Quark/3 (Part 1): Penney, Delany, Hacker, Simpson, Lafferty, Eklund, La Vigne & Russ

I'm always impressed when tarbandu or Joachim Boaz reads an entire anthology or collection and opines about each story.  They have a willpower and open-mindedness I lack.  My standard operating procedure with anthologies is to read the pieces by authors I know I like and then toss them aside.  I have a short attention span, and I am very picky, and scrupulously avoid authors and stories I have reason to expect will be boring or irritating. These "reasons" range from having read the author before, to vague impressions and subconscious feelings that I call "my spider sense" and other people would probably call "irrational prejudice" or "unconstitutional profiling."

I had a good experience reading the entire contents of Novelets of Science Fiction, an anthology of 1950s SF stories edited by Ivan Howard and printed in the 1960s, and so I have decided to read another anthology cover to cover.  To really up the degree of difficulty, as people who watch the Olympics say, I am throwing caution to the winds and have selected Quark/3 to be the subject of this experiment.  Quark/3 is the third in a series of anthologies (styled an "original review" and a "quarterly of speculative fiction") of new stories and art edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker in the early 1970s.  Quark/3 was printed in May of 1971, mere months before my own birth.  I purchased it recently at a used bookstore in Mankato, Minnesota which does not accept credit cards; luckily I was able to get cash across the street at Walgreens.

Quark/3 definitely has my spider sense tingling; is this volume going to be 230 agonizing pages of semi-intelligible denunciations of our sexist, racist, imperialist, consumerist and polluting (pollutist?) bourgeois society?  I bought this book for the Lafferty story, and my instincts are telling me to read that story and then forget all about Quark/3, but on TV they are always telling you to "get outside your comfort zone," and if you can't find wisdom in TV cliches, where can you find it?  So, off we go.

Cover Painting by Roger Penney

I actually like the wraparound cover by Roger Penney, which I guess you could call "primitivist surrealism" or maybe "naive surrealism."  I'm throwing "primitive" and "naive" in there because the painting lacks the polish and technique you see in, say, Salvador Dali.  (It's fun to play amateur art historian.)  A few minutes on Google suggests Penney's oeuvre consists of paintings of buildings that look like women and this piece is no exception.  

Forward by Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker

I don't know much about Wittgenstein.  I like the Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Spinoza, that kind of thing; Wittgenstein is beyond me.  In grad school I knew a woman who was an expert on Wittgenstein; I am terrible at remembering names, and so, in my mind, and when I tell people stories about her, I just call her "Wittgenstein."  Wittgenstein and I would have dumb arguments about Christopher Hitchens, and when she was moving out of the dorms she gave me pretentious hardcover copies of Moby Dick, Don Quixote, and a collection of P. G. Wodehouse stories.  I love Melville, Cervantes, and Wodehouse, but I already had (cheap) copies of these books and tried to refuse them, but she insisted.  Due to a categorically imperative need for cash, I sold them to the Strand.

Anyway, Delany and Hacker start their forward with an epigraph from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which argues that fictional worlds inevitably have something in common with the real world.  Delany and Hacker, apparently participating in a dialogue with those whom they term "commercial science fiction writers" (Delany and Hacker represent "experimental speculative fiction writers") go on to insist that "adventure stories" are useless because they have no chance of inspiring the reader to political action.  In a neat piece of ju jitsu, Delany and Hacker claim that SF writers who say they are not experimenting because they want to entertain the audience are in fact cheating their audience, because they are limiting themselves; if they truly were dedicated to entertaining the audience, they would employ "the full range of aesthetic discipline."  (I said "neat," not "convincing.")  As examples, they point out Uncle Tom's Cabin and Babbit as the two most revolutionary books produced by American authors; neither of them, we are told, is an adventure; they are "social chronicles."  Delany and Hacker further argue that SF writers must be encouraged to experiment as much as possible.

They don't quite come out and say it, but I get the impression that our editors aspire to publish, in Quark/3, stories which are not "popular entertainment" but instead are "politically dangerous fiction" and "view meaningfully the social, psychological, and technological crises present."  I'll keep this in mind as I read the stories, and if you see me next week throwing a brick through the window of a Starbucks, well, you'll know why. 

"Continuous Landscape" by Donald Simpson

Six pages of the paperback are occupied by a drawings of a craggy, stalagmite-like landscape by Donald Simpson.  These are pleasant.  I don't know how they fit into Delany and Hacker's theory that art should make you uneasy and drive you to social action; maybe there are no living things in the landscape because we have despoiled the environment?

"Encased in Ancient Rind" by R. A. Lafferty

Here's the story that I bought this book for.  It has been anthologized and collected in various places, but its first appearance was in Quark/3 and this is the first book I've encountered which includes it.

In its first paragraph we learn the story is about apocalyptic air pollution.  In the second and third paragraphs Lafferty promises us the story is not as banal as we expect:

                          "Aw dog dirt, not another air-pollution piece," you say.

                          Oh come off of it. You know us better than that.

Air pollution kills many people and exterminates many species, but the strongest survive.  The increased carbon in the atmosphere then causes an impenetrable cloud to form around the Earth, what Lafferty calls a "canopy."  In this new environment some species, including the minority of humans who have survived, thrive, growing larger and longer-lived.  Lafferty suggests jocularly that cutting off the Earth from radiation recreates conditions of the past, with lizards growing into simulacra of dinosaurs, horses growing into creatures like the Baluchitherium, and humans changing to resemble Neanderthals.  People, now able to live for centuries, begin to think the new dark world under the canopy is more "efficient" than the 20th century world of blue skies, and eventually forget, willfully, that there was a time when the canopy wasn't there.

Lafferty seems to be saying that whatever the conditions, life will adapt, and that every situation has good and bad points, that every change is good for some and bad for others.  Also, that our view or the world, our attitude to conditions, is largely up to our choice, even if it is beyond our power to control or predict what is going on. 

"Encased in Ancient Rind" is entertaining, throwing a surprising concept and various interesting images at you.  It certainly seems that Lafferty has thought "meaningfully" about various social and technological crises, though I don't think this story is "politically dangerous" or will spur anyone to social action.

"Home Again, Home Again" by Gordon Eklund

I don't think I've ever read anything by Gordon Eklund, though I have a book of his on the shelf.  This story is, unfortunately, the kind of thing I expected to find in Quark/3, a ham-handed story about how war changes a person and makes it hard for him to return to civilian society. 

A nameless soldier, simply called "The Vet," returns from a war in outer space against aliens known as "Bugs" (a reference to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, one presumes.)  The Vet lost his face in battle, and has an artificial face that is not at all like his original face, and cannot express emotion.  He returns to his home town after ttwenty years away, where all the houses look the same and everybody is out of work because of machines.  Nobody wants to talk about the war with him (they'd rather talk about their boring everyday concerns) and The Vet goes bonkers and goes on a rampage.  He stabs his sister with a fork, murders his girlfriend (who had an affair with a musician who read Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann while the Vet was out in space immolating scores of the alien Bugs) sets fire to the local gas station, and kills a dozen other people.  Then the "investigators" with their robot dogs catch up with The Vet, and it is revealed that this was a test to see if a soldier could readapt to civilian life-- all the people The Vet murdered were just androids and the town is just a set.  Having failed the test, The Vet is taken to an asylum.

Eklund lards the story with ambiguity.  The Vet claims to have known the androids were not real people, and says he could have passed the test if he wanted.  It also seems that The Vet didn't just return from the war, that the war ended a century ago and The Vet has been in an asylum all this time.  Everything in the story is open to question, because The Vet is insane and everything the investigators and androids say could be a lie; it seems possible the Bug war is a delusion.    

This story feels tired, both the war-made-this-guy-nutso premise, and the twist at the end.  Maybe I'm being unfair, maybe Eklund was a pioneer of the Vietnam-vet-goes-crazy genre, or maybe this story is supposed to be a subversion of that genre, but nothing in the story felt fresh or interesting, and there's nothing about Eklund's writing style that elevates the story into something engaging or entertaining.

Lame.   

"Dog in a Fisherman's Net" by Samuel R. Delany

I've read a few things by Delany, most recently Empire Star, and my feelings are mixed.  The cognoscenti are much more enthusiastic about him than I am,; there's a lot of talk about hi Nova (which I read and can barely remember a thing about) being one of the best SF novels of all time, for example.

This story takes place in the 1960s, on a Greek island inhabited by fishermen and, up in the hills, pagan goatherds.  In a freak accident, a man is killed while he is repairing a fishing net--a dog gets mixed up in the net, tangling the net around the man and his knife, and when people try to kill the dog all the thrashing around drives the knife through his throat.  The dead man's brother has sad flashbacks that illuminate the lives of poverty and ignorance lived by people on the island.  He decides to leave the island.

This is a reasonably good mainstream literary story; there are interesting characters, things happen which engage your emotions, Delany has a good style.  The SF content, such as it is, is related to the conflict between the Greek Orthodox fishermen and the goatherds, who have some kind of matriarchal society up in the hills where they worship a pagan goddess with a secret name (perhaps she is a Minoan Snake Goddess) and women have multiple husbands.  The superstitious Christians are afraid to swim in a bay where a pagan statue of the goatherd's deity is submerged, and the goatherds have a dance Christians are forbidden to see.  The fisherman whose brother died in the weird accident decides to move to the mainland after swimming in this bay and seeing the black statue of the goddess, fishermen's nets snagged about it.

Is this story "politically dangerous?"  Maybe "Dog in a Fisherman's Net" is about outsiders, the "other," and how such people try to escape their subordinate or inferior condition. The Christians look down on (but also fear) the pagans, women in the fishing village are under the thumb of men, a girl is born with light hair and her parents try to hide this from the dark-haired populace, a teacher humiliates an ignorant student and the student refuses to return to school, British and French archaeologists cart Greek treasures off to Paris, etc.

A good story; paradoxically, it appears to be one of the more conventional stories in the book.

Twelve Drawings by Robert La Vigne  

Twelve pages of the book are taken up by silly doodles by Robert La Vigne.  In this book there is a space between the "La" and the "Vigne," but a few minutes on Google suggests this is some kind of error, and the artist's name is usually written "LaVigne."

"The Zanzibar Cat" by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ is one of those authors I've avoided despite the praise she receives.  I've spent enough time with feminist college professors in real life; I'm not going out of my way to read fiction by feminist college professors.  So this is my first direct experience of Russ's work.  

"The Zanzibar Cat" is a solipsistic and recursive feminist fairy tale.  I guess it is supposed to be funny, and to remind you that stories aren't real, in the way the famous "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" painting by Magritte is supposed to remind you that a painting is just a reproduction, not the thing it represents.  Maybe "The Zanzibar Cat" is also supposed to be a celebration of women writers and their ability to write stories that celebrate women writers?  The story is also an homage to British writer Hope Mirrlees, whom I've never read.  (I only know this because of the "The Zanzibar Cat"'s French subtitle.)  Maybe the style is an imitation of Mirrlees's?

Anyway, the story goes like this: the land of Appletap-on-Flat is haunted by a ghost.  An army marches from Appletap-on-Flat's largest city, Appletap-cum-Cumber, over the Merry Marches and the Meaning Mountains to Fairyland, to confront the ghost.  A young woman accompanies the army as a camp follower.  When they meet the ghost the young woman defeats him by willing him out of existence; the young woman, we learn in the last line, is Joanna Russ, author of the story.

As a kid, I never liked the Bugs Bunny cartoons in which the characters knew they were in a cartoon and would complain directly to the animator (I guess I'm thinking of "Duck Amuck" and "Rabbit Rampage") or that Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit," that pokes fun at the whole idea of making a cartoon about cat versus mouse violence.  And I don't like "The Zanzibar Cat," either.  When I invest time in reading a story I expect the author to make an effort to entertain me or tell me something interesting, not jab me in the ribs and say, "This isn't real, dummy, why are you wasting your time reading this?"  Besides that, the story felt long, with long sentences and long paragraphs full of lists and extraneous detail.

"The Zanzibar Cat" meets Delany and Hacker's dicta that a story should give discomfort and precipitate action; the action I am considering is refusing to read any more Russ stories.

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So, there we have the first 74 pages of Quark/3.  The Lafferty and the Delany pieces are worthwhile stories, while the Eklund is a poor story.  The Russ isn't even a story, but a postmodern trick.  Let's hope the Lafferty and Delany stories are representative of the remaining components of the anthology.

Two more stories from Fundamental Disch (plus the essay "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory")

The back cover of Fundamental Disch suggests that Disch writes like Jerzy Kosinksi, or Jules Feiffer, or John Collier; in Samuel Delany's intro he tells a story in which a book Disch wrote under a pen name was mistakenly attributed to Gore Vidal.  I’m in no position to assess these judgments, but I’m still (sort of) young, and maybe one day I will become familiar with those writers.

The two stories I reread today are conventional mainstream literary fiction, with no SF elements; perhaps it was these stories that inspired critics to make the comparisons to nongenre, mainstream writers we see on the book’s back cover.

"Slaves" (1967) 

I read this years ago, the story of the relationships among three young people living together in a New York apartment on the Upper West Side. There’s Paul, grad student in English, his girlfriend Danielle, who studies ballet by day and dances at a discotheque at night, and “the Baron,” Paul’s childhood friend and college dropout, down on his luck since his father committed suicide. The Baron, unemployed, cooks and cleans and runs errands for the household.

Paul’s father is wealthy, and so Paul pays all the bills, including for Danielle’s abortion and contact lenses. (The money Danielle makes dancing is all spent on an analyst.) Paul is not necessarily faithful to Danielle, and Danielle and the Baron are attracted to each other. Danielle and the Baron figure out how to swindle 50 dollars out of Paul, and Danielle tells the Baron, just before kissing him, that they have turned the tables on Paul, that now he is their slave. In a final scene the three roommates blow up over a hundred balloons they have shoplifted and release them from their balcony.

Of course I am susceptible to these New York stories. At one point Danielle looks out the window of their apartment and watches a tugboat sail upriver, past the cliffs and trees of New Jersey. When she said “I think that’s lovely,” I sadly nodded. And Disch is a good writer, filling the story with interesting images and phrases, so I liked it.

But what is the point of the story? Who are the slaves? Is everybody a slave? All the characters are morally compromised (except maybe the pet bird), and they are all manipulated, robbed, or dominated by the other characters (especially the caged pet bird.) What do the balloons represent? What does New Jersey represent? (Danielle finds New Jersey ”vaguely frightening,” which could just be a joke about New Yorkers’ attitude about my home state, but many of the balloons head over the river to New Jersey.) It is hard not to suspect that the balloons represent people and/or their souls, and that the winds that push them hither and yon, some to the Manhattan streets, others to New Jersey, symbolize the fates directing them to heaven or hell, or maybe just happiness or unhappiness, if you don’t believe in souls (whether or not people have souls is a topic of the Baron’s conversation.)

A good story.


"Getting into Death" (1976)

This is another story I am rereading after quite a few years. “Getting into Death” was the title story of a collection of Disch stories published four years before Fundamental Disch.

The protagonist of “Getting into Death” is Cassandra Millar, a terminally ill novelist.  The entire story takes place in her Manhattan hospital room.  She is a sort of hedonistic, counter-cultural figure; she took LSD with Timothy Leary, smokes "grass," finds it impossible to take religion seriously.  Her medical issue is with her heart, and she is totally lucid, and spends her time in the hospital reminiscing about her life and career, reading Proust, getting high, masturbating (at least I think that is what that paragraph at the bottom of page 357 is about), drafting new stories and novels, and chatting with visitors.

Cassandra is something of a misanthrope; she doesn't like the daughter-in-law who brings LSD and marijuana to her in the hospital, is bitter about her father, and was relieved when her biological daughter moved to New Jersey to live with Cassandra's ex-husband after their divorce.  When she considers her will she expresses a wish to leave her money (she is a millionaire) to the government instead of her family!  Egads!  Often she pretends to be asleep in order to get rid of her visitors.

Cassandra also has contempt for the reading public.  Under one name she writes spectacularly successful gothic romances (that is where she got her millions) which she herself considers silly, and under another she writes didactic detective novels which were never profitable and tend to not stay in print very long.  It is these mysteries, the product of research and her legitimate interests and feelings, which she considers "her" books.

By the end of the story Cassandra has had a sort of revelation.  Thanks largely to her conversations with a rabbi who started his career as a psychoanalyst and has been telling her lies to make her feel better, Cassandra realizes that what people want is to be lied to, to be deceived.  She begins enthusiastically expressing insincere affection for her father, her numerous ex-husbands, and everybody else.  The story ends right before Cassandra is about to try her loving lies on her most perceptive relative, her daughter.

This is a well-written story about fiction and its value.  People do not want too much contact with the horrible reality that is life, Disch is apparently saying; people crave fiction, which is essentially lies.  As usual, Disch's fine style and his economical way of developing the characters and their interactions makes the story a good read.

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"Getting into Death" is about fiction and what it is for, and so is an essay written by Disch in 1975 that is included in an appendix to Fundamental Disch, "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory."  In my peregrinations around the web over the years I have gotten the vague impression that many SF fans have it in for Disch.  Disch's iconoclastic criticism, I suspect, is the source of some of this ill-feeling, and I think "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory" is a good example of the kind of criticism that might generate animus among genre readers. 

In "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory" Disch suggests that people read genre fiction because of its sameness, that when we buy a western or mystery or SF book we know what to expect and we buy it to fill a particular need.  He compares a predilection for genre fiction to sexual perversion -- a love of genre fiction is a sign of arrested development!  A successful adult will not read genre fiction, because his life satisfies him.

Disch provides examples of what sort of people buy what sort of genre fiction.  Science fiction readers, he says, are smart youngsters and "a particular kind of retarded adult" who worship intelligence and science.  Ouch!

As for mainstream fiction, Disch theorizes that it trains people in how to act, forms their taste and speech patterns.  How do we learn how to attract members of the opposite sex, how to defer to bosses without losing our self respect, and how to manage subordinates without becoming ogres?  Through observing lovers and workers in fiction.

I actually think this is a strong and interesting theory, but you can see why it might piss off SF fans.

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So, Thomas M. Disch, and the collection Fundamental Disch, get the MPorcius Seal of Approval.  I'm glad I bought mine long ago; I'm too cheap to pay most of the prices I'm seeing online today!      

Three SF stories by Thomas M. Disch

As Joachim Boaz reminded us via twitter, Thomas M. Disch’s birthday was this month. I recently enjoyed some of Disch’s art criticism, and his fine novel, On Wings of Song, so I decided to read (and reread) some stories from the 1980 Bantam collection Fundamental Disch. I’m not crazy about the cover (a pun on “mental,” I guess) but a cover with a rocket ship or a sexy girl or a slavering monster wouldn’t really make sense, and maybe by 1980 the days of abstract Richard Powers covers were coming to a close.  Maybe a picture of the New York City skyline would have made sense.

The three stories I read today all fit into the conventional definition of “science fiction;” they all include telepathy, and two of them are about the future.

“102 H-Bombs” (1965)

This is the title story from an earlier Disch collection, and is, in part, a sort of satire of the United States military and the Cold War as well as an anti-war story. (Disch served briefly in the U S Army in the late 1950s; things didn’t work out.) It also seems like a faint reference to Isaac Asimov’s famous idea of “psycho-history.”

For decades the world has been gripped in a dreadful low intensity war following a political crisis around the year 2000, when much of New York City was bombed into rubble. Fortunately the Empire State Building was one of the few surviving buildings; now NYC (population three million) is mostly covered in federally-owned hydroponic agricultural facilities, leaving the ESB the last privately-owned building in town.

Charlie is the smartest member of a 28-boy-strong company of ten-year-old orphans, training in the MidWest under Drillmaster Grist. Charlie and Grist get an opportunity to go to New York, where Charlie and 101 other ten-year-old geniuses have been gathered by the firm that owns the ESB. Charlie becomes part of a complicated time-travelling conspiracy: robot agents of the inhabitants of the peaceful world of 3652 AD have come back in time to fix all the screwups that occurred in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ESB is their home base.

This is a good story. It includes many of the themes we see in Disch’s work; the MidWesterner who leaves his stifling home to find freedom and beauty in New York, the genius being used by the government to help the war effort, the way inexplicable outside forces manipulate our lives. This one has an essentially happy ending, though.

“Assassin and Son” (1964)

This is a quite good story, a pivotal day in the life of a young man living on an alien planet. Disch economically develops an intricate and vivid milieu, a planet inhabited by monarchical blob people which is used by the Earth as a sort of penal colony. The blobs have a powerful taboo against murder, but are approximately as corrupt as humans, and so the humans on the blob planet are employed as assassins in the blobs’ many personal and political disputes. In this short tale Disch manages to get across his common themes about how religion is a scam and how our lives are out of our control, while also delivering good characters and a solid plot about family relationships and cross-cultural and cross-class relationships. I read this years ago, and reread it yesterday; I really like it.

“The Roaches” (1965)

This story is good, another I have read before. I think this is one of Disch’s more famous stories, widely anthologized in horror collections.

A young woman from the MidWest moves to Manhattan where things don’t go so well for her. She wages a ceaseless war against the roaches in her apartment, until finally realizing she can telepathically communicate with the insects; the roaches fall in love with her and are eager to follow her commands. She becomes their queen and (with no family, no boyfriend, no friends even) she returns their love! The final image the story leaves you with is of all the roaches in the city converging on a single apartment building to be with their beloved ruler.

I probably like the “life in NYC” aspects of the story more than the SF/horror elements. I’ve lived in four different Manhattan apartments and one apartment in Queens, and I have fought my own wars with roaches.

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So, a very good story and two good stories.  Tomorrow I will read more stories from Fundamental Disch. 

Out of this World Science Fiction Classics from Bantam, 1983

In the back of my 1983 copy of Samuel Delany’s Empire Star is this advertisement for Bantam’s “great series of science fiction classics,” full of fancy, terror and adventure.  What is the story with these ads?  Why do some paperbacks have them, and others do not?  Was Delany annoyed that his book contained ads like this?  How were the books chosen for the ad... are these books Bantam is proud of, or are these books they printed too many of and are scrambling to unload?  If Ursula K. LeGuin saw this page back in 1983 would she say, "Awesome, my buddies at Bantam are really working hard promoting my work!"  or would it be more along the lines of, "Cripes, Bantam must really be having trouble selling all those copies of my Earthsea books to the stores."  How many people actually used this "handy coupon" to order books from Bantam?  What percentage of Bantam's gross revenue came from such orders?       

Four of these books are by Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I’ve never read, and three of them are by Warren Norwood, whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am familiar with several of the listed books.

Sundiver by David Brin

I read this in the ‘90s, in fact I think it was the first SF book I read after a few years of avoiding SF and reading mostly history and poetry, the period when I thought I might actually finish grad school and get a degree.  I thought Sundiver was just OK; I liked the sciency stuff of flying into the sun, but wasn't impressed by the murder mystery stuff (the guy with laser eyes did it.)  I never read any more of Brin's fiction, though his critique of Star Wars (that it is elitist and promotes hereditary aristocracy), which I must have read in Slate right after "Phantom Menace" came out, I found very interesting and has stuck with me.  

The Dinosaurs by William Stout, Byron Preiss and William Service

I love this book to death, and have spent many hours admiring the beautiful illustrations.  Stout works in various media and various styles, so even though its dozens and dozens of pictures of dinosaurs by the same guy, each page is fresh and exciting.  I can still remember seeing this in the bookstore in the mall for the first time, and then buying it on a subsequent trip.  The store only had one copy, and it was a little shopworn, but I put a piece of masking tape on the spine and the book is still in one piece, 30 years later.

Harlan Ellison also loved The Dinosaurs, and wrote a gushing blurb-sized review for it in the February 1982 issue of "Heavy Metal," which I learned on tarbandu’s blog, The PorPor Books Blog, back in February of 2012.   There is also an enthusiastic preface by Ray Bradbury. 


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 

As I have said earlier, I don’t think I have read every story included in all the different editions of Martian Chronicles, but I have read many of them here and there, and liked them.  I think Thomas Disch's criticisms of Bradbury (that Bradbury can be too sappy and sentimental) have some merit, but in the same way that I still like Star Wars even though David Brin scores some points against George Lucas, I still like lots of Bradbury's work.  "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in Martian Chronicles, isn't sappy or sentimental at all. 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

This book is on Half Price Book's list of 100 SF books, and its Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it might be good. 

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

I saw the movie of this with David Bowie. I really like Bowie, as a musician and just as an appealing character who livens up the TV screen whenever he appears, and the movie had some memorable images and scenes, but also felt too long and a little too silly.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.

I read this in the mid '90s, when I worked at a bookstore in New Jersey, after graduating college but before moving to New York and starting grad school.  This may have been the last SF book I read for a long time, before the SFless period ended by Sundiver. (Though I read Dave Wolverton's On My Way To Paradise and two Serpent Catch books around the same time.  I enjoyed those books, and remember them pretty well.) I remember very little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, except a vivid discussion of how you shouldn’t try to euthanize a sick cat.  I should probably read A Canticle for Leibowitz again.   

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If you want to join Harlan, Ray and me in gushing about Stout’s The Dinosaurs, or if you want to tell me who Warren Norwood is and why I should know him, or say anything at all about these Bantam books or David Bowie, feel free to do so in the comments.   

Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany

Elsewhere on this blog I have reported that I read Samuel R. Delany's Nova and Ballad of Beta-2 years ago, and found them underwhelming. Today I read Delany's short novel Empire Star and found it a little underwhelming as well, despite its pretensions to depth.

I have the Bantam 1983 edition of Delany's 1966 novel, with the Wayne Barlowe cover. Barlowe's drawing and composition seem fine, but the colors are unappealingly washed out, all some shade of purple.

Empire Star is the story of Comet Jo, an 18-year-old boy living four thousand years in our future on a moon where they grow plants in caves that are made into building material. Jo's simple rural working-class existence ends when a spaceship crashes on the moon, and a dying member of the ship's crew gives Jo a small crystallized being and the instructions that he must take the being, and a message, to Empire Star. Jo undertakes this quest, even though he doesn't even know what the message is or what Empire Star is, bringing along an eight-legged cat with three horns named Di'k.

The story is told like a child's fable, with Jo meeting various mentors along the way and being given little lessons, like the importance of keeping an open mind and asking questions, the insight that criminals and artists are the most important people because they are agents of change, and the fact that slavery makes people sad and if you own slaves you can never relax. On the one hand the whole thing is cloyingly precious, but on the other Delany takes the book very seriously, with two epigraphs (one from W. H. Auden, one from Proust) and with various literary allusions which he challenges you to figure out (the easy one is to Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas), an experimental chapter in the form of a list (it almost looks like a poem) to help you follow out the time travel plot, and the revelation at the end that tries to convince you the simple story is in fact very complicated. At its conclusion we learn that Empire Star is one of those time travel stories in which everybody has been going back and forth through time again and again, providing young people crucial advice and artifacts that we have already seen them using earlier in the story, when they were older and went by different names.  For example, the person who gives Jo the crystal turns out to be Jo himself, older, and the comb that an adult woman gave Jo at the start of the story is the same comb Jo gives her at the end of the story, when she is a 16-year-old princess.

One reason I don't generally like time travel stories is because of irritating paradoxes like, "If he gave her the comb when he was old and she was young, and she gives it back when she is older and he is younger, where did the comb come from?"

There are numerous reasons why I felt the book, though it aims high and wants you to think it is an epic worthy of serious cogitation, is not a very entertaining read. The characters lack any depth and there is no reason to care about them. The tone and plot generate no tension or excitement; Jo doesn't drive the plot by making decisions or overcoming challenges or escaping dangers, he is just carried along by all the other characters who tell him what to do. You never think Jo is in danger; collisions between space ships and the infiltration of a space battleship are just treated as a joke.  All the literary references, including Delany's extravagant praise of Theodore Sturgeon of "Killdozer" fame, feel a little tacked on, like gratuitous showing off.  At times Delany seems to take an almost adversarial stance towards the reader, basically saying, "You won't understand this story unless you are sophisticated!"

I've got a lot of complaints about Empire Star and I didn't really enjoy reading it, but looking back on it as I compose this blog post, flipping though it as I try to figure out who was who and did what when, I have to grudgingly admire it for its ambition and for the way Delany gets all those moving parts to mesh together.  It is frustrating, but I can't decide whether I'm recommending this one or not.  

Half Price Books' List of 100 SF Novels: 51 to 100

Here we are as in olden days, considering Half Price Books' List of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books worthy of "geeking out" over.  Oh those kids and their wacky slang.  Today we are cutting a rug with selections 51 to 100, chosen by 3,000 "bibliomaniacs."  That's right, over the objections of the union, we are doubling production for this post.

51, 52 & 53) The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling, and Old Man' s War by John Scalzi
These are all books I have not read by authors whose books I have not read.  I remember people on the SF newsgroups praising Anubis Gates, and I have considered reading Stirling's books about people going to Venus and Mars, and John Scalzi gets a lot of attention in what the kids are calling "the blogosphere," but somehow I have not read any of their books yet.

54 & 56) The City of Dreaming Books by Walter Moers and The Electric Church by Jeff Somers
I haven't heard of these books or authors before.  Am I getting a magic realism vibe?

55) The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson  
This gets good press, but I'm not moved.

57) Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
I might read this some day.  It is my understanding that it is a condemnation of the Allied policy of raining bombs on Nazi Germany.  Maybe we've found something on which Vonnegut and John Ringo of Watch on the Rhine fame can agree.

58) Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
I own the very edition chosen by the bibliomaniacs to illustrate their list.  This is Volume II of the Gormenghast Trilogy.  I own all three of the books, and have read Volume I, Titus Groan. I wanted to like it, and I finished it, but it seemed very long and slow - its over 500 pages of tiny little print, like 38 lines to a page!  There wasn't much plot that I can remember.  A bunch of weirdos live in a huge castle and have difficult conversations with each other, then there is some kind of climactic one on one fight, then a funeral.  I must be forgetting something; I am told this is one of the greatest classics of 20th century British literature.

Gormenghast looks to be even longer than Titus Groan. 

I like Peake's illustrations to the book; will that protect me from charges of philistinism?

59) Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
People are always hailing this as a masterpiece, so I am not surprised it is on the list.  I don't find overpopulation and ecological scare books very interesting, though, and the only John Brunner book I have read (Maze of Stars) was very weak.  Also, this thing is over 500 pages long.

Add another charge of philistinism to my record.

60) Mort by Terry Prachett
I read the first Discworld book when it came out, and it didn't make me laugh, so I have never read any more Terry Prachett books.  I'm not crazy about SF books whose main goal is to be funny or to be a parody of other SF books. 

In a brush with fame, on June 30, 2003, I posted something banal on the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup, and Terry Prachett, or someone using the name, agreed with me.

61) Johnathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke
I remember women in the office reading this during the Harry Potter craze, and my wife read it as well.  Wizards during the Napoleonic Wars?  Not for me.

62) Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny
I've enjoyed some Zelazny, like This Immortal and Damnation Alley and some short stories, and disliked some, including the first Amber book which I read as a kid, disliked, and then tried as an adult, and disliked again.  Lord of Light I have not attempted.  Maybe someday.

63) Ladyhawke by Joan Vinge
Ladyhawke?  I laughed when I saw this on here.  Joan Vinge is a respected writer, but a movie tie-in for a B movie?  Are the bibliomaniacs just recommending it because Michelle Pfeiffer is so good looking?   The cover image of the paperback is an arresting portrait of Pfeiffer, no doubt.

I hate going to the movie theater, smelling other people and listening to them eat.  I can recall all the films I have seen in a theater, because the number is so small.  Ladyhawke is one of the movies I saw in a theater with other kids when it came out.  We thought it was silly - we were cynical kids.  There is a scene in which we see the interior of a castle from the point of view of a fighting man in a visored helmet; we laughed because looking through the slots of the visor as the soldier advanced looked like the view from inside a TIE fighter.  The double crossbow also made me groan.  I was a real killjoy.     

Seeing the Ladyhawke tie-in here makes me wonder why there are no Star Wars or Star Trek books on this list.  If those movie/TV tie-ins were excluded, why not this one?  Half Price Books' bibliomaniacs work in ways mysterious.

64) I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
I read at least some of these stories as a kid, and of course like everybody I know the Three Laws of Robotics.  I can't recall anything about these stories, though.  I'm guessing they are puzzle stories, in which a robot behaves oddly and the human characters sit around and figure out the peculiar way the robot interpreted the Three Laws of Robotics.  Very droll.

65) Armor by John Steakly
I've already described my thinking about MilSF.

There's quite a bit of MilSF on this list, but not the series I thought was famous, one I have actually read a little of, David Drake's "Hammer's Slammers."   

66, 67 & 75) The Lathe of Heaven, The Wizard of Earthsea, and the Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
I've never read any LeGuin.  I've always assumed these books would be some kind of feminist polemic.  I got my fill of feminist polemic at Rutgers and CUNY. Maybe I am missing out.  My wife has read some LeGuin, but I think they were "mainstream" books, not any of these.

68) The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffery
I might have read this when I was reading those Pern books, or maybe I just read about it.  The idea of imbedding a human intelligence in a machine is of course a good idea.  Probably I wouldn't read this today.

69 & 71) Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell and Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
I must be out of touch; these I have never heard of.

70) War with the Newts by Karl Kapek
Here we go with the esoterica, a book written in Czech in 1936.  Maybe people are reading this in college?

According to Wikipedia this is an attack on racism, fascism, nationalism, consumerism, and scientism that lacks a central character.  Sounds like fun.  The film was scheduled to be released in 2013, and is still in production.  Don't pulp all those extra copies just yet, Half Price Books people! 

72 & 76) To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
I've never read anything by Willis.

73 & 99) Stardust and Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
I've not read anything by Neil Gaiman. This is magical realism, right?  My wife, Gene Wolfe, and Tori Amos all like Gaiman, but so far I have resisted their blandishments.

74) Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link  
You're not going to be shocked to hear I haven't encountered this one before.  The cover is a "reimagining" of my favorite painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, "Lady with an Ermine."  I think Leonardo is a little overrated; I like Leonardo, but I think Michelangelo, Rafael, and Botticelli are all superior.  One mark of their superiority is that the secret codes embedded in their paintings have yet to be deciphered.

77) Outlander by Diana Gabaldon
I remember the women in the office back in New York lugging this around.  This is a romance novel about a woman who goes back in time to fight in some sexy Anglo-Scottish war, right?  I can't really poke fun at this after gushing about Princess of Mars, can I?

Wasn't it annoying when every time Scotland came up in conversation somebody had to perform that "we got colonized by wankers" soliloquy?  I don't miss those days.  

78 & 79) Mockingbird by Walter Tevis and This is the Way the World Ends by James Morrow
These are books I've never heard of.  I've been living under a rock!

Mockingbird sounds like it might be interesting, and would give me excuses to reminisce about New York.

Morrow is one of those guys who makes sure his pets are mentioned in his Author's Bio.  Woof!  This is the Way the World Ends takes an audaciously bold stand and tries to awaken the public to the possible negative effects of a nuclear war.

80) Robotech: Battlecry by Jack McKinney
Ladyhawke doesn't look so crazy now, does it?

When it was first on U.S. TV I loved loved loved the Macross sequence of Robotech.  I thought the mecha designs and the Zentraedi space ship designs were brilliant, and I even thought the soap opera story of the Rick Hunter/Lynn Minmay/Lisa Hayes love triangle and the Romeo and Juliet story of Max and Miriya Stirling worked.  (On the inside I am a sentimental sap.)  I loved the background music and the funny subplot about the three alien spies (it's like Ninotchka, isn't it?). I bought Macross comic books and role playing game books, I drew Zentraedi battle pods in my notebooks during boring college classes. I was hooked.

When I first saw these Jack McKinney novels I was past my Robotech phase.  The story of how they came about, which I just read on Wikipedia, is pretty interesting.  Jack McKinney is a pen name for two writers, one of them Brian Daley.  As a kid I read Brian Daley's Han Solo's Revenge.  The other kids in school saw me carrying it around, and so, one day, when they were trying to start a fight between me and some other kid, one of these little bastards told me, "You need to get revenge on him, like Han Solo!" 

81 & 82) Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marrillier and Resurrection by Arwen Elys Dayton
These must have been published while I was in that coma.

83 & 84) Parable of the Sower and Kindred by Octavia Butler
I haven't read any Octavia Butler.  We were supposed to read a Butler book in my Science Fiction class at Rutgers, but either we didn't get to it, or I just neglected to read it.  I wasn't a very conscientious student.

85 & 86) The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass by Phillip Pullman
Covered these already.

87 & 88) Grass by Sheri Tepper and Three Days to Never by Tim Powers
Nothing is coming up on the scanner.

89) Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
Often, at the New York Public Library's Mid-Manhattan Branch, I would pick up their hulking copy of this book, feel I should read it, then put it back as appearing too forbidding.  I had read Delany's Nova and The Ballad of Beta-2, both of which I thought were just OK.  Today I can remember almost nothing about either.  

The Wikipedia page for Dhalgren makes the book sound very exciting, with titans of SF ranged on both sides, ecstatically for or against the book.  800 pages full of typos, however, is an investment I am not currently willing to commit myself to. 

90) That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis
I was disappointed in Out of the Silent Planet, so didn't get to this one.

91) Logan's Run by William Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
I've seen this movie, and never considered reading the novel. 

92) The White Mountains by John Christopher
I read the three Tripods books as an adult, and enjoyed them.

93) Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov
I thought this movie was fun because of the art direction, special effects and cast, but I never thought to read the book Asimov came up with based on the screenplay.

94) Mister Monday by Garth Nix
I see this guy's name in the anthologies I take out of the library.  Is this a kid's book?

"Tuesday Afternoon" by the Moody Blues and "Drive In Saturday" by David Bowie are great songs.  When I was a kid I went through a U2 phase, and loved "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."  

95) Ringworld by Larry Niven
This is a good novel, but has a bunch of nagging problems.  The characters are too much like caricatures, you can't take them seriously and you can't care about them.  The book's tone is too silly and light.  Also, Niven's idea that "luck" is not only real, but hereditary, is irritatingly stupid.

96) The Misenchanted Sword by Lawrence Watt-Evans   
I kind of want to read this.  When I was young I read Watt-Evans' Cyborg and the Sorcerers and really enjoyed it.  I'd like to read that again.  

On a side note, I like many of the realistic cover paintings Darrell K. Sweet and Michael Whelan have done over the years.

97) Robopacalypse by Daniel H. Wilson
I feel like I just failed a spelling test. 

98) The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddor
Looking Glass War is my favorite novel by John Le Carre.  Is this the sequel?

100) The Giver by Lois Lowry
This is SF?  Who knew?

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

Final notes on omissions
  
There is no Frankenstein, no Dracula, no I Am Legend, and no H. P. Lovecraft.  Maybe the Half Price Books bibliomaniacs consider that those popular and important books belong in the horror category.

There's also no H. G. Wells or Jules Verne, which is odd, especially when we see Karl Kapek on there.

Gene Wolfe and Jack Vance are not represented. Wolfe and Vance have devoted followings in the SF community, and are the kind of SF writers who receive praise from prestigious mainstream institutions like The New York Times, so it is noteworthy that the bibliomaniacs left them off but put a cartoon tie-in and a movie tie-in on there.

There are fantasies I've never heard of on the list, and fantasies the critics frown on as Tolkein clones, like Sword of Shannara, but no Conan or Elric.  Robert Howard and Michael Moorcock have been very influential, have critical defenders, and Conan and Elric are very popular, so it is a little strange.

If Lord of the Rings and the Pullman thing had been considered as a single book there would have been space for representative works of famous authors like Arthur C. Clarke or Harlan Ellison, writers important to the history of the SF field like Poul Anderson or A. E. Van Vogt, or acknowledged classics like Pohl's Gateway and Haldeman's Forever War.

Still, this is a fun list of SF books, and I encourage everyone to rush to the library to seek them out.  I mean to Half Price Books.  And keep an eye out for the faithful adaptation of War with the Newts starring Will Smith coming soon to a theatre near you.