1979 stories by S. P. Somtow, Orson Scott Card, Richard Wilson & Richard Cowper

Cover of the hardcover edition

Let's read four more stories from Donald Wollheim's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  Today let's look at stories by people with whom I am not very familiar.

"The Thirteenth Utopia" by S. P. Somtow (as by Somtow Suchartikul)

Some of us barely have the energy and dexterity to roll out of bed every morning and make the espresso for the wife without burning down the house.  And then you have those heroes who are fluent in multiple languages, compose symphonies and ballets and operas, are intimately familiar with the major American poets, and publish dozens of novels and scores of short stories.  S. P. Somtow (who published much of his fiction under the name Somtow Suchartikul) is just such a hero.  "The Thirteenth Utopia," one of his earliest published stories, is the first in a long series of stories known as the "Inquestor" series, and first appeared in Analog.  I have never read any of this dynamo's work before; let's see what's up with him.

(Earlier this year Joachim Boaz gave a middling review to Somtow's award-winning first novel, Starship and Haiku.)

Unfortunately, "Thirteenth Utopia" fits into two categories of stories which make me groan: the "guy visits hippy utopia and goes native" story, and the "we humans are violent and would be better off if we were conquered by aliens" story.  I've had to wade through a lot of these sorts of stories in my career as an SF fan, and I try to avoid them, but sometimes they ambush me.  These stories are just as much silly wish fulfilment fantasies as all those stories in which a guy fights monsters and/or in wars and marries a princess (John Carter) or beds lots of women (Conan.)  But while those Burroughs or Howard stories offer excitement, adventure, tension, horror, and an allegory of life as a struggle in which the good person (John Carter) or selfish ubermensch (Conan) can achieve lofty goals, perhaps improving the world or at least enjoying himself, most of these hippy utopia stories and "please conquer us, E.T." stories simply offer tedious lectures and bitter denunciations of the human race from an author who considers himself better than the common run of humanity.  If I need to offer a list of examples, consider these from just off the top of my head: Theodore Sturgeon's Cosmic Rape and "The Skills of Xanadu;" 75% of the Chad Oliver stories I have read, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, Robert Crane's Hero's Walk, J. Hunter Holly's The Green Planet, and the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.  You can probably think of more; hell, I have probably written about more on this blog and since forgotten them.  

"Thirteenth Utopia" is set in a universe in which there are many human-inhabited planets, most part of a sort of empire that is constantly embroiled in wars. The story's protagonist is an Inquestor whose job is to go to planets that are disconnected from the empire and are rumored to be utopias. He has already been to a dozen utopias, discovered their fatal flaws, and acted to overthrow their utopian regimes and integrate the planets into the space empire so their human and material resources can be used in all those wars.

His thirteenth target is Shtoma.  Here, everybody lives in harmony with nature, is in touch with their feelings, and has a lot of promiscuous sex.  There is no mental illness, crime, or war.   All the earlier utopias the Inquestor encountered had a rottenness at their core, their surface happiness based on a foundation of atrocious exploitation or murderous totalitarianism, but on Shtoma no flaw is to be found. There must be a flaw, the Inquestor knows, because man is a fallen creature, is himself fundamentally flawed. Then the Inquestor learns the truth--this planet's population has lost (the bad?) part of its humanity because the system's sun is alive and radiates into the people its "love," "cleansing" them.  As usually happens in these utopian stories the visitor goes native, and the Inquestor does not return from whence he came but joins the people of Shtoma in their happiness.

Why Wollheim thought this one of the best SF stories of 1979 is beyond me.  There are no new ideas and the style is unremarkable.  Is there any chance Somtow, in a subtle way that my sensors failed to detect, is attacking the tired and boring subgenres of which this story is an example?  (After all, the Inquestor is a man of passion and deep feelings who has lived a life of service to a cause and of adventure, while the people of Shtoma seem pretty frivolous and shallow.  Even so, gotta give this one the thumbs down.  

"Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is famous and important, what with that Ender's Game which everybody talks about all the time.  I've never read Ender's Game because I feel like I already know the plot and the surprise ending just from exposure to pop culture. Years ago I did read a short story by Card, a horror story called "Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory," which I thought was effective, but I never went back to read any more of Card's work.  Well, here is my chance to further investigate Card's body of work.

"Unaccompanied Sonata" first appeared in Omni, and I was surprised at how good it is; it probably is one of the best stories of 1979!

Christian Haroldsen is a genius born into a static, technocratic, totalitarian world of the near future.  The government gives every child a battery of tests and can determine with almost perfect accuracy what job a person is best suited for and will make him most happy; each person is trained for and assigned this dream job, and everybody in the world is happy!  Haroldsen is found to be a musical prodigy and is groomed for membership in the tiny isolated elite of creative people known as the Makers.

One of the laws Haroldsen must follow is that he listen to no other music, only his own; his only influences are to be natural sounds, the wind in the trees and the calls of birds and such.  When he breaks this rule around age thirty he is punished, assigned the job of delivery truck driver and forbidden to ever make music again.  When he does make music (on an ancient piano in a bar) he is again punished, this time severely (his fingers and thumbs are severed with a laser beam!), and assigned to work on a road construction crew.  When Haroldsen makes music yet again, this time singing, he receives the ultimate punishment--he becomes a government agent, a Watcher, tasked with enforcing all these terrible laws against the Makers!

"Unaccompanied Sonata" is well-written and even moving, and brings up several uncomfortable questions about art and our lives.  To what extent should art be original, and to what extent do we accept derivative work as successful art?  Does (high) art really make us happy, or does it challenge us in ways that are disturbing and can actually make us less happy?  If a planned economy could be made to work and a totalitarian government put in the hands of people who are not corrupt or vindictive, would we all be happier with far less freedom than some of us today consider absolutely essential?  I am always against censorship, planned economies, technocracy and limits to individual freedom, but Card (in this story, at least) questions my values in a way that is more intriguing, and less boneheaded or insulting, than most suggestions that we need more government and less freedom.

Powerful and disturbing; strongly recommended!

"The Story Writer" by Richard Wilson

I've never read anything by Wilson, but isfdb lists three novels and about one hundred short stories published stories by him, ranging from 1938 to 1988.  Looking at the covers of his novels, I am lead to suspect Wilson is one of those guys who writes wacky stories full of silly jokes and inflicts broad satires of politicians on his readers. I try to avoid this sort of thing, but as I have suggested, sometimes my spider sense fails me and I get ambushed.  Well, this blog post is about exploring new territory, so let's get on with it!

"Story Writer," which first appeared in Destinies, a sort of periodical in book form edited by Jim Baen, appears to be one of Wilson's most famous short stories: it earned Wilson a Nebula nomination and is the title story of the 2011 collection of Wilson stories put out by Ramble House, a publisher all classic genre lit fans should keep an eye on.

"The Story Writer" is a sappy, sentimental, self-indulgent and pandering tale of 42 pages about a pulp writer who made enough money churning out western and detective stories and then TV scripts to retire in his fifties, who then starts hanging out at flea markets, banging out stories on the fly on an old typewriter for customers. I can see why "The Story Writer" would appeal to Nebula voters, what with the way it romanticizes writers and name drops so many old pulp writers and genre characters.  (The Nebulas, of course, are chosen by professional writers.)  The story is also full of details about what it is like to hang around flea markets and antique stores.  As followers of my Twitter feed know, the wife and I spend a fair amount of our free time at flea markets and antique stores, so I guess I am the target audience of this story in more ways than one, but somehow this stuff left me cold--I don't read SF to see my own boring life reproduced.

Anyway, a mysterious man comes to the flea market and the protagonist writes a story about how the mystery man is one of an alien race hiding on Earth, sought by the government, while the writer himself is the hero foretold in the aliens' prophecy.  He goes to another dimension, and then to Washington, D. C., to hash out a modus vivendi between the humans and the aliens.  So we have a weak story serving as a frame for a feeble story.

The plot is absurd, banal and tired, and the style isn't any good either, long-winded and boring, with long lists of items and of people and of song titles that are supposed to make you nod knowingly when you recognize them, a monotonous chain of metaphors when one metaphor would suffice, and plenty of superfluous prattle about the protagonist filling his pipe or drinking root beer or whatever.  And then there is the poetry....

Bad!

No, no, please, no....

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" by Richard Cowper

As Joseph Banks and William Bligh could tell you, sometimes you explore new territory and find fascinating new specimens, and sometimes you explore new territory and your friends get eaten by cannibals.  But we can't let these setbacks discourage us from our odyssey of literary exploration; our motto must be "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," even  if "the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," and your foreign minister cares so little for transparency and national security that she lost or stole thousands of official communications and half of the twenty electronic devices full of confidential info she used.

Richard Cowper seems to have a pretty good reputation among the internet SF community (check out Joachim Boaz's posts and links here and tarbandu's review of a Cowper novel here) so maybe this story will salve the wounds I suffered at the hands of Richard Wilson.

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" takes place in a post-Space Age future; during the lifetime of many of the characters the last of Earth's spaceships returned to Earth, never to leave again.  Because of a lack of fossil fuels (I guess, or maybe some other reason), international commerce is conducted via high-tech sailing ships.  Our main character is Roger, a 12-year old boy staying at a Caribbean resort with his mother (this whole set up, the story's tone, and various small details, like a maternal kiss, reminded me of Proust;could Cowper be consciously emulating In Search of Lost Time?)  Roger meets a beautiful woman, and the captain of that last space ship, a man of great wisdom, and in the second half of the story we readers learn about that last voyage and how it changed the world.  You see, the crew of that last voyage encountered peaceful and immortal aliens who play an elaborate skill-based board game, somewhat like go. When the game was introduced to the Earth, mankind became devoted to the game and imbued with its zen-like wisdom, ending wars and poverty.  A little sappy and utopian, maybe, but Cowper's style and delivery sell the story.

Charmingly written, this is a pleasant, entertaining piece.  Quite good.

**********

So we've got two winners here, from Card and Cowper, a below average story from Somtow, and a story by Wilson that is so poor I'm guessing Baen and Wollheim published it mainly to honor an old hand who started in the genre fiction racket way back when (Wollheim in his intro notes Wilson was one of the Futurians) and devoted his life to it.  Looking back at them, I see three of the four stories are about ways of creating a happy human society, and question whether happiness should even be mankind's primary goal.

In our next episode, more science fiction short stories selected by a celebrated editor--these will be from the 1960s.

Orbital Resonance by John Barnes

"We have a very small number of adults trying to raise a very large number of you into a culture that we just made up, one we don't have any emotional attachment to ourselves."

On the cover of my 1992 paperback edition of John Barnes' 1991 novel Orbital Resonance, Orson Scott Card compares Barnes to Heinlein, and on the back cover Poul Anderson compares Barnes to Heinlen.  Inside, on the "Praise for" pages, various SF periodicals do the same.  Well, I like Heinlein, so I thought I'd give Orbital Resonance a chance.

The year is 2024 and the Earth has been totally effed up by biological warfare, climate change and AIDS!  The only people to survive the catastrophes were those willing to do anything to survive.  Once these ruthless survivor types were in charge they came up with a scheme to save the Earth--space stations made from asteroids where things can be manufactured without damaging the Earth's environment, and where a new society of social-minded humans can be developed!

Our narrator is Melpomene Murray, thirteen-year-old daughter of a psychologist on the council ("CPB") who has played a major role in developing the new generation of communitarian people.  They live in Flying Dutchman, an asteroid in an orbit between Earth and Mars.  Melpomene is writing the book we are reading after having been enlisted by the CPB to produce propaganda that will help Earthers understand what life is like in space and convince them to think well of the space people.

The comparisons to Heinlein are quite apt--much of Orbital Resonance reads like a pastiche of "Menace from Earth" and the various juveniles, with a teenage girl as first-person narrator, describing her life in a space colony (we've got no room, no privacy, variable gravity, and we like it!) and teenage relationship dramas (a bully is mean to the new kid from Earth, girls worry about their figures and about boys liking them, Melpomene's brother is broken hearted because he is bad at computer programming class, there is a rift between Melpomene and her best friend Miriam because Miriam is paying attention to a boy, etc.)  The story also addresses philosophical issues that Heinlein often wrote about, like the tension between individualism and duty to society, when it is appropriate to obey authority and when it is appropriate to rebel, and the forms family and erotic relationships will take in the future.

Kids on the asteroid station are conditioned and hypnotized (Melpomene's father uses words like "designed" and "programmed") to fear breaking rules, to fear leaving Flying Dutchman, and to enjoy working in teams.  A math test, for example, is like a team sport; each student is given different problems, and the good students take time out to help the poor students because each student's score is affected by everybody else's score ("In Pyramid Math, your score is half your own plus one quarter the average of you and your partner, plus one eighth the average of your foursome,  and so forth....") If there is a fight in class every student gets punished.

Basically, the kids have been programmed to be a bunch of commies (Dad says "Individualism is dead because it didn't work,") but over the course of the book we see signs the programming is starting to break down.  The aforementioned bullying wasn't supposed to happen, for example, and an immigrant from Earth who cracks cruel jokes, Theophilus, starts everybody speaking their minds in antisocial ways ("'I've always thought things like that.  I bet other people have too.  We just never used to say them until Theophilus came up.'")  And when Melpomene realizes that so many of her attitudes and emotions, which feel totally natural, may be the result of tampering with her mind, she rebels.

Her rebellion, which occurs in the last seventy or so pages of the book, consists of hacking into CPB computer files with her boyfriend and eavesdropping on Dad.  She learns that she is, without her knowledge, being groomed to be ruler of the asteroid! Her brother is being manipulated into being an artist!  (He isn't really a bad computer programmer, the teachers just give him impossible problems so he will turn to his art. They also sabotage his sports career!)  Melpomene's boyfriend is being groomed to be the Flying Dutchman's captain!  The CPB also plan to outlaw labor unions and abolish elections soon.

Melpomene stops all the individualistic nastiness started by Theophilus (Winston Smith style, in the end Theophilus cheerfully joins the collective--he was just reenacting the cruelty he learned on Earth and now sees the error of his ways.) Melpomene also convinces the CPB to abandon all their manipulations of the kids as well as their plans of getting rid of unions and elections.  In fact, the adults who were born on Earth agree to leave the asteroid and move to Mars (which is in the process of being terraformed.)  Life on Earth with its violence and individualism has made the adults unfit to rule, so like Moses who lead his people to the promised land but could not enter it, they are leaving the space-born teenagers they programmed to run The Flying Dutchman without them!  

I wanted to like this book more than I did; its milieu is interesting and Barnes has interesting ideas, but Orbital Resonance is just too long (218 pages) and repetitive. The little Stakhanovs play sports all the time, so we get many long detailed scenes in which various low gee sports are explained to us; these are followed by long detailed scenes in which we follow the course of a match. I never watch sports if I can avoid it, and I don't read about sports either, and my eyes glazed over a bit during the sports scenes, and these scenes are legion.  (I should have kept track; I swear a third of the novel takes place in gyms and race tracks.)  I didn't care who won when I had to watch my wife's nieces and nephews play soccer, so I'm not likely to care if high school kids who aren't even real win or lose at sports that aren't even real.

(Jack Vance in his Alastor books and Demon Princes books has speculative sports scenes, but in the former the sport, hussade, has bizarre erotic overtones, and in the latter the sport, hadaul, is a blood sport, and in both series the sports directly serve the plot and are played for high stakes.  The sports are boring and the stakes are low in the sports scenes in Orbital Resonance.)

The scenes of relationship drama can also get repetitive.  There are numerous sexual relationships, teenage friendships, and parent-child relationships depicted in Orbital Resonance.  The kids on the Flying Dutchman, I guess thanks to their "programming," are really into expressing their feelings, and so all these relationships involve lots of hand holding, hugging, and crying.  I should have kept count; I swear somebody cries or gets a hug every five pages--usually both.

I like the kind of tragic love stories we read in Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust, and I liked the teenage relationship drama in Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover, but the soap opera suds in Barnes's novel didn't interest me.  As with the sports stuff, I think this is partly because the stakes are low.  In Maugham and Proust people's amorous relationships result in lives being ruined; scenes of twelve-year-olds having crushes and pawing each other in a dark corridor or arguing with their parents have little emotional impact because we know even if they are crying today over a slight or a rejection they'll be over it tomorrow.

Another weakness of Barnes's novel, at least when comparing him to Vance, Maugham, and Lee as I just have, is the style.  Barnes's style is not bad, but it is bland. The novel inspires very little feeling.  One reason Lee's teenage relationship shenanigans pull at the heart strings while Barnes's just sit there is because Lee has a compelling, affecting style, and Barnes does not.  

I'm scoring Orbital Resonance as marginally positive/acceptable: I certainly don't like it as much as Card, Anderson, or the many other people who did their part providing the novel with over three pages of ecstatic blurbs.  What do they like so much about it?  Maybe after two decades of the New Wave some were happy to see an old-fashioned semi-realistic "life on a space station" story.  Maybe some approved Barnes's criticisms of our individualistic society (we don't hug and cry enough and we aren't doing enough about climate change and AIDS.)  Maybe some liked the stuff about teenagers groping each other and masturbating.  Orbital Resonance has virtues, but for me it is hobbled by a bland style and excessive length; my lack of interest in sports and computer hacking, and my devotion to the cult of the individual, also didn't help.

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.