The Wicked and the Witless by Hugh Cook

"Towards noon, Sarazin passed a gross grey skull, so huge that half a dozen trees sprouted from holes in its dome.  It gave him such a shock that he thereafter suspected the forest of evil intent, and scanned each thicket for ambush by werewolf or worse."

My copy, front and back covers

As a kid I borrowed Wizard War (1986) by Hugh Cook from the library.  It's a pretty long book (447 pages) and I didn't finish it, but a few aspects of the book stuck with me. Particularly, I never forgot the disgusting worms in the novel; in one scene a worm actually crawls into a guy's urethra!  Another worm, the size of an anaconda, bursts from the carcass of a dead dragon.

As an adult I purchased a used copy of Wizard War, and then it sat on shelves and in storage for years.  I finally read it last year.  I loved it, and quickly ordered several more books from Cook's ten volume series, Chronicles of an Age of Darkness, of which Wizard War (British title, The Wizards and the Warriors) is the first.  I read volumes two, three and four, and then took a long break.  This week I read volume five, The Wicked and the Witless (1989).

In general, these novels are long adventure stories, in which people travel around, encountering monsters and wizards and exploring ruins in the wilderness, and in towns getting involved in wars, court intrigues, feuds, love affairs, etc.  The setting is a fantasy world, with magic spells, dragons, demons, and plenty of sword fighting, but thousands of years in the past this was a world of high technology, and ancient science-fiction style artifacts will turn up and play a role in the plot.  This post-apocalyptic setting also allows Cook, and the characters, to use words and concepts like "democracy," "anarchism" and "terrorism" without it feeling jarringly anachronistic.  Wicked and the Witless even includes a minor character who is a gentle parody of Ayn Rand; she engages in a spirited debate on laissez-faire economics with a loyal adherent of King Tor, an ogre.

For my taste, Cook includes in the books just the right amount of sex, violence, suspense, and humor, and strikes a perfect balance between plot and description; the places and characters are always well-defined in my mind, but the story is always moving, something is always happening.  The Chronicles of an Age of Darkness are some of the most entertaining books I have ever read, all of them quite long, but never feeling long; I am always eager to find out what will happen on the next page.

One of the clever things about Chronicles of an Age of Darkness is that most of the books take place during the same time period, and include many of the same characters.  In different books we see the same events from different points of view, or follow a character we recognize from earlier books during a different period of his life.  The Wicked and the Witless stars Watashi, who was a minor character in earlier volumes, a bloodthirsty 25 year old cavalry commander.  Watashi has just turned 22 when we meet him in The Wicked and the Witless, and he is more interested in a poetry career than a military career.  He is still going by the his birth name, Sarazin.

Inside cover and first page

Sarazin's mother, Farfalla, is the chief executive of a powerful country, The Harvest Plains, and Sarazin has spent his youth as a hostage at the court of a neighboring nation, the Rice Empire.  At 22 Serazin returns home, and we follow several years of his madcap military and political career, which takes place during a time of upheaval in the world; as we have seen in the earlier volumes of the series, the nations surrounding The Harvest Plains and Rice Empire are wracked by invasions and revolutions, and then the sorcerous defenses to the south which have kept the monstrous Swarm at bay for centuries collapse, leading to a cataclysm.  Amidst this chaos Serazin strives to achieve greatness, wins the name Watashi, and receives an education from various relatives, tutors, and mentors, and from innumerable horrible experiences.

A theme of Wicked and the Witless is free will and fate.  Serazin has been taught that people are responsible for their own lives, that successful people deserve their success and that failures and the poor equally deserve whatever happens to them.  At the same time, Serazin is obsessed with prophecies and the fates, visiting soothsayers and poring over a prophetic book, and the events of his own life, which is rife with political manipulations and secret conspiracies, strongly suggest that people are at the mercy of powers beyond their control, perhaps beyond comprehension.

I thought The Wicked and the Witless was a lot of fun, but I'm sure it is not for everybody.  It goes on and on, 457 pages of incident after incident, and doesn't really follow a traditional adventure story structure; there isn't a big action climax or a sharp resolution, the novel ending in the middle of a war at the point at which all of Sarazin's teachers have been incapacitated or killed or have abandoned him, and for the first time he has to stand on his own two feet. The novel is also, as the kids say, "politically incorrect;" topics like rape, incest, torture, and child abuse are prevalent and often played for laughs.  Numerous jokes revolve around the fact that Serazin is tricked into having sex with obese and/or old women.  Cook expresses considerable cynicism about lawyers, politicians, and religion.

So, not for everybody, but I found it a solid piece of entertainment.

Clarion stories by Vonda N. McIntyre, Octavia E. Butler, and Glen Cook

Vonda N. McIntyre, Octavia E. Butler, and Glen Cook all achieved some measure of critical and commercial success in the years after their participation in the 1970 Clarion Writers' Workshop.  Each of these writers has one of her or his Clarion Workshop stories in the 1971 anthology Clarion, and this weekend I read them.  Is their later success presaged in these early works?

"Only at Night" by Vonda McIntyre
The New American Library financed prizes for the top three stories at the Clarion workshop, and McIntyre won the second place prize with her story "Spectra."  "Spectra" does not appear in Clarion (it appeared in 1972 in Orbit 11) but McIntyre is represented in Clarion by her tale "Only at Night."  Editor Robin Scott Wilson tells us that "only a woman could have written a story as sensitive as this one," and that he envies women such sensitivity.

"Only at Night" is a first person narrative (in the present tense we see so often in "literary" short stories) of a nurse who has the lonely night shift in a ward occupied by children with incapacitating birth defects.  Being alone with these children is depressing and even dangerous, as at least one is exceptionally strong and can be violent, but the narrator would rather be in the ward at night, because during the day she would have to interact with the callous and selfish parents who have abandoned these children.  It is suggested that those who would abandon their own children are less human and more monstrous than the babies who lack limbs or brains or eyes who populate the ward.  The story seems to be an indictment of the way individuals and society would rather not deal with, not even see, the least fortunate among us.

The story is quite effective; McIntyre uses a direct style, short sentences, and shows rather than tells.  Fiction about this subject matter could easily feel manipulative, or schmaltzy, or hectoring, but McIntyre avoids those pitfalls. This is probably the best story I have yet read in Clarion; "Wheels" by Thurston is its only competition, and "Only at Night" tackles new and different material, while "Wheels" is about typical stuff (car chases, urban violence, race relations) you read about all the time.

I've never read anything by McIntyre before; if this is a representative sample of her work maybe I should seek out more of her short fiction. (Both "Only at Night" and "Spectra" appear in the collection, Fireflood and Other Stories.)

"Crossover" by Octavia Estelle Butler
This is a competent mainstream story about a woman with a sad, dangerous life.  She works in a factory where the other workers resent her, she lives in a neighborhood where drunks and punks harass her, and she has a boyfriend who gets into fights and has just returned from a 90-day stint in jail.  She has considered suicide and at the end of the story, following the example of the drunks she has lived among "most of her life," she decides to get drunk to forget her problems.  Of course, it looks like turning to the booze will only worsen her situation.

"Crossover" isn't a science fiction story, but it has characters, a plot, and memorable images, and doesn't waste your time with bad jokes or confusing "literary" experiments, in contrast to some of the Clarion stories I have been reading.  I've never read anything by Butler before, and this story leaves me with a good impression of her.

"Crossover" was reprinted in 1995 in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

"Song From A Forgotten Hill" by Glen Cook
I've read 12 novels by Glen Cook, two of which (The Black Company and The Silver Spike) I really enjoyed.  The rest were sort of forgettable, though most of them were entertaining.

"Song From a Forgotten Hill" is set in a post-apocalyptic future.  Nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union killed all the white liberals (the Soviet missiles targeted the cities where they lived) and was followed by a civil war in America between the surviving whites ("rednecks") and blacks.  The rednecks won the civil war and enslaved most of the blacks.  The story describes how one of the last free black families, hiding in a cave, is discovered by a party of white hunters and destroyed.

This is an uninteresting anti-racism and anti-war story.  It is competently, but unremarkably, written, the characters feel like archetypes or stereotypes, and nothing about the story is surprising or challenging. I guess I would grade it "barely acceptable."

"Song From a Forgotten Hill" returned to print in 2012 in the collection Winter's Dreams.

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

It is certainly nice to read three stories that are not bad; Clarion is looking better.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the three most famous people with fiction in Clarion contributed some of the best stories. There are still a dozen stories in the anthology I haven't read, most by people I have never even heard of, and I have to consider if I will give them a try.

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.

The Swordbearer by Glen Cook

In the second installment of my scholarly examination of Half Price Books’ list of 100 science fiction and fantasy novels worthy of “geeking out” over, I spent substantial time discussing Glen Cook’s Black Company series.  Over the last few days, between expeditions to shopping malls to buy Christmas gifts and marathon sessions washing dishes soiled during my wife's baking of mountains of cookies, cakes, pastries and fudge, I read a Glen Cook grim and cynical fantasy adventure set in a different world from that of the Black Company tales.

The main character of The Swordbearer is Gathrid, the crippled son of a knight charged with defense of a castle on the eastern border of the easternmost of a bunch of small loosely allied kingdoms. A huge army from the eastern empire of Ventimiglia, led by a bunch of undead wizards, comes to the castle and demands a famous magic sword. Gathrid’s father, like everybody else in the castle, has no idea where the magic sword is, and before long the Ventimiglians have taken the castle and wiped out all resistance in their search for the sword. Gathrid manages to escape, and hides in some caves where, wouldn’t you know it, he meets a dwarf who has been slumbering for centuries and is the custodian of a huge black magic sword.

The Swordbearer bears several resemblances to Michael Moorcock’s Elric stories. Elric wields a sentient black sword, Stormbringer, that drinks the souls of those it kills and invigorates Elric, and the sword Gathrid carries is quite similar. It cures Gathrid’s disabilities and gives him tremendous power, but also manipulates him in the interest of a cruel goddess. One of the interesting things in the book is how Gathrid gains the memories, even the personalities, of people he kills with the black sword; this is reminiscent of the alzabo episodes in Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. Another interesting facet of the novel is the fact that the magic sword is famous, the subject of many old histories and tales, and Gathrid, and others familiar with the old tales, often wonder if he will suffer the same dreadful fate as earlier Swordbearers, or if he can somehow come up with a happy ending to his relationship with the sword.  (A major theme of the book is the question of to what extent mortals are at the mercy of the gods and fate, and how far can people decide their own destinies.)

Wielding the sword, Gathrid participates in the war between the invading easterners and the western kingdoms. Thanks to the sword, he can fight whole platoons single-handed. Also thanks to the sword, he accidentally kills his own sister (not unlike how Elric accidentally killed his cousin/girlfriend with Stormbringer). Gathrid then leaves the war behind, sneaking east towards the capital of Ventimiglia, hoping to find the ruins where the Ventimiglians dug up the undead wizards and the magical artifacts they are using to conquer the west. He rescues a girl from being sacrificed to a demon, and (this is one of the book’s most inspired elements) Gathrid takes along not only the girl, but the head of the demon, which is still alive and keeps up an abusive and jocular commentary for the rest of the adventure.

Cook’s writing is often “revisionist;” the good guys are often not all that good and the bad guys not all that bad, war is not heroic, politicians are all corrupt, the plight of poor peasants and other civilians is remarked upon, etc. Maybe critics would say this is a response to Vietnam and Watergate. So, when Gathrid gets to the heart of Ventimiglia he finds that the place isn’t so steeped in evil as he expected, and when he meets the leader of Ventimiglia he makes an alliance with him, and joins him in prosecuting a civil war against the now renegade army that is back west despoiling Gathrid’s homeland.  People, Gathrid included, often switch sides in this war, which is not about ideology or patriotism or economics or social forces, but about the ambition and insanity of the individuals at the top, kings, generals, wizards and deities.   

The Swordbearer is an enjoyable “dark” or “grim” fantasy adventure, but there isn’t much in it to mark it as special. I was entertained, so marginal thumbs up, but I'm not going to remember much of the plot, characters or setting.  There are many minor characters with odd names who appear briefly and then get killed and many vaguely described battles and sieges, but Cook doesn't put too much effort into creating personalities for the people or cultures for the cities and nations fighting these insane wars.  Cook isn't trying to paint sharp vivid pictures full of detail here, but rather a powerful mood or tone, and he uses bold and broad strokes and grinding repetition - battle after battle, tragedy after tragedy - to paint a dark, depressing, black canvas of doom.

I read the 1990 paperback from Tor of this 1982 novel, with a cover painting by Keith Berdak. I always think Berdak’s work looks amateurish, and wonder why publishers have used him on Cook’s books.

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 26-50

Here we have Part 2 of my look at Half Price Book's list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, covering selections 26 to 50.  This idiosyncratic list was selected by 3,000 bibliomaniacs, or so says the Half Price Books website.

26) Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
I read the first volume of this series when it was new, and enjoyed it, but didn't pick up the second volume when it came out.  Perhaps for the best.

27) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I'm not really into alternate history or any of that, and I think stuff like the I Ching is ridiculous.  Still, if I was living in an alternate universe in which I had to read a Dick novel, it would probably be this one, as it is so highly regarded.  Also, the title is good poetry.

28) Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
Is this the detective one in which the shock ending is that a woman had sex with a robot?  I read this as a kid, and was disappointed that there wasn't something more to it.

29) Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
What?

30) I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein
I'm a little surprised to see this on the list instead of Starship Troopers, which is so famous and controversial and includes the awesome and influential opening chapter in which the heavily armored human marine fights aliens with a hand flamer.

I read I Will Fear No Evil as a kid, and, looking back, I am surprised I finished it.  Presumably I was charmed by the idea of a friend in my head to keep me company, and I guess there must have been some sex in the book.  I do want to reread this one; I think Heinlein has a good writing style, and there is no way it could be as bad as Number of the Beast.

31) Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind 
This is the Objectivist fantasy epic, right?  I'm sympathetic to Ayn Rand's individualistic philosophy, but I don't want to spend time reading a long book about it.  I haven't read any Ayn Rand's own novels, and I'm not going to read any of this guy's novels.  Those two page articles in Reason magazine about Rand are enough for me to get the gist of her thought and move on.

32) A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs    
This is one of my favorite books.  I love everything about it; Burroughs comes up with a very exciting, even beautiful, version of Mars, and his writing really brings it to life.  The fact that the book is so old, and written in an old-fashioned style, and espouses old-fashioned values (it is basically an apologia for 19th-century imperialism, isn't it?) makes it even more alien and perhaps paradoxically even more believable.  At the same time it is an over the top wish fulfillment fantasy: John Carter is immortal, the best swordsman in the solar system, and also scrupulously honest and decent.  He doesn't use his superior fighting ability to rob people and sleep around like Conan; he is faithful to his wife and tries to teach the people of Mars how to behave.  Somehow Burroughs makes it work and people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Wolfe have been singing Burroughs' praises ever since.

33) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I read the four Hitchhiker books as a kid, and I enjoyed them, but I remember little now.  I might read these again.

34) Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffery
I read a bunch of these Pern books as a kid; I liked the idea of having a little friend dragon that would keep me company all the time.  Also, the idea of the Thread attacking the planet every century or whatever is exciting.  As an adult I tried to read Dragonflight, which I think is the first of these Pern books, and thought it was horrible and wrote a scathing review on Amazon. 

35) The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
I loved the Elfstones of Shannara as a kid; it was like 300 pages of guys running around, fighting with swords and bows and magic fire.  I imagined that the Elfstones were like my light blue plastic D&D dice.  Then I read The Sword of Shannara, and I liked it, but I found the end disappointing, anti-climactic.  It was trying to teach you a lesson about telling the truth or something, which I found condescending.  I can still remember sitting in the car, riding home from Nana's in my Dad's car, reading by the dashboard light, finishing the book and thinking, "Is this really how it ends?  This is like a book for kids."  I got the Wishsong of Shannara as a gift, and started it, but the magical artifact wasn't as cool as the Ellfstones, I was older, and the story seemed repetitive, so I abandoned it.

I've been thinking of reading Elfstones again, but I'm afraid the same thing might happen as happened when I tried to read Dragonflight.

36) The Once and Future King by T. H. White
My mother gave me a paperback copy of this and it sat on my bookshelf for twenty odd years.  I don't know where it is now; maybe my brother has it.

37) Brave New World by Aldous Hiuxley
This is pretty good.

38) Foundation by Isaac Asimov  
I tried to read this as an adult; I read the first two or three stories, and then abandoned it.  Asimov's writing style was feeble.  Even worse was the plot: besides being outlandish (a guy can predict exactly what will happen hundreds of years in the future?) it is terrible drama.  (A guy teleporting to Mars and sword fighting everybody is outlandish but good drama.)  The stories consist of a guy sitting in a room, watching a movie of a dead guy telling him what to do; then he does it, all goes perfectly, the end.  There is no humanity, no feeling, no tension, it's as exciting as watching a guy order a burger at McDonalds' drive thru; wow, look, he ordered a quarter pounder and... he receives a quarter pounder! 

What is the ethic, the ideology of these stories?  That an elite of smart guys should manipulate the rest of us behind the scenes?  Sickening. Who does this appeal to?  Smart guys who want to manipulate other people?  I've heard that Paul Krugman and Newt Gingrich love Asimov's Foundation books, that they were inspired by the idea of using math to bend history and society in the direction they want it to go.  Horrible.

I remember, as a kid, reading an essay by Isaac Asimov.  I'd like to read it again, but of course I can't recall the title or where I saw it.  It must have been in an SF anthology or something.  Asimov was decrying stories in which a barbarian defeats a wizard.  Presumably he was referring to Conan.  I had never read such stories, they not being at the local library, and I remember thinking it odd that Asimov, who had like a dozen books at the local library, was attacking writers whose work I had never seen as if they were a ubiquitous plague.  Asimov thought it bad that the smart guy in the story was the villain, and the strong guy the hero, that this would teach people the wrong values or something.

Obviously, in the Foundation stories we see Asimov doing the opposite, giving us a story in which a smart guy tricks the strong guy.  In one of the stories I read in the first volume of the Foundation series the heroes win by selling to the villains a space battleship that they have sabotaged.  The villains are so stupid they don't realize the ship has been sabotaged and try to use it to conquer some planet or other, and of course are humiliated when their weapons don't work.  Maybe this is the wish fulfillment fantasy of a smart but weak kid, but to me, this is not drama.

Maybe it was not obvious to Asimov, but it seems obvious to me why stories of strong guys fighting hand to hand with enemies and monsters is appealing -- it is an allegory for our lives, which are a long lonely struggle which we are doomed to lose.  And it is obvious why people like the story of the ordinary man who defeats the smart man who has specialized knowledge.  In our everyday lives we are all at the mercy of people who are smarter than we are, or have knowledge we lack: lawyers, politicians, doctors, bankers, car mechanics, etc.  These people could use their specialized knowledge to take advantage of us, and sometimes they do.  And of course many people envy the wealth that clever people in our modern society can accumulate.  So of course people like the idea of the barbarian overcoming the crafty wizard.  Who would identify with a guy who sells another guy defective merchandise, a guy who wins by lying, by trickery? A lot of people, apparently, because we see Foundation on these lists all the time, but I don't get it.  

39) Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
This is the guy who hates religion, right?  I'm an atheist already, so what would be the point of me reading this book?  Religion in the West has been in decline for centuries; is it fun to kick a man when he is already down? 

My brother read some of these His Dark Materials books, and said the early ones were good, but they got worse as more and more anti-religious stuff took over the page count.

40) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
This is the basis of the film Blade Runner, I believe.  I thought that movie was OK, but apparently it is common for people to praise it extravagantly.  Once I was sitting with two college professors, and one of them told the other that Blade Runner was the movie that best portrayed "the urban space," or some jargon like that.  I think they were talking about the movie Children of Men, which he had just seen and thought was Blade Runner's only competition for top spot in depicting what city life was all about.  I haven't seen Children of Men, and I haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I don't need to use the I Ching to tell me I am probably not going to do either.

41) Anathem by Neal Stephenson
This guy has a good reputation, but somehow his books always look like a slog, like a project, and self-consciously educational. Forbidding.

42) The Black Company by Glen Cook
I have read all ten of the Black Company books, and enjoyed and recommend the first four.  The first one, or maybe the "spin off," The Silver Spike, are the best.  As the series ground on it became slower paced and eventually tedious, but out of curiosity I read them all.

The Black Company are a bunch of ruthless jerk offs, a mercenary unit in a world dominated by warring evil wizards. In the first episode of the book the Black Company betrays and murders the people who have hired them because they realize they are on the losing side of a war. The cool thing about the first book is that Cook conceives of ten bizarre evil wizards, each one with a cool name, like The Hanged Man or Nightcrawler or The Howler, and each one has a weird deformity, strange mannerisms, and special powers.  I would have loved reading about these wizards and their insane adventures trying to conquer the world and each other.  Unfortunately, these wizards all get killed pretty quickly.

The books in the Black Company series are the record of the Company's career, written by the unit's annalist.  Early in the first book the Black Company is hired by a female wizard known as The Lady, the most ruthless, evil and powerful wizard in the world.  In a bizarre piece of foreshadowing, the annalist entertains the Black Company's troops by writing and reciting pornographic stories about his imaginary love affair with The Lady!  (This pornography is not reproduced in the book.  You can decide on your own if this makes the books more attractive or less attractive.)  Then, to my dismay, the Lady is overthrown and joins the Black Company and turns out not to be a bad person after all and the Black Company starts being the good guys.  With the Black Company now the good guys, the series loses much of what made it distinctive. 

The Silver Spike is a sort of noirish story of criminals who mess with an undead wizard or something like that; there are lots of plot twists and double crosses and so forth.  I liked it.

43 & 44) The Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn and The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
I saw these, but I didn't touch them.

45) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll      
I haven't read this.  My wife read it some years ago.  I may read it someday. 

46) Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and John Barnes
It took three guys to write this?

I read this when it was new, a million years ago.  As I remember, some guys try to explore or colonize a planet, and some monster attacks them.  This novel is an homage to "Beowulf;" the monster is called "a grendel."  I'm not exactly a fan of the whole "I'm going to rewrite Romeo and Juliet and put it in a New York slum," or "I'm going to write Moby Dick, but in outer space," or "I'm going to write a feminist version of the Trojan War," school of literature.  I guess everybody thinks they can do this because James Joyce did it.

I did like when Gilligan and the Professor put on their own production of Hamlet, though.

I guess I liked Legacy of Heorot, but was disappointed that there weren't more monsters or something else going on with the plot.  Or maybe Niven's, Pournelle's and/or Barnes's writing style wasn't doing it for me.  Still, I'd consider reading this again.

Niven and Pournelle aren't exactly master wordsmiths, but they seem like smart guys and Niven definitely has good ideas when it comes to setting.  I liked the setting of the two Integral Trees books, and Ringworld was alright, and Mote in God's Eye was pretty good.  I'm a little surprised Legacy of Heorot is here and not Mote.  I'd bet a million dollars Mote is more famous and sold more copies.

My rule of thumb, based on my career working at book stores and in academia, is that when more than one author is listed, the last person listed probably actually wrote the book.  So I'm guessing John Barnes did most of the work on Legacy of Heorot.  I have two John Barnes books on my shelf, but I haven't read them yet.  I bought them because Orson Scott Card and Poul Anderson both compare Barnes to Heinlein.  I should make an effort to read them.

47) Dark is the Sun by Phillip Jose Farmer
I am surprised this is on here instead of To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  I have mixed feelings about Farmer, who tries to do adventure stories like, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but tries to make them more "modern" or sexy.  I've read several of Farmer's books, with To Your Scattered Bodies Go being good, Maker of Universes bad, and Dayworld and Dare average.  I might read Dark is the Sun if I stumble on it for a few dollars or at a library.  The cover looks like that of a solid adventure story, and my man Tarbandu at PorPor Books Blog praises it.


48) Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber
I've considered reading Weber, but never actually done it.  I am interested in military history (I have big piles of books about WWII tanks and planes and ships, books about Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, a stack of those Osprey books about medieval knights and WWII infantry tactics, etc.) and like the idea of space navies fighting vast wars, but the few times I've tried to read "military SF" I've been disappointed.  Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Haldeman's Forever War, and the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian are good fiction about guys participating in wars because Heinlein, Haldeman and O'Brian are good writers, and their books are about more than just fighting, they are about politics, society, human relationships, etc.  I guess I'm worried that Weber's books will just be page after page of people shooting it out, and I have no idea if Weber is a good writer.  Perhaps I am doing him a disservice.

49) Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
This is, in my opinion, Silverberg's best book, and the book of his I'd expect to see on a list like this, a book that is quite like a modern mainstream literary novel, about a smart guy living in a big city, trying to face life and its challenges and changes.  I think this is the kind of book a person who reads Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but looks down at science fiction, could enjoy.

50) Watch on the Rhine by John Ringo and Tom Kratman
Most of what I say about David Weber above could probably go for John Ringo.  This book, according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, seems kind of crazy, like it was deliberately written to piss people off.  Aliens attack the Earth, so the Earth raises the Waffen SS from the dead to fight them?  Cripes!   

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Tomorrow the saga of Half Price Books' list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books will continue.