To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last by Connie Willis
434 pages
Published 1998
Read from November 16 to November 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Time travel and the comedy of manners are made for each other. I never realized it until this book. Willis avoids the tonal problems that made Doomsday Book so uneven, skipping the melodrama and Meaningful Sentiments and emphasizing the wry humor of misunderstandings and harried heroes questing across time and space to locate a hideous Victorian objet d'art. Complication piles upon humorous complication, interweaving Agatha Christie-esque detective work with Victorian courtship, reminding me once more of Peter Ackroyd's thesis on the English taste for surface complexity and elaboration. Thoroughly satisfying.
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
2014 read #106: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Translated and adapted by Jay Rubin with the participation of the author
611 pages
Published in three volumes in 1994 and 1995; English translation published 1997
Read from November 10 to November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A tremendous collage of subject and scene, part metaphysical mystery, part locked-room horror, part war story, part gulag story, part metatextual satire on the needs of the novel and its main character dragging ancillary characters along in their wake. Recurring motifs on an old life cut short and a new life taking its place; repeated phrasing and overlapping incidents highlighting artifice as a stylistic statement. Murakami boldly grabs fistfuls of threads and twists them in interesting ways, but leaves some dangling short and doesn't tie everything together into a tidy knot at the end, I felt. Not that that's necessary or even desirable in such a convoluted and postmodern storyline, but the ending lacked the fizz and pop of the body of the book. Murakami's one of those authors I constantly hear name-checked, atop all sorts of favorite-authors lists, and this book is certainly ambitious, strange, and absorbing. But the narrator's quest, to save a woman who left him despite her definite assertions of finality and independence, was a bit hokey and dated, much like a pivotal hacking scene in which, adorably, the password is three letters long. I'm intrigued to read more of his books in the future, even if I'm in no hurry to read another 600 page literary novel.
Translated and adapted by Jay Rubin with the participation of the author
611 pages
Published in three volumes in 1994 and 1995; English translation published 1997
Read from November 10 to November 16
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
A tremendous collage of subject and scene, part metaphysical mystery, part locked-room horror, part war story, part gulag story, part metatextual satire on the needs of the novel and its main character dragging ancillary characters along in their wake. Recurring motifs on an old life cut short and a new life taking its place; repeated phrasing and overlapping incidents highlighting artifice as a stylistic statement. Murakami boldly grabs fistfuls of threads and twists them in interesting ways, but leaves some dangling short and doesn't tie everything together into a tidy knot at the end, I felt. Not that that's necessary or even desirable in such a convoluted and postmodern storyline, but the ending lacked the fizz and pop of the body of the book. Murakami's one of those authors I constantly hear name-checked, atop all sorts of favorite-authors lists, and this book is certainly ambitious, strange, and absorbing. But the narrator's quest, to save a woman who left him despite her definite assertions of finality and independence, was a bit hokey and dated, much like a pivotal hacking scene in which, adorably, the password is three letters long. I'm intrigued to read more of his books in the future, even if I'm in no hurry to read another 600 page literary novel.
Saturday, November 8, 2014
2014 read #105: Rebellion by Peter Ackroyd.
Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution by Peter Ackroyd
470 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 3 to November 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Structurally, this is the best of Ackroyd's histories I've read to date. He manages to tell a cohesive and directed story of the central political events of the day, as he does in Tudors, but without abandoning the colorful anecdotes and glimpses into the lives of everyday people that made his older histories so engaging. One could hope for more asides on the important thoughts and authors of the day, but all in all Ackroyd finds a successful equilibrium here between rich detail and easy readability. In terms of interest factor, this book explores a period of English history rarely treated, at least in histories I find stateside. In these days when hardline religious movements conflate "freedom" with forcing their own specific ideology upon the body politic, the escalation and prosecution of the Civil War and the career of the Protectorate make for enlightening reading.
Three volumes into Ackroyd's expansive treatment of English history, the strains of meeting deadlines are just starting to show, mainly in recycled phrasings: I lost count of how many times a politician or a religious movement "raised the temperature" of a public debate or political situation; it was colorful the first time Ackroyd employed the phrase, but rapidly grew distracting. That tendency aside, Ackroyd's dry and concise style grows if anything more charming.
470 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 3 to November 8
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Structurally, this is the best of Ackroyd's histories I've read to date. He manages to tell a cohesive and directed story of the central political events of the day, as he does in Tudors, but without abandoning the colorful anecdotes and glimpses into the lives of everyday people that made his older histories so engaging. One could hope for more asides on the important thoughts and authors of the day, but all in all Ackroyd finds a successful equilibrium here between rich detail and easy readability. In terms of interest factor, this book explores a period of English history rarely treated, at least in histories I find stateside. In these days when hardline religious movements conflate "freedom" with forcing their own specific ideology upon the body politic, the escalation and prosecution of the Civil War and the career of the Protectorate make for enlightening reading.
Three volumes into Ackroyd's expansive treatment of English history, the strains of meeting deadlines are just starting to show, mainly in recycled phrasings: I lost count of how many times a politician or a religious movement "raised the temperature" of a public debate or political situation; it was colorful the first time Ackroyd employed the phrase, but rapidly grew distracting. That tendency aside, Ackroyd's dry and concise style grows if anything more charming.
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
2014 read #104: The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by Gordon Van Gelder.
The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Volume Two, edited by Gordon Van Gelder
419 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"The Third Level" by Jack Finney (1950). A slight, cute time travel fantasy. Something I keep noticing when I read Golden and Silver Age SF is how frequently these old stories prefigure later plots, settings, even subgenres. In this sense, little has changed in genre plotting except bulk and elaboration. In the Edenic olden days, when every plot was still fresh, when original ideas could be plucked unbruised from the tree, it was enough to write five or so pages setting up a conceptual situation and delivering the punchline. Carry this story's situation into the 1980s, and you could have a novel-length treatment by Connie Willis. Carry it forward into the '90s or '00s, and the single line "Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots" could be transmogrified into a series of urban fantasy books. Which is why a story like this can leave someone of my generation not fully sated. I've been conditioned to expect, not necessarily better, but more.
"The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth (1956). I haven't read much science fiction from the 1950s -- just enough to know that some of it could be surprisingly good (even if much of the rest was undistinguished pulp). Nevertheless, I was struck by how unpredictable, how fresh, how recent this story seems. Even the cartoon satire of hippy-dippy self-help liberalism wouldn't be wholly out of place in a modern publication (though there's a somewhat stronger flavor of misogyny in the satire than one usually finds now, bad as our own cultural misogyny tends to be). Structurally, this story is superb, beginning strange and spacing out the explication of the situation to keep the reader's interest, ending with a hilarious (and, to me, not totally expected) one-two punch of revelations (and precocious postmodern genre-awareness).
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I puzzled over the authorial intent of the "uncomfortable parable," with little success.
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson (1956). Another satisfying and seemingly timeless tale, a quiet mood piece that could have been penned by Le Guin in the '80s or one of the up-and-comers in the '00s. It tiptoes up to the brink of corniness, but what the hell -- I had a couple tears in my eyes at the end. I'm not ashamed.
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley (1958). The tired old manhunt gameshow storyline -- in the 1950s? I should stop being so surprised by how far back genre staples go, but it's startling to find that the ancestry of The Hunger Games and The Running Man dates at least as far back as I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Startling, and impressive. It's sufficiently thrilling and bleakly funny, and if the points "Prize" preaches against the audience (and whom it's truly rooting for) have become stale truisms, that's the fault of its imitators. A solid entry.
"'—All You Zombies—'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959). Given the limited set of variations possible in the "time travel paradoxes" theme, it isn't surprising that peak paradox (so to speak) was reached so early. This is a well-constructed story, looser and freer than the more formal time-paradox stories of the early '50s, concealing its working parts beneath typically Heinleinian pulp sexuality. It's that overlay of Heinleinisms that sours me on this story. I used to love the guy's novels, but I got burnt out sometime around To Sail Beyond the Sunset; in Heinlein's hands, a story about a man who is his own father and mother is less apt to stir marvel at the central paradox, and more apt to raise questions about whether Heinlein just wanted to have sex with himself. Interpreting incident and character at face value as the desires of the author -- this is the most naive (puerile, even) level of textual criticism. With Heinlein, however, there's always the chance that it could be accurate.
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W. Aldiss (1962). An overbearing mother-wife and a "sinister matriarchy" are the only off-notes in an otherwise excellent piece of far-future rococo, a style that arose early and has never quite gone out of fashion, for obvious reasons. It doesn't reach the heights of what-the-fuck transcendence found in Aldiss' later "The Worm That Flies," but to repeat what I said in that review, "Artistry" feels "more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be."
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance (1963). Gently wry humor breathes life into a mechanics of magic piece, prefiguring the likes of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Brief but satisfying.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, where I acerbically remarked "This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing." I keep seeing it picked up in various anthologies, so I guess I'm stuck with the minority view.
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg (1969). An interesting stylistic piece that didn't entirely click with me. At a fundamental level, I appreciated the shifting narrative perspectives as a crude but effective means of conveying the "search for realities," but I wasn't blown away by the story as a whole.
"The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed (1976). This one's just silly, too, but in a charming and legitimately funny way.
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen (1977). Rarely do "new fairy tales" rouse the sense of magic and elegance of the best of the old, but this is one of those few. Exquisite.
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison® (1977). My cynicism toward sappy nostalgia and "good ol' days" mythology wasn't armor enough. Tears flowed freely at the end of this one, it must be said. I rag on Harlan Ellison® because of how puffed up and self-important he can be, but damned if the old cock doesn't have flashes of brilliance that (almost) justify his attitude.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I mused at length on "how every generation of stories must get ever more sophisticated, as the big revelations and hard truths of one generation become the truisms and dull cliches of the next," and said "This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors."
"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger (1984). A delightful and funny tale of aliens as annoying know-it-all neighbors. A necessary antidote to the post-"Jeffty" blues.
"Rat" by James Patrick Kelly (1986). Proto-crustpunk, serviceable but not my bag. I am reminded of Victorian and Edwardian "sensation" stories.
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe (1989). An interestingly ambiguous tale of murder and pacts with supernatural evil. It took some time for the hints in the coda (basically, the narrator's sister was institutionalized for murdering one or more young children, presumably in connection with occult activities, if my reading is anywhere in the ballpark) to click in my brain, and that only after rereading a few passages. Solid; enjoyable but not mindblowing.
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint (1993). Urban fantasy revolving around a mentally ill homeless woman: yep, we've reached the early '90s -- the "Even Flow" years, as I like to call them. (Okay, so the fixation on Magical Homeless began in earnest in the mid-'80s, but really avalanched between '90 and '93, at least in my limited reading.) This particular story is quaint and quietly earnest, alighting on what I've already come to think of as de Lint's usual concerns of how urban life deadens our spirits and makes us all "desert" creatures, our lives more underground than on the surface. It's a slight story that goes down easy.
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh (1995). Vivid and cleverly conceived alternate history, with "recalcitrant" slave owners getting rounded up and shipped west after Lincoln survives an assassination attempt, and Quaker abolitionists running an underground railroad to rescue some few and return them to families down South. Despite the brutal press of a train platform stampede, and its aftermath, the emotional effect of the story is more numbing than crushing, but it's an excellent installment nonetheless.
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling (1998). "Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network." "Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him." "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!'" Early visions of the webbed future were adorably gawky and naive, and did not age well (kind of like contemporary electronic music). The democratic, noncommercial network and gift-exchange economy depicted here are at aphelion from the current reality of paysites and malicious doxxing and big business purchasing the end of net neutrality from corporatist government. I suppose some tightly-knit user clusters at, I don't know, Pinterest or a private P2P or something might do each other small favors and send timely gifts, but this "friendly strangers on the network" business is as quaint a future vision as anything printed in the 1950s. The story itself is a pleasant comedy of errors, with a happily networked young family man getting collared by a harassed federal agent.
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed (1999). For the most part I'm bored of transhumanist stories, but Robert Reed is usually a treat. Not as ornately bizarre as more recent transhumanist works ("Widows in the World" by Gavin J. Grant comes to mind, reviewed here), "Winemaster" nonetheless manages to mix in a dystopian Christian America and a Stapledonian "huge and cold, and slow" interstellar race, wishing to upgrade to organic forms and snap up terrestrial real estate once everybody earthside goes micromachine. It's a satisfactory tale; if it isn't as superb as what I've come to expect from Reed, at least it's more involving than other transhumanist stories I could name.
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison (1999). This is a dull one, a dreary ennui of modern life piece stringing together cliches of adventure sports and VR gaming into an unconvincing, unappealing mash (though it's a well-written mash). Stories like this helped push me away from sci-fi, which these days is rote regurgitation of nanotech or transhumanism when it isn't despondent, too-plausible visions of future scarcity and rising sea levels, and toward fantasy, which at least preserves some remnant of vitality.
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman (2001). An absorbing and unexpectedly moving window into a near-future culture on the verge of vanishing into an allegory of globalization. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in a vaguely Central Asian milieu.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2004). In a grimdark nanotech future, a world of mountain-devouring machines, regenerating limbs, flammable oceans, and acidic tailing pits across the surface of the globe, a gang of modified soldiers finds a living, fully biological dog eking out its existence in the toxic wastes of Montana. It turns out that pairing a standard bleak military-nanotech setting with the world's last "the dog dies at the end" story produces a solid entry. Not an all-time classic, but pretty good.
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand (2005). A prime example of 21st century melancholia, exquisite and haunting, a dislocating drift across years as the world warms, towers collapse, and civilization, unseen, goes silent and satellites wink out one by one.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King (2008). A decade or so into this century, the hot new idea seemed to be stories that made death mundane, bureaucratic, a place of waiting rooms and broken escalators and waiting, lots of waiting. This story taps into that vibe, turning out a weeper that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2011). I forgot how I found out about Ken Liu. I certainly wasn't encountering his fiction in the magazines -- I can't afford the subscription rates, and my library only has copies of Analog, my least favorite of all the pro rags still in print. Maybe I came across his name on Twitter while setting up my short-lived online magazine a few years ago. However it happened, I remember going to Liu's website and despairing at how prolific and consistently excellent his stories were, this wunderkind just barely older than me bursting upon the scene with exquisite, perfectly crafted delicacies and marvels. This story is, naturally, one such delicacy, folding together two generations of sorrow and identity and displacement, loss and love and the quiet magic between parent and child. It deserves every award it won.
Of all the stories in this collection, only "The Paper Menagerie," "Jeffty Is Five," and perhaps (at a stretch) "Echo" can match the excellence of "All Summer in a Day," "Flowers for Algernon," "Solitude," "The Women Men Don't See," and the other all-time classics reprinted in the first Very Best anthology. And unlike the first volume, Volume Two includes a few stories I just don't care for, such as "Suicide Coast," "Narrow Valley," and "Rat." But the general quality of the other stories remains high, so I won't knock the grade down too harshly.
419 pages
Published 2014
Read from November 1 to November 4
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
"The Third Level" by Jack Finney (1950). A slight, cute time travel fantasy. Something I keep noticing when I read Golden and Silver Age SF is how frequently these old stories prefigure later plots, settings, even subgenres. In this sense, little has changed in genre plotting except bulk and elaboration. In the Edenic olden days, when every plot was still fresh, when original ideas could be plucked unbruised from the tree, it was enough to write five or so pages setting up a conceptual situation and delivering the punchline. Carry this story's situation into the 1980s, and you could have a novel-length treatment by Connie Willis. Carry it forward into the '90s or '00s, and the single line "Sometimes I think Grand Central is growing like a tree, pushing out new corridors and staircases like roots" could be transmogrified into a series of urban fantasy books. Which is why a story like this can leave someone of my generation not fully sated. I've been conditioned to expect, not necessarily better, but more.
"The Cosmic Expense Account" by C. M. Kornbluth (1956). I haven't read much science fiction from the 1950s -- just enough to know that some of it could be surprisingly good (even if much of the rest was undistinguished pulp). Nevertheless, I was struck by how unpredictable, how fresh, how recent this story seems. Even the cartoon satire of hippy-dippy self-help liberalism wouldn't be wholly out of place in a modern publication (though there's a somewhat stronger flavor of misogyny in the satire than one usually finds now, bad as our own cultural misogyny tends to be). Structurally, this story is superb, beginning strange and spacing out the explication of the situation to keep the reader's interest, ending with a hilarious (and, to me, not totally expected) one-two punch of revelations (and precocious postmodern genre-awareness).
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I puzzled over the authorial intent of the "uncomfortable parable," with little success.
"The Anything Box" by Zenna Henderson (1956). Another satisfying and seemingly timeless tale, a quiet mood piece that could have been penned by Le Guin in the '80s or one of the up-and-comers in the '00s. It tiptoes up to the brink of corniness, but what the hell -- I had a couple tears in my eyes at the end. I'm not ashamed.
"The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley (1958). The tired old manhunt gameshow storyline -- in the 1950s? I should stop being so surprised by how far back genre staples go, but it's startling to find that the ancestry of The Hunger Games and The Running Man dates at least as far back as I Love Lucy and Howdy Doody. Startling, and impressive. It's sufficiently thrilling and bleakly funny, and if the points "Prize" preaches against the audience (and whom it's truly rooting for) have become stale truisms, that's the fault of its imitators. A solid entry.
"'—All You Zombies—'" by Robert A. Heinlein (1959). Given the limited set of variations possible in the "time travel paradoxes" theme, it isn't surprising that peak paradox (so to speak) was reached so early. This is a well-constructed story, looser and freer than the more formal time-paradox stories of the early '50s, concealing its working parts beneath typically Heinleinian pulp sexuality. It's that overlay of Heinleinisms that sours me on this story. I used to love the guy's novels, but I got burnt out sometime around To Sail Beyond the Sunset; in Heinlein's hands, a story about a man who is his own father and mother is less apt to stir marvel at the central paradox, and more apt to raise questions about whether Heinlein just wanted to have sex with himself. Interpreting incident and character at face value as the desires of the author -- this is the most naive (puerile, even) level of textual criticism. With Heinlein, however, there's always the chance that it could be accurate.
"A Kind of Artistry" by Brian W. Aldiss (1962). An overbearing mother-wife and a "sinister matriarchy" are the only off-notes in an otherwise excellent piece of far-future rococo, a style that arose early and has never quite gone out of fashion, for obvious reasons. It doesn't reach the heights of what-the-fuck transcendence found in Aldiss' later "The Worm That Flies," but to repeat what I said in that review, "Artistry" feels "more fantastic and exotic than even the most out-there fantasy novel ever dares to be."
"Green Magic" by Jack Vance (1963). Gently wry humor breathes life into a mechanics of magic piece, prefiguring the likes of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Brief but satisfying.
"Narrow Valley" by R. A. Lafferty (1966). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, where I acerbically remarked "This one's just silly. Worth a couple chuckles, but not my kind of thing." I keep seeing it picked up in various anthologies, so I guess I'm stuck with the minority view.
"Sundance" by Robert Silverberg (1969). An interesting stylistic piece that didn't entirely click with me. At a fundamental level, I appreciated the shifting narrative perspectives as a crude but effective means of conveying the "search for realities," but I wasn't blown away by the story as a whole.
"The Attack of the Giant Baby" by Kit Reed (1976). This one's just silly, too, but in a charming and legitimately funny way.
"The Hundredth Dove" by Jane Yolen (1977). Rarely do "new fairy tales" rouse the sense of magic and elegance of the best of the old, but this is one of those few. Exquisite.
"Jeffty Is Five" by Harlan Ellison® (1977). My cynicism toward sappy nostalgia and "good ol' days" mythology wasn't armor enough. Tears flowed freely at the end of this one, it must be said. I rag on Harlan Ellison® because of how puffed up and self-important he can be, but damned if the old cock doesn't have flashes of brilliance that (almost) justify his attitude.
"Salvador" by Lucius Shepard (1984). Read and reviewed in Modern Classics of Science Fiction. There I mused at length on "how every generation of stories must get ever more sophisticated, as the big revelations and hard truths of one generation become the truisms and dull cliches of the next," and said "This story is on the wrong end of that sophistication curve when it comes to warfare and its horrors."
"The Aliens Who Knew, I Mean, Everything" by George Alec Effinger (1984). A delightful and funny tale of aliens as annoying know-it-all neighbors. A necessary antidote to the post-"Jeffty" blues.
"Rat" by James Patrick Kelly (1986). Proto-crustpunk, serviceable but not my bag. I am reminded of Victorian and Edwardian "sensation" stories.
"The Friendship Light" by Gene Wolfe (1989). An interestingly ambiguous tale of murder and pacts with supernatural evil. It took some time for the hints in the coda (basically, the narrator's sister was institutionalized for murdering one or more young children, presumably in connection with occult activities, if my reading is anywhere in the ballpark) to click in my brain, and that only after rereading a few passages. Solid; enjoyable but not mindblowing.
"The Bone Woman" by Charles de Lint (1993). Urban fantasy revolving around a mentally ill homeless woman: yep, we've reached the early '90s -- the "Even Flow" years, as I like to call them. (Okay, so the fixation on Magical Homeless began in earnest in the mid-'80s, but really avalanched between '90 and '93, at least in my limited reading.) This particular story is quaint and quietly earnest, alighting on what I've already come to think of as de Lint's usual concerns of how urban life deadens our spirits and makes us all "desert" creatures, our lives more underground than on the surface. It's a slight story that goes down easy.
"The Lincoln Train" by Maureen F. McHugh (1995). Vivid and cleverly conceived alternate history, with "recalcitrant" slave owners getting rounded up and shipped west after Lincoln survives an assassination attempt, and Quaker abolitionists running an underground railroad to rescue some few and return them to families down South. Despite the brutal press of a train platform stampede, and its aftermath, the emotional effect of the story is more numbing than crushing, but it's an excellent installment nonetheless.
"Maneki Neko" by Bruce Sterling (1998). "Word of Tsuyoshi's skills had gotten out on the network." "Friends he didn't even know were working every day to help him." "'Well, your network gift economy is undermining the lawful, government approved, regulated economy!'" Early visions of the webbed future were adorably gawky and naive, and did not age well (kind of like contemporary electronic music). The democratic, noncommercial network and gift-exchange economy depicted here are at aphelion from the current reality of paysites and malicious doxxing and big business purchasing the end of net neutrality from corporatist government. I suppose some tightly-knit user clusters at, I don't know, Pinterest or a private P2P or something might do each other small favors and send timely gifts, but this "friendly strangers on the network" business is as quaint a future vision as anything printed in the 1950s. The story itself is a pleasant comedy of errors, with a happily networked young family man getting collared by a harassed federal agent.
"Winemaster" by Robert Reed (1999). For the most part I'm bored of transhumanist stories, but Robert Reed is usually a treat. Not as ornately bizarre as more recent transhumanist works ("Widows in the World" by Gavin J. Grant comes to mind, reviewed here), "Winemaster" nonetheless manages to mix in a dystopian Christian America and a Stapledonian "huge and cold, and slow" interstellar race, wishing to upgrade to organic forms and snap up terrestrial real estate once everybody earthside goes micromachine. It's a satisfactory tale; if it isn't as superb as what I've come to expect from Reed, at least it's more involving than other transhumanist stories I could name.
"Suicide Coast" by M. John Harrison (1999). This is a dull one, a dreary ennui of modern life piece stringing together cliches of adventure sports and VR gaming into an unconvincing, unappealing mash (though it's a well-written mash). Stories like this helped push me away from sci-fi, which these days is rote regurgitation of nanotech or transhumanism when it isn't despondent, too-plausible visions of future scarcity and rising sea levels, and toward fantasy, which at least preserves some remnant of vitality.
"Have Not Have" by Geoff Ryman (2001). An absorbing and unexpectedly moving window into a near-future culture on the verge of vanishing into an allegory of globalization. Maybe I'm just a sucker for stories set in a vaguely Central Asian milieu.
"The People of Sand and Slag" by Paolo Bacigalupi (2004). In a grimdark nanotech future, a world of mountain-devouring machines, regenerating limbs, flammable oceans, and acidic tailing pits across the surface of the globe, a gang of modified soldiers finds a living, fully biological dog eking out its existence in the toxic wastes of Montana. It turns out that pairing a standard bleak military-nanotech setting with the world's last "the dog dies at the end" story produces a solid entry. Not an all-time classic, but pretty good.
"Echo" by Elizabeth Hand (2005). A prime example of 21st century melancholia, exquisite and haunting, a dislocating drift across years as the world warms, towers collapse, and civilization, unseen, goes silent and satellites wink out one by one.
"The New York Times at Special Bargain Rates" by Stephen King (2008). A decade or so into this century, the hot new idea seemed to be stories that made death mundane, bureaucratic, a place of waiting rooms and broken escalators and waiting, lots of waiting. This story taps into that vibe, turning out a weeper that doesn't overstay its welcome.
"The Paper Menagerie" by Ken Liu (2011). I forgot how I found out about Ken Liu. I certainly wasn't encountering his fiction in the magazines -- I can't afford the subscription rates, and my library only has copies of Analog, my least favorite of all the pro rags still in print. Maybe I came across his name on Twitter while setting up my short-lived online magazine a few years ago. However it happened, I remember going to Liu's website and despairing at how prolific and consistently excellent his stories were, this wunderkind just barely older than me bursting upon the scene with exquisite, perfectly crafted delicacies and marvels. This story is, naturally, one such delicacy, folding together two generations of sorrow and identity and displacement, loss and love and the quiet magic between parent and child. It deserves every award it won.
Of all the stories in this collection, only "The Paper Menagerie," "Jeffty Is Five," and perhaps (at a stretch) "Echo" can match the excellence of "All Summer in a Day," "Flowers for Algernon," "Solitude," "The Women Men Don't See," and the other all-time classics reprinted in the first Very Best anthology. And unlike the first volume, Volume Two includes a few stories I just don't care for, such as "Suicide Coast," "Narrow Valley," and "Rat." But the general quality of the other stories remains high, so I won't knock the grade down too harshly.
Friday, October 31, 2014
2014 read #103: The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman.
The Voice of the Mountain by Manly Wade Wellman
179 pages
Published 1984
Read from October 30 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Somehow this book, the last Silver John novel, doesn't seem as, well, bad as the others. I'm being unfair, or rather, the last two Silver John books retroactively made me dislike the first two; going back to my original reviews, I find I liked The Old Gods Waken and After Dark just fine, or at least no less than I liked this one. But The Lost and the Lurking was ruined by its ridiculous plot, and The Hanging Stones was such a mess, I must number it among the worst books I've read all year. Together they made me brace for the worst as I prepared to push through one final book to complete the series. Perhaps finding The Voice in the Mountain so unexpectedly painless makes it seem like a better book than it is. (These grades are all arbitrary anyway, so who cares?)
There's still plenty to cringe over here, just not as much as there has been in previous volumes. There's the requisite down-home, sensible, righteous young man (who's totally different from the others in every prior Silver John book, because this one has a beard!), but he disappears after three chapters and doesn't show his face again until the very end, when he's needed for the happy reunion scene. (Which makes it strange that he gets such a detailed and eccentric backstory -- a foundling child named Tombs because he was left in a graveyard -- which never has any relevance to the plot.) There's the mountain village so romanticized it verges on parody, a place of respectable hard-working folks and bright healthy children, the sort of misty-eyed dream a Southern conservative might believe in when idealizing the virtues of Appalachian poverty. There are Wellman's female characters, either wizened old witches, seductive young witches, or rosy-cheeked hill country Madonnas sent from on high to be helpmeets for the requisite down-home young men. There are the pacing issues that have plagued most of these books -- the rising action consists of Silver John sitting in a room, gabbing with the witches, while the villain reads a book in a different room, and occasionally pops in to have a sandwich or to put a movie on his magic window for his guests to enjoy. (I'm not even kidding.)
Yet the worst of Wellman's recurring motifs are blessedly absent. The villain is neither a lost race "here before the Indians" nor an '80s-style Satanist panic, but rather a buckskin version of John Dee that could almost have been an interesting character had he not been written by Wellman in his later years. In fact, the character of Ruel Harpe (for such is the villain's name) goes a long way toward making Voice feel closer to "Walk Like a Mountain," the 1955 story that got me interested in Silver John, than to the rubbish the last couple novels proved to be. Glimpses of creatures from Appalachian folklore also help link Voice to the Old Weird Americana I wished all these books had pursued (even if said creatures are little more than set dressings for the villain's evil mountain fortress). And even if, in the end, John outwits Ruel Harpe by getting him mad enough to lean in close to make a threat, thereby permitting John to snatch away his magic amulet in the corniest climax ever put to paper, well -- fuck it. At least I'm done with these novels now, and maybe -- maybe -- one day I'll care enough to shell out $25 for the collection of Silver John short stories, which might at least be worth reading.
179 pages
Published 1984
Read from October 30 to October 31
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
Somehow this book, the last Silver John novel, doesn't seem as, well, bad as the others. I'm being unfair, or rather, the last two Silver John books retroactively made me dislike the first two; going back to my original reviews, I find I liked The Old Gods Waken and After Dark just fine, or at least no less than I liked this one. But The Lost and the Lurking was ruined by its ridiculous plot, and The Hanging Stones was such a mess, I must number it among the worst books I've read all year. Together they made me brace for the worst as I prepared to push through one final book to complete the series. Perhaps finding The Voice in the Mountain so unexpectedly painless makes it seem like a better book than it is. (These grades are all arbitrary anyway, so who cares?)
There's still plenty to cringe over here, just not as much as there has been in previous volumes. There's the requisite down-home, sensible, righteous young man (who's totally different from the others in every prior Silver John book, because this one has a beard!), but he disappears after three chapters and doesn't show his face again until the very end, when he's needed for the happy reunion scene. (Which makes it strange that he gets such a detailed and eccentric backstory -- a foundling child named Tombs because he was left in a graveyard -- which never has any relevance to the plot.) There's the mountain village so romanticized it verges on parody, a place of respectable hard-working folks and bright healthy children, the sort of misty-eyed dream a Southern conservative might believe in when idealizing the virtues of Appalachian poverty. There are Wellman's female characters, either wizened old witches, seductive young witches, or rosy-cheeked hill country Madonnas sent from on high to be helpmeets for the requisite down-home young men. There are the pacing issues that have plagued most of these books -- the rising action consists of Silver John sitting in a room, gabbing with the witches, while the villain reads a book in a different room, and occasionally pops in to have a sandwich or to put a movie on his magic window for his guests to enjoy. (I'm not even kidding.)
Yet the worst of Wellman's recurring motifs are blessedly absent. The villain is neither a lost race "here before the Indians" nor an '80s-style Satanist panic, but rather a buckskin version of John Dee that could almost have been an interesting character had he not been written by Wellman in his later years. In fact, the character of Ruel Harpe (for such is the villain's name) goes a long way toward making Voice feel closer to "Walk Like a Mountain," the 1955 story that got me interested in Silver John, than to the rubbish the last couple novels proved to be. Glimpses of creatures from Appalachian folklore also help link Voice to the Old Weird Americana I wished all these books had pursued (even if said creatures are little more than set dressings for the villain's evil mountain fortress). And even if, in the end, John outwits Ruel Harpe by getting him mad enough to lean in close to make a threat, thereby permitting John to snatch away his magic amulet in the corniest climax ever put to paper, well -- fuck it. At least I'm done with these novels now, and maybe -- maybe -- one day I'll care enough to shell out $25 for the collection of Silver John short stories, which might at least be worth reading.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
2014 read #102: Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick.
Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick
255 pages
Published 1959
Read from October 29 to October 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
What is reality? How do we perceive what is real? How do we know whether what we perceive has any external reality? Dick has rather the specific métier: novelizations of freshman philosophy. Even The Man in the High Castle, an otherwise straightforward (and excellent) alternate history novel, ended with the titular man revealing that their universe is not the universe that should exist (and, for that matter, neither is ours). Dick was good at his schtick, as good as Tolkien was at writing elves simultaneously neighborly and otherworldly. Time Out of Joint is a solid entry in the Dick canon, a satisfying and occasionally brilliant unraveling of one man's reality, this time based in classic paranoid ideation. But after only five books and one short story, I'm starting to bump up against the limitations of Dick's thematic reach. And this novel in particular falls somewhat flat at the end, resorting to the stale Western European race myth of restless movement and colonization as an eternal motivator for human (read: white American) yearnings and behavior, reading more like an entry-level Heinlein than a Dick.
255 pages
Published 1959
Read from October 29 to October 30
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
What is reality? How do we perceive what is real? How do we know whether what we perceive has any external reality? Dick has rather the specific métier: novelizations of freshman philosophy. Even The Man in the High Castle, an otherwise straightforward (and excellent) alternate history novel, ended with the titular man revealing that their universe is not the universe that should exist (and, for that matter, neither is ours). Dick was good at his schtick, as good as Tolkien was at writing elves simultaneously neighborly and otherworldly. Time Out of Joint is a solid entry in the Dick canon, a satisfying and occasionally brilliant unraveling of one man's reality, this time based in classic paranoid ideation. But after only five books and one short story, I'm starting to bump up against the limitations of Dick's thematic reach. And this novel in particular falls somewhat flat at the end, resorting to the stale Western European race myth of restless movement and colonization as an eternal motivator for human (read: white American) yearnings and behavior, reading more like an entry-level Heinlein than a Dick.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
2014 read #101: Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes.
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
311 pages
Published 1966
Read from October 24 to October 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I'll write this review as soon as I finish crying...
I'm glad I read the short story version first. The novel takes the same amount of storytelling power and gut-punching emotional impact and spreads it thin with a bunch of Freudian mumbo-jumbo and repressed memories and dissociative complexes and out of body experiences, all things that, I felt, didn't contribute much to the pre-existing perfection of the short story. Recovering Charlie's memories and discovering emotional and sexual hangups is a logical extension of the storyline, but having read the short story first, I guess I never felt it was at all necessary.
That last line, though. It doesn't matter that I read it a month ago. It still gets me. Right in the heart. Right in the everything. I don't know how such a straightforward line can pack in so much sadness, so much meaning, so many layers of feeling. That's real skill and artistry right there.
311 pages
Published 1966
Read from October 24 to October 28
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I'll write this review as soon as I finish crying...
I'm glad I read the short story version first. The novel takes the same amount of storytelling power and gut-punching emotional impact and spreads it thin with a bunch of Freudian mumbo-jumbo and repressed memories and dissociative complexes and out of body experiences, all things that, I felt, didn't contribute much to the pre-existing perfection of the short story. Recovering Charlie's memories and discovering emotional and sexual hangups is a logical extension of the storyline, but having read the short story first, I guess I never felt it was at all necessary.
That last line, though. It doesn't matter that I read it a month ago. It still gets me. Right in the heart. Right in the everything. I don't know how such a straightforward line can pack in so much sadness, so much meaning, so many layers of feeling. That's real skill and artistry right there.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)