Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

I've got my copy of Omon Ra on hand and I'm heartily glad it's a slim volume.  In addition I'm reading The Reverse of the Medal by Patrick O'Brian, book 11 of the Aubrey/Maturin series for those of you keeping count.  I'll also be reading Ubik by Philip K. Dick with a couple guys at work.  It turns out we never read the same books so we thought it might be fun to talk about one we've all read for a change.

Why Ubik?  We used a random number generator to choose one for us from The Classics of Science Fiction list.  We ran the numbers 6 times until we landed on a book none of had read and that none of us objected to.

I missed posting the rest of my July reads in the July thread, so I'll catch up here.  The last few weeks have seen me through a bunch of quickies;  I think that WWE has really spurred my reading appetite!

The Green Man (1969) by Kingsley Amis was quietly spectacular!!  The characters and their interactions were so real and the writing was so crisp and sardonic.  The plot was great as well, managing to unhurriedly cover quite a bit of ground for such a slim little book.  I had enjoyed his sf criticism in New Maps of Hell (1960), but this was my first encounter with Amis' fiction.  I've definitely become a fan of his, and will be reading more soonest!

The Enemy Stars (1958) by Poul Anderson was a GMRC read.  A piece of it's time, I suppose I would say.  It had a few moments, and the Nordic characters were typically strong and vivid, but some of the other characters were weaker, and even problematic.  The plot was a little flimsy, but the book is really more of a character study.

The Nonexistant Knight and The Cloven Viscount (1952/59) by Italo Calvino were a pair of charming fables, surreal, whimsical, and quite enjoyable.  Criminally, it's been ages since I last read Calvino.

Frank Reade:  Adventures in the Age of Invention (2012) by Guinan & Bennett is an odd book.  The Frank Reade stories were the earliest Edisonade stories, predating Tom Swift, and featured Frank Reade and his descendants in a long running series of adventures for boys starring the Reades and their inventions (steam airships, submarines, etc.).  This book is a curious artifact, purporting to tell the "secret" history of the Reades, blurrily conflating real and fictitious history.  Three quarters of the book is devoted to beautiful period photographs and artwork, but here again, it is a mix of authentic pieces and pieces that have been photoshopped or even created wholesale, all without any clear way to tell which is which.  The book would have been more compelling if it had approached the subject matter in a straightforward documentary style.

The Paradox Men (1953) by Charles L. Harness, read because I was intrigued by Scott Laz's review.  Sadly for me, I didn't enjoy the same reading experience that he did.  The circular paradox of the book is indeed clever, but I found that the juxtaposition of this cleverness with the cartoonish Van Vogt style employed here was too dissonant for me.  Afterwards, I wound up rereading his semi-autobiographical and very moving Cybele, With Bluebonnets, written almost fifty years later, and reworking the same themes of The Paradox Men to good effect.

The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson, the classic novel of psychological horror.  It's clear why this one has such a great reputation.  I liked it quite a bit, but I think I liked her We Have Always Lived in the Castle even better.

A Short History of Fantasy (2009) by Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James was just that, a short history, briefly covering lots of titles, and with surprisingly few lacunae given it's short length (almost 100 of it's less than 300 pages are given over to indexes, a chronology, and the like).  Recommended.

Omon Ra (1996) by Victor Pelevin, a reread for the Outside the Norm group read.  In connection with that, I also read a couple of vaguely associated books, books that might be best described as genre-tinged novels of communist economic history: Red Plenty (2010) by Francis Spufford (historical USSR) and The Fat Years (2011) by Koonchung Chan (near future China), which were both entertaining and informative.

The Testament of Jessie Lamb (2011) by Jane Rogers, the recent Arthur C. Clarke winner.  Pretty underwhelming.  The protagonist was just so... jejune.  Over at Strange Horizons , Adam Roberts sums up it's shortcomings much better than I can.

The Mirage (2012) by Matt Ruff was disappointing, at least when compared to his earlier books.  This one is a fairly earnest inversion of the 9/11 attack in which a terrorist attack by Christian fundamentalists from a backwards American is carried out upon an Arab superpower.  The plot, such as it is, is really just there as a way for Ruff to engage in some heavy handed satire at the expense of various villains on both sides of the real 9/11 and it's aftermath.  The ending was especially muddled.

Redshirts (2012) by John Scalzi.  Scalzi is always light, witty, entertaining reading, and is especially so here.  This isn't actually a good thing, as the book has so little heft to it that it feels like it would have fared better as a novellette, or even as a short story.

The Masks of Time (1968) by Robert Silverberg, A GRMC read and one of the earliest "new Silverberg", written as Silverberg was trying to shed his "zap-zap pulp adventure" reputation (see Silverberg's later introduction).  He succeeds in producing a thought provoking book with intriguing characters, but it's still not quite as good as some of his books written just a year or so later.

Ring Around the Sun (1953) by Clifford D. Simak, another GMRC read, is another good but not great effort by a Grand Master.  Written in Simak's characteristically clear style and featuring another of his everyman protagonists, it ultimately becomes a puzzle of identities, somewhat reminiscent of Harness's The Paradox Men.

Darker Than You Think (1948) by Jack Williamson, yet another GMRC read, was excellent, especially considering it's vintage.  Reporter Will Barbee is caught up in his desire for the beautiful and mysterious cub reporter/"werewolf" April, and their nighttime escapades together quickly enmesh him in a supernatural struggle beyond his ken, pitting him against old friends, indeed against all of humanity.  What will Will do?  The ending is a corker!!  As a bonus,  the edition I read was graced by a number of brilliant illustrations by David G. Klein (uncredited - why does that happen so often?).  This book was the subject of a couple of fine WWE blog reviews, one by Charles Dee Mitchell, and one by Scott Lazerus.

@Dave:  Ubik is great, so y'all should really enjoy it.  RNG, nice!!  Next time, maybe read Robert Silverberg's The Stochastic Man or Stanislaw Lem's The Chain of Chance! 

I also happened to read Mendlesohn & James's Short History of Fantasy this week. I agree it does what it's trying to do pretty well, but it's a bit of an impossible task. I started to get bogged down in the later chapters by the torrent of one-or-two paragraph descriptions of author after author, with fairly arbitrary transitions between them. I don't know that it could have been done better, though, considering the variety and sheer volume of current fantasy they were trying to summarize. I'd recommend it, especially for the earlier chapters. Clearly the authors know their stuff, and the chapter on Tolkien and Lewis was fascinating.

Just finished Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell, in the March 1939 issue of Unknown. It's a paranoid conspiracy theory story based on the idea that most of humanity's misfortune and irrationality, as well as various unexplained phenomena, is the result of the existence of invisible (to us) parasitic energy beings (Vitons) that have been manipulating us into behaving badly (wars and such) so that they can feed off of our negative emotions. Missing persons? Bermuda Triangle? That's the Vitons abducting people in order to experiment on them. Birth defects? Mental illness? The result some of those experiments. You know that shivery feeling like "someone just walked across your grave"? That's a Viton inserting an energy tendril into you so as to feed off of your emotions! Etc. Why haven't we ever figured this out? Because the Vitons are telepathic, and anyone who suspects is wiped out. In the story, a government agent (a Heinleinian hero-type taken to the extreme) has to figure this out and disseminate the knowledge without being found out by the Vitons, then find a weapon against them. Once the word gets out, the Vitons retaliate by mentally hijacking the "Yellow" races of Earth (apparently more susceptible to their manipulation) and force them to start a war against the "white" countries of America and Europe, in order to help wipe out those who have discovered them, and feed on the resultant pain and terror. Russell wrote much better stories during the '40s, but this one doesn't work for me. It is one of his earlier efforts, and it's difficult to get past the dated style, seemingly unconscious racism, and unbelievable main character. I suppose the idea that all of humanity's problems are the result of a single cause could be appealing, but I have no patience for conspiracy theories, which seem to arise in order to provide scapegoats for the simple-minded who can't be bothered to understand and grapple logically with the complex problems that we face. This novel is pretty well known, and has mostly stayed in print, but I don't think it's a very good example of Golden Age SF, though in some ways it may be a representative one...

Omon Ra was a quick read. Looking forward to the discussion. @engelbrecht: I meant to get Red Plenty after seeing it reviewed in The Economist a while back, but it wasn't out in the U.S. yet. I was reminded of it yesterday as there was a rave review by Jo Walton on tor.com. It seems to have gotten a lot of interest from the SF community. [also @engelbrecht: That Frank Reade book sounds like it’s along the same line’s as Philip Jose Farmer’s Tarzan Alive; and yes, it is sad for you that you didn’t like The Paradox Men.] 

Not sure what I'll get to this month, but rising toward the top of the list are Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, maybe some Robert E. Howard Conan stories for the blog, Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore, and The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Also, agreed that Ubik is essential PKD (maybe the best/most representative novel), and therefore possibly the greatest book ever!

@Scott:  Thanks for the Jo Walton Red Plenty link, lots of good stuff there.  Something Jo doesn't say is how science fictional the book is:  according to the Science Fiction section of the author's Red Plenty site, the structure of the book was consciously modeled after Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars trilogy and KSR was one of the draft readers of the book (noted in the acknowledgements).  Additionally, the book has it's moments when it's in something of a fairytale mode (see the Fairytales section of the same site).  It's all extremely entertaining, and, should you be looking for additional depth, just look to the buttressing 70 pages of notes and bibliography.  Take it from an old Econ major, it's the best novel of mathematical economics in action you could ever hope to read! 

I also just finished Margaret Atwoods The Handmaids Tale (1985), and The Gods of Mars (1918) by Edgar Rice Burroughs (the second Barsoom book). For the most part, they couldnt be more different, but strangely enough, they have a common theme: the potentially dangerous power of organized religion. In The Gods of Mars, we learn that the entire religion of Barsoom is a fraud designed to maintain the lifestyle of the white-skinned Therns, who use religious pilgrims for slaves and cannibalism, and whose own religious beliefs are in turn fostered by the Black Martians, who foster the Therns superstitious beliefs in order to prey off of them. Burroughss equation of religious with irrational superstition is palpable. This novel really ups the ante on Princess of Mars. If you like the pulp adventure of Princess, youll love Gods. If you are annoyed by the pulpish deficiencies of Princess, youll see them increased to the point of ludicrousness in Gods. Burroughss books are just the sort of thing Margaret Atwood is thinking of when she refuses to label her own novels as science fiction, but The Handmaids Tale is an SF classic (whether she likes it or not). Its a cautionary tale, extrapolating on the danger to women and society of political power in the hands of religious fundamentalists, portraying the Taliban-like treatment of women following a political coup in the U.S., in response to a fertility crisis. Beautifully written, it is a convincing first-person portrait of a person trying to come to grips with a complete loss of individual agency. Are there really Americans who would like to control womens reproduction as the novel posits? Consider that we have to vote on the Personhood Amendment in Colorado this November for the third time in five years. Atwood posits a scenario in which the proponents of this sort of thing take over completely and suspend the Constitution As an added bonus, reading it will move you closer to completing ten WWEnd lists!

And now for something completely different, Im trying out some Conan stories by Robert E. Howard.