Berserker by Fred Saberhagen (Part 1)

Years ago, while living in New York, the wife and I drove out west to visit in-laws, and in Minnesota I purchased the 1967 paperback edition of Berserker, the first volume in what is perhaps Fred Saberhagen's most famous series.  I read a few of the stories and, not particularly impressed, put the book aside for years.  Recently I have mentioned my decision to give Saberhagen another look, and this week took Berserker off the shelf with the plan of reading it in its entirety and assessing it anew. Today we'll cover the first five of the eleven stories in the 190 page volume.

For Ballantine's Berserker (U5063) Saberhagen added brief introductions to each of the stories that serve to link them together and provide a little background on humanity's colonization of the galaxy and relationship with the peaceful Carmpan, a cerebral race unprepared for the berserker onslaught.

"Without a Thought" (1963)

Originally published with the title "Fortress Ship" in If, "Without a Thought"'s first paragraphs tell us what we need to know about the berserkers: they are huge robots programmed to exterminate all life and equipped with enough firepower to destroy the entire surface of a planet in 48 Earth hours, built by the score a bazillion years ago by now-forgotten warring space empires.  The berzerkers act unpredictably, and thus are difficult for humanity's space navies to outfight.

Two human starships confront a berserker we are told is the size of my home state of New Jersey! If the robot gets past them it will destroy a human-inhabited star system! But it takes three human ships to defeat a berserker, and the third ship is four hours away! Can they stall the berserker until help arrives?

Yes! The berserker is testing out its mind-paralyzing ray! To assess the effectiveness of the ray, it challenges a human pilot to a game of checkers!  But the human figures out how it can fool the berserker into thinking the mind ray is not working--he develops a logical system much like a computer program that teaches his semi-intelligent alien pet how to play checkers!  This buys enough time for the third ship to arrive!

This story is OK, but it feels contrived and gimmicky, like Saberhagen came up with the cool idea of how to teach the pet checkers, and then built a story around this idea. (Can't the berserker just talk to the human to figure out how well the mind ray is working?)  The way the berserker toys with the humans instead of just shooting them down, even though Saberhagen explains that this is research and an effort on the part of the berserker to remain unpredictable, feels like the irrational behavior of a Bond villain who decides to let 007 live after capturing him.  Of course, "Without a Thought" fits well into the SF tradition of stories in which an engineer-type uses science and logic on the fly against the clock to save the day.

"Goodlife" (1963)

This story is much more successful as a human drama and an adventure tale than "Without a Thought."  Two people, a man and a woman, are captured by a berserker when it destroys the ship on which they are passengers.  Inside the berserker they encounter a young man who has lived his entire life inside the genocidal robot!  A test tube baby, created from the DNA of earlier captives, he has never seen a human in the flesh before, and habitually obeys the berserker, who calls him "Goodlife."  (All other life is "badlife.")  While the robot studies his two new captives and plots to breed the female with Goodlife, the man and woman plot to disable the berserker from within and win Goodlife over to their side.

"Goodlife" works as a sort of horror story, as it gives us glimpses of the psychological effect the berserker war has on people and thrusts them into the bizarre environment of the berserker's interior.

"Goodlife" first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow, which, like If, was edited by Frederick Pohl.  In fact, I think all the stories in Berserker appeared in Pohl-edited magazines published by the Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

"Patron of the Arts" (1965)

This one appeared in If.  A space ship full of famous art works flees the Earth because the berserkers are approaching.  The ship is captured by a berserker and the crew is killed while resisting.  Two passengers who do not resist survive, including a depressed artist whom we are told is weary of life.

The artist tries to paint an abstract representation of the berserker's "essence," a canvas "of discordant and brutal line...aflame with a sense of engulfing menace!"  The artist laments that the berserker will destroy all the famous paintings and sculptures on the ship.  He is then surprised to learn that the berserker is not going to destroy the art--the art is already dead, he is told, and thus destroying it is not part of the berserker mission.  The berserker is not going to kill the artist, either; the robot, detecting the artist's own unhappiness with life and interpreting his painting as praise for the berserkers, sets the artist and the art ship free so that "other life-units can learn from you...."  Shocked, the artist, as soon as he is out of the robot's clutches, rips up the painting of the berserker's essence and announces his intention to become a better person: "I can change.  I am alive." 

Titian - Man with a Glove

The most memorable scene in the story is probably when the artist, thinking the robot is going to destroy the artworks, has to decide whether to let the other human survivor, an ugly young woman, get away in a one-man life boat, or fill up the escape pod with Titian's Man with a Glove, which Wikipedia is telling me takes up about nine square feet.  I always find references to traditional high culture in classic SF, like the Chinese bowl in "--We Also Walk Dogs" by Robert Heinlein or all the references to classical music in Poul Anderson's Avatar interesting.  What is their agenda in mentioning these works of art?  To signal to the reader that "I am sophisticated, even if my work appears in these goofy pulp magazines!"?  To stand against the trend towards abstract art and rock music?  Saberhagen in  "Patron of the Arts" has the artist compare his abstract painting to Titian and feel ashamed of his own work, which he later destroys.  Who appreciates the abstract canvas?  The murderous robot!  Maybe we should see "Patron of the Arts" as a denunciation of modern art as inhuman and an insult to the high tradition of Western art.  

Saberhagen's choice, and the character's choice, of Man with a Glove also prods us to play such parlor games as "If you were on a desert island with one work of art..." or "If only one work of art would survive the apocalypse, what would it be?"

"The Peacemaker" (1964)

"The Peacemaker" appeared in If under the title "The Life Hater."  Like "Without a Thought," it is a story that portrays a single human outwitting a berserker to buy time.  "The Peacemaker" also tries to trick readers and hit us with a surprise ending.

A berserker is bearing down on a human planet on the edge of the galaxy!  The government is scrambling to build warships, but will they have time?  A lone man, "something of a pacifist," goes off in a one-man ship to "talk of peace and love" with the genocide machine!  The berserker and the pacifist have a little debate, in which the human tries to convince the machine that it should not destroy life, but serve it, and serve humanity in particular, humanity being the highest form of life, as evidenced by the complexity of human cells.

The berserker asks for a cell sample, ostensibly to see if human cells really are so complex.  In reality it uses the information from the cell sample to develop a biological warfare agent!  The berserker says it is convinced, and will now serve humankind, and sends the pacifist back to his planet infected with the biowarfare agent, expecting the human to land and infect the entire planet.  But the joke is on the berserker!  The pacifist has cancer, and provided the robot with a cancer-stricken sample, so the infection is curing him instead of killing him!  And his proximity to the berserker allowed him to gather valuable recon that will help the hastily assembled defense destroy the mechanical menace!

This one feels a little contrived, but is OK.

"Stone Place" (1965)       

"Stone Place" was published in If, and is the first berserker story promoted on the magazine's cover.

"Stone Place" is long (40 pages) and at times drags.  For me there is too much political jockeying stuff between various human factions; I generally find court intrigue to be boring.  There is also a prophecy based on mathematical calculations (shades of Asimov's psychohistory); I find that kind of thing tiresome.  This prophecy is pronounced by the first Carmpan to appear in an actual berserker story (the Carmpans have been mentioned in the intros, which are written in the voice of a Carmpan.  So far these intros have been superfluous.)

A large portion of this story was inspired by the Battle of Lepanto of 1571.  In "Stone Place" a dude named Johann, whose brother is the ruler of the Esteel Empire, is given command of a coalition space fleet.  In the 16th century a guy named Don John whose brother was King of Spain was given command of the fleet of the Holy League.  In "Stone Place" one of the space marines is a poet named Mitchell Spain; he loses an arm in the battle.  In the 16th century the great novelist Miguel Cervantes served as a marine at Lepanto, where he lost an arm.  And there are other clear parallels evident to the reader of "Stone Place" who is familiar with the Wikipedia articles on Lepanto and Cervantes.

Some people may enjoy picking out all the elements in the story inspired by the real-life naval campaign, but I find this kind of thing irritating.

There were things I liked about "Stone Place," however.  I liked the scenes in which Mitch Spain and his marines invade berserkers and fight battle droids, and I liked how the berserkers, in an elaborate piece of psychological warfare, brainwash Johann's beautiful fiance Christina de Dulcin (you heard that right, Don Quixote fans) so she will hate Johann and fall in love with Mitch Spain.  

Also noteworthy are the story's religious and philosophical overtones.  The all-seeing, all-knowing Wikipedia tells us Saberhagen was a practicing Catholic. (Has some English prof out there written his or her dissertation on 20th century American Catholic SF writers? It seems a fertile field of inquiry; for one thing you could compare people like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, and Saberhagen to the famous British religious writers of speculative fiction like Tolkein, Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, about whom I assume much has already been written.)  Johann is religious, and he is a hero and a decent sincere guy.  His brother the Emperor of Esteel believes in mechanistic determinism, that "everything [is] determined by the random swirls of condensing gasses," and he is a ruthless and decadent sex pervert who finds life empty and contemplates suicide.

Which brings us to determinism (and free will) as a major theme of the story.  There's the aforementioned Carmpan prophecy, and Christina's love for Mitch-- is her love "legit" even if it is the result of the enemy's tinkering with her brain?

The good parts of this story are good, but I think it could have been streamlined a little.

**************

These stories are all worth reading; though they do have weaknesses, I'm not quite sure why I was so disappointed in them years ago.  Well, tastes and moods change-- now I am looking forward to finishing Berserker and finding the next two or three volumes of these stories in used bookstores.

Lallia by E. C. Tubb

For Christmas my brother got me an iTunes gift card.  I don't listen to a lot of new music, and when I do, its on YouTube (I guess I am vulnerable to the charge of stealing the food right out of poor Hope Sandoval's mouth.)  So I recently used the credit to purchase from Gateway e-books of some of E. C. Tubb's Dumarest novels.  Today I finished Lallia, the sixth Dumarest adventure, reading it on my iPhone.

I won't deny that I would rather have a paperback copy of Lallia (in particular I am always curious about the interior illustrations you find in Ace Doubles), but I've not seen one in a used bookstore, and for price and convenience, the Gateway digital edition beat out Amazon and Abebooks' used copies.

The Gateway edition of Lallia has a blurb on its cover from Michael Moorcock.  As those of you who follow my every move are aware, it is just such a Moorcock comment about Tubb that led me to start reading the Dumarest books in the first place.  I certainly agree that the Dumarest books are "fast-moving and colourful."  Another reason Moorcock, who describes himself as an "anarchist," has famously attacked more conservative writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Robert Heinlein, and C. S. Lewis, and has engaged in what you might call feminist literary activism (revising his own work to be more sensitive to womens' issues, and trying to stigmatize and marginalize John Norman's Gor books), might appreciate the Dumarest series is that Tubb populates them with callous aristocrats, greedy businessmen, and manipulative intellectuals, as well as the legions of poor desperate people who suffer from their indifference and exploitation.

The other four Dumarest books I have read have included secondary plots about competing elites who enlist Dumarest in their struggles, but in Lallia it's all Dumarest; I think he appears in every scene. Dumarest, as part of his quest across the galaxy in search of Earth, a planet most people see as a fiction, joins the crew of a small space ship.  This ship, the Moray, is bad news. The ship's captain tries to make a profit by carrying cargo and passengers between planets, but they are just barely getting by, and don't even have the money to keep the ship clean and properly maintain its systems.  Tubb pithily characterizes each member of the doomed Moray's crew; the captain, who is horrified of space and indulges in the use of an alien symbiote that provides him vivid dreams, the dipsomaniac engineer who puts everyone at risk by getting drunk when he should be carefully tending to the sensitive hyperspace drive, the naive young steward who doesn't know what he has gotten himself into by signing up.

One of the themes of the Dumarest books which I haven't mentioned in earlier blog posts is religion.  In every book the bizarre Cyclan, a galaxy-wide organization of scarlet-robe-clad geniuses who have had brain surgery to disable all emotion, appear.  The members of the Cyclan use their fantastic mathematical ability and ice cold logic to manipulate others and increase their influence.  The foil of the Cyclan is the Church of Universal Brotherhood; they have also appeared in all the Dumarest books I have read.  The members of the Church try to help the poor and wretched, giving them food, helping them negotiate with the middle class for jobs and medical care, that sort of thing.  Tubb (at least in the books I have read) has always portrayed the Church monks as selfless and sincere, but there is a Clockwork Orange aspect to the Church; those who accept food from the monks are expected to kneel before the "benediction light," which conditions them hypnotically with the command "thou shalt not kill."  (You can believe that Dumarest, who regularly finds himself fighting for his life against assassins, gladiators, and monsters, has never knelt before the benediction light.)

Religion takes center stage in Lallia.  The most responsible and sympathetic of the crew of the Moray is the navigator, who is a student of ancient religions and a committed believer.  One of the planets the Moray lands on is home to a primitivist "back-to-nature" sect that considers metal "a thing of the Evil One" and uses only wooden and stone implements.  In the end of the novel the ship crashes on a planet called Shrine, the destination of scores of sick or deformed pilgrims.  These people seek a miraculous cure, and sometimes receive it, for on Shrine is an ancient alien artifact which nobody understands, but which truly has healing properties.  Tubb's view of religion is nuanced, and each character, through his words and actions, evinces a different attitude towards religion, and we see religion employed as a tool to dominate others, as a comfort to those in trouble, and as an inspiration to perform good works.

This may be a book in which the author presents views about religion, but primarily Lallia is still an adventure story.  As in earlier volumes, Dumarest ends up fighting for his life as a gladiator and rescuing a beautiful woman who has psychic powers.  He also has to contend with a Cyclan assassin; the Cyclan is still trying to retrieve the ring that book 4's beautiful psychic woman, Kalin, gave him, a ring which has encoded within it a priceless technological secret.  Lallia also moves the plot of Dumarest's saga forward; when he touches the artifact on Shrine Dumarest receives a vision of the galaxy, with the region where Earth lies highlighted.  

Another solid Dumarest adventure; interesting characters, strange creatures and technology, plenty of violence and tragedy.  Next up on my iPhone, Technos, the seventh Dumarest caper.

The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

My man Tarbandu praised the Viriconium books by M. John Harrison, so when I saw one at a used bookstore I bought it.  Tarbandu is not Harrison's only big league fan; the back of the copy I purchased, Avon 19711, printed in 1974 (copyright 1971) has praise from Michael Moorcock, and on the first page are quotes from Ursula K. LeGuin (comparing Harrison to Fritz Leiber) and Philip Jose Farmer (comparing Harrison to Jack Vance and William Hopes Hodgson.)

This copy also has a fun ad on its last page for an anthology of stories from New Worlds. Interestingly, the words "science fiction" do not appear on this ad, a black and white reproduction of the book's cover.

The Pastel City is one of those stories, like Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories (1950-1984), or Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun (1980-1983), or Hugh Cook’s Chronicles of an Age of Darkness (1986-1992), about a far future society with a quasi-medieval technology and social structure, but which is able to take advantage of old technology left over from earlier more advanced civilizations, technology that is only dimly understood. (This way, as on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom, you can have guys sword fighting in one scene, flying aircraft in the next scene, and shooting off guns in the scene after that.)  The Pastel City, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth books and Michael Moorcock’s Elric and Corum stories, also is about a formerly high civilization in a period of change and/or decline, and those of its members who sadly recall a superior past.

The city of Viriconium is in trouble. Not only has the city been sliding into decadence, its people more concerned with trade and wealth than fighting in wars (the book is full of leftist Harrison's hostility to the bourgeoisie): now Canna Moidart, a cruel foreign woman with a claim to the throne of Viriconium (she married the previous king’s brother and then murdered him) is leading an army on the city, hoping to overthrow the current queen, the beautiful teenage girl Methvet, AKA Jane. The aristocratic heroes who led the armies of Jane’s dad come out of retirement and gather together to save Jane and Viriconium.

The Pastel City reminded me a lot of some of Moorcock’s Eternal Champions books, those ones in which the best swordsman in the world gets a message from a higher power and is sent on a quest in order to thwart some other higher power's world-threatening designs. Our main character, Cromis, is the best swordsman in the world as well as a talented poet and musician. After he kills an evil merchant he gets a message from a higher power and goes on a quest. Canna Moidart has unearthed an army of robots (“robots” is not very poetic, so Harrison calls them “automata”) but after she defeats Jane, the robots cease to obey Canna Moidart and start killing people at random. It seems the robots were programmed to destroy all human life. (This kind of Ludism goes hand in hand with hostility to the merchant class.) So Cromis and the other aristocrats must travel through a desert created by the industrialism of past civilizations to find and destroy the one huge computer (Harrison calls it “the artificial brain”) that controls all the genocidal robots.

The book is, or tries to be, moody.  On almost every page Harrison describes the wind, or how some person place or thing has been eroded by time. We get samples of Cromis’s T.S. Eliot-style poetry (“…we are nothing but eroded men…”). There is tragedy, with lots of Cromis’s old buddies getting killed. Harrison is also into images; we get detailed descriptions of everybody’s clothes, of various landscapes, and of architecture, with an emphasis on colors.

The book works, and I’m comfortable recommending it to people who like these sword fighting science fantasy things, but I didn’t think it stood out from its genre.  All the other authors I have mentioned in this blog post have done better work of this general type. 

The plot and the characters in The Pastel City are just kind of average; I didn’t really care who won the war and who lived or died.  It could be that the book is too short, that there wasn't enough time to develop any feelings for Cromis and Jane and Viriconium and the rest so that when they got betrayed or killed or whatever I was invested in them.  Canna Moidart, who sets the whole adventure in motion, never appears "on screen."  The high points of the book are things like the eight foot tall power armor a dwarf engineer refurbishes and wears into battle, the killer robots (who collect the brains of the dead), and the truth about the huge "artificial brain." 

I’ll probably give Harrison another shot, but, as I brood and the wind ruffles my black garb, I do not hear any insistent voices beckoning me to stalk this bitter land, a land ravaged by time and the industry of forgotten generations, in search of the sequels to The Pastel City.

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 1 to 25

Half Price Books' free calendar has 12 lists of books in it, but except for the "classics" list they consist almost entirely of books I have not read, will not read, or have not even heard of.  Jesse of the Speculiction blog, in the comments to my post about the 10 book classics list, points out a full 100 book list of science fiction and fantasy books from my buddies at Half Price Books.  It actually is a pretty good list; I have read at least some of 30 of them, and have inchoate opinions on many of the others based on prejudices, hunches, knowledge of the author's other work, and augury.

   
Today I will tackle just 25 of these, which were apparently chosen by a panel of "3,000 bibliomaniacs."

1) Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
This is one of those books I haven't read but feel like I know because everyone is always talking about it.  The plot seems good, and isn't it a riff on a one page scene from a Heinlein novel, maybe Space Cadet, in which a young person sits in a simulator and has to plot the defense of the Earth as part of the entrance exam or assessment when he joins the Space Patrol?  As a kid I loved that scene, and had elaborate day dreams about playing that kind of video game.

Card is an important SF writer and very popular, and also controversial because of his political and religious beliefs, so I should probably read some of his work, but for whatever reason I have only read one story by him, "Eumenides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory."  I remember thinking it was good, both horrible and thought-provoking.

We were supposed to read Wyrms in the Science Fiction course I took at Rutgers, but we didn't get to it.  The prof, who was a young guy and tried to include jokes in his lectures, told us his one word review of Wyrms was "Ewwww...."

Maybe someday I'll read Ender's Game.  First I will probably hunt down some of Card's short fiction.

2) Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin  
I haven't read this, and haven't even really considered reading it.  I played Dungeons and Dragons like a fiend as a kid, and enjoy many sword fighting fantasy stories, like Howard's Conan, Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and Hugh Cook's Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, but somehow this hasn't appealed to me.  For one thing, I like stories about individuals, stories with a singular point of view, and I generally don't like those sagas in which there are twenty different characters from eight different families snubbing each other at parties and stabbing each other in the back, and my spider sense tells me these Game of Thrones books are likely to fall into the latter category.    

I have a funny story about Game of Thrones, however.  One day my sister-in-law came over and said to my wife and me, "I started watching 'Crown of Thorns.'"  We asked her how she liked it, and were amazed when she started talking about it, because we had thought she must have been talking about a documentary about Jesus Christ which we had never heard of.

3) Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
I read this in my youth and as an adult a second time, and it is a very good novel, and a very good science fiction novel, because it tries to create a future society based on various premises and more or less succeeds.  Part of its fame rests on the fact that it endorses values that we are all expected to embrace, opposition to censorship and advocacy of free speech, but the book is also provocative: the censorship in the book is a government response to the demands of minority interest groups.  Also provocative are Bradbury's attack on television and his idea that an atomic war could actually make way for a rebirth of a better society.  Fahrenheit 451 doesn't just comfort the reader by agreeing with him that censorship is wrong, it challenges and surprises the reader.

4, 5, 6 & 7) The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkein  
I have read this twice, as a kid and as an adult, and liked it.  It is full of striking images and it actually does affect the reader on an emotional level, at least it did me; I had tears in my eyes in the end when the elves and one of the hobbits goes off to wherever it is they go off to, the moon or something?  Tolkein's old-fashioned conservatism, all that jazz about who has the blood and how factories are disgusting, and his celebration of feudal relationships like that between Sam and Frodo, is an interesting contrast to the modern middle-class "conservatism" that embraces individualism and capitalism.

The world Tolkien creates is vivid, but it is also odd in that it almost totally neglects some of the things that really matter in our lives, like sex, money, and religion.  Robert Howard's Conan stories and Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser tales, like our real lives, are full of merchants, gods and priests, and sexual relationships, and the characters, like people in real life, are driven by desire for money and/or sex, or by religious motives.  One could argue that leaving out sex, money and religion is a weakness of Lord of the Rings, but it must have been a conscious artistic choice of Tolkein's, and since the story works so well the choice cannot have been a bad one.  Tolkein's treatment of war, friendship, and politics is quite good, and perhaps throwing in more topics would just have been distracting.

8) Neuromancer by William Gibson
I doubt I'll ever read this; I'm not that interested in computers or "cyberpunk."  I think "steampunk" is a sexy and interesting aesthetic, but I'm not interested in reading a book about it.  I don't really like punk rock, though I do like those early Cure albums and outtakes like "I Want to Be Old" and "I Just Need Myself."  I never watched the version of "Candid Camera" called "Punked."  I didn't watch "Punky Brewster," either.  

Did I say I haven't read Neuromancer?

9) Hyperion by Dan Simmons
I savaged this in an Amazon review years ago for being too full of references and allusions to mainstream and genre literature, and being too histrionic in general. I actually like much of Simmons's source material and the classics he name checks, like Jack Vance and the Fitzgerald translation of The Aeneid, but I couldn't take this novel.

10) Dune by Frank Herbert 
I tried to read this as a kid and gave up on it quickly.  Maybe I should try it again.  Based on the David Lynch movie, which I saw in the theater as a kid, the plot and its various elements seem good.

Jack Vance trivia: Vance and Herbert were friends, but Vance didn't like Herbert's work, as it contained too much mysticism. 

11) The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Is this really a novel?  Looking at Wikipedia, I'm surprised at how many different versions the book and the stories which make it up have gone through.

I've never actually sat down and read this collection, but I have read versions of many of the component stories, and thought them all worthwhile.  "The Silent Towns" is a great misogynist story about how the last human male on Mars is repelled by the last human female on Mars, and is the one I read most recently.   I also read "The Wilderness" (women are about to move to Mars to meet husbands, like 19th century women on the American frontier) relatively recently.  Many of the stories, like "Ylla," "Mars is Heaven!" "There Will Come Soft Rains," and "Million Year Picnic" are famous classics which I have experienced in TV or comic book form. 

12) Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein
I am a Heinlein fan, but I started this one as a kid and gave up pretty quickly.  I was pretty fickle as a kid.  Probably I should read it.  Is this the one in which there is a painter who takes photos and then paints over the photo?  For some reason that has stuck in my mind.

13) 1984 by George Orwell 
Orwell has a very good writing style and this is a great novel, very immersive and effective.

14) Ubik by Philip K. Dick
I haven't read this, in fact, I think I have only read one Dick book, and I can't quite recall which one.  The way people talk about Dick's work doesn't make it sound very appealing to me.

15) Storm of Swords by George R. R. Martin
See 2.

16) The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
As with The Martian Chronicles, I have read a bunch of these stories over the years in various places.  For the most part I like them.

I always think "The Veldt" is a little overrated.  I can't quite suspend my disbelief enough; the TV animals come to life and kill the parents?  "The Rocket" is too sappy for me.  "Kaleidoscope,"  "Zero Hour," "The Visitor," "The Long Rain," and "The City" I have fond memories of.

17) "Who Goes There?" by John W. Campbell
I have read two novels about space war by famous SF editor Campbell, Ultimate Weapon and Invaders from the Infinite, and was not particularly impressed.  I've read one or two of his short stories, but can't recall anything about them.  I should read more of his short fiction; maybe someday.  I also haven't seen either of the movies based on this story.

These 3,000 bibliomaniacs must really be into esoterica if they put this above anything by Asimov, Gaiman and LeGuin.  Was there a surplus of these on the remainder pile?

18) The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss
Never heard of it.

19) The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
I read this as a kid and liked it.  One day at the Rutgers library I looked at Alexei Panshin's book of criticism of Heinlein.  Panshin leveled a number of very effective criticisms at The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and for decades now I have been thinking I should reread the book and reassess both the Heinlein novel and Panshin's criticism.  I should also reread this because as a kid I knew absolutely zero about history or politics or sex, and many things probably flew right by me.  I think the thing I liked about it as a kid was Heinlein's style, and the idea of making friends with a computer.  I don't really find computers very interesting, but the friendship between the narrator and Mike the computer, somehow, touched me.  I was a lonely kid. 

As an adult I was thrilled when I first read the passages in the second volume of Proust in which Proust tells us friendship is a load of crap.  It's not just me, I realized.  

20) The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
Never heard of it.  I also haven't read Jane Eyre.

A name that starts with two consonants is sexy, though.  Two consonants in the middle of a name, like "Ylla," is also sexy.  Two consonants at the end is useless, though.  Sorry to all you Jeffs and Bills out there.  I also think it is sexy when you can call a woman by a traditionally male name, like calling a Roberta "Bob" or a Mikella "Mike."  It's like women in men's clothes, like those famous Dietrich photos or Ingrid Bergman decked out in armor in Joan of Arc.  Jasper can be a man's name or a woman's name, can't it?

Anyway, Jasper Fforde has the best name on this list.  Congrats to him or her.

21) A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L'Engle
I read this in 6th grade.  Or maybe just the start of it.  Fickle, fickle.  Is this the one in which an Arab and/or Muslim dictator has an atomic bomb, and some kid decides to say "Fewmets" instead of "shit?"  That's all I remember.

I remember what grade I read (part?) of A Wrinkle in Time in because I remember the particular teacher who loaned it to me, the specialist that ran the "Gifted and Talented" program at my grammar school, a program which, I know not how, I was included in.  When I was a kid people thought I was going somewhere in life.  Joke's on them.  

22) The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
I never read these.  (I read Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet and didn't like it very much.)  Tilda Swinton looked pretty good in the movie, though.  Just imagine if her name was Ttilda Swintton.  Hubba hubba.   

23 & 24) The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle and Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
I've heard of these.  That is all.

25) Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
I think a lot of kids read this when I was in grammar school, but I haven't read it.  Was there a TV version or something that was pushing sales?

I like Bradbury, but it is a little funny the way he criticized TV in Fahrenheit 451 (and I guess in "The Veldt") but embraced TV as part of his career. 

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Tomorrow I will assault 25 more of the SF books on Half Price Book's list.  Stay tuned for more trivia about my early life and clues as to which actresses I think are pretty.