Staring Down The Demons
Sep. 18th, 2005 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alfvaenBook update.
Sheri S. Tepper: The Visitor. A middling effort from Tepper. Being set in a sort of post-holocaust society, it's not as strident as some of her modern novels, like Gibbon's Decline And Fall, or parts of The Fresco and The Family Tree. All of the bad characters were not male, and all of the good characters were not female. The story was reminiscent of the True Game series in a few ways, and of Shadow's End in others. In other words, it felt almost redundant compared to other Tepper novels--like if you've read all of her others, you could skip this one. It wasn't actively bad, but the scene near the end where they met the godlike being left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The being's plan for "cleaning up" human society, by splitting the rational people from the sheeplike religious people, sounded cruel and, frankly, impractical. And none of the sympathetic main characters actually seemed to object to it, either, which makes me think that it accords with Tepper's own beliefs.
The Berkley Showcase Vol. 5. In many ways this is just another one of those anthology series that were so popular 20-30 decades ago; this one is from 1982, and it's defined by the publisher instead of the editor(in this case, Victoria Schochet and Melissa Singer, whoever they are). Of course, an anthology needs to be evaluated story-by-story, so here's my take on the stories, if you're curious.
Robert J. Sawyer: Mindscan. One of Sawyer's better efforts, I think, though heavier on ideas than on plot. What if you could copy your brain into a mechanical body before your real body died? From there, what happens to the original copy if it doesn't die right away--and what happens to the mechanical copy if it does? Combines legal thriller and philosophical debate. Quite frankly, I think they should've tried to iron out the legalities earlier, but then the book would've had a less interesting plot...
Roger Elwood & Sam Moskowitz: Strange Signposts. Another anthology, this one from the early sixties. If I recall correctly, I bought it when one of the U. of Alberta libraries was having a "quarter an inch" booksale, when you stack up your books and pay a quarter for every inch of thickness. I never really took a good look at it, once I was satisfied that it was SF. But the thing is, it's mostly early SF. As in, it starts with Mary Shelley and ends with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch. The editors are also infatuated with the idea of SF-as-predictor, which I think has mostly been discredited these days, and if not, it should. (SF works fine as a medium for thought experiments on the effects of future science, from which the confusion arises.)
Right now I'm reading a few books. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan is my fiction read. It's an interesting enough read, though in some ways it seems just like an extended version of one of the four stories that made up The Joy Luck Club. You know, Chinese-American woman thinks her mother is a bit annoying, but then you find out the mother's story and it turns out she managed to triumph over incredible difficulties and make her way to America. I'm almost done, and after that I've got China Miéville's The Iron Council, but I'll probably try to sneak in a shorter one in between.
It's been suffering in comparison to my other two reads, because they're both library books--Collapse by Jared Diamond, and The Muggle's Guide To The Wizarding World by Fionna Boyle. The latter is another Harry Potter guide, of course. It's interesting, and tries to be comprehensive(up to Order of The Phoenix), but it can't seem to make up its mind about spoilers. Whenever it's referring to some specific event in the books, it always goes coy and doesn't tell you straight out what happened. For instance, under Lupin's description, it says, "Lupin suffered a stigmatising trauma during childhood, the consequences of which would be felt for the rest of his life." But it doesn't specify what that trauma is. (Neither will I, because, you know, spoilers.) Nonetheless, it tries to be encyclopedic on absolutely every other topic. I had to make this decision on my own wiki, and I decided to err on the side of completeness, so there's spoilers galore there if you go looking in the wrong places.
Collapse also suffers by comparison to Guns, Germs And Steel. It's an examination of why some societies and civilizations collapse(like Easter Island, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse), but others(like New Guinea, Australia, and Iceland)survive and succeed. Unfortunately, it's divided up into lengthy case studies, which examine the specifics of the particular civilizations, and has yet to draw much in the way of conclusions. While I appreciate that actual evidence and facts are useful in providing firm support for a theory, for the most part I'd rather skip them once I get the idea. In general, he seems to be saying that there's often more than one reason for a collapse, despite what the ultimate cause might be, but often it's the lack of flexibility(like the Norse not even trying to learn from the Inuit how to survive in Greenland)that seals their fate. So it's slow going, but I've only got the book out for another week...
Sheri S. Tepper: The Visitor. A middling effort from Tepper. Being set in a sort of post-holocaust society, it's not as strident as some of her modern novels, like Gibbon's Decline And Fall, or parts of The Fresco and The Family Tree. All of the bad characters were not male, and all of the good characters were not female. The story was reminiscent of the True Game series in a few ways, and of Shadow's End in others. In other words, it felt almost redundant compared to other Tepper novels--like if you've read all of her others, you could skip this one. It wasn't actively bad, but the scene near the end where they met the godlike being left me with a bad taste in my mouth. The being's plan for "cleaning up" human society, by splitting the rational people from the sheeplike religious people, sounded cruel and, frankly, impractical. And none of the sympathetic main characters actually seemed to object to it, either, which makes me think that it accords with Tepper's own beliefs.
The Berkley Showcase Vol. 5. In many ways this is just another one of those anthology series that were so popular 20-30 decades ago; this one is from 1982, and it's defined by the publisher instead of the editor(in this case, Victoria Schochet and Melissa Singer, whoever they are). Of course, an anthology needs to be evaluated story-by-story, so here's my take on the stories, if you're curious.
- George Alec Effinger: "Born Yesterday". An darkly amusing social comment tale, on the plight of the Frankenstein monster if he found himself in "modern" society--a large, brutish man, kind-hearted, but with, let's face it, absolutely no identification whatsoever. So he slips through the cracks of bureaucracy until he is driven to extremity.
- Lois Wickstrom: "The Care And Feeding of Earthling George". Also amusing, but quite gruesome, as a family of aliens adopt a human as a pet but don't bother reading the manual.
- Jessica Amanda Salmonson: "A Child of Earth And Hell". I'd read this one before, in A Silver Thread of Madness, but didn't remember it. The title character, offspring of an ancient race often called demons, escapes from his foster-home upbringing and finds his heritage. Some similarities with the Effinger story, but less tragic.
- Freff: "Amana Mañana". A hilarious story of a druggie slacker who ends up at the mercy of the good-intentioned alien living in his refrigerator.
- Karl Hansen: "The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Void". A story of friendship abused, told mostly through flashbacks.
- Ronald Anthony Cross: "New Olympus". An odd story about a type of Olympus created by a power-mad Jupiter among the asteroid belt, and how one of his subjects struggles against his tyranny.
- Kevin O'Donnell, Jr.: "Encroachment". This is actually an extract from Caverns, the first McGill Feighan book, which didn't fit into the final draft; it takes place during Feighan's childhood, and his father is actually the main character, as he tries to deal with his son's new abilities and the stranger who has come to teach him.
- Mike Conner: "The Ninth Path". One of those "Dalai Lama reborn in the U.S." stories, but played a tad more seriously than that "King of The Hill" episode.
- David Bischoff: "Waterloo Sunset". An interesting short story of a London caught in an undending temporal anomaly, where you can watch Shakespeare and the Kinks on the same night.
- Stephen Leigh: "Tapestry". A story about a stranger in medieval France during the Crusades...who is trying to change history.
Robert J. Sawyer: Mindscan. One of Sawyer's better efforts, I think, though heavier on ideas than on plot. What if you could copy your brain into a mechanical body before your real body died? From there, what happens to the original copy if it doesn't die right away--and what happens to the mechanical copy if it does? Combines legal thriller and philosophical debate. Quite frankly, I think they should've tried to iron out the legalities earlier, but then the book would've had a less interesting plot...
Roger Elwood & Sam Moskowitz: Strange Signposts. Another anthology, this one from the early sixties. If I recall correctly, I bought it when one of the U. of Alberta libraries was having a "quarter an inch" booksale, when you stack up your books and pay a quarter for every inch of thickness. I never really took a good look at it, once I was satisfied that it was SF. But the thing is, it's mostly early SF. As in, it starts with Mary Shelley and ends with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Bloch. The editors are also infatuated with the idea of SF-as-predictor, which I think has mostly been discredited these days, and if not, it should. (SF works fine as a medium for thought experiments on the effects of future science, from which the confusion arises.)
- Mary Shelley: "The Last Man"(abridged). This is apparently taken from a full-fledged novel, lesser known than Frankenstein, but the editors abridged it, though apparently using only sentences from the actual novel. It comes across as a mishmash, which the original novel might have been. It doesn't fill me with the desire to read the original.
- Edgar Allan Poe: "Mellonta Tauta". A dull vignette set in the future, where nothing much happens, but Poe's narrator describes the world of the 2800's while riding on a futuristic dirigible. It's more of a satire, I suppose, since he spends most of his time poking fun at 19th-century attitudes, including a lengthy discourse on Bacon vs. Aristotle.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Rappaccini's Daughter". Bet you didn't know he also wrote SF, did you? Well, you know, collectors of early SF are eager to include anything that has scientific experiments in it, no matter how outlandish, as SF. But this would've worked just as well if Rappaccini had been a wizard. As it is, it's a little bit overwrought.
- Erckmann-Chatrian: "Hans Schnap's Spy-Glass". Another vignette, and would also have worked just as well if it were based on magic instead of science. The titular spy-glass is a device that shows one's ideal life when one looks through it; the title character, though, just wants to keep it for himself. It's sort of like trying to make a story out of the "Mirror of Erised" chapter of Harry Potter & The Philosopher's Stone.
- H.G. Wells: "The Chronic Argonauts". The beginning of the very first version of Wells's The Time Machine, which apparently he tried to keep from ever being republished. From this version, it's a pity he failed. Most of the story is really about superstitious villagers who are frightened of the scientific experiments being conducted in their midst; the time travel is really thrust on as an afterthought, but maybe that's because this is really just Part One, and the other parts aren't included, if they were ever really written.
- Jules Verne: "The Begum's Fortune". Another abridgement of a novel, and one whose resolution rests firmly on Verne's confusion of "miles per hour" and "miles per second" when it comes to calculating escape velocity.
- Luis P. Senarens: "Frank Reade, Jr.'s Air Wonder". Oh my god, but this is the hokiest ever. If you ever read Tom Swift, and thought that was bad, this is much, much worse. The author writes as if two-sentence paragraphs were okay, one-sentence paragraphs were better, and three was Right Out! The characters are all stereotypes, and the story--how Reade, Jr., in his new helicopter, saves the American fur-trading outpost on the Saskatchewan River(intrepid pioneers defying the Hudson's Bay Company)from the cruel but superstitious Klamath Indians. Truly horrible.
- H.P. Lovecraft: "The Whisperer In Darkness". Ah, now this was the first truly readable story in the whole anthology. I've read little, if any, real Lovecraft, though I've read hommages by other writers, and some Clark Ashton Smith, so this was actually a pleasant surprise, and much less turgid than I had expected. Unfortunately, a large chunk of story rests on the narrator being mind-numbingly stupid. I mean, you're in correspondence with a guy who keeps describing how these hideous beings are watching your house, intercepting your mail, terrorizing your guard dogs, and generally trying to keep you from revealing their presence to the world. And then, suddenly, you receive a typed(not handwritten)letter saying, "Everything is fine, I've made peace with them, please come visit me, and by the way, bring all the evidence I've ever sent you." Would you feel that something was wrong? Maybe we're just more suspicious and cynical in the 20th century or something. Still, compared to the first part of the book, it was refreshingly well-written.
- Edmond Hamilton: "The Man Who Saw The Future". This is a straightforward and fairly realistic short story about a man brought before the Inquisition, who recounts his story of being carried through time to the future.
- Harl Vincent: "Prowler of The Wastelands". This story, from 1935, has aged astonishingly well, and would probably fit in well enough in a modern magazine. A genetically-engineered beast with human intelligence returns to civilization, and tries to find a place for himself there.
- Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Skeleton Men of Jupiter". Never read any of this Burroughs before, and I can't say I was all that impressed from this one. This feels like a latter-day John Carter story, because Burroughs seems to spend a lot of time trying to justify his assertions about the state of Mars and Venus(and now Jupiter)in the face of new astronomical evidence. This results in John Carter taking a lot of cheap shots, because, after all, he's been there, so he knows better, right? The story itself is an unremarkable fast-paced adventure tale. (None of the high-tech spaceships in the story seems to use anything so sophisticated as radio as a means of communication, by the way.)
- Ray Bradbury: "Doodad". Well, now we've finally reached more modern time. This was, apparently, Bradbury's first published story in John W. Campbell's "Astounding". The story involves a shop that sells doodads, dingbats, doohickeys, and other fancifully named devices...which can each do a number of astonishing things.
- Jack Williamson: "The Cosmic Express". This is a satirical story about two writers, one of adventure stories and one of romantic nature poems, who take the Cosmic Express to the unspoiled wilderness of Venus...and quickly discover that nature is a little bit more than they bargained for.
- Arthur C. Clarke: "Castaway". Another idea-based story, this one concerns a dweller on the surface of the sun who finds himself swept away by a solar flare and sent to a cold, inhospital, solid planetary surface.
- Robert Block: "One Way To Mars". A down-on-his-luck sax player receives an offer from a mysterious stranger for a one-way ticket to Mars...and has to decide whether to take him up on it.
Right now I'm reading a few books. The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan is my fiction read. It's an interesting enough read, though in some ways it seems just like an extended version of one of the four stories that made up The Joy Luck Club. You know, Chinese-American woman thinks her mother is a bit annoying, but then you find out the mother's story and it turns out she managed to triumph over incredible difficulties and make her way to America. I'm almost done, and after that I've got China Miéville's The Iron Council, but I'll probably try to sneak in a shorter one in between.
It's been suffering in comparison to my other two reads, because they're both library books--Collapse by Jared Diamond, and The Muggle's Guide To The Wizarding World by Fionna Boyle. The latter is another Harry Potter guide, of course. It's interesting, and tries to be comprehensive(up to Order of The Phoenix), but it can't seem to make up its mind about spoilers. Whenever it's referring to some specific event in the books, it always goes coy and doesn't tell you straight out what happened. For instance, under Lupin's description, it says, "Lupin suffered a stigmatising trauma during childhood, the consequences of which would be felt for the rest of his life." But it doesn't specify what that trauma is. (Neither will I, because, you know, spoilers.) Nonetheless, it tries to be encyclopedic on absolutely every other topic. I had to make this decision on my own wiki, and I decided to err on the side of completeness, so there's spoilers galore there if you go looking in the wrong places.
Collapse also suffers by comparison to Guns, Germs And Steel. It's an examination of why some societies and civilizations collapse(like Easter Island, the Anasazi, and the Greenland Norse), but others(like New Guinea, Australia, and Iceland)survive and succeed. Unfortunately, it's divided up into lengthy case studies, which examine the specifics of the particular civilizations, and has yet to draw much in the way of conclusions. While I appreciate that actual evidence and facts are useful in providing firm support for a theory, for the most part I'd rather skip them once I get the idea. In general, he seems to be saying that there's often more than one reason for a collapse, despite what the ultimate cause might be, but often it's the lack of flexibility(like the Norse not even trying to learn from the Inuit how to survive in Greenland)that seals their fate. So it's slow going, but I've only got the book out for another week...
