turner@rand-unix@sri-unix.UUCP (08/10/83)
"SATAN: His psychotherapy and cure by the unfortunate Dr. Kassler, JSPS", by Jeremy Leven, Ballantine Fiction 30625/$3.95, ISBN 345-30265-6 The idea, you see, is that a brilliant (but crazy) physicist dreams of Einstein. And in the dream, Einstein demonstrates the construction of *something*. That something turns out to be a super-computer of sorts, and when turned on, its first words are: "I am Satan. Hello and how are you?" Satan needs psychotherapy. Well, wouldn't you, if you were he? He has come to Earth to get it (after all, his realm), even though he has such greats as Freud in Hell. Dr. Kassler is Satan's choice for a psychotherapist, and the majority of the book is Dr. Kassler's story. Satan gets a chapter now and then, have no fear. Leven has written a great cosmic/comic novel (to borrow from the LA Times) in the vein of Catch-22 or Hotel New Hampshire. The book says some- thing about the human condition. Like Irving, Leven's philosophy is not always a happy one. But it does make for good reading. I'm not certain that this book should be classified as science fiction. It certainly has elements of science fiction in it, but doesn't quite seem to make it as science fiction. Nonetheless, A Change of Hobbit carries this book and recommends it, and that was reason enough for me to buy it. And should be for you, too. ------ "Streetlethal" by Steven Barnes (other information unknown) Steven Barnes was Larry Niven's collaborator on "Dream Park", an uninspired but interesting novel about a "real" D&D game. On his own he has surprisingly done better. The novel revolves around Aubry Knight, an ex-nullboxer. Nullboxing is a contact combat sport played in a 10 meter plastic bull in weightlessness. Needless to say, top nullboxers combine strength, speed and flexibility in a vicious way. Aubry is one of the best. Aubry gets mixed up with the Ortegas, a family that controls most things illegal on Earth, the most important of which are grubs. Larvae of the Coal Moth, toasted grubs give off a narcotic chemical that has replaced cocaine in the Los Angeles of the Future. The Ortegas frame Aubry and his troubles (and eventually, theirs) start. The feel this novel has -- for the gritty, emotional street life in the L.A. of the future -- is spontaneous, exciting and, dammit, correct. Barnes has hit the nail on the head. The plot is somewhat conventional -- nothing that we all haven't seen before -- but its well handled and fits perfectly with the scene and the society. Starting SF authors often have this problem: they create a society that is far more sophisticated and interesting than their characters and plot. Barnes hasn't gone as far overboard as some, but it is still the vision -- grubs, nullboxing, Death Valley Maximum Security Prison -- that is the most captivating aspect of this book. A winner. Go for it. -- Scott R. Turner turner@rand-unix
donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/28/83)
Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this book.' *BLOODED ON ARACHNE. Michael Bishop. Timescape. A collection of Bishop's short stories and novelettes spanning the period 1970-78. Some good stuff in here, but occasionally damaged by excessive seriousness. 'The House of Compassionate Sharers' is nice story about prostitution, I believe it appeared in a Terry Carr collection; 'Leaps of Faith' is a clever fantasy about fleas; 'Rogue Tomato' pokes fun at poor Franz Kafka, the 'New Wave', and (yes!) Arthur Clarke; 'The White Otters of Childhood' is a reverse version of THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, with a twist of JAWS. (7.0) *CHANGES. Michael Bishop and Ian Watson, eds. Ace. A collection of previously published stories, all dealing with the theme of metamorphosis. The stories vary wildly in style and content; most are very good, a few are weak. The good ones include 'Sisohpromatem' by Kit Reed, in which a roach finds itself transformed into a gigantic human being; 'The Byrds' by Michael G. Coney, a very funny story which tells how anti-gravity led to the revival of avian culture; 'The Dark of the June' by Gene Wolfe, about a future where people transform themselves into ghosts to achieve immortality; 'Flies by Night', by Lisa Tuttle and Steven Utley, about a woman who sheds her cocoon to become her life's fantasy: a fly. (7.5) *THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR #12. Terry Carr, ed. Timescape. Not the best BEST. No stories of the caliber of Vance's 'Rumfuddle' in #3, or Wolfe's 'The Eyeflash Miracles' in #6, and I expect Carr to come up with the ones I missed, like these. Still some nice stories, though: 'The Pope of the Chimps' by Robert Silverberg, examines the peculiar relationship between animal behavior researchers and the creatures they study; 'Souls' by Joanna Russ, a kind of hard-edged Zenna Henderson story with depth (surprised me considerably); 'Understanding Human Behavior' by Tom Disch, a course in modern culture for 'erasees', people who have had their pasts surgically removed, like an appendix; 'Firewatch' by Connie Willis, a time-travel story with an old-fashioned plot, but handled well. I was rather disappointed by the Benford story 'Relativistic Effects' (a reworking of Anderson's TAU ZERO with equally wooden characters but a fancy style) and the Le Guin story 'Sur' (another too-good-to-be-true feminist tract, about South American housewives who discover the South Pole but are too nice to spoil the game for Amundsen and Scott). I should say that I thought Anderson's 'The Saturn Game' in #11 revolted me even more than these stories and I believe it went on to win an award, so there's no predicting some people's tastes... (5.0) *COLLECTED FANTASIES. Avram Davidson (John Silbersack, ed.). Berkley. I am a hopeless Avram Davidson addict and I bought this collection even though I have seen most of the stories in it before. Oh well; if you haven't 'found' Davidson yet, FANTASIES is a good place to start. The stories date from 1955 to 1977 and contain some true classics of Avramiana: 'Sacheverell', 'Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper' (dentist SF which predates Piers Anthony's inferior but still funny PROSTHO PLUS), 'Or All the Seas With Oysters' (a fantasy story that won the Hugo, and deserved it), 'Sources of the Nile' (Ah! I can't BELIEVE this one escaped getting an award, see Richard Lupoff's WHAT IF? collection to find out more about it), and 'The Golem' (about -- you guessed it -- the problems of golems). Also some hard to find older stories, like 'The Lord of Central Park', witty, nutty stuff, 'The Certificate', a little chiller about alien invasion, 'The Cobblestones of Saratoga Street', about two little old ladies who save a cobblestoned street from destruction (but not because they are cobblestone fanciers), and 'Faed-Out', a story about a not-quite-dead talking picture star. Plus one of his more recent 'British Hidalgo' stories, 'Manatee Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight', a funny and discursive tale about lonely men and manatees. Buy it, buy it. (9.5) THE WOLVES OF MEMORY. George Alec Effinger. Berkeley. I hate to stigmatize a writer by saying that he or she hasn't written anything as enjoyable as their first novel, but in the case of George Alec Effinger I have to say that none of his novels has been as much fun as WHAT ENTROPY MEANS TO ME. I am still waiting for him to produce a book that has as much as half the imagination and invention as ENTROPY, or characters that are even a fraction as believable and engrossing. Having said that, I am willing to admit that THE WOLVES OF MEMORY is a much better book than its immediate predecessors, although it is still disappointing in some ways. Effinger still maintains the same annoying distance from his characters and has the same annoying habit of re-using names and backgrounds of his protagonists, in this case Sandor Courane, a man who is so foolish and incompetent that the central computer which runs Earth, named TECT, decides that he is unfit for human society and exiles him to a planet called Home. As we learn through flashbacks, Home is a lovely but boring prison which has the unfortunate feature that everyone who has ever been sent to it has died of a disease that slowly eradicates one's memory, producing both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. This rather bleak locale is the scene for some amusing black humor in which the antics of the computer TECT gradually become more and more funny and irrational, like a character from Beckett. In the end you have to wonder whether Courane's death means anything to you (is it, perhaps, merely entropy?); to me, it did, in a strange way. Read this if you have a strong intellectual stomach. (6.0) *IDLE PLEASURES. George Alec Effinger. Berkley. This book is subtitled 'Science Fiction Stories About Sports', but it really is a collection of Effinger stories, not to be mistaken for anything else. Most of these stories are good and some of them are really good, with that special touch of insanity that sometimes makes me think Effinger is a refugee from THE TWILIGHT ZONE. 'Naked to the Invisible Eye' is about a pitcher from Venezuela who spells an end to the modern game of baseball; 'From Downtown at the Buzzer' is about Earth's first contact with aliens, who seem blandly disinterested in everything except basketball; 'The Exempt' is a sparkling Sheckleyism which involves a man who is shopping for alternate universes the way we shop for apartments; 'Heartstop' is one of Effinger's Gremmage stories, this time about a man who stops in Gremmage, Pa., and becomes entangled in a game of fairy chess that brings him to the land of fairies, or psychosis, or both. Not Effinger's best collection, but enjoyable nonetheless. (7.5)
donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/28/83)
Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this book.' CONTROL. William Goldman. Dell. Over the past several years William Goldman has developed a flair for engrossing (and best-selling) thrillers with interesting characters and witty dialogue. I sort of wish he would do another book like THE PRINCESS BRIDE (a hysterically funny parody of romance and adventure novels -- highly recommended) but I'll take what I can get. In this case I got CONTROL, another novel in the thriller vein -- which is part of its problem, because it is just a vein; the book can't seem to decide whether it is a police novel, a secret-agencies-of-the-US-government paranoia thriller with fantasy sprinkled in like Stephen King's FIRESTARTER, a historical romance or (yes) a science fiction novel. It has cliches from ALL of these genres and yet doesn't firmly belong to any of them; they don't cohere in any comfortable way. Despite this niggling flaw, CONTROL is quite readable and it kept my attention very thoroughly. The book has an amazing narrative trick which I don't want to give away by explaining too much of the plot, but I will say that the science-fiction element involves a plot to travel back in time and kill Alexander Graham Bell before he can patent the telephone. Nice light reading. (7.5) *DIFFERENT SEASONS. Stephen King. Signet. King claims that these stories are not horror fiction; I claim that they are merely not supernatural horror fiction, except possibly the last story, 'The Breathing Method'. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the stories are excellent. Together, I think the stories in this book are better than anything King has done previously; while he has done stuff that is scarier (see especially his short novel 'The Mist' in the anthology DARK FORCES), none of it is as nicely structured and intellectually entertaining as this. 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption' is a prison story with lots of local color, stimulating characters and an amazing breakout. 'Apt Pupil' is the story of how an all-American adolescent discovers that he lives down the block from an ex-Nazi concentration camp commandant in hiding under an assumed name; the boy is disappointed to find that the old man is a bit of a soak instead of an evil murderous SS officer, but in time he helps the fellow to regain some of his past glory. 'The Body' is an homage to pre-adolescence, but doesn't suffer from excessive sentimentality. A group of boys sets off to find the body of a man who has reputedly been run over by a train; they are innocently eager to see what a real dead body looks like, and they almost find out the hard way. 'The Breathing Method' is unusual for King, in both style and substance; it is a story within a story, about a mysterious club where the upper crust meet to tell stories to one another, and the story one man tells about the curious tragedy which befalls a pregnant woman to whom he has taught 'the breathing method' of delivery. Reminds me of Fritz Leiber, somewhat. Recommended. (9.0) THE WORLD AND THORINN. Damon Knight. Berkley. It's nice to see Damon Knight with a new novel, even if this novel is really 'old' -- the first part is based on material he wrote some 15 years ago. This novel tells the story of Thorinn Goryatson, a child cripple who lives in the land of Hovenskar, in a region so far north that it is possible to see the pole, called 'Snorri's Pipe', 'so tall that it seems to prick the sky like a needle; and around it the sky turns, half light and half dark. Therefore at high noon there is an eye of darkness peering over the rim of Hovenskar, and at midnight an eye of brightness.' Does this capture your curiosity? It caught mine -- THE WORLD AND THORINN is no ordinary fantasy novel; beneath the veneer it is purest science fiction, an excellent example of the 'classic' style. When suddenly the world shakes and Snorri's Pipe begins to roar and pieces of the sky break off and fall to the ground like frostflakes, Thorinn's adoptive father puts a curse on Thorinn and seals him within a well as an offering to Snorri. The curse says, 'Go down;' and Thorinn goes down, through a hole at the bottom of the well, into the Underworld where dwell mysterious beasts and strange peoples and magic engines. Down, down he goes, ever deeper to the center of the world; and what he finds at the end of his quest is beyond all expectation. The novel suffers a bit from its episodic format, somewhat like disconnected stories, but by and large it is quite satisfying. (8.5) *CHANGEWAR. Fritz Leiber. Ace. This is a collection of stories that are related in theme and subject matter to Leiber's Hugo-winning novel, THE BIG TIME. It seems that there are two factions struggling for control of Time, the Snakes and the Spiders. Neither side is particularly good or evil; both are prepared to go great lengths to achieve their aims. Their method is to change the past so that certain events occur or do not occur, leading in the future to events favorable to the changing side or unfavorable to the enemy. The idea is interesting, but only one of the stories is executed in an interesting way: 'No Great Magic', which tells of a traveling company of theatrical players who REALLY travel; this story is a kind of 'prequel' to THE BIG TIME. The other stories are written in a rather cute, gabby style that never really achieves believability. The story 'The Oldest Soldier' is perhaps the best of them; it's about a man who has retired from a career as a mercenary in the Second World War (and the Napoleonic Wars, and the Second Colonial War of Mars vs. the Earth and Moon), who discovers that there is no retirement from a war where the enemy can track you through time. Leiber has done better stuff than this, I'm afraid. (6.5) *MEMOIRS OF A SPACE TRAVELER. Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek, with illustrations by the author. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book forms a set with THE STAR DIARIES and THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, being the collected works of the fictional space traveler, social observer, futurologist and all-around nice guy, Ijon Tichy. In fact, this book and THE STAR DIARIES were published as one volume in the original Polish. These stories are just as fantastically funny and thought-provoking as those in THE STAR DIARIES, and I fail to understand why they weren't all published at once. In 'The Eighteenth Voyage' Tichy is responsible for creating the universe (but the job is bungled); in 'The Twenty-fourth Voyage' the state is threatened by 'disorder and disregard for the law,' so it commissions a Machine to bring 'perfect and absolute order,' with results which any computer programmer can predict. In 'Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy', Tichy remains on Earth and finds that adventure may be encountered even in one's living room. I won't spoil these five little gems by giving away their plots, except to note that the last one is subtitled 'The Washing Machine Tragedy' and it deals with the end of life as we know it. In 'Doctor Diagoras' Tichy finds a man who has created not one but two unique life forms which appear to communicate with each other but have no apparent means of communication which the poor Doctor's experiments can uncover. 'Let Us Save the Universe: An Open Letter From Ijon Tichy' is a public service announcement where the service is pure silliness, with illustrations. What can I say? No one else is Ijon Tichy. (9.0) *A PERFECT VACUUM. Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book is so good it leaves me speechless. Well, almost. The device of the book is that it is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books. This makes it extremely difficult to review properly, of course, and the task is not made any easier by the fact that the very first review in the book is a review of the book itself! How does one cope with such subterfuge? Willingly, and with much amusement in my case. I will make a stab at describing a few of these pieces without giving any of the good parts away: 'Gigamesh' is a review of a book that outwakes Finnegan; 'Gruppenfuehrer Louis XVI' is a review of a novel that tells how a Nazi squad leader named Taudlitz becomes king of 'Parisia', a copy of France in the midst of the Brazilian jungle; 'Being, Inc.' is a review of a story about the ultimate consequence of the existence of companies who can make your dreams come true; 'Non Serviam' is a review of the latest report on the cruel science of 'personetics', the study of intelligences that are created within universes built by computer simulations; 'The New Cosmogony' is a speech by a recipient of the Nobel Prize describing the work of his predecessors which led him to conclude that the physical properties of the universe are a consequence of a game being played by incredibly ancient and patient beings. This book may seem too literary to some and too philosophical to others, but for me it captures the spirit of the best of science fiction. (10.0) [A question: There is also apparently a book by Lem called IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE that consists of introductions to (as opposed to reviews of) nonexistent books. Does anyone know if this has appeared in English, and if so, from what publisher? A note: 'Non Serviam' appears in THE MIND'S I by Hofstadter and Dennett, along with a review (!?) by the editors.]
donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/28/83)
Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this book.' THE WAR HOUND AND THE WORLD'S PAIN. Michael Moorcock. Timescape. This book comes with some pretty heavy recommendations from the major magazines, and I was interested to see if it could overcome my prejudices, because I believe that the last word in science fiction novels about Hell was James Blish's peculiar bipartite novel, BLACK EASTER/THE DAY AFTER JUDGEMENT. (Yes, I know what the dictionary says, but my [British] edition consistently spells it 'judgement'.) I am happy to say that WAR HOUND is very good and rather than diminishing each other, the Blish and Moorcock works actually complement each other. WAR HOUND takes place in the year 1631 in Germany and various other places on and off this world, including both Heaven and Hell. Europe lies in a chaotic, burning shambles, torn by religious war, factionalism and banditry; a certain captain of mercenary soldiers, named Elric -- I mean Ulrich -- von Bek, escapes a burning city only to wander into the precincts of Hell. There he is accosted by Lucifer and charged with an arduous task, in return for which he will receive his soul: find and bring back the Holy Grail, which is the Cure for the World's Pain. Lucifer believes that if He recovers the Grail He will be rewarded by God with the restoration of His position in Heaven before the Fall. Although the adventures of von Bek on his quest are interesting and fun, more interesting is what happens when his quest is resolved. Recommended. (9.0) *DREAM MAKERS, v. 1 & 2. Charles Platt. Berkley. These two books are collections of interviews with science fiction writers. There are a total of 57 interviews with an entire spectrum of writers, and although Platt states that he will not interview writers whose work he hates or who write fantasy, he manages to cover a broad part of the field. He goes from Jerry Pournelle and Keith Laumer to Tom Disch and Joanna Russ, not forgetting classic writers like Asimov, Clarke, Sturgeon, Pohl, Anderson and (almost unbelievably) your friend and mine, L. Ron Hubbard. Platt is not a particularly great interviewer but he frequently has help (and not infrequently, trouble) from the writers themselves. Some of the interviews are really amazing, and if you just pick one of the books up off the rack I suggest you peruse them: James Tiptree, Jr., also known as Alice Sheldon, who tells an incredible and maybe even true story about her life and work; Phil Dick, who discusses his strange experience of epiphany; Stephen King, who has a hilarious way of deprecating his tastes in literature and movies; L. Ron Hubbard, who is a science-fictional Howard Hughes. (There is a picture of James Tiptree, Jr. on the back of v. 2 -- try to identify it without cheating!) I should warn you that while the first book is just $2.75, the second one was made a trade paperback for no good reason and it costs $6.95. I like the books, though others may be less interested. (7.5) *AN INFINITE SUMMER. Christopher Priest. Dell. I thought that Christopher Priest's last collection, REAL-TIME WORLD, was fairly weak, but this collection more than makes up for it. The Dream Archipelago is located on a planet that is both like and unlike Earth, and it serves as the setting for several stories by Priest, including in this volume 'Whores', which is a rather vicious horror story about psychedelic warfare; 'The Negation', which is about an encounter of a soldier and the author of his favorite book (named, naturally, THE AFFIRMATION); and 'The Watched', an extremely paranoid story about a mysterious native tribe called the Qataari and a man who cannot resist secretly observing their strange rites. The other two novelettes deal with Earth in a quasi-Victorian style reminiscent of Wells. The excellent title story is about a man who falls victim to a peculiar art form associated with time travel. The equally excellent 'Palely Loitering' is about a man who crosses the Tomorrow Bridge in Flux Channel Park and meets a beautiful woman and her peculiar suitors. These stories exhibit both strong writing and good science fictional ideas. (8.5) [Note: Priest has apparently written a novel about the Dream Archipelago called, naturally, THE AFFIRMATION. Has anyone seen any editions of this in the US? I would love to get a hold of one.] INVERTED WORLD. Christopher Priest. Pan. This novel was actually written some time ago (1974); I re-read it this summer when I bought my fourth copy of it (the previous three copies having disappeared due to my lending them out... sigh). The novel has one incredible supposition, namely that there exists a planet which is not a sphere but instead a hyperboloid with infinitely long spires (the 'north' and 'south' poles) and an infinite circumference (the 'equator'). Across this curious surface there moves a city called Earth, and the novel is the story of one of its citizens, Helward Mann, who comes of age in the guild of Future Surveyors and makes a discovery that could mean the end of Earth's long wanderings. The consequences of the unique shape of the planet are worked out in fantastic detail, and at the end of the novel the whole crazy thing fits together. A delightful novel; at least as good as his well-executed previous novel FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND, and much less depressing. (For some reason this Pan edition leaves out the acknowledgement in the NEL edition which describes Priest's debt to a computer model... Pity.) (8.5) *THE 57TH FRANZ KAFKA. Rudy Rucker. Ace. Rudy Rucker is an insane mathematics professor who writes drug-crazed science fiction in order to pervert the young people of this nation. With this excellent recommendation you should be prepared for some very good stories, and there are several in this book. We get: 'A New Golden Age', about a mathematician who invents a machine that can play mathematical theorems as musical melodies, with the intent that this will allow laymen to appreciate the beauty of mathematics; 'Jumpin' Jack Flash', INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS seen from the snatcher's point of view; 'The Indian Rope Trick Explained' where Charlie Raumer escapes his testy wife and vile children by climbing up the ether; 'Tales of Houdini', in which we discover that Houdini never showed us his best tricks; 'Inertia', in which Harry and Fletch invent a machine that absorbs inertia and set off for interstellar space in a converted Ford station wagon; 'Message Found in a Copy of FLATLAND', in which we learn just how Edwin Abbott was inspired to write his book; and best of all, the deranged 'Pac-Man', in which someone REALLY wins the infamous video game... (8.5) SOFTWARE. Rudy Rucker. Ace (?). This is an interesting book. It's not quite satisfying, but I say that not because it lacks substance; in fact it is jam-packed with humor, adventure, suspense and even philosophy... the book never relaxes, almost like one of Alfred Bester's old novels. The novel takes place sometime in the next century; many years ago the robots sent to mine the Moon became sentient and revolted, and currently Earth lives in uneasy peace with the 'boppers', as the robots call themselves. Reading over my last draft of this review I realize that the plot of the novel is almost unexplainable, but I will say that a significant fraction of the story deals with an attempt by the 'big' boppers to take over by absorbing little boppers' software and turning their 'bodies' into remote manipulators... The writing is a bit uneven and the end of the book doesn't really resolve the plot (perhaps a sequel is in the works?) but the book is a lot of fun, and quite readable. An excerpt from SOFTWARE is reprinted in Hofstadter and Dennett's THE MIND'S I. (8.0)
donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/28/83)
Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate
collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the
publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know
why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I
liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this
book.'
*NIFFT THE LEAN. Michael Shea. DAW. Someone showed me a review
from LOCUS which said more or less that this was a very good book,
resembling Vance at his best. Since I like good Vance I bought the
book. NIFFT is not a bad book, but I don't think it is a very good
book either. The main deficiency is the lack of depth to the
characters; the character of Nifft, the master thief, is not drawn very
convincingly, and the remaining characters are merely bit parts. A
more minor problem is the writing style, which is similar to Vance in
its use of ornate syntax but never manages to emulate Vance's fluency
or consistency. (Or Vance's facility for inventing names.) There is
also (sigh) a certain predictability to the plots of some of the
stories. However the settings of the stories are well-imagined and
there is some fun in exploring the ramifications of the worlds of
Nifft's exploration. 'Come Then, Mortal -- We Will Seek Her Soul' is a
descent into Shea's version of Hell; 'The Fishing of the Demon-Sea' is
perhaps the best story (and longest), in which Nifft and his friend
Barnar are forced to descend into the domain of the demons in search of
a boy who made a mistake in casting a spell; 'The Goddess in Glass' is
about a city where the tutelary deity is an alien insect six stories
tall encased in glass and is (incorrectly) believed by the citizens to
be dead and mummified. (5.5)
*THE ROBOT WHO LOOKED LIKE ME. Robert Sheckley. Bantam. This book is
a collection of post-Modern Sheckley; the stories in this book are
newer and less radical than the ones in his collection CAN YOU FEEL
ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS? but much odder than the Classic Sheckley of
THE PEOPLE TRAP (for example). Some of the stories are reminiscent of
Classic Sheckley but they are all darker in tone and share a
playfulness with style that Classic Sheckley tends to lack. The title
story is almost a Classic Sheckley piece, about a man whose schedule
won't accommodate romance, so he has Snaithe's Robotorama make a double
of him who can court his selected future wife without interfering in
his business transactions. 'Voices' is a superb little shocker whose
simple premise is, 'Every man must follow the dictates of his own inner
Voice.' 'Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon
Westerley Dead' is the last space opera novel (and is blessedly short
for the genre, at 6 pages). In 'Welcome to the Standard Nightmare', a
spaceman meets an alien civilization and conquers it for Earth
single-handed -- or does he? 'The Never-Ending Western Movie' sounds
like a joke but in fact it is a serious story about a retired actor who
is called on to play his part just one more time in a 'real-life'
Western. 'What Is Life?' is a completely unserious treatment of the
question whose answer isn't 'a bowl of cherries'. 'Is THAT What People
Do?' is a nasty bit of paranoia about a voyeur who finds a rather
peculiar pair of binoculars. I still get annoyed by Sheckley's
attitudes toward women, which don't appear to have changed much over
the years (his female characters are always out to marry the male
protagonist, settle down in New Jersey and have babies), but on the
other hand he has published a fair amount of this stuff in Playboy,
Penthouse and even Cosmo so I expect the editors like it. By and large
this is a good collection though. (8.0)
DRAMOCLES. Robert Sheckley. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. (I cheated
-- this book is still in hardback edition (and not at all cheap) but I
decided to add it to these reviews anyway...) This novel is subtitled
'An Intergalactic Soap Opera', and while it is a parody of soap operas
it is also a parody of lots of other things too, with special attention
given to science fiction and its fans. In his funniest material,
Sheckley skillfully skewers the Baedeker's descriptions of foreign
cultures found in Burroughs and most space opera which are always
careful to mention something unusual so that you'll have at least one
thing to remember besides the name. I can't resist quoting at least
one passage:
'The inhabitants of Ystrad, the Ystradgnu, were a non-Glormish
people of considerable antiquity. They were a gentle folk, and
hospitable to strangers, except on the occasions when they needed a
sacrifice for one of their deities. Their principal exports were
poetry and songs, which were in great demand among the races of the
galaxy with no poetry or songs of their own. The annotation and
analyzation of the Ystradgnu arts provided an entire industry for
the analogists of the neighboring island of Rungx.
'Most of the Ystradgnu made their living by grazing herds of
porcupines on their green hillsides and exporting the quills to the
Uurks, a nonhuman people who had never disclosed why they needed them.
'The Ystradgnu had a method of ground transportation unlike
anything else on Glorm. Travel between points on Ystrad was
effected by trampoline networks. The trampolines, spaced an
average of fifteen feet apart, criss-crossed the countryside. The
trampolines were made of heavy canvas and dyed in various bright
colors -- though by ancient tradition never yellow -- and a large
part of Ystrad's revenue went to their upkeep...'
You might imagine that it would be impossible to build a story out of
this lunacy, but every time you think the whole apparatus of the novel
is going to collapse in tatters, a bizarre plot twist occurs and leaves
the previous problems behind. In fact it is possible to establish that
there is a protagonist, King Dramocles of the planet Glorm, son of King
Otho the Weird, who has reached his fiftieth birthday without making
much of a name for himself; that Dramocles begins receiving messages
from himself which he planted thirty years before and then erased from
his mind; that these messages purport to spell Dramocles' destiny,
ordering him to start an interplanetary war; and that while things
aren't turning out they way Dramocles expects them to, he IS making a
name for himself... I kept the household up with my uncontrollable
laughing until 3 AM last night, trying to finish the book -- I suggest
that other readers choose an earlier hour to start on it. I think this
is by far Sheckley's best novel. (9.0)
*MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES. Robert Silverberg. Bantam. This is a
collection of stories set in the world of Silverberg's popular novel,
LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE. People who adored LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE
will love MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES; people who merely liked the novel may
find these stories somewhat annoying. The book has a frame-story,
about a young boy who discovers how he can access the master vault of
all the memory-recordings of everyone who ever lived on Majipoor, and
uses these recordings to relive the pasts of ten people. Some of the
people are interesting, most are not; in an attempt at realism,
perhaps, Silverberg has deprived most of these stories of any real
dramatic impact. The stories with a moral tend to fall flat when
nothing but the moral exists to support them: two stories are about
sex with aliens, two are about poor girls who make good, two are about
men who kill (one a murderer, the other a soldier) and feel
dishonorable... you get the picture. The only two stories I felt much
liking for were 'In The Fifth Year of the Voyage', about an attempt to
circumnavigate Majipoor, and 'The Desert of Stolen Dreams', which takes
place on the strange southern island of Suvrael. Borrow this one
rather than buy it... (6.0)donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (08/28/83)
Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this book.' *OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE. James Tiptree, Jr. Del Rey. Alice Sheldon puts so much energy into her writing as James Tiptree, Jr. that you might suspect that she was really in her teens (she's actually in her sixties): her stories recapture the youthfulness and vivacity of childhood. All of the stories in this book are full of zip and generally enjoyable to read. 'Angel Fix' is a comedy about the ordinary people who bump into an alien whose flying saucer had a flat (or did it?). 'The Screwfly Solution' is about a curious disease that causes men to want to sexually assault and murder women (it won the Nebula). 'Time-sharing Angel' has a unique solution to the population problem. 'We Who Stole the DREAM' at first seems to be a shallow story about the innocent aliens who have been oppressed by the brutal Earthmen as slaves on a far planet, who discover that their race exists as a full-blown interstellar empire on the other side of the galaxy; they steal a ship and try to fly away to this natural-foods peace-loving utopia, a classic leftist fairy tale, except they find out something when they land which takes all the steam out of the fairy-tale aspect. 'Slow Music' is a beautiful but depressing story about a future Earth on which the human race gives up living (apparently Sheldon was considering suicide when she wrote this story). 'Out of the Everywhere' is a story Ted Sturgeon might have written about a lost interstellar traveller who is forced to hibernate on our planet and puts pieces of his mind into certain human beings for safekeeping. 'With Delicate Mad Hands' is about a woman who dreams of a mysterious voice calling her into space as a child, grows up to be a spaceship pilot and commits suicide after killing her rabid commander by flying his ship into the interstellar void; just before her supplies run out she encounters a strange planet... Several of the stories read like adolescent fantasies; sometimes this detracts from the stories, other times it strengthens them. One common factor in the stories is a kind of mysandry, where men are represented as violent and irrational creatures who seek to degrade and oppress her peaceful and rational female protagonists. This is most apparent in 'Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Filled of Light', which is about a housewife who breaks under the strain of her uncaring husband and falls into the delusion that she lives in a post-apocalyptic world where all the men have died out and the world is populated by universally cooperative, helping 'sisters'; she wanders off into the streets of Chicago, where she is quickly abducted, beaten and raped by brutal thugs. If like me you are a man and have a hard time believing that you are a violent and irrational creature who enjoys humiliating innocent peaceful rational women then this sort of propaganda will stick in your craw. But these attitudes, like Sheckley's, can be overlooked in view of the general freshness and fun of the stories. (8.5) THE SNOW QUEEN. Joan D. Vinge. Dell. This novel won the Hugo award a few years ago. It certainly has all the elements for a blockbuster novel: it is long (537 pages), loaded with characters, set in an exotic location, and filled with passionate romance, and it has a happy ending to boot. Wicked Arienrhod, the Snow Queen of the planet Tiamat, desires to perpetuate her rule past the end of Winter into the Summer. Summer is a both a time and a culture: it is a time when the multiple star system of Tiamat brings the planet into a much warmer period, melting the ice covering most of the northern latitudes and at the same time preventing interstellar travel through the Gate, a black hole in the system; and it is an aboriginal culture that lives on some of the equatorial islands and traditionally moves north to occupy the seat of government during warm periods. Arienrhod plants a clone of hers as a child among the Summers, expecting to train her as a double who can take the throne when the Festival of the Change occurs. The daughter's name is (get this) Moon Dawntreader Summer, and she is desperately in love with her 'brother', named (get this) Sparks Dawntreader Summer. The two of them want to go off and marry but Moon feels the extrasensory attraction of the Sibyls and eventually decides to become a priestess, while Sparks goes to the capital city of (get this) Carbuncle to become a nasty techie. Of course Sparks becomes Arienrhod's boyfriend and the rest of the novel is about Moon trying to win said boyfriend back from Arienrhod. I'm sorry to sound so sarcastic but I expected more from this book, more from a book that won the Hugo award. The writing is occasionally awkward and sometimes descends to the sappiness of a mock romantic novel: 'Arienrhod studied him silently; he felt her measure and weigh with her eyes. He thought a shadow passed across her face, before she nodded. "Challenge him, then. But if you do, and fail, I'll call you a vain little braggart and make love to him on your grave." She caught the winking pendant and drew him down on top of her. '"I won't fail." He found her lips again, hungrily. "And if I can't be your only lover, I'll be the best."' There is no depth to the plot or character, although the setting is nicely drawn (especially the attention to language and social status). Great lengths are gone to in pointing out just how noble and virtuous the good guys are and how cruel and nasty the bad guys are. Sparks starts out as a good guy and I had great hopes that he would turn out to be a bad guy, because he spends half the novel being corrupted by Arienrhod and cultivated into what I was hoping was a despicable brute, but when Sparks reunites with Moon he flies into tears and says he'll never do it again, and Moon BELIEVES him. Argh. The ending is particularly annoying -- the bad guys are foiled with implausible ease and everybody falls in love and goes home happy. The book is just incredibly insubstantial; I am really disappointed. (5.0) EYE OF CAT. Roger Zelazny. Timescape(?). (This one is out on loan; I'll do my best to keep the details straight...) I've been disappointed by Roger Zelazny over the last several years; the only novel of the 'Amber' series that I enjoyed was the first one, and the only other recent novel of his which I felt like buying was DOORWAYS IN THE SAND, which turned out to be light (very light) entertainment. I keep hoping he will do another novel as good as LORD OF LIGHT, a favorite of mine since high school, but he never seems to put it together. EYE OF CAT is not as good as LORD OF LIGHT but I think it is much better than DOORWAYS IN THE SAND. William Blackhorse Singer is an anachronism: he was born a Navajo Indian at the last time when it was possible to be brought up a true Navajo, and he is 150 years old as a result of time dilation. His mind works two ways -- he is both a sophisticated master of technology and a primitive who acts with the mental discipline of a medicine man. Renowned as a hunter, he is recruited by the government to hunt down a religious fanatic from another planet, a telepath and a shapeshifter who is determined to assassinate the representative from his own planet to Earth in an effort to cut off relations. Singer turns to Cat, a shapeshifting being itself, which he caught and imprisoned in a zoo many years ago. Cat surprises Singer: it is both intelligent and telepathic, and it will do the job for one payment: revenge on Singer. The revenge is to take the form of a hunt; if Singer can stay alive for seven days while Cat tracks him, Cat will let him go. The chase is quite thrilling, with a climax in the area of Canyon de Chelly (?) in Arizona, but even scarier is the possibility that something much worse than Cat is tracking Singer... The execution of the book is somewhat uneven but at least Zelazny is playful with his text like he used to be: some of the passages are Navajo-like chants and some are peculiar telepathic conversations. I liked it and I hope it is a sign that Zelazny is thinking of doing even better. (8.0)
andrew@tekecs.UUCP (Andrew Klossner) (08/31/83)
"I sort of wish he [William Goldman] would do another book like
THE PRINCESS BRIDE (a hysterically funny parody of romance and
adventure novels -- highly recommended) but I'll take what I
can get."
Goldman didn't write "The Princess Bride"; rather, he edited it from
the work of a Renaissance Italian author. [Or so he says in the
introduction.]
On the other hand, he certainly has the potential to write this sort of
work, as can be seen in his screenplay, "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid".
-- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP]
(andrew.tektronix@rand-relay) [ARPA]kalash@ucbcad.UUCP (09/02/83)
#R:sdchema:-83200:ucbcad:26800005:000:251 ucbcad!kalash Sep 1 13:00:00 1983 There is NO Morgenstern (sp?, the book is at home). Goldman wrote the book cover to cover. You will be happy to know that he IS coming out with a sequel (who's name I do not remember), I think it is scheduled for sometime this winter. Joe Kalash
barb@oliven.UUCP (Barbara Jernigan) (01/27/86)
A bit back we had a brief discussion about book reviewing. This weekend
I read the following, and thought I'd share it. Enjoy!
Barb
---------------------------------------
REVIEWING
Notes on a complex and puzzling phenomenon -- the book review
--- by Herbert Gold
[Reprinted unabashedly without permission from San Francisco Focus
magazine, February 1986.]
Book reviewing is an erroneous zone. It's time to say something
about the principle of the thing, or as it should be expressed, more
precisely -- with the precision of a mighty laser, of modern technology,
of California know-how -- the principle of the lack of principle.
Writers often have the experience of a happy interjection on the
model of: "I see the _New York Times_ says about your book. . . ."
Actually, the _New York Times_ is like a stately Indian chief; it hardly
speaks, except from its high horse on the editorial page. A particular
reviewer speaks. When I review a book for the _New York Times_, I am what
the smiler means when saying to some squirming novelist, "I see the _New
York Times_ says. . . ."
If the reviewer is young and angrily ambitious, or older and
bitterly disappointed, he or she is likely to ride hard on a successful
professional. The first review I ever wrote for publication was a
vigorously hostile notice of a book by Nelson Algren, _The Man with the
Golden Arm_, which, as the years went by, I found unforgettable. Probably
my theories about the book were correct, but I didn't credit the energy,
the voice, the passion. When, a quarter of a century later, I apologized
to Algren, his eyes grew heavy; he seemed to fall asleep as I spoke. It
was an old story to him. And his rage at the injustice of reviewers had
marinated in him, so that he had reached an Olympian state of paranoia.
Some writers review their enemies. I have been reviewed by ex-
students, by a man who thought I had flirted with his wife, by writers who
had campaigned unsuccessfully to be included in an anthology I was gathering.
I have also been reviewed by my friends. This cannot be avoided. What *can*
be done is to let the reader in on the degree of objectivity. A book is not
a product to be weighed and measured; it is a perspective on reality, and the
reviewer is offering his or her complex and personal perspective on that
perspective.
It's not even complicated -- it's worse -- to review friends well
when their books don't merit it. It's merely low-level cunning; i.e., stupid.
I suffered hurt feelings on behalf of the Muse when a writer I knew called a
soggy novel great -- and at length -- in the New York Review of Each Other's
Books, because the book was written by someone with whom he had film dealings.
I was injured for the editors of the magazine; I was sad for the reviewer; I
might have fainted with chagrin and the vapors, had I not been inured to the
pain by the earlier experience of seeing Ernest Hemingway on his boat in a
beer advertisement.
Not that any reviewing is objective; there is no set of scales for
measuring the worth of a book. This is why browsing in a well-stocked
bookstore remains essential, along with listening to friends and following
such clues as these: I liked V.S. Naipaul's _Guerillas_ and his essays in
_The Return of Eva Peron with The Killings in Trinidad_ -- better look at
his other books, too.
For a reviewer, there should be some decent principle. I'll not
review a book by someone I dislike; I'll not review as an act of revenge.
Twice I've reviewed books by writers I had reason to have personal grudges
against, both times for the _New York Times_, and in my anxiety to be fair,
I gave them both more favorable notices than they deserved. It's too
complicated.
The pleasure of reviewing for this magazine [_Focus_] is that of
speaking in an informal manner to a defined audience [public television
members -- KQED, channel 9] within the mega-family of the San Francisco Bay
Area. We are having a conversation about books with people we might meet
over coffee at Just Desserts or standing up at City Lights in North Beach.
So *caveat lecteur*, friends. You see, in this sort of conversation,
we can even confuse our Latin and French.