redford%avoid.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (07/23/85)
From: redford%avoid.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (John Redford) Two other SF novels heavily involved with music are "On Wings of Song" by Thomas Disch, and "Tintagel" by Paul Cook. The premise in OWoS is that with mechanical aid a good singer can release her/his soul from the body and flutter off to Nirvana. A Midwestern farm boy yearns to become a singer, and has many satiric adventures on on the way. Disch gets in lots of (undeserved!) jabs at Iowa and America in general. He writes like a non-luuded-out Kurt Vonnegut and is always worth reading, but usually depressing. "Tintagel" is unusual in that the music in it is all modern classical. The idea here is that if you are infected with a certain plague, music has the literal power to take you to another world. You disappear in a small "Poof!" of inrushing air, and appear in the world evoked by the piece. The more familiar the music the easier it is to vanish, so traditional classical music and popular music have been banned. People still crave music of some form, so twentieth century classical is revived, since no one but a few connoiseurs knows it. People are still disappearing, though, so our hero (who has the ability to return from the evoked worlds) has to bring them back. The premise is kind of interesting, but not well handled. The author obviously loves modern classical, and resorted to this somewhat tortuous device to work it into a story. John Redford