wrinkle, closer to my sympathies, but otherwise the ending was, I felt, the weakest part of the novel.

2016 read #6: In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells.

In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells
202 pages
Published 1906
Read from January 10 to January 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I had vague memories of reading this book ages and ages ago, way back when I was living in North Carolina -- twelve years ago now. The framing device in the prologue (and can we talk about how flimsy and ridiculous that was as a framing device?), certain descriptions in the early chapters -- all suggested a near-forgotten familiarity. But after two or three chapters, that sense of familiarity vanished, which led me to conclude that I had tried giving this a go all those years ago, but baffled with the working-class verisimilitude of the first half of the book, I must have given it up not too many pages in.

Nowadays I have a better appreciation of Wells' descriptions of industrial class squalor and the tawdry commercialism of the turn of the century, so this time around, the first half of Comet struck me as an excellent sociopolitical satire set against an atmospheric science-fictiony backdrop. Sharply observed details of working class housing, the cheap luxuries and sad norms of the time, are among Wells' best attempts at the theme. The climax, however, in terms of both action and theme, comes at the halfway mark -- which leaves Comet something of an ungainly, awkwardly paced creature, half penetrating social-character study, half utopian just-so story. Utopias don't get much more diaphanous, after all, than "A gaseous comet impacts Earth and changes the properties of atmospheric nitrogen so that it becomes a metabolic gas, thereby clarifying and vivifying human thought and perceptions." The second half has a Stapledon-esque feel, glimpses of vast social and architectural changes in the aftermath of the comet, enough to intrigue, but far from satisfying. There is also, inevitably, a flavor of racism and antisemitism endemic to the times -- contrasted by an oddly progressive (for Wells) view of women, and even a precocious hint in the direction of Free Love, that preoccupation of SF writers six decades down the line.

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.

2015 read #39: After London by Richard Jefferies.

After London, or Wild England by Richard Jefferies
312 pages
Published 1885
Read from August 4 to August 7
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

"The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike." That ranks up there among the very best opening "hooks" in Victorian speculative fiction -- perhaps not quite equal to The War of the Worlds, but without a doubt powerful and intriguing. The moment I read it I knew I wanted to know everything that followed.

Unforunately, H.G. Wells was ahead of his time in terms of structuring scientific romances and integrating story with imaginative ideas. Jefferies spends his first five chapters laying out the geography and anthropology of his changed England, guided perhaps by the model of Classical historians. His hero is introduced in a sound sleep while our omniscient future-historian narrator describes all the furnishings in his room. Jefferies squanders the novelty of his setting on a sort of medieval romance, most reminiscent to me of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company, though Jefferies uses his setup to emphasise the squalor and tyranny of feudal society. Despite adherence to the race theory of his time, Jefferies advances a clearly anti-aristocratic message, hinting at how little separates the disparities of class and wealth in Victorian times from the barbarous, autocratic warlordism and debt slavery of his post-collapse England.

This message doesn't gel particularly well with Jefferies' nascent environmentalism, which contrasts the woodsy idyll of the early scene-setting chapters with the poisonous effluvia of decaying London. Perhaps the thematic link between "nature good, city bad" and "humans in the depopulated countryside will revert to barbarism and feudal slavery" is simple misanthropy. Jefferies lavishes his depopulated England with glowing descriptions of fish and fowl and verdant forests; the human marauders intruding upon these Edenic scenes bring their own low-minded violence and despotism with them.

After London's primary appeal is the novelty of its precociously postapocalyptic setting. The story, prose, and characters are uninspired, at best, and Jefferies' social and environmental messages are somewhat muddled, perhaps even superficially contradictory. As a historical curiosity, it's certainly worth a read. But it never lives up to the evocative hook of its opening lines.

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.

2015 read #21: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.

The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
214 pages
Published 1955
Read from April 22 to April 24
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

This book follows the likes of C. M. Kornbluth's "The Cosmic Expense Account" (reviewed here) in dumbfounding me by how goddamn good science fiction from the 1950s could be. My first exposure to Brackett (aside from, of course, The Empire Strikes Back, the first draft of which she penned), The Long Tomorrow anticipates the gentle dexterity and surety of character that distinguishes Le Guin at her best. If we put Tomorrow head-to-head with the most obvious parallel in Le Guin's work -- a post-apocalyptic novel grounded in anthropology, in which a young man out of place traces a hazardous journey west from the Ohio Valley to find a rumored remnant of the lost civilization -- Brackett, amazingly, beats Le Guin, and handily. To be fair, even Le Guin admitted that City of Illusions was one of her weaker works; I would never claim that Tomorrow could best "Solitude" (reviewed here). But the anthropological slant of Brackett's world, and the deeply felt humanity of her central characters, make comparisons to Le Guin hard to resist -- even as they elevate Tomorrow (and Brackett) to a level where comparisons are scarcely necessary.

Tomorrow steals up on thorny questions of faith and fundamentalism, the destiny bound up in how we're raised to think and see the world, developing them so expertly within the conflicts and the character arcs that they startle with their elegance and power in the denouement. In many ways the outline of the plot is predictable -- you know going in almost exactly what each turn in Len's journey of dissolution, acceptance, and redemption will be -- yet I can't help but admire Brackett's artistry in how she brings those turns about, always veering from the expected course and (to hopelessly muddle the metaphor) turning the screws on Len just that extra bit more before (again with the metaphor) opening a window once the door has been shut. The result is genuine tension. You know the main character isn't going to die midway through a sci-fi novel from 1955, but there were moments when I wasn't at all sure about that. I genuinely cared about Len, and his evolution from starry-eyed New Mennonite boy to brawling port town tough to embittered and cynical man standing (seemingly) against the world is startlingly believable and true to his character, and gives Tomorrow a sense of scale far more epic than its pagecount -- not to mention how it suggests shades of Blood Meridian.

I'm being conservative on my (arbitrary) rating, held back by that aforementioned sense of predictability as well as the usual social trappings that plague any book from this time (the helplessness of women, the drunken destructive rage of the one character of color). Nonetheless, this is a superb classic that merits a revival.

2014 read #118: The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Eye of the Heron by Ursula K. Le Guin
179 pages
Published 1978
Read December 7
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

A small but beautiful book on the importance as well as the limits of nonviolent resistance. Through much of its length I mused on the naiveté of the dream of nonviolent triumph and nonparticipation; in a culture and a world squeezed by late-stage capitalism, with cops trained to bust up passive resistance and nowhere left to run off to, the thought that the tactics of Gandhi and King could flourish into a science fiction future was a sweet but sad and futile fantasy. I should have known Le Guin better than that, of course. Out of all the authors who have attempted utopian visions, Le Guin seems to have the best grasp of human failings, our cultural blinders, our sheer propensity to fuck everything up. Which makes the ending especially bittersweet and poignant, described as it is with Le Guin's gentle, deft beauty. We must all of us keep marching -- but on this planet, we've nowhere left to go.

2014 read #114: City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin.

City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin
203 pages
Published 1967
Read from December 1 to December 2
Rating: ★★ out of 5

Not a good sign: Le Guin, in an introduction to a reprint edition ten years after the original publication, muses about the differences between "the book one imagines and the book one writes." "When the discrepancy is particularly huge," she elaborates, "it is comforting to think Platonically that that subjective or visionary book is itself a mere shadow of the ideal BOOK, which nobody can ever get to...." Le Guin doesn't come out and say it in as many words, but she's all but warning away any potential reader: This book stinks. Don't bother. Her opinion of City of Illusions is sufficiently low that she takes the time to list the handful of things in it she's grateful she got to write.

Two of those items were my favorite bits of City of Illusions: "The chance to imagine my country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our species as it was five hundred years ago," as well as "The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it." The Prince of Kansas was great. And Le Guin's depictions of depopulated and reclaimed-by-wilderness North America were seductive, flirting with that well-after-the-apocalypse esthetic so rarely done right. (Le Guin's depopulated America, to be exact, is far emptier than it was before the Great Columbian Exchange began, a haunting landscape of humans huddled in small family clusters, obliterated by their alien overlords should they grow too populous or try to resurrect lost technologies.) The first half of the book, really, is a harmless, diverting adventure, a fun romp populated by "Thurro-Dowists" (Thoreau-Taoists) quoting On Walden Pond to alien wanderers, pathways snaking along the lines of ancient highways, and the anthropological touches that almost always enliven Le Guin's work.

It's when our hero arrives at the titular city that the book falls apart. In the introduction, Le Guin notes, "This book has Villain trouble," referring to the nefarious Shing race; and again, "Herds of Bad Guys are the death of a novel." Le Guin, writing this out in 1978, realizes the central failing of much popular, morally binary fantasy literature decades before most of its fans (many of whom still snap up reheated claptrap about dark elves and whatnot to this day). Despite its post-civilization, post-alien-conquest setting, City of Illusions is a fantasy quest novel to its core, a lightweight effort whose structural weaknesses become evident as soon as Falk leaves the wilderness. Like Le Guin, though, I'm grateful for the good bits.

2014 read #92: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.

The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology, edited by Gordon Van Gelder
475 pages
Published 2009
Read from September 23 to September 29
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

"Of Time and Third Avenue" by Alfred Bester (1951). Mid-century time travel stories have a certain rigid, sonnet-like formality, presenting a neat paradox or a neat way out of paradox or a small neat logic puzzle, with little ornamentation beyond a tendency toward comic peculiarities in the men visiting from the future. This structure is not without its charms, but my own future-dulled senses find such stories less than satisfying. This one feels even more insubstantial than most, rushing through the time traveler's "You wouldn't really want to profit from knowledge of the future, would you?" pitch as if Bester had somewhere else he had to be that day.

"All Summer in a Day" by Ray Bradbury (1954). Beautiful and terrible, chilling and heartbreaking and aching with childhood in its cruelties and its animal joy, classic Bradbury in a tight and efficient seven pages. Now I wish there were a Venusian companion to The Martian Chronicles, so I could savor this tiny glimpse of a world and a people for a couple hundred more pages.

"One Ordinary Day, with Peanuts" by Shirley Jackson (1955). A cheerful and elegantly understated ditty about the small actions that can make your day -- or ruin it.

"A Touch of Strange" by Theodore Sturgeon (1958). A sweetly awkward (but in the end kind of predictable) love story, a couple brought together by a "touch of strange" in their otherwise plain, boring, average lives. It isn't hard to see this as an allegorical endorsement of genre fiction, really.

"Eastward Ho!" by William Tenn (1958). Despite the basic and wholly undisguised allegory -- what if the tables were turned between Indians and white men?? -- this may be my new favorite post-apocalyptic story of all time. It's just so damn clever, laugh out loud funny, and yet still somehow tense and exciting. Outstanding.

"Flowers for Algernon" by Daniel Keyes (1959). With classics, there's a good chance that the gist of the story will have been spoiled for you by cultural osmosis. A classic worthy of the name, however, will knock you down and pummel your heart regardless. I haven't read the novel or seen any film adaptations (though I have the novel checked out and will probably read it next month), yet of course I knew the general course of events; the story struck me hard all the same. The loss of intelligence, knowledge, and thought, whether through senility, disease, or some other factor, is one of my deepest anxieties, so Charlie's decline had a personal edge for me. Devastating and superlative fiction.

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut (1961). Reading this through my own socially progressive, socialistic filter, I find it hard to believe that anyone could see "Harrison Bergeron" as anything other than a lampoon of the Randian ideal, a piss-take cartoon of that evil overbearing liberal government trying its best to keep the superhuman Atlas locked down. The sheer earnest absurdity of it all -- capped with the evil bureaucrat busting down doors with a double barreled shotgun -- seems to preclude any other interpretation. Yet I have heard rumors that some people understand it to mean the exact opposite, which makes me wonder -- did we read the same thing?

"This Moment of the Storm" by Roger Zelazny (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I said "This story wasn't a total wash (heh, I made a pun), but modern classic? I think not."

"The Electric Ant" by Philip K. Dick (1969). Something else (seemingly) everyone is aware of through cultural osmosis, even if they've never experienced it, is the drug trip, as well as its corollary, the concept of drug-expanded consciousness. Especially if you have a mushroom-head or an LSD fan among your Facebook friends. This is, essentially, a well-written drug trip presented with minimal science-fictiony set-dressings -- all talk of subjective consciousness and solipsism and opening the mind, so to speak, to the universe of sensory stimuli. As a well-written drug trip, I found it quaintly earnest but ultimately disposable.

"The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison® (1973). Lol. Yes, Harlan Ellison®. The dude seriously trademarked his name. Seriously. Good for him, I guess? Anyway. (Fucking Harlan Ellison®, man. I don't think I'll ever write his name another way from now on.) I imagine there are people who pick up a piece of postmodern fiction -- a story, say, presented as a test packet, a story chopped up and interspersed with seemingly unrelated essays and bible verses and test questions -- and toss it aside as pretentious garbage. My whole life I've had something of the opposite problem: I've always had a tendency to see difficult, nontraditional fiction as automatically profound and brilliant, scaling proportionally to the opacity of the storytelling. Neither extreme holds merit. Opacity for the sake of opacity is a bore, yes, but opacity in service to a higher point -- giving just enough material for the reader to construct their own edifice of meaning -- is an effective and admirable technique, provided it is employed with skill and purpose. Based on that criterion, "The Deathbird" is pretty good, an interesting (and possibly original for its time, for all I know, though it doesn't feel original nowadays) take on Zoroastrian or Gnostic dualism, slithering from an interplanetary judiciary ruling before the Garden of Eden all the way to a post-nuclear hellscape Earth a quarter of a million years from now. But it isn't great. The "sustained shout" of Harlan Ellison®'s style here feels overbearing and bluntly manipulative, without truly moving me.

"The Women Men Don't See" by James Tiptree, Jr. (1976). I felt some trepidation when I reached this story. Tiptree is one of my favorite authors, on the strength of just one story: "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," the most devastating nine pages I'd ever read. What if this story wasn't up to that impossible standard? Or -- and it's kind of silly to fear this -- what if it was every bit as devastating? I had no cause to worry, on either count. "Women" is undeniably brilliant, but the emotion it evokes is not so much devastating as it is chilling, both from the events of the story itself and from what Tiptree has to say about gender, society, and survival in the hidden spaces between the two. In 27 pages, Tiptree delivers a '70s feminist wallop with more skill and insight than Joanna Russ managed in the entirety of The Female Man, and also the most original and socially meaningful alien encounter story I can remember reading.

"I See You" by Damon Knight (1976). Rapid-sketch parable of a fantastic technology's effect on society and humanity -- a "Utopia was achieved, but at what price?" sort of thing. Good for what it is, brisk and, in its own way, almost poetic.

"The Gunslinger" by Stephen King (1978). When you pen something as mythological, as monolithic as the first "Gunslinger" story, there's nowhere to go but down. The last three books in the Dark Tower series nosedived so hard and so fast, it can be difficult to remember how singular and brilliant The Gunslinger had been, and this novelette is the apotheosis of the entire series, the original and perfect distillation of its mood, scene, and esthetic, everything that made the rest of us endure seven volumes of increasingly bastardized and blunted attempts to turn the spark into a blaze. Maybe I'm being harsh on the ensuing novels, but reassessing "The Gunslinger" here, in isolation from the bloated mess it would lead to, just shows how King hit the bullseye with this story, and maybe should have stopped winging wildly at the target after this.

"The Dark" by Karen Joy Fowler (1991). Did we just skip the entirety of the 1980s? I mean, '80s fantasy can be a mixed bag to be sure, but I was looking forward to something that could have been a companion piece to James P. Blaylock's "Paper Dragons," a brilliant and dream-haunting mood piece printed by F&SF in 1985 (and anthologized in Modern Classics of Fantasy). Leaving out an entire decade is just harsh, dude. Anyway, "The Dark" is an elliptical tale that hints at one direction and ends up going another, from disappearing families in Yosemite, and "phantoms in human form" transmitting plague in the historical accounts of Procopius, to a feral boy, tunnel warfare in Vietnam, and a phantom savior of the tunnel rats. Fowler makes only the slenderest thematic links between the topics, leaving you to work out much of her meaning; the story is better for it, though somewhat insubstantial.

"Buffalo" by John Kessel (1991). An odd, slight story about a fictive encounter between two people facing despondence and disappointment in 1934: H.G. Wells, watching his dreams of a sane socialist future wither away in his old age, and the author's own father, reaching the end of his youth and realizing that his own dreams of making it big may be foolish and naive. It's an intimate but antiseptic piece, a curiosity nearly matching the mood of Bruce Sterling's "Dori Bangs," but little more.

"Solitude" by Ursula K. Le Guin (1994). An elegant masterpiece of soft science fiction that should be on reading lists for cultural anthropology courses. Full of the quiet dignity and beauty that is Le Guin at her best. In any lesser anthology this would be my hands-down favorite, but I can tell it will be impossible to pick a clear favorite from this book.

"Mother Grasshopper" by Michael Swanwick (1998). Pure Swanwickian whatthefuckery, a Malthusian fable of immortality set inside the eye of a grasshopper as big as several planets put together. It doesn't come together exactly right, the way my favorite Swanwick stories do; there's no emotional punch hidden behind the conceptual mastery. Terrific all the same.

"macs" by Terry Bisson (1999). A merciless skewering of the death penalty and the hallowed "Closure" it's supposed to bring. 167 rapid-grown clones are made of Timothy McVeigh and, along with "the real McCoy," are distributed via lottery to the families of his 168 victims, so each family may personally execute one. The ending was obvious a long way off, so the story is only of conceptual interest.

"Creation" by Jeffrey Ford (2002). Another quietly perfect Jeffrey Ford story. The thematic gist -- fathers and sons, god and man, the responsibilities inherent in each act of creation -- is obvious stuff, but the story is no less magical for it.

"Other People" by Neil Gaiman (2001). Another "obvious" topic that still has a surprising amount of juice in it, surprisingly moving for a story only three pages long.

"Two Hearts" by Peter S. Beagle (2005). After the last Schmendrick story I read ("The Woman Who Married the Man in the Moon," reviewed in Sleight of Hand) proved to be little more than a trifling morsel, I expected little of this installment. Instead it is a rich and moving novelette that supplies much of the charm and sad grace of The Last Unicorn. Excellent.

"Journey into the Kingdom" by M. Rickert (2006). Read and reviewed in Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition. I called it "A low-key and quite seductive ghost story that abruptly and violently goes places I wasn't expecting."

 "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" by Ted Chiang (2007). An engaging series of clever time travel vignettes set in medieval Cairo and Baghdad. A sweet and gentle finale to a lovely collection of stories.

This anthology is unique: I didn't dislike a single story here. "macs" and "Buffalo" were middling efforts, I felt, but overall this is the finest and most consistent set of stories I've encountered thus far. I may be overrating it a tad bit, but if any anthology deserves almost unlimited praise, it's this one. Even my wish that it were longer is assuaged by the fact that there's a second volume, one I've already ordered from the library system.

2014 read #78: The Female Man by Joanna Russ.

The Female Man by Joanna Russ
215 pages
Published 1975
Read from August 5 to August 12
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

The only way I can grok this book, it seems, is to think of it in terms of '70s-style avant garde film. Not that I'm an expert on that domain --  Zardoz (if it can be counted as avant garde, and not merely trying-hard-to-be-cult) and Alejandro Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain are pretty much the extent of my exposure. But The Female Man shares much with The Holy Mountain: the burlesque on gender in different societies, the satirical exaggeration of social arenas such as the military and housewifery, the broad allegory, the non-linear structure, the metafictional incorporation of the auteur within the work, the occasional lack of actually making sense in any way.

Unlike The Holy Mountain, The Female Man additionally lacks much in the way of what I could recognize as a plot; what little there is could more aptly be described as a situation. A man-killing assassin (from a world in the multiverse where Manland and Womanland are locked in perpetual war) gathers together her equivalents from other worlds in the multiverse, whose stories and attitudes are used to amplify the arguments of second-generation feminism. As with all materials from second-generation feminism, women of color are mostly invisible, and transgender folks are depicted with what I feel is distaste verging on scorn, positing “transsexualism” as an aberrant identity forced into being by the needs of militant masculinity and a phobia of "true homosexuality."

The Female Man is best where Russ waxes angriest. Her extended rants, dripping with sarcasm and venom, hit with a hundred blows, most often on the mark. Where the story pauses to develop a half-assed science-fictiony framework for the parallel worlds and the different depictions of (white) womanhood is where it sags. I derived some amusement from the idea that a second-gen feminist would have to resort to alternate universes to present the role of enculturation and expectations on otherwise identical women, as opposed to noticing the experiences of women from different racial categories or levels of affluence or anything of that nature. Intersectionality, at this stage of ideological development, seemingly only referred to intersections of the multiverses.

2014 read #74: Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler.

Patternmaster by Octavia E. Butler
138 pages
Published 1976
Read from July 30 to July 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5

I think I regret reading this series following the internal chronology. Reading them in order published would have started me off with this book; all the worldbuilding details might possibly have been intriguing in that case, and made me curious for more, instead of seeming an end product of three volumes methodically arranged to get to a certain point. What I mean is, this book felt dry and laconic, cladded with technical details of psionic attack and riposte, the checks and balances of Patternists against mutes and Clayarks against Patternists, without much heart evident beneath the superstructure. Far too much of Patternmaster felt like notes for how a larger story world would function, the sort of girders and supports that, ideally, should be shrouded with engaging character and story.

Only the character of Amber -- tough, ambitious, an unapologetic and confident bisexual -- rose above the clunky exposition and board-setting. The final confrontation of Teray and Coransee felt like a matter of procedure, a checkmark on the hero's résumé, noted with a nod from the dying authority figure. If there had been further adventures to come, a payoff for the "Clayarks are people too!" foreshadowing early on in the book, I wouldn't have minded; like Le Guin's Earthsea books, I could see the Patternist series following small, defining encounters in the life and rule of Teray, developing the world of psychic southern California, actually moving some pieces across the chessboard. Instead, Butler went backward to put all those pieces into place. I'm not complaining, exactly -- Wild Seed was terrific, and Clay's Ark was a good read -- but reading it all in the order I did, Patternmaster is a letdown.

2014 read #73: In the Drift by Michael Swanwick.

In the Drift by Michael Swanwick
195 pages
Published 1985
Read from July 28 to July 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

I've long listed Swanwick as one of my favorite authors, but I wonder now if that declaration was a tad hasty. Much of his elevation rests on the power of his short fiction. "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," "Riding the Giganotosaur," "The Edge of the World," "The Very Pulse of the Machine" -- all of these, when I first read them, overwhelmed me with their remorseless brilliance. His novels, those of which I've read, are markedly uneven in comparison. Stations of the Tide is one of my all-time favorite novels (though I wonder how well it would hold up to a reread now; too bad my copy departed with an ex girlfriend and is probably in a dump somewhere). Bones of the Earth, expanded from "Scherzo with Tyrannosaur," has none of that story's abrupt charm; it rambles and seems to get lost in its own hazy sense of time. And then there's In the Drift.

This is another book I bought in the Fayetteville days and hadn't read in full until now. I made an attempt many years back (2006 or so, perhaps?) and found the first "chapter" (actually an expanded version of a short story) remarkably inventive -- eerie and memorable, evolving a bit of local color into a decadent and threatening power structure in the aftermath of a full-scale nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island. I was brought up short by the very title of the next chapter. Even in 2006, I didn't think white guys should toss around racial slurs like they're nothing. I'm on the side of unrestricted free speech, but I'm also a fan of responsibility and accountability. Any white guy who casually employs the N word should be free to do so, but also earns my distaste.

This illustrates something of the problem with Swanwick. He's an author of absolute privilege. I've only read three of his novels and a handful of his short stories, but I can't recall seeing anyone but straight white men and tough, straight white women portrayed sympathetically. In the Drift may perhaps be written off as a product of its time (the early '80s were a time when white guys grew especially bold with minority themes, but before anything like sensitivity and restraint had evolved), but every single black character is gap-toothed, jive-talking, singing and capering, cackling and back-slapping. Women reek of menstrual blood, and the more confident and empowered they are, the more inevitable it is they will casually disrobe in front of the male hero and quirk an eyebrow until sex results. All sex in a Swanwick tale, seemingly, must be a power play, sealing an alliance or bringing an underling more firmly under their superior's sway. After a few repetitions of these motifs, one begins to question whether Swanwick really deserves the esteem he gets.

Swanwick's diffidence with the long form is especially evident in this, his first "novel." It consists of two excellent, highly polished novelettes -- published separately in an anthology and a magazine, respectively -- connected by a shakier, far less engaging string of vignettes sketching in the intervening years. With such a minimalist structure, making a point of, say, Keith's severe aversion to black people stands out all the more, because it's left dangling with no resolution or payoff, as if it were included, '80s style, for "shocking" verisimilitude. In a way I'm sorry this got turned into a novel; on their own, "Mummer Kiss" and "Marrow Death" would be a compelling, self-contained diptych of post-nuclear horror.

2014 read #46: Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler.

Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
365 pages
Published 1998
Read from May 17 to May 20
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5

Science fiction loves to traffic in religion. Ignoring the sci-fi scribblers who went out and actually founded religions, we're left with an enormous reliquary of star religions, eugenic religions, political religions, most intended to reflect some allegorical or didactic goal of the author's. We often see Campbellian heroes or Randian ubermensch in the process of founding these systems, which, once founded, roll along with irresistible momentum -- and of course every secondary world story will have long-practiced beliefs somewhere in the background. Parable of the Talents is an interesting outlier, sketching the early years of a new and useful belief system as it struggles for survival against a much larger, predatory species of Christianity.

Talents was easier to endure, emotionally, than Parable of the Sower -- partly because the Christian theocracy it depicts, with slave labor "reeducation" camps and uniformed Crusaders killing or uprooting "heathen" families is (just slightly) more remote from the big business dystopia of Sower, but also partly because Talents isn't structured with quite the same skill. There is no rising, inevitable dread as one disaster creeps after another, only a quiet, bucolic interlude of personal and ideological productivity in the first third of the book before Christian America comes to power and (literally) crashes the gates. The plausible horrors of life on the road are replaced with life in a slave camp -- a subject never far removed from the thoughts and experience of a huge number of Americans, but in execution erring a little too near to misery porn. It felt nihilistic, an extended depiction of the evils of what ordinary people (zealots in particular) do with unchecked power, numbing and dreary rather than powerful and sobering. The way Oyamina and Earthseed escape from the camp, and how later Oyamina finally lucks into spreading her message, feel like dei ex machina. I guess it's too hard to write a believable scenario for the origin of a forward-thinking religion in a time of cultural regression.

Butler's writing is absorbing and powerful in its directness, however, and even if outright Christian theocracy is a little bit further away than the libertarian dream-come-true of Sower, it's still a present-enough danger to raise chills. The structure of the narrative as a reluctant hagiography is interesting, but perhaps not fully exploited.

2014 read #27: The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper.

The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri S. Tepper
278 pages
Published 1988
Read from February 26 to March 15
Rating: ★★½ out of 5

Spoilers ahead.

After a nuclear war devastates the globe, survivors gather under a leader named Martha Evesdaughter to build a new society, a better society, where indiscriminate war and the male lust for glory and domination and ownership will be bred out of the species, even if it takes a thousand years. Men are kept in garrisons, armed with Bronze Age technology, fed a cult of personal honor and duty and one-on-one combat, but given the chance to return to Women's Country should they choose. These less violent males become breeding stock, leading over many generations to brilliant, psychic empaths and clairvoyants, while the garrison males are told they are the sires of the "warriors' sons" birthed after every conjugal carnival, but they really aren't. And the breeding males and the ruling females can actually defend themselves, because they have like crazy ninja skills and weapons in addition to the clairvoyant empathy thing, so the warrior males are totally expendable. Got all that?

Allegorical novels can fall apart if the allegory doesn't grab the reader. Certainly the world didn't grab me, set up as it was solely to sustain the allegory. The characters could have been interesting if they hadn't all been making stupid, stubborn decisions because the plot needed them to. But the allegory here was the main thing, and it didn't work for me at all. For one thing, what was the allegorical meaning? That male-dominated societies suck, that men have all too often treated women as chattel and possessions, that honor and glory breed machismo and disrespect for women? All valid points, but even in 1988 I think you would have needed something more to bulk up your novel. Women's Country felt insubstantial -- and, worst of all, it was boring.

Tepper hints at the role of the Campbellian hero's quest as a male empowerment fantasy and a rationale for misogynistic behavior, a theme she would treat in great detail in Raising the Stones, but in neither book does she develop that thesis to any satisfactory conclusion. (Another thing she revisits in Sideshow is the caricature of the god-fearin' patriarchal society, which feels like a protracted detour in this book and led to a less than satisfying climax. Not elegant plotting.) The whole "breeding the violence out of the men" thing was some half-baked anthropology -- violence, cooperation, and empathy are largely modulated by culture, so I couldn't stop thinking how stupid it was to let the warrior males raise all the male children from age 5 on, Sparta style, if you wanted to set up a peaceful matriarchal society.