Ambrose & Elsewhere

Herded by sartorias over to one of those “Who Am I?” sorts of quiz.

Re question 6:

“Which set of books have you read ALL of?”

I have to admit I’ve never read The Great Gatsby. But I used to live in a neighborhood where F. Scott Fitzgerald had briefly lived a couple generations before, and what bond is closer than that, really?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

SF Book Club Best 50 SF books 1953-2002

The 50 most significant science fiction/fantasy books, 1953-2002, according to the Science Fiction Book Club. Bold the ones you’ve read, strike-out the ones you hated, italicize those you started but never finished, and put an asterisk beside the ones you loved.

*The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
*The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov (I loved it when I was 12, anyway. It’s hard for me to tell if I’d feel the same way about it, coming across it as an adult.)
*Dune, Frank Herbert
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein (I like lots of Heinlein, including parts of this book, but it’s also the book which began his long downward spiral into inanity.)
*A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
Neuromancer, William Gibson
Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury (Honestly, I can’t tell if I’ve read this or not. Whenever I think about it I flash on the movie. This might amuse Bradbury or not.)
The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe (Begins brilliantly, but tapers off in the last book and a half.)
*A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
*The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras (I read “In Hiding” which is apparently part of this book.)
Cities in Flight, James Blish
The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett (I don’t actually think Pratchett is usually very funny. But I do like his mock-worldmaking, the Nac Mac Feegle and Granny Weatherwax.)
Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
*Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
*The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany (I enjoy a lot of Delany’s work, “Nova” for instance, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why “Dhalgren” is such a big deal.)
Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
Gateway, Frederik Pohl
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams (I prefer the original radio show. Or the TV version. Let’s not discuss the movie.)
I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
**The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
*Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon (Sturgeon’s best work is in short form. Even the middle section of this book, published as “Baby is Three”, was better standing by itself.)
*The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
*Ringworld, Larry Niven
Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys (The most overrated of all sf novels.)
*The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut (If it were “Sirens of Titan” or “Cat’s Cradle” I’d’ve asterisked it.)
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner (Brunner’s brief career as a Serious Important Author for Our Times–the 1970s–bored me. But his “Traveller in Black” stories are fun, in a dry way, and his cheesier earlier work is still worth reading.)
*The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks (I know this is on the list because it paves the way for the Plague of the Big Plump Trilogies. But it doesn’t, really: there were other Tolkien-lite series that emerged around the same time. “Shannara” is a symptom rather than a cause.)
Timescape, Gregory Benford
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

The awfulness of this list has been commented on before. Is “Cities in Flight” really more significant than “After Such Knowledge”? Why is “I Am Legend” on this list at all? Why “On the Beach”? Where is Leiber (who was at least 2 or 3 of the great sf/f writers of the 20th C.), Jack Vance, Lois Bujold, Connie Willis, Clifford Simak, “The Space Merchants”, James Tiptree jr., C.S. Lewis? Where shall wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding?

[edit: some second thoughts about what’s on the list and what should be. sartorias proposes Andre Norton, and it’s something I should have thought of. It might be hard to pick just one of her books, but then a number of items on the list aren’t really single books either.]

It turns out that, due to the disarray of the Robert E. Howard estate, much of his work is in the public domain. Wikisource has buckets of it online at the URL below. (Thanks to Gneech for the link.)

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Robert_E._Howard

Most amusing and disturbing to me were a couple pieces of non-fiction. One was an essay about cats (“The Beast from the Abyss”) which seemed to be anti-cat (but given REH’s dark proclivities it can be hard to tell which side he’s on). I think he’s wrong about cats–for one thing they devour annoying pests and for another they provide endless hours of cheap entertainment. But it’s always interesting to see a gifted writer plunge screaming over the top into the No-Man’s Land of rhetorical conflict.

The other was a letter he wrote to Farnsworth Wright. A slice of this below:

…“[I]t has been six months since ‘The People of the Black Circle’ (the story for which the check is now due me) appeared in Weird Tales. Weird Tales owes me over eight hundred dollars for stories already published and supposed to be paid for on publication–enough to pay all my debts and get me back on my feet again if I could receive it all at once. Perhaps this is impossible. I have no wish to be unreasonable; I know times are hard for everybody. But I don’t believe I am being unreasonable in asking you to pay me a check each month until the accounts are squared.”

Yow. I thought I had no illusions about the circumstances under which the great works of pulp fiction were produced, but I had no idea things ever got this bad. At the very least, nowadays predators and editors are distinct species (though one still tries to masquerade as the other). It looks like “The Unique Magazine”, in those bad old days, stayed afloat on a river of interest-free loans from its writers. $800 was a significant amount of money: better than $11K in today’s inflated currency (according to Morgan Friedman’s Inflation Calculator). Hard to believe financial frustration wasn’t one of the factors that led REH to blow his brains out a year later.

The moral of the story: mail Farnsworth Wright a cat. (This advice comes sixty or seventy years too late to do anyone any good, but that just makes it timeless.)

Courtesy of John O’Neill, here’s a review of Black Gate 9 from the Australian blog Horrorscope:

http://ozhorrorscope.blogspot.com/2006/11/review-black-gate-9.html

I always enjoy reading kind words about myself (or Morlock), but I was especially pleased to see the reviewer take notice of the issue’s art. Black Gate is stunningly produced, everything a genre magazine should be and seldom is, and some of the artists are really remarkable (especially Chuck “Trismegistos” Lukacs).

The latest word seems to be that Black Gate 10 (with, among other things, a new Morlock story “A Book of Silences”) will be out in December.

sartorias discusses kids’ early language and how it represents creative thought. It provoked an interesting discussion, but my own reaction wasn’t really on her topic, so I put it here.

My youngest brother, when he was still a preschooler, used to get tired of hearing about things that happened before he was born. He would make up things that never happened and then, when questioned, would say sharply, “It was a long time ago; you don’t remember.” At the time I thought this was hilarious. Now it makes me a little queasy: he was obviously mirroring dismissive attitudes he perceived in his mob of older siblings, including me. He was at war with us and imagination was his primary weapon; he was making up his own history to compete with ours.

The more I think about this the more it seems to be a primary impulse in the writing of fantasy fiction, maybe fiction generally: to create an imaginary history to defend one’s own identity. In its cruder forms, this produces the log of the USS Mary Sue. In subtler forms you might get something like Joyce’s quasi-autobiographical fiction. But maybe even stuff where the authors disappear behind their creation (like Vance’s fantasy or LeGuin’s or, on a more elevated plane, the work of Shakespeare or Homer) serves the same function.

So maybe the archetypal fantasy story doesn’t really begin with a polite Once upon a time… but with a surly subvocal mutter, It was a long time ago; you don’t remember.

Since I won’t normally be reviewing books here, I thought I’d make my first entry a book review.

The book is Chris Roberson’s Paragaea.

http://tinyurl.com/uyb42

The book involves a female cosmonaut falling through a hole in space to land on a Pangaea-like continent on a parallel Earth full of various kinds of human, human animal hybrids (“metamankind”: jaguar-men, snake-men, fish-men, crocodile-men etc.), a couple of demi-mortal androids and a forbidden city of high science-magic. Metal is rare, but technology is not necessarily low. There are air-ships, preyed upon by pterosaur-riding air-pirates, sword-fights, nomadic nations on sea (“the Drift”) and land (“Roam”), a metallic forest of highly but bizarrely intelligent trees, etc. The cosmonaut has to fight her way through most of this stuff to get back home to peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Republics. Roberson has invented a wonderful world and sketched out some interesting figures in it: the ostensible lead character, Akilina Mikhhailovna Chirikova (Lina); Balam, the exiled ruler of the jaguar-men (who are mostly women, it seems); Hieronymus Bonaventure, a swashbuckling lieutenant in the 18th C. British navy who also fell through a hole to Paragaea.

What’s not to like?

Unfortunately, there is a great deal not to like in the book. I hate to say this, as I badly wanted to praise Paragaea, and it does have some great things in it. But…

Roberson is a careless and often inept stylist. Characters frequently “sigh a sigh” or “dream a dream” or “VERB a COGNATE-NOUN”, and excess verbiage of that type is a hallmark of Roberson’s style. One character cycles between dog-Latin and ineptly constructed archaic English, for no very clear reason. More importantly, Roberson’s bland indefinite descriptions and his addiction to clichés take the world out of focus, make it harder to see what he’s talking about.

Still, that would be a minor problem if the storytelling were there. It’s not. One example. The heroes go to the bizarre society of the Roaming Empire, a vast nomadic city. Pages of exposition are spent on the place. Once there, one of the characters goes offscreen (as it were) to get horses for the next stage of their journey, and they leave. I am not making this up. Roberson has invented the weird and intriguing society, but never tells a story using it which, in a nutshell, is his problem throughout the book. At the end of the novel, in a development set up with unusual care, the forbidden city of Atla has been breached and an army of metamen (including the daughter of one of the protagonists) is raging through the city. It would be nice to know how this works out, but we don’t because Roberson leaves the reader hanging.

The adventure, too, is often lacking in adventurousness. The heroes go to the Temple of the Forgotten God and fight through a dungeon full of useless monsters to reach the heart of the temple where a rather pompous android named Benu is resurrecting himself. The monsters are meant to keep people out of this place that Benu returns to once every thousand years. (Why not just shut the door behind you and lock it? Who tends the giant scorpion etc. in the thousand years between Benu’s visits? I know, I know: If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts etc.) The heroes defeat all the challenges with such off-handed ease that they themselves seem bored. Why should the reader be interested? This one wasn’t.

In summary, there was some wonderful stuff here, but the story just didn’t work. When and if Roberson figures out how to conduct a story worthy of his splendid background he’ll be someone to reckon with. But, based on Paragaea, he’s not there yet.

Those who disagree can find more Roberson goodness (including an entire novel about Hieronymus Bonaventure) at http://www.chrisroberson.net/