donn@utah-cs (05/26/85)
From: donn@utah-cs (Donn Seeley) I bought the latest novels by James Tiptree, Jr, T E D Klein and Rudy Rucker in hardcover because I had high expectations of them. I now find that I'm not quite satisfied with any of the books, each for different reasons, and I suppose that should teach me something about holding expectations (or buying hardcovers!). The best of the three is probably the Tiptree book, BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR (Tor, Feb. 1985, 382 pp.). The story involves a large cast of characters (thoughtfully laid out in an appendix at the end, which is useful for those times when you forget who does what), all of whom, for one reason or another, are present on the planet Damiem when it is passed by the final shell of ionized particles shed in the explosion of the star Vlyracocha. The spectacular auroral display and time distortions are used by the bad guys to distract from some covert activities, and the action in the novel proceeds along the lines of a genre thriller a la Alastair Maclean or Robert Ludlum. It's not all that bad a thriller, but I expected something more given the excellent past work by Tiptree/Sheldon. I was somewhat mollifed by some clever footwork at the end which casts a shadow on the usual happily-ever-after thriller ending... T E D Klein was until recently the editor of TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE, and is the author of a superbly nasty horror novella called 'Children of the Kingdom'. His first novel, THE CEREMONIES (Viking, c1984, 505pp.), is a Gothic horror story about a young New Yorker who decides to rent a room for the summer on a farm in the New Jersey countryside, not realizing that he is being manipulated by a mysterious Old One who is determined to destroy the world by performing an elaborate Ceremony. The man is a student of Gothic horror, and of course a number of tributes are paid to past classics over the course of the novel. The writing is clear and straightforward, the characterizations are nicely done, but... as is the case with many other Gothics, the novel's plot unfolds at a truly glacial pace. After 500 pages, the climax just didn't seem to make up for the detailed, patient, thorough build-up. The comment by Stephen King on the back of the jacket compares this book to Straub's GHOST STORY, but I think King or Straub would have provided a more suspenseful or theatrical ending and probably would have done better at tying up loose ends. Rudy Rucker's latest novel is MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME (Bluejay, Nov. 1984, 229 pp.). For those who've read Rucker's previous stuff, such as THE SEX SPHERE or THE 57TH FRANZ KAFKA, you should know that this is a 'Harry and Fletch' story as well as a sequel to SPHERE. The idea of the story is that there exists a device called the 'blunzer', which uses free gluons to change the value of Planck's constant in the region of the operator's head, turning the operator into what amounts to God. The idea allows to Rucker to blast away at the structure of the universe, particularly in New Jersey, which gets invaded by Godzilla (GWEEEEEEEEEEENT!), taken over by large, slimy, parasitic brains, and infested by bizarre plant life (pork chop bushes?). The problem with MASTER is that the notion is just too damn powerful -- if you can do anything, it doesn't really matter what you do... The 'rolling snowball' approach to weirdness that works so well in SPHERE doesn't work at all for MASTER. Buy it in paperback. (Another good reason to buy it in paperback is the relatively poor production by Bluejay. One peeve of mine is the large point size used for the print; I read the book from cover to cover in a little more than two hours, making me wonder if the $14.95 price isn't covering a lot of extra paper...) 'Although I couldn't share Harry's pleasure at the unearthly smells, this stretch of the Jersey Turnpike was one of my favorite places. I was particularly fond of the refinery cracking towers, those great abstract totems of knotted pipe and wire. And the big storage tanks, the code-painted conduits, the webs of scaffolding, the catwalks, the great pulsing gas flares -- all sheerly functional, yet charged with surreal meaning. I felt like a cockroach in a pharmacy.' -- from MASTER Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn