The Year's Best Fantasy Stories: 5, edited by Lin Carter
204 pages
Published 1980
Read from February 7 to February 8
Rating: ★★ out of 5
Here we are again, with the penultimate YBFS volume curated by Lin Carter. You wouldn't think I'd be looking forward to this -- some unexpected gems aside, the stories chosen (and often written) by Carter in the preceding installments were terrible. They were so consistently bad that I found myself reading them
for the pleasure of hating them, and subsequently mocking them in my
reviews. It was the short story equivalent of riffing B-movies. And, secretly, I also found myself oddly intrigued by the form of '70s heroic
fantasy. The problem was the content, not the form. The idea of a serial
adventure following a protagonist through a fantasy realm grew on me
with each volume, especially whenever I read a serial I liked, such as
Pat McIntosh's Thula tales, or Phyllis Eisenstein's stories of Alaric
the minstrel (of which, sadly, I've only encountered one so far) -- or
George R. R. Martin's "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr," which is the
apotheosis of the form, despite being a one-off story. This influence has crept perceptibly into my short story writing, nudging me into experiments with "1970s-style adventure fantasy serials," in which a central hero outwits opponents for the Macguffin, or simply runs away with life (though not pride) intact.
All this has, I believe, helped me forget just how terrible so many of these stories have been, particularly those written by Carter (sometimes under assumed names) and those hewing closest to the Carterian ideal of chiseled, Aryan barbarian trudging across the deserts of a lost continent under the weight of a mighty, turgid thesaurus. I can remind myself of that all I want, yet I still feel just a mite bit sad that this volume and YBFS:6 will complete the run of Carter-curated anthologies. YBFS:7 will inaugurate the editorship of Arthur W. Saha; if Amazon reviews are to be believed, the tone of these collections shifts toward the sleek and dazzling fantasy of the 1980s, much to the disgruntlement of those people who actually like this sort of thing.
So I hope to make the most of my limited time in the company of Lin Carter, master of adult fantasy, tastemaker, lecherous creep, and world's most bald-faced self-promoter. I hope the Saha years ahead of me will help me forget all about you, but I think there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the batshit-stupid fantasy of the 1970s (though not for your stories, which are crap).
More so than usual, the publication dates are all over the place, ranging across three calendar years in this "annual" collection. Those stories designated with a 1980 publication date saw original publication in this volume.
"The Troll" by T.H. White (1978). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Fantasy, where I said, "This story feels more suited to the late
nineteenth or early twentieth century.... [It] feels like a lost Wells creature feature. Enjoyable, if terribly dated." Lin Carter unexpectedly comes to the rescue, providing the information that "The Troll" was likely written before 1933, and was only published after it "came to light" among the deceased author's papers. I feel like patting myself on the back for catching its anachronistic quality so early in my genre education.
"In the Balance" by Tanith Lee (1978). Mildly entertaining bauble, efficiently (if generically) setting up the situation and pulling a twist ending that, honestly, wasn't so surprising. I could see this getting published in Adventures of Sword & Sorcery magazine in the late '90s, though that isn't a testament to Lee being ahead of her time so much as it is evidence of how much of a throwback that short-lived pro magazine had been.
"The Gem in the Tower" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (1978). Not even Sprague de Camp's participation can elevate Conan fan-fiction, especially when Lin Carter is involved. Carter brags in his introduction to the story that "seldom before [in our Conan fan-fiction] have we mastered [Robert E. Howard's] tendency toward gloomy foreboding and ominous spookiness as well as in this yarn." This foreboding ominousness seems to be conveyed by outright telling the reader that there is (I quote) "ominous foreboding." It's a good thing the text says so, because otherwise the effect would have been lost on me. Conan is a pirate here, with a crew of racial stereotypes, hunting after a dead wizard's gem; he battles a fantasy-Pteranodon (de Camp's influence, I'm guessing), and has a good laugh with his men once the peril is dispatched. A rote effort; I can't even work up enough interest to hate it, which by default makes it one of my favorite Lin Carter stories.
"Above Ker-Is" by Evangeline Walton (1978). Lin Carter, ever the gallant, praises the talents of female fantasy writers, and chuckles, "There's enough sheer inventive genius there to create a brand new universe over the weekend, and still have time to get the dishes done." You know, because they're women, and Lin Carter is a jackass. Anyway, this story was written in 1927 and locked in a trunk, an item of luggage with which seemingly every early fantasist was provided, through some far-sighted lock-stories-in-trunks-for-posthumous-exploitation fund. This happens to be my first Evangeline Walton story. It certainly has an antique feel, close in spirit to T.H. White's "The Troll," yet also hinting at an almost Cosmicist horror of the mysteries of existence -- horrors, in this instance, lurking within human sexuality and attachment rather than in primordial beings and ghastly dimensions. It's a fascinating take on what we would now subsume into faery lore, though as a story, I felt it was only pretty good, not amazing.
"Ms. Lipshutz and the Goblin" by Marvin Kaye (1978). For once, Lin Carter's introduction to this story hits the nail on the head: "The spirit of John W. Campbell's Unknown still lives." This sort of droll New York City working-mensch fantasy can trace its ancestry directly to Unknown, which, sadly, I've only encountered in two stories reviewed here. Kaye updates the formula to poke fun at current issues, like those women's libbers wanting to be called "Ms.," and of course our heroine finds happiness, fulfillment, and weight-loss in marrying a successful goblin and settling into the suburbs, but this sort of patronizing was probably considered progressive for its time. A mildly amusing bauble.
"Rhian and Garanhir" by Grail Undwin (1980). "I am enormously fond of Grail Undwin," Lin Carter writes, "because I discovered her all by myself." Actually, as we all know, Grail Undwin is Lin Carter, using his Year's Best Fantasy Stories platform to push his pseudonymous productions upon the fantasy-reading public, and heaping fulsome praise upon his alter-ego: "Nobody ever wrote fairy tales like these before: they break all the rules and get away with the trick superbly." I'm a fan of tales of Faery, and seek them out when I can, yet not even I can discern which rules were supposedly broken in the course of this story. There are distinctly unmagical elves, with little to distinguish them from idealized medieval fantasy knights and ladies; an anecdote of hopeless courtly love is conveyed with little affect; and the story ends. There isn't much here to stick in memory, let alone a bold new rule-breaking direction for fantasy.
"Lord of the Dead" by Robert E. Howard (1978). This is the third "rediscovered tale from a long-dead early master" in this volume so far, in addition to the Robert E. Howard fan-fiction written by the editor and his pal, plus one story written by the editor but passed off as the work of some eccentric new master of the craft. Seven stories, representing the "best fantasy of the year," and only two of them -- the Tanith Lee and the Marvin Kaye -- were original stories actually written and published by contemporary authors who were not the editor. Even by Lin Carter's standards, YBFS:5 has been bleak pickings so far. This story was originally picked up by a pulp called Strange Detective in 1933, which folded and left it unpublished. A he-man detective with the inevitable "cold blue eyes" of a Howard hero, brawling in alleys with Orientalist assassins and ending up berserking with a massive axe through a torture dungeon -- this might be the single most pulp story I've ever read. Really, it's just Conan dressed in city clothes; our "big dick," as Howard terms him, stumbles into some sort of
pan-Asian mystery cult slash crime syndicate masterminded by a descendant of Genghis Khan. Perhaps it's even more racist than the Conan stories: "The alley, nameless to white men, but known to the teeming swarms of River Street as the Alley of Silence, was as devious and cryptic as the characteristics of the race which frequented it." There's an iota of entertainment to be found in the sheer testosterone-addled pulpiness of it all, I guess, but if there are any more stories to be found locked in trunks, let them be Evangeline Walton's.
"Child of Air" by Pat McIntosh (1980). McIntosh's Thula stories tend to be a highlight of these books. Her gentle, wary prose is leagues beyond the turgid pulp of Carter's other favorite serials. This story, however, is a bit disappointing, putting our (now former) warrior maid in sexual peril, reduced to a prize to be dueled over by an evil monarch and his gallant and handsome cousin (who happens to be a werewolf as well as a wizard), her agency limited to being the Wolf's helpmeet in wizard-battle. A middling effort.
"A Malady of Magicks" by Craig Shaw Gardner (1978). Nothing to complain of here -- a perfectly enjoyable, funny romp with a has-been wizard and his hapless apprentice. Basic stuff, but good. It's a shame that this is the best story in the book so far.
"St. George" by David Mallory (1980). Lin Carter heaps praise upon the originality of this "newcomer," which immediately arouses my suspicions. Sure enough, googling discloses that the only other item in this fellow's bibliography is a letter printed in Weird Tales #3 a year after the publication of this collection. Grail Undwin is a known alias of Carter's; Philip Coakley, whose only published story is "Lok the Depressor" in YBFS:4, I'm 100% certain is another. I'm only about 99% convinced that this David Mallory is yet another Carter pen name; that letter to the editor seems like too much commitment for a Carter ruse (though perhaps it was just a reader with a similar name; without seeing the letter, I have no idea if it's really the same guy). Certainly the "so original you've got to read it to believe it" storyline (Lin Carter's words) is merely a fumbling attempt at a sex gag: George jizzes in his armor with the satisfaction of slaying the dragon, then becomes "history's first sadist" with poor Sabra, which feels like Lin Carter trying to be saucy and provocative -- and, perhaps, explains why he wanted to stay safe behind a pseudonym. So once again, three of the twelve stories in this book were either written or co-written by the editor. I know you're dead and all, but seriously, you were a real dickweed, Lin Carter.
"Astral Stray" by Adrian Cole (1979). A splendid and startlingly ambitious setting, and glorious heaps of backstory spanning universe upon universe, helps elevate this tale. The plot could have just as easily revolved around mundane travelers swapping favors in a conventional fantasy inn, but the scope of its cosmic setting and its creation-epic imagery were memorable and ahead of its time. With additional polish to its prose, and perhaps some tweaking to modernize and freshen up the side characters, I could see this getting snatched up by Asimov's in the late '90s. Easily my favorite entry in this volume. Stories like this make wading through Lin Carter's regressive tastes and overmastering self-indulgence worthwhile.
"Demon and Demoiselle" by Janet Fox (1978). Solid, satisfying pseudo-medieval sword and sorcery -- as basic an article as they get, but well-made and durable. The descriptions are vivid and the prose goes down easy, and the practical, undaunted heroine -- a sorceress determined to retrieve her demon -- is a refreshing antidote to all the pulp masculinity and the disappointingly meek Thula we've seen in the foregoing stories.
That's it for yet another installment of YBFS. Three good stories, three all right stories, plus a good story I'd already read before -- I guess I'd better swallow my dislike of Lin Carter and give this volume a relatively generous score, even if nothing here is as good as "The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr" in YBFS:3.
Sunday, February 8, 2015
Saturday, February 7, 2015
2015 read #6: The Just City by Jo Walton.
The Just City by Jo Walton
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.
My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.
In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.
Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."
Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.
368 pages
Published 2015
Read from January 31 to February 7
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Content warning: Discussion of rape depicted in the book.
My first exposure to Plato was the PHI 101 course I took during my first semester as an undergrad. The professor was dynamic and engaging, but his weakness, appropriately enough, was for philosophical debate. Plato (and by proxy Socrates), together with the rest of the Classical Greek philosophers, was only supposed to occupy the first three weeks of the course, but Professor C. let the class get out of hand in their enthusiasm for going for Plato's jugular. Six weeks into the course -- almost halfway through the semester -- students were still standing up in the lecture hall to expostulate on Plato's errors and why he was just plain wrong about something. I was new to the classroom experience, and certainly contributed my share of derailment -- I thought I had a brilliant response to the question of whether any thinking being might choose the bad over the good, but found myself lost in a completely irrelevant (and public) description of my depression -- but even at the time I understood that there was no reason to argue so vehemently against Plato, because arguing against Plato is literally the history of the rest of Western philosophy, so we only had to wait for Professor C. to get around to teaching us the arguments that had already been made. Unfortunately, we spent so much time arguing with Plato ourselves that Professor C. had to cut substantial portions of the syllabus to get back on track; we never covered anything later than Nietzsche and William James, and we only touched on them because Professor C. had a fondness for James and used him for the capping lecture at the end of the term.
In all those endless weeks of undergrads pwning Plato, we never read a word of the Republic. We read selections from Crito, Phaedo, Meno, and possibly another dialogue, but the Republic was a chunk of our greatest-hits-of-philosophy reader that we never touched. I regret the spotty nature of my philosophical education, but until now I hadn't thought I'd missed much by not reading an additional Platonic dialogue -- it was that stuff that Professor C. had to cut to make room for all our Plato hate, everything in between the Stoics and Descartes, and again between Descartes and Nietzsche, and again after James, that I wish I'd learned. But when I heard that Jo Walton, one of my favorite authors, was about to publish a two-book science fantasy about Greek gods and the establishment of Plato's Just City, I counted down the days until my library's copy of the first book would arrive.
Walton says the idea of writing a novel about time travelers establishing the Just City occurred to her way back when she was 15, which makes all the dinosaur novels and Star Wars fan-fiction I was writing at 15 seem pretty silly. But whatever her original idea had been, she uses the trope of the Just City to explore, on multiple levels, issues of consent, autonomy, and the equal significance of persons. (Incidentally, I just used the word "trope" correctly, for perhaps the first time in the history of the internet. Suck it, TV Tropes. You changed the meaning of a perfectly good word, and frankly you aren't that interesting a website.) Unfortunately, as the god Apollo, incarnate as a young man named Pytheas in order to learn about these topics for himself, admits, "Explaining [these issues] to humans wouldn't be possible. I could try to inspire people to make art about it. Poems. Sculptures. But it's one of those things that doesn't go easily into the shapes of stories."
Consent, autonomy, and equal significance are vital issues, and throughout the book, one gets the sense that Walton is trying to do a public service in creating a science fantasy book (the sort of book, presumably, 15 year old Jo would have loved to read) that addresses them in a sensitive but direct and unswerving manner, a didactic correction to all those horrid genre books full of casual rape and misogyny. It makes for stiff and artificial reading at times. A scene in which one of the time-traveling masters of the city is raped by another is carefully written to demonstrate that arousal is not a token of consent, and to show how poisonous and predatory the idea of "But she really wanted it" is, but the dialogue between rapist and woman is as naturalistic as an undergraduate gender studies essay. I'd rather these issues be explored in any way possible, naturalism be damned, but I agree with the words Walton put in Apollo's mouth: it doesn't go easily into stories. It's important that authors address these issues, but The Just City shows that the art of explaining consent and equal significance is still in an awkward, fumbling phase. In time, I'm sure, genre authors will have a better grasp of how to discuss autonomy and consent (for all I know literary authors figured this out long ago). The Just City is an important step in that direction, but as art, I'd hardly call it inspired.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
2015 read #5: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog!) by Jerome K. Jerome
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
177 pages
Published 1889
Read from January 27 to January 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Whew. The second half of January has been dismal, as far as reading is concerned. Between Five Weeks in a Balloon, which took a week to finish, and Vonda N. McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which I began on January 17 and might not ever finish, my works have been clogged with dull, joyless books that have thrown my reading apparatus entirely out of whack. Even Three Men in a Boat, a thoroughly enjoyable trifle I should have been able to breeze through in a day and a half, tops, took four days to complete. I feel like I've forgotten how to read again, after two years of being very good about it.
I love the dry understatement of later Victorian humor, so most of this book was a delight, but after a while the comic digressions began to feel more wearisome than winsome. Most likely this is a result of my burned-out attitude toward reading after the unparalleled boredom of The Moon and the Sun, and not a reflection on the literary merits of Three Men. The earnest Romantic interludes warbling poetic about the beauties of nature are only to be expected in a Victorian work. The ending feels somewhat abrupt, as if Jerome ran out of steam and crammed the rest of the (fictionalized) river journey into a couple of pages, after all the digressions and anecdotes that had, perhaps, filled up his quota of words. Much of the book until that point had been laugh-out-loud funny, but the ending heightened a sense of unevenness and awkward pacing that left me somewhat unsatisfied.
Endnotes by Jeremy Lewis
177 pages
Published 1889
Read from January 27 to January 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Whew. The second half of January has been dismal, as far as reading is concerned. Between Five Weeks in a Balloon, which took a week to finish, and Vonda N. McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which I began on January 17 and might not ever finish, my works have been clogged with dull, joyless books that have thrown my reading apparatus entirely out of whack. Even Three Men in a Boat, a thoroughly enjoyable trifle I should have been able to breeze through in a day and a half, tops, took four days to complete. I feel like I've forgotten how to read again, after two years of being very good about it.
I love the dry understatement of later Victorian humor, so most of this book was a delight, but after a while the comic digressions began to feel more wearisome than winsome. Most likely this is a result of my burned-out attitude toward reading after the unparalleled boredom of The Moon and the Sun, and not a reflection on the literary merits of Three Men. The earnest Romantic interludes warbling poetic about the beauties of nature are only to be expected in a Victorian work. The ending feels somewhat abrupt, as if Jerome ran out of steam and crammed the rest of the (fictionalized) river journey into a couple of pages, after all the digressions and anecdotes that had, perhaps, filled up his quota of words. Much of the book until that point had been laugh-out-loud funny, but the ending heightened a sense of unevenness and awkward pacing that left me somewhat unsatisfied.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
2015 read #4: A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.
A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle
290 pages
Published 1960
Read from January 15 to January 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
"[T]he happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead." That, in one sentence, sums up what is so beautiful and so delicate and so inimitable about Beagle at his best. And this is Beagle in his finest form, at least to my tastes, surpassing even The Last Unicorn and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here). There is just a hint of midcentury propriety in Beagle's characterizations of Laura and Mrs. Klapper, otherwise well-realized characters who seem to have no direction in life beyond the love given them (or not) by men. Otherwise this tale is breathtakingly ahead of its time. I can't imagine anglophone fantasy daring to explore such a small, intimate enchantment again until the mid-'80s at the very earliest; my knowledge of literary fiction is more impoverished, but I also have a hard time believing such an achingly human exploration of love, mortality, and existence would be presented by any lit author in the medium of what is, essentially, a ghost story, not until the '90s or thereabouts.
All of which is a mess of adjectives and feeble attempts at capturing a feeling. This book made me glad I've spent the last ten years in New York, so that I could appreciate Beagle's evocations of June and July and August in the green and sweaty and earthy and beautiful city he depicts. Beagle brings a vivid sense of place and the personal, stirring life on every page. The better a book is, the worse equipped I feel to convey what made it so special. This is definitely one of those cases. It is a humble book, and sometimes the artifice of a young and ambitious author Making a Statement can elbow through, but I feel wholly inadequate to say why exactly I loved it so much.
290 pages
Published 1960
Read from January 15 to January 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5
"[T]he happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead." That, in one sentence, sums up what is so beautiful and so delicate and so inimitable about Beagle at his best. And this is Beagle in his finest form, at least to my tastes, surpassing even The Last Unicorn and "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros" (reviewed here). There is just a hint of midcentury propriety in Beagle's characterizations of Laura and Mrs. Klapper, otherwise well-realized characters who seem to have no direction in life beyond the love given them (or not) by men. Otherwise this tale is breathtakingly ahead of its time. I can't imagine anglophone fantasy daring to explore such a small, intimate enchantment again until the mid-'80s at the very earliest; my knowledge of literary fiction is more impoverished, but I also have a hard time believing such an achingly human exploration of love, mortality, and existence would be presented by any lit author in the medium of what is, essentially, a ghost story, not until the '90s or thereabouts.
All of which is a mess of adjectives and feeble attempts at capturing a feeling. This book made me glad I've spent the last ten years in New York, so that I could appreciate Beagle's evocations of June and July and August in the green and sweaty and earthy and beautiful city he depicts. Beagle brings a vivid sense of place and the personal, stirring life on every page. The better a book is, the worse equipped I feel to convey what made it so special. This is definitely one of those cases. It is a humble book, and sometimes the artifice of a young and ambitious author Making a Statement can elbow through, but I feel wholly inadequate to say why exactly I loved it so much.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
2015 read #3: Five Weeks in a Balloon by Jules Verne.
Five Weeks in a Balloon; or, Journeys and Discoveries in Africa by Three Englishmen by Jules Verne
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.
By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.
There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.
Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.
Translated by "William Lackland"
345 pages
Published 1863; unauthorized translation published 1869
Read from January 9 to January 15
Rating: ★½ out of 5
Jules Verne was one of my first loves as a reader. I cut my teeth on abridged versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Center of the Earth, and quickly graduated to the full versions of those classics as well as From the Earth to the Moon, Around the Moon, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Mysterious Island. One of the very first pieces of creative writing I ever produced was a fan-fiction "sidequel" of sorts to 20,000 Leagues, which I wrote when I was 8 or 9. In my tween and teen years I grew into a Wells partisan -- The War of the Worlds was the first unabridged "adult" novel I ever read, and I vastly preferred the vivid and exciting The First Men in the Moon to Verne's more aloof selenographic explorations -- but Center of the Earth had plesiosaurs, damn it, and Captain Nemo remains one of science fiction's most enduring and fascinating antiheroes.
By some form of cultural osmosis, a vague idea of Five Weeks in a Balloon seems to permeate many people's ideas of the rest of Verne's bibliography. My brother, when I first read Around the World in Eighty Days, said something to the effect of "Didn't they [the characters] go the whole way in a balloon?" (Or maybe he thought it was something that had actually happened. Randy sometimes had trouble telling fiction apart from history in those days.) Yet I've never read Balloon. It is perhaps the most recognizable omission from my Verne reading list (how much of the general public today, after all, has heard of Robur the Conqueror, the Verne book I'm most excited to read?). I felt more obligation than anticipation about reading it now. I checked it out way back in November and kept putting it off until now. At the very worst, I figured this would be a virulently racist but quaintly entertaining old-timey adventure. It is indeed virulently, horribly racist (in keeping with basically all popular fiction of the period), but I was wrong about the entertaining part. Five Weeks in a Balloon is, in a word, boring.
There is one evocative, Romantic scene, in which the Victoria glides gracefully over a "green, almost transparent sea" of grass: "The anchors plunged into this lake of flowers, and traced a furrow that closed behind them, like the wake of a ship." That image is powerful, lovely, and perhaps the only mark in the book's favor. The characters are dull, barely defined types that would recur in Verne's later work: Joe, the goofy, acrobatic, devoted servant, is a discount store version of Passepartout, whom (in memory, at least) is more vividly realized and individual; Dr. Ferguson is a stock competent captain type grafted onto the "genius scientist" role; Dick Kennedy is the merest outline of the Great White Sportsman type. I kept expecting the book to gain momentum once the voyage proper began, a hope which kept me reading long after I should have abandoned it, but aside from the sea of grass scene, which lasts scarcely a page, reading remained an unrewarding trudge through horrible Victorian conceits and race theory. Genre parody though it may be, Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer Abroad is a vastly more satisfying balloon adventure across Africa.
Perhaps the fault lies with the translator, a pseudonymous and wholly unauthorized pirate distributor none too careful about expressing Verne's exact meaning, and certainly heedless of placing pages in the correct order. In this reprint of the 1869 "William Lackland" edition, the first page of chapter thirteen is missing entirely, substituted with the first page of chapter thirty, which in turn is absent in its proper place, replaced by a random page from chapter forty-three. There's no telling how many careless word mixups there are throughout the text; I certainly doubt the eastern coast of Africa was ever buffered by "mango" swamps.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
2015 read #2: All Clear by Connie Willis.
All Clear by Connie Willis
642 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 4 to January 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
In the end, of course, the thousand or so pages of time travelers just barely missing each other, of plot running in circles, of waiting and stalling and worrying and waiting some more throughout both of these books -- in the end, this all has thematic relevance. Disappointingly, that theme is just a bloated, much less charming repeat of To Say Nothing of the Dog's denouement: the conceit that time travelers are a way for the space-time continuum to fix itself, as it were, to make sure certain small actions registered in a chaotic system, rather than a hazard to the proper course of history, which the travelers spend so much time worrying about. To be fair, there probably isn't all that much else to say, thematically speaking, in a "realistic" depiction of time travel, but after this ground was covered so elegantly in To Say Nothing, I feel like I read through a whole lot of fake cliffhangers and "We totally just altered the events of history and the Nazis will win for sure... oh, wait, no, sorry, we didn't really change a thing" stingers and ever so much historical padding to reach conclusions already spelled out in the previous (and far superior) Oxford time travel adventure.
Well... all that historical padding shouldn't be in the negative column with the fakeout cliffhangers and the constant (and needless) bellyaching about changing the continuum when really everything was fine. The historical padding might be a tad generous, but it's the most engaging and fascinating part of both Blackout and All Clear. Willis has gotten me interested in reading books about World War II -- no small achievement, considering I'd long thought it the most prettied-up, morally sanitized, and Hollywood-ready of all twentieth century conflicts (perhaps because it was the last war in which America, despite some slip-ups, could unequivocally claim to be the good guys). I came this close to picking up a history of the Dunkirk evacuations earlier tonight, before the library closed. If there are any good books on the British homefront war or the French resistance, I want them.
Blackout and All Clear form an ambitious diptych that, unfortunately, became an obvious case of the story getting away from the author. It would be too glib to say "This would be an excellent novel at half the length," but my feelings are somewhere in that neighborhood.
642 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 4 to January 8
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
In the end, of course, the thousand or so pages of time travelers just barely missing each other, of plot running in circles, of waiting and stalling and worrying and waiting some more throughout both of these books -- in the end, this all has thematic relevance. Disappointingly, that theme is just a bloated, much less charming repeat of To Say Nothing of the Dog's denouement: the conceit that time travelers are a way for the space-time continuum to fix itself, as it were, to make sure certain small actions registered in a chaotic system, rather than a hazard to the proper course of history, which the travelers spend so much time worrying about. To be fair, there probably isn't all that much else to say, thematically speaking, in a "realistic" depiction of time travel, but after this ground was covered so elegantly in To Say Nothing, I feel like I read through a whole lot of fake cliffhangers and "We totally just altered the events of history and the Nazis will win for sure... oh, wait, no, sorry, we didn't really change a thing" stingers and ever so much historical padding to reach conclusions already spelled out in the previous (and far superior) Oxford time travel adventure.
Well... all that historical padding shouldn't be in the negative column with the fakeout cliffhangers and the constant (and needless) bellyaching about changing the continuum when really everything was fine. The historical padding might be a tad generous, but it's the most engaging and fascinating part of both Blackout and All Clear. Willis has gotten me interested in reading books about World War II -- no small achievement, considering I'd long thought it the most prettied-up, morally sanitized, and Hollywood-ready of all twentieth century conflicts (perhaps because it was the last war in which America, despite some slip-ups, could unequivocally claim to be the good guys). I came this close to picking up a history of the Dunkirk evacuations earlier tonight, before the library closed. If there are any good books on the British homefront war or the French resistance, I want them.
Blackout and All Clear form an ambitious diptych that, unfortunately, became an obvious case of the story getting away from the author. It would be too glib to say "This would be an excellent novel at half the length," but my feelings are somewhere in that neighborhood.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
2015 read #1: Blackout by Connie Willis.
Blackout by Connie Willis
492 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
Doomsday Book, the first of Willis' Oxford time travel novels I read, was an ambitious book with a wonky mishmash of tone: part comedy of manners, with academic bureaucracy and misunderstandings and overbearing mothers, and part melodrama, with two (count 'em) pandemics, a correspondingly high body count, and a Jesus allegory. To Say Nothing of the Dog, the best of the series so far, resolved the tonal dissonance by concentrating on the comedy aspect, resulting in one of the funniest sci-fi books I've encountered. Blackout, the first volume of what was supposed to be a single novel before it evidently got out of Willis' control, veers some distance in the other direction -- not quite all the way to melodrama, thankfully, but the emphasis is on stranded-in-the-past time travel adventure; humorous touches are plentiful, but aren't as central and plot-significant as they were in the first two books.
As an adventure story, however, Blackout has some significant problems, especially in pacing and a tendency toward "fakeout" cliffhangers. I neglected to note exactly when it became obvious that our three central heroes were going to be stuck in the London Blitz, but it was definitely no later than page 200. Yet each of our three heroes spends the next 250 or so pages waiting with increasing anxiety for their "drops" to open, making excuses for why they haven't opened, rationalizing the failure of retrieval teams to appear, setting out in search of other time travelers in order to use their drops, just missing each other in the confusion of train delays and bombed out rail lines, exposing Blackout's DNA as a missed-connections comedy without drawing any laughs from the confusion. Historical detail and Willis' "compulsively readable" prose maintain the story's momentum even as the plot stalls for those 250 pages, but I was nearing the limits of my engagement by the time our heroes finally found each other and, presumably, moved the plot forward to its next stage. That, however, is exactly the point at which Blackout ends. The rest of the story will be taken up in the 640-or-so pages of All Clear, the concluding volume.
Just as annoying as the stalled plot is Willis' fondness for ending chapters on cliffhangers that turn out to be not cliffhangers at all. While Mike, one of the time travelers, is stuck in a war hospital, driving himself batty with worry that his actions have changed history, someone bursts into the room, screaming that the Germans are invading and coming up the Thames; several chapters later, when we return to Mike's p.o.v., it turns out the other guy is a shellshock patient who screams of invasion whenever the air raid sirens go off. Toward the end, when the three heroes have found each other but fear their actions have changed who ends up dying in the Blitz, they find dozens of bodies outside a bombed store that should have had only three casualties; as the next chapter opens, it turns out the bodies were mannequins all along. Early on in the book, an entirely new character is introduced (possibly a different time traveler, or maybe even Mike under a new, assumed name later in the war), inflating decoy tanks in a field before D-Day, and finds himself staring down the horns of a bull; some chapters later, when we return to this scene, it resolves without injury, and the guy never appears in the book again, presumably to play a role in All Clear. The scene as a whole is pointless, except to introduce this new character who may or may not be someone we already know, and to show off Willis' research of the homefront effort in England. Dividing it into two chapters for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger is inexcusable.
In the same family as the fakeout cliffhanger is the "p.o.v. character has a vital clue that she or he will not share with the reader." It's a cheap ploy to build up mystery and suspense. It happens at least twice in Blackout: once right at the beginning, with Colin (the boy from Doomsday Book, now 17 and nursing a crush on one of our time travelers) rushing around, trying to get sent somewhen, anywhen back in time for "urgent" reasons; and once toward the end, when Polly (a time traveler with a literal deadline -- she can't survive all the way to V-E Day, because she visited V-E Day before and something something mechanics of time travel) decides she's figured out why the drops aren't opening and why the three of them are stuck in the Blitz, yet won't tell anyone, not even the reader. Colin's urgent mission turned out to be a plan to age himself via differential time travel so that he could be more age-appropriate for his crush; I guess All Clear will reveal whether Polly's insight is equally anticlimactic.
Despite all that, I'll do the stereotypical book-reviewer bit and say Blackout was hard to put down. Willis' prose is excellent, in an unobtrusive way; I care about the characters; I'm interested in where the story is going. I just hope it starts to go somewhere in the next book.
492 pages
Published 2010
Read from January 1 to January 4
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Spoilers ahead, be warned.
Doomsday Book, the first of Willis' Oxford time travel novels I read, was an ambitious book with a wonky mishmash of tone: part comedy of manners, with academic bureaucracy and misunderstandings and overbearing mothers, and part melodrama, with two (count 'em) pandemics, a correspondingly high body count, and a Jesus allegory. To Say Nothing of the Dog, the best of the series so far, resolved the tonal dissonance by concentrating on the comedy aspect, resulting in one of the funniest sci-fi books I've encountered. Blackout, the first volume of what was supposed to be a single novel before it evidently got out of Willis' control, veers some distance in the other direction -- not quite all the way to melodrama, thankfully, but the emphasis is on stranded-in-the-past time travel adventure; humorous touches are plentiful, but aren't as central and plot-significant as they were in the first two books.
As an adventure story, however, Blackout has some significant problems, especially in pacing and a tendency toward "fakeout" cliffhangers. I neglected to note exactly when it became obvious that our three central heroes were going to be stuck in the London Blitz, but it was definitely no later than page 200. Yet each of our three heroes spends the next 250 or so pages waiting with increasing anxiety for their "drops" to open, making excuses for why they haven't opened, rationalizing the failure of retrieval teams to appear, setting out in search of other time travelers in order to use their drops, just missing each other in the confusion of train delays and bombed out rail lines, exposing Blackout's DNA as a missed-connections comedy without drawing any laughs from the confusion. Historical detail and Willis' "compulsively readable" prose maintain the story's momentum even as the plot stalls for those 250 pages, but I was nearing the limits of my engagement by the time our heroes finally found each other and, presumably, moved the plot forward to its next stage. That, however, is exactly the point at which Blackout ends. The rest of the story will be taken up in the 640-or-so pages of All Clear, the concluding volume.
Just as annoying as the stalled plot is Willis' fondness for ending chapters on cliffhangers that turn out to be not cliffhangers at all. While Mike, one of the time travelers, is stuck in a war hospital, driving himself batty with worry that his actions have changed history, someone bursts into the room, screaming that the Germans are invading and coming up the Thames; several chapters later, when we return to Mike's p.o.v., it turns out the other guy is a shellshock patient who screams of invasion whenever the air raid sirens go off. Toward the end, when the three heroes have found each other but fear their actions have changed who ends up dying in the Blitz, they find dozens of bodies outside a bombed store that should have had only three casualties; as the next chapter opens, it turns out the bodies were mannequins all along. Early on in the book, an entirely new character is introduced (possibly a different time traveler, or maybe even Mike under a new, assumed name later in the war), inflating decoy tanks in a field before D-Day, and finds himself staring down the horns of a bull; some chapters later, when we return to this scene, it resolves without injury, and the guy never appears in the book again, presumably to play a role in All Clear. The scene as a whole is pointless, except to introduce this new character who may or may not be someone we already know, and to show off Willis' research of the homefront effort in England. Dividing it into two chapters for the sake of a cheap cliffhanger is inexcusable.
In the same family as the fakeout cliffhanger is the "p.o.v. character has a vital clue that she or he will not share with the reader." It's a cheap ploy to build up mystery and suspense. It happens at least twice in Blackout: once right at the beginning, with Colin (the boy from Doomsday Book, now 17 and nursing a crush on one of our time travelers) rushing around, trying to get sent somewhen, anywhen back in time for "urgent" reasons; and once toward the end, when Polly (a time traveler with a literal deadline -- she can't survive all the way to V-E Day, because she visited V-E Day before and something something mechanics of time travel) decides she's figured out why the drops aren't opening and why the three of them are stuck in the Blitz, yet won't tell anyone, not even the reader. Colin's urgent mission turned out to be a plan to age himself via differential time travel so that he could be more age-appropriate for his crush; I guess All Clear will reveal whether Polly's insight is equally anticlimactic.
Despite all that, I'll do the stereotypical book-reviewer bit and say Blackout was hard to put down. Willis' prose is excellent, in an unobtrusive way; I care about the characters; I'm interested in where the story is going. I just hope it starts to go somewhere in the next book.
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