The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
182 pages
Published 1959
Read from September 29 to September 30
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
When there are two women in a room, they must come to instinctively despise each other: that seems to be the operative rule for female characters in much of 20th century fiction. That trite and automatic antagonism between the two female leads is the only sour note in what is otherwise a masterpiece of literary horror. The character of Eleanor is fascinating, and the way her psychological fragility engages with whatever may be said to lurk in Hill House was expertly plotted and portrayed. The banter and repartee between the leads was hilarious, if occasionally seeming forced and artificial, though perhaps people really did talk that way at the time, for all I know. The detailed touches of character, description, and interaction were a delight throughout the book.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Monday, September 29, 2014
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.
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.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
2014 read #91: The Lost and the Lurking by Manly Wade Wellman.
The Lost and the Lurking by Manly Wade Wellman
179 pages
Published 1981
Read from September 26 to September 27
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I find no end of amusement in the thought of the Satanic scares of the '80s. Covens lurking behind the suburban façade, ready to pounce from the shadows and snatch up your child for their midnight outrages! A coordinated conspiracy to indoctrinate little Billy and Suzie with Dungeons & Dragons! Some shadowy elite out to corrupt the youth and destroy The American Way of Life! Finding that silly urban mythology in this book, front and center as the primary plot point, deflated what could have been my favorite Silver John novel yet. Somehow, an evil village of Satanists bent on world domination is even sillier to me than two (two!) separate novels of creatures "here before the Indians" rising to reclaim the hemisphere, counteracting the good parts of an otherwise better-paced and more assured outing.
Well, the Satanic silliness isn't the only thing that detracted from this book. You could even say that Satanic conspiracies are fully consistent with the story universe established thus far. In a world where battles between good and evil go on seemingly every night in the hills and hollers, where it is clear that there is some force of ultimate good in the universe, where other conscientious and well-meaning religions are given token sympathy and ecumenical respect (but Christianity, clearly, is given ultimate precedence) -- in such a world, it would actually make sense for some sort of black witchcraft to set up shop and plot to rule the world from a forgotten hill country hamlet. However, none of that calls for the president of the United States to summon a backwoods troubadour for some kind of Appalachian X-Files investigation, and none of it requires a subplot of foreign dignitaries hoping to use Satanic power to overthrow American power -- plot threads which get forgotten anyway, left unaddressed in the abrupt climax and immediate finale. The young federal agent, the investigation, the foreign dignitaries, what anyone expected to gain from an alliance with a hill country cult -- whatever happened with all that stuff? Why was it even included to begin with?
179 pages
Published 1981
Read from September 26 to September 27
Rating: ★★½ out of 5
I find no end of amusement in the thought of the Satanic scares of the '80s. Covens lurking behind the suburban façade, ready to pounce from the shadows and snatch up your child for their midnight outrages! A coordinated conspiracy to indoctrinate little Billy and Suzie with Dungeons & Dragons! Some shadowy elite out to corrupt the youth and destroy The American Way of Life! Finding that silly urban mythology in this book, front and center as the primary plot point, deflated what could have been my favorite Silver John novel yet. Somehow, an evil village of Satanists bent on world domination is even sillier to me than two (two!) separate novels of creatures "here before the Indians" rising to reclaim the hemisphere, counteracting the good parts of an otherwise better-paced and more assured outing.
Well, the Satanic silliness isn't the only thing that detracted from this book. You could even say that Satanic conspiracies are fully consistent with the story universe established thus far. In a world where battles between good and evil go on seemingly every night in the hills and hollers, where it is clear that there is some force of ultimate good in the universe, where other conscientious and well-meaning religions are given token sympathy and ecumenical respect (but Christianity, clearly, is given ultimate precedence) -- in such a world, it would actually make sense for some sort of black witchcraft to set up shop and plot to rule the world from a forgotten hill country hamlet. However, none of that calls for the president of the United States to summon a backwoods troubadour for some kind of Appalachian X-Files investigation, and none of it requires a subplot of foreign dignitaries hoping to use Satanic power to overthrow American power -- plot threads which get forgotten anyway, left unaddressed in the abrupt climax and immediate finale. The young federal agent, the investigation, the foreign dignitaries, what anyone expected to gain from an alliance with a hill country cult -- whatever happened with all that stuff? Why was it even included to begin with?
Friday, September 26, 2014
2014 read #90: Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye.
Your House Is on Fire, Your Children All Gone by Stefan Kiesbye
199 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 25 to September 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I'm amused that a creative writing professor at Eastern New Mexico University would write a novel about ignorant, inbred, superstitious villagers in a flat landscape forgotten by the 20th century, and all the vicious jealousies, cruelties, and hidden crimes of rural life. For one strange interval of my life I had a tenuous link with ENMU, a place where academic mediocrity goes to stagnate, and the idea that some lost soul condemned to that post produced a novel like this is just so damn apt.
The book itself is not quite so perfect. Kiesbye's prose is adequate, occasionally rising to a surprising phrase but largely as flat and unremarkable as the coastal German boglands around Hemmersmoor. The four narrators fail to develop specific voices, ruminating on past murders and rapes and blackmails and poisonous loves with identical tones of defeat. The novel is more of a sequential string of vignettes, each chapter a largely self-contained short story in which, almost inevitably, someone dies at the end. The predictable rhythm fails to build any sense of rising tension or unease -- Kiesbye finds his motif in the very first chapter, when the village mobs together to kill an outsider family in a bout of superstition, and thereafter coasts along the same path with little deviation.
199 pages
Published 2012
Read from September 25 to September 26
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
I'm amused that a creative writing professor at Eastern New Mexico University would write a novel about ignorant, inbred, superstitious villagers in a flat landscape forgotten by the 20th century, and all the vicious jealousies, cruelties, and hidden crimes of rural life. For one strange interval of my life I had a tenuous link with ENMU, a place where academic mediocrity goes to stagnate, and the idea that some lost soul condemned to that post produced a novel like this is just so damn apt.
The book itself is not quite so perfect. Kiesbye's prose is adequate, occasionally rising to a surprising phrase but largely as flat and unremarkable as the coastal German boglands around Hemmersmoor. The four narrators fail to develop specific voices, ruminating on past murders and rapes and blackmails and poisonous loves with identical tones of defeat. The novel is more of a sequential string of vignettes, each chapter a largely self-contained short story in which, almost inevitably, someone dies at the end. The predictable rhythm fails to build any sense of rising tension or unease -- Kiesbye finds his motif in the very first chapter, when the village mobs together to kill an outsider family in a bout of superstition, and thereafter coasts along the same path with little deviation.
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
2014 read #89: Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon.
Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
192 pages
Published 1937
Read from September 20 to September 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
In terms of scope and the sheer scale of imagination and audacity of conception, this book surpasses everything I've ever read or even heard of, outside the more esoteric and convoluted cosmologies of Hinduism, mystical Buddhism, and mystical Judaism. The career of our physical universe, from Big Bang to heat death, encompassing every stage of evolution and the evolution of intelligence -- from brutish, befuddled ol' Homo sapiens up to a universal cosmic mind united in contemplation of the eternal Star Maker -- is only the foundation of an ultimate revelation: a pantheistic conception of our universe as but one particle of creation "objectified" from the Star Maker in an eternal, cyclical act of self-creation (or "divine self-midwifery," in Stapledon's phrase), but one stage in a timeless process of creative growth from crude dimensionless bubbles of rhythm and music to some ultimate cosmos beyond our (or the author's) conception, in which universes such as ours were as mere atoms in its substance. It is a thrilling vista, a truly bold attempt to grapple with the possibilities of science fiction as a philosophical medium, and an equally bold effort to imbue the scientific scale and cold brilliant majesty of the universe with something like an essentially human spiritual framework.
As with all such attempts, Stapledon's conception of the creator remains pathetically anthropomorphic, despite his protests that he must describe in human terms what defies human understanding. I can't fault him for failing to describe the indescribable. Nor can I do anything but praise Stapledon's imagination, which again glosses over in mere paragraphs or bare lines breathtaking science fictional concepts that would produce whole volumes and subgenres in the hands of subsequent writers.
No, my problem with Stapledon (beyond the taint of eugenics and flawed "race theory" of his time) is how dreadfully dull and dry it all is. Those mere lines and paragraphs, bold though they may be, carry the emotional intensity of a graphing calculator or a slide rule. "Immensity itself is not a good thing," Stapledon admonishes, yet seems to ignore that dictum in his own storytelling -- if such a word even applies to an antiseptic examination of countless eons, scarcely interrupted by so much as a pulse of life or character. The early going is positively Swiftian in character, lampooning certain ideological follies by exaggerating them into alien cultures. But nothing approaching a "story" is evident, beyond the story of the evolution of cosmical consciousness itself, which makes for dreary reading.
192 pages
Published 1937
Read from September 20 to September 23
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
In terms of scope and the sheer scale of imagination and audacity of conception, this book surpasses everything I've ever read or even heard of, outside the more esoteric and convoluted cosmologies of Hinduism, mystical Buddhism, and mystical Judaism. The career of our physical universe, from Big Bang to heat death, encompassing every stage of evolution and the evolution of intelligence -- from brutish, befuddled ol' Homo sapiens up to a universal cosmic mind united in contemplation of the eternal Star Maker -- is only the foundation of an ultimate revelation: a pantheistic conception of our universe as but one particle of creation "objectified" from the Star Maker in an eternal, cyclical act of self-creation (or "divine self-midwifery," in Stapledon's phrase), but one stage in a timeless process of creative growth from crude dimensionless bubbles of rhythm and music to some ultimate cosmos beyond our (or the author's) conception, in which universes such as ours were as mere atoms in its substance. It is a thrilling vista, a truly bold attempt to grapple with the possibilities of science fiction as a philosophical medium, and an equally bold effort to imbue the scientific scale and cold brilliant majesty of the universe with something like an essentially human spiritual framework.
As with all such attempts, Stapledon's conception of the creator remains pathetically anthropomorphic, despite his protests that he must describe in human terms what defies human understanding. I can't fault him for failing to describe the indescribable. Nor can I do anything but praise Stapledon's imagination, which again glosses over in mere paragraphs or bare lines breathtaking science fictional concepts that would produce whole volumes and subgenres in the hands of subsequent writers.
No, my problem with Stapledon (beyond the taint of eugenics and flawed "race theory" of his time) is how dreadfully dull and dry it all is. Those mere lines and paragraphs, bold though they may be, carry the emotional intensity of a graphing calculator or a slide rule. "Immensity itself is not a good thing," Stapledon admonishes, yet seems to ignore that dictum in his own storytelling -- if such a word even applies to an antiseptic examination of countless eons, scarcely interrupted by so much as a pulse of life or character. The early going is positively Swiftian in character, lampooning certain ideological follies by exaggerating them into alien cultures. But nothing approaching a "story" is evident, beyond the story of the evolution of cosmical consciousness itself, which makes for dreary reading.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
2014 read #88: Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon.
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
Foreword by Gregory Benford; afterword by Doris Lessing
324 pages
Published 1930
Read from September 16 to September 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Within the last year or so, I read words from some recently famous sci-fi writer or editor, to the effect that Olaf Stapledon had been an enormous influence on the Grand Masters of science fiction, and his modern-day obscurity is a shame. Such words nudged me toward checking him out, together with the prospect of learning something -- anything at all -- about the evolution of genre fiction between the heyday of Wells and the first stirrings of the New Wave. Some say Star Maker is his masterwork, and I'll be reading that soon enough. Others say Last and First Men was his crowning achievement. If this is true... well, there were times during the last few days when I thought it might be better that Stapledon be forgotten.
Last and First Men is a bizarre book, fragments of brilliance and Siddhartha-esque spirituality scattered through a dry-as-dust narrative recounting the next 2,000,000,000 or so years of human evolution. On one hand it's fascinating to observe early appearances of themes and imagery that would be staples over the next two generations of speculative fiction: sentient virus clouds predating Star Trek, metapsychic unity long before Julian May, grisly and outré scenes of far-future ecology that would do Dougal Dixon proud. On the other hand, the book makes heavy use of then-current "race theory" and eugenics, as well as repugnant notions of "racial senescence" and the supposed vitiating effect of tropical ecosystems (dreamed up as a posthoc "theory" for why the "Nordic races" conquered the world, I imagine). And just think -- this Stapledon guy was progressive for his time. There's a description early on in Last and First Men, depicting the crude and appalling "Americanized" near-future, which features a ritualized Sacred Lynching -- all portrayed with anthropological detachment. In 1930, this would have been a scathing criticism of American culture and de facto politics. Reading it now, the effect is merely horrifying.
Gregory Benford, writing perhaps in the flush of the "Tear down this wall!" speech, advises in his foreword to skip the early chapters, eliminating the "antique quality" of Stapledon's interwar prognostications. Skipping the Americanized Planet, however, glosses over some sharp commentary and unexpectedly perceptive extrapolations of America's inevitable failure. I won't type out extensive quotations, so I'll share one of my favorite pages as two pictures, here and here. Stapledon's thoughts on the world's immediate future are certainly quaint, but what he gets right is startling from seventy years' distance.
Boring, horribly racist, full of stuffy pseudo-Buddhist philosophy -- why did I rate it so highly? I don't know. I guess the ending passages got to me despite my cynicism. And it's hard to entirely hate a book that incorporates both a Lindberghian cult of the airplane and a race of monkeys using posthuman "submen" as beasts of burden and of warfare. Plus -- one last thought, I swear -- it's fascinating to see how many eons Stapledon assumed would pass before any human descendant fashioned workable interplanetary travel (almost half a billion years before the first attempt to travel to the moon, and only then when instigated by planetary catastrophe). Not that that deserves a higher rating on its own, but I love the historical interest of it all.
Foreword by Gregory Benford; afterword by Doris Lessing
324 pages
Published 1930
Read from September 16 to September 20
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Within the last year or so, I read words from some recently famous sci-fi writer or editor, to the effect that Olaf Stapledon had been an enormous influence on the Grand Masters of science fiction, and his modern-day obscurity is a shame. Such words nudged me toward checking him out, together with the prospect of learning something -- anything at all -- about the evolution of genre fiction between the heyday of Wells and the first stirrings of the New Wave. Some say Star Maker is his masterwork, and I'll be reading that soon enough. Others say Last and First Men was his crowning achievement. If this is true... well, there were times during the last few days when I thought it might be better that Stapledon be forgotten.
Last and First Men is a bizarre book, fragments of brilliance and Siddhartha-esque spirituality scattered through a dry-as-dust narrative recounting the next 2,000,000,000 or so years of human evolution. On one hand it's fascinating to observe early appearances of themes and imagery that would be staples over the next two generations of speculative fiction: sentient virus clouds predating Star Trek, metapsychic unity long before Julian May, grisly and outré scenes of far-future ecology that would do Dougal Dixon proud. On the other hand, the book makes heavy use of then-current "race theory" and eugenics, as well as repugnant notions of "racial senescence" and the supposed vitiating effect of tropical ecosystems (dreamed up as a posthoc "theory" for why the "Nordic races" conquered the world, I imagine). And just think -- this Stapledon guy was progressive for his time. There's a description early on in Last and First Men, depicting the crude and appalling "Americanized" near-future, which features a ritualized Sacred Lynching -- all portrayed with anthropological detachment. In 1930, this would have been a scathing criticism of American culture and de facto politics. Reading it now, the effect is merely horrifying.
Gregory Benford, writing perhaps in the flush of the "Tear down this wall!" speech, advises in his foreword to skip the early chapters, eliminating the "antique quality" of Stapledon's interwar prognostications. Skipping the Americanized Planet, however, glosses over some sharp commentary and unexpectedly perceptive extrapolations of America's inevitable failure. I won't type out extensive quotations, so I'll share one of my favorite pages as two pictures, here and here. Stapledon's thoughts on the world's immediate future are certainly quaint, but what he gets right is startling from seventy years' distance.
Boring, horribly racist, full of stuffy pseudo-Buddhist philosophy -- why did I rate it so highly? I don't know. I guess the ending passages got to me despite my cynicism. And it's hard to entirely hate a book that incorporates both a Lindberghian cult of the airplane and a race of monkeys using posthuman "submen" as beasts of burden and of warfare. Plus -- one last thought, I swear -- it's fascinating to see how many eons Stapledon assumed would pass before any human descendant fashioned workable interplanetary travel (almost half a billion years before the first attempt to travel to the moon, and only then when instigated by planetary catastrophe). Not that that deserves a higher rating on its own, but I love the historical interest of it all.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
2014 read #87: The Bees by Laline Paull.
The Bees by Laline Paull
340 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 13 to September 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A slight, unobjectionable animal fantasy, brought down considerably by its loose, almost aimless structure. At times Paull is clearly channeling Watership Down, but rather than a structured epic, The Bees is a picaresque narrative, bumbling from one vignette to the next as the viewpoint character, Flora 717, finds herself working or witnessing every possible permutation of life inside and outside the hive, without much purpose beyond "Here are some facts about bees and colony collapse, presented through a talking animal filter." Flora is constantly distracted and sidetracked, corralled into a cleaning job while on her way out to forage just so Paull could depict drones carousing and demanding entertainment, before Flora escapes to forage anyway. Fantasies built upon quasi-realistic depictions of biology are a fine idea, but in a novel, story should always come first; at times during The Bees, I wished I could be watching a bee documentary instead.
340 pages
Published 2014
Read from September 13 to September 16
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
A slight, unobjectionable animal fantasy, brought down considerably by its loose, almost aimless structure. At times Paull is clearly channeling Watership Down, but rather than a structured epic, The Bees is a picaresque narrative, bumbling from one vignette to the next as the viewpoint character, Flora 717, finds herself working or witnessing every possible permutation of life inside and outside the hive, without much purpose beyond "Here are some facts about bees and colony collapse, presented through a talking animal filter." Flora is constantly distracted and sidetracked, corralled into a cleaning job while on her way out to forage just so Paull could depict drones carousing and demanding entertainment, before Flora escapes to forage anyway. Fantasies built upon quasi-realistic depictions of biology are a fine idea, but in a novel, story should always come first; at times during The Bees, I wished I could be watching a bee documentary instead.
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