Recent Reads wRapup 2005

Other books I've read and intended to comment on during the year. Sic transit gloria.

Sailing to Byzantium, by Robert Silverberg
A projected future of Postrellian dynamic destruction and a society -- like Iain M. Banks' Culture -- in which production is so ridiculously cheap that the greatest concern of humanity's descendants is how to amuse themselves. A person from the 20th century is an amusing diversion. For a while.

Seven American Nights, by Gene Wolfe
Wolfe's novels are always based on intriguing premises, although readers sometimes must resort to cryptological methods to figure out what they are. In this short novella, bound dos-a-dos with Silverberg's Sailing to Byzantium, he projects a future in which American society has imploded due to widespread, slow-acting environmental contamination resulting in pervasive mental retardation and genetic dysfunction. The Middle East (somewhat improbably) has not been affected, and has built a thriving civilization that regards the former superpower with negligent disdain. Nonetheless, certain restless and curious young men remain fascinated by its decaying remnants....

Half in Shadow, by Mary Elizabeth Councilman
All but one of these short stories were originally published in Weird Tales, alongside the more sanguinary exploits of Conan the Barbarian and H.P. Lovecraft's neurotic, doomed protagonists. Many of them are set in the backwoods of the author's native South, and this infuses them with a different atmosphere than Lovecraft's grim, grey, haunted New England or R.E. Howard's imaginary Hyperborea. The author says, in her preface, that "the Hallowe'en scariness of the bumbling-but kindly Wizard of Oz has always appealed to me more than the gruesome, morbid fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and those later authors who were influenced by their doom philosophies." Even so, one is hard-pressed to find a story with a happy ending. Some of the stories ("The Twister", "A Death Crown for Mr. Hapworthy", and "Night Court", for example) are merely competent reiterations of rather tired themes of occult fatalism. But there are some gems buried here as well. "The Three Marked Pennies", "The Shot-Tower Ghost", and "The Tree's Wife" are minor classics, and well worth seeking out. The only non-WT story in the collection, "A Handful of Silver", might make a good story for a certain kind of Christmas storytelling party.

Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books, by Azar Nafisi

The Callahan Chronicals, by Spider Robinson.
Tipsy, ironical fun with time-travellers, space aliens, and others who somehow manage to stumble onto the ultimate good-time bar. Great fun.

Spiritwalk, by Charles de Lint.
I enjoy de Lint's book reviews in F&SF, but for some reason I've never found his books particularly compelling. The writing is quite competent, but his characters, although appealing, all seem to be cast from the same mold of good-hearted New-Agey urban bohemians, and I find the rather fuzzy mysticism that appears in most of the stories to be unconvincing. I enjoyed this one because of its setting in de Lint's hometown of Ottawa and the mountains and lakes of Gatineau Park. Even so, I couldn't figure out quite what was going on with Emma/Esmerelda's "split personality", and the mixture of native-American and European mythology never seemed to make sense.

Moonlight and Vines : a Newford collection, by Charles de Lint.
On the other hands, de Lint's short stories are consistently excellent. Perhaps I have a problem with my attention span. Or perhaps Jilly Coppercorn and company are best enjoyed in small doses.

A Civil Campaign, by Lois McMaster Bujold.
I enjoy Bujold's Vorkosigan books, even though I frequently suspect her of stacking the deck in favor of her physically-stunted but hyperintellectual protagonist. In this installment, Miles Vorkosigan-- after being burned in a number of cross-cultural romances -- sets his sights on matrimony with a young widow from his own planet. Unfortunately, sex-selective genetic engineering has caused a grievous lack of marriageable women in Barrayaran high society, and every other testosterone-soaked young blade in the relentlessly competitive capital city has the same idea. Meanwhile, the Emperor's controversial impending marriage is causing political chaos. And there is that slight problem of Miles being involved in the death of the lady's husband....

A Bookman's Fantasy : how science fiction became respectable / Twenty four essays by Fred Lerner
Many years ago, part of Mr. Lerner's essay on the possibilities of model railroads set in fictional worlds like Middle Earth, Lake Wobegon, or Islandia was quoted in a column in a model railroading magazine which I read and promptly mislaid. Finding that essay reprinted in its entireity was the most pleasant surprise I encountered in this slim collection from NESFA. There are plenty of other pleasant surprises: a proposed (but admittedly inadequate) system for classifying science-fiction, reflections on how libraries should respond to floods of newly-published material, commentaries on Heinlein and Lovecraft, the proposed charter of the Vermont Council on Tackiness, and a whimsical account of a day in the Commonwealth of John Myers Myers' Silverlock. Well worth seeking out for librarians, readers of fantasy & SF, and anyone else who loves books.

Meditations of a Great Lakes Sailor : a novel, by Stanley B. Graham
I picked this up because I was curious about the everyday lives of the men who live and work on the freighters that ply the Great Lakes. According to the preface, many of the characters and events in the book were closely based on the author's experiences during a summer working on just such a freighter. I got what I was looking for -- the descriptions of the ship's quarters and crew are convincing and detailed -- but it's also a good coming-of-age story. Even though the writing is a bit clumsy at times, the inherent interest of the story kept me forging onward as the protagonist encountered dangerous tasks, impossible physical demands, exhaustion, rough humor, petty backbiting, and the complications of shoreside relationships with women. And eventually, through the problems of a crewmate, found himself drawn involuntarily toward his eventual profession. Anyone who's considered ditching the academic or professional career track for a blue-collar job should read this book.

How did I get to be 40 & other atrocities, by Judith Viorst.
Slight but amusing free verse about the vicissitudes of marriage and family life, circa 1973. "Leonard the Liberated Husband" sticks in my mind more than the others.

Red Dwarf : infinity welcomes careful drivers, by Grant Naylor
Novelization of the famed British SF comedy. Like the show, it's funny and satirical, especially about the professional and hygeinic shortcomings of its protagonist, Lister. It also has some of the casual, Douglas Adams-inspired nihilism of the TV show, and follows that to its logical conclusion. I was surprised that the book's ending took this approach. I don't recall ever seeing the final episodes of the television show, so I don't know whether it concluded the same way.

My Mother's Body : poems by Marge Piercy
"The Good Go Down", "Your cats are your children", "Return of the prodigal darling", and "Why marry at all?" are standouts.

The Ordways, by William Humphrey
A Faulknerish treatment of the East Texas frontier, told through the experiences of one family.

Rockets, Redheads & Revolution, by James P. Hogan
A collection of essays, memories, and minor stories from a prolific SF writer, mostly humorous (as when he claims credit for destroying Communism at a total cost of $8.43) but occasionally deadly serious (as when he argues that accepted means of treating AIDS are wrongheaded.) Unfortunately, I don't remember many more details, although I did enjoy it. (Honest.)

What is this thing called love : poems, by Kim Addonizio
Addonizio seems to have put aside the sonnet-form that she occasionally used in her previous collection Tell Me, although she still uses traditional poetic forms more than many other modern poets. That's ironic, because her subject matter is anything but staid. She's still fascinated by sensuality, by sweaty bodies, gin glasses, loud music and self-destructive excess. Her poems are often sexual and occasionally vulgar, but she regularly hits emotional bullseyes. In this collection from 2004, she seems to be increasingly aware of the passage of time and its effect on human lives and bodies. In "Ex-Boyfriends",

...they're over
you now. One writes a book in which a woman

who sounds suspiciously like you
is the first to be sadistically dismembered
by a serial killer. They're getting married

and want you to be the first to know,
or they've been fired and need a loan,
their new girlfriend hates you,

and they say they don't miss you but show up
in your dreams, calling to you from the shoeboxes
where they're buried in rows in your basement....

From "31-Year-Old Lover":

... He stands naked in my bedroom and nothing
has harmed him yet, though he is going
to be harmed. He is going to have a gut one day,
and wiry gray hairs where the soft dark filaments
flow out of him, the cream of his skin is going
to loosen and separate slowly, over a low steady flame
and he has no idea, as I had no idea,
and I am not going to speak of this to him ever,
I am going to let him stretch out on my bed
so I can take the heavy richness of him in
and in, I am going to have it back the only way I can.

Is it one of our unacknowledged rites of passage to realize that songs and poems about young love and young lovers can no longer apply to oneself?

Shadow of a doubt, by William J. Coughlin
Noirish tale of a washed-up Detroit attorney who has one last chance at a high-profile murder case. The shocking revelation at the end of the trial is not so much of a shock now as it was when the book was published in 1991, but it's still a good read.

The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane.
This is one of those stories that I was supposed to have read in high school. I didn't, of course. I just picked up enough from the classroom discussions to fake my way through the exam. It's just as well; I probably wouldn't have appreciated the protagonist's talent for self-deception at that time.

The Kedrigern Chronicles, Vol. 1 and 2, by John Morressy
A pieced-together series of stories about the wizard Kedrigern of Silent Thunder Mountain. They were originally published separately in F&SF and (perhaps?) other magazines, and although this sometimes makes for rather disjointed transitions, they fit together reasonably coherently. It's pleasant to read, once in a while, about a fantasy-world hero who is cranky, opinionated, and stubborn, and whose greatest desire is to make a reasonable amount of money and be left in blessed peace in his idyllic mountain cottage. Of course, that wouldn't make for much of a story. Nor would it keep his beloved wife Princess happy. (She's flighty. Really. Has wings. Pretty ones, like a butterfly. When she's not been turned into a frog by some dastardly curse, that is.)

I've enjoyed the Kedrigern stories that I came across in F&SF, and this collection is enjoyable light reading.

The Castle of the Louvre, by Michel Fleury & Venceslas Kruta
A gift from Yam and S. after their late-2003 honeymoon trip to Paris. They know me well enough to know that I'd be more interested in a historical and archaeological dissection of a defunct castle than in a coffeetable book of paintings.

Nekropolis, by Maureen F. McHugh
Hariba, a young Muslim woman in a near-future version of Morocco, has been biochemically "jessed" to be a perfectly loyal, perfectly subservient houseslave. Akhmim is another valuable possession of the merchant who purchases her, an artificially-engineered man designed to be a perfectly skilled, perfectly amoral synthetic lover. What could possibly go wrong?

The Old Spanish Missions of California, by Hubert A. Lowman
A belated souveiner of my interview trip to southern California, found in a library discard sale here in Michigan.

The Calling of Bara, by Sheila Sullivan
Eh.

Star Soldiers, by Andre Norton.
Military space opera. Eh.

The Eyre Affair, by Jasper Fforde.
I like the premise of Fforde's novels about Thursday Next, Literary Detective. And I enjoyed this book. However, I don't think it will become a part of my long term personal collection. The story's enjoyable and funny but I can't imagine wanting to read it again. It's like a sugar puff.

The Swordswoman, by Jessica Amanda Salmonson
A disappointing novel about a woman swordfighter from Earth who is transported to a fantasy world where she has various & sundry adventures. It's disappointing because I've read the author's website and some of her posts to listservs, and I know she's capable of being much more witty and stinging than this. There are a few interesting ideas in the book, but they're rendered unpalatable by the clunky third-person prose. The rather stiff and amateurish illustrations don't help -- they're below par even for 1970s book club editions. Maybe she Did It For the Money.

Little, Big, by John Crowley.
I love the premise of this novel. I love stories about big, eccentric, mysterious houses with big, mysterious gardens and forests, and I love stories about whimsical and eccentric families, and I love stories about elusive creatures of myth co-existing with the modern world. Unfortunately, for some reason I simply could not stay focused on the slow-moving plot of this book. I'll set it aside to try again later.

Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine
It's been said by several different people on several different listservs that many of the best fantasy books being published nowadays are in the young-adult market. This book supports that assertion. It's clever and thoughtful and funny. (For the uninitiated: At her birth, Ella was given the "gift of obedience" by an airheaded fairy. Consequently, she must follow any command, which causes grave complications when her mother dies and her father remarries a vicious woman with two equally vicious daughters, who order her to give them her possessions and do kitchen work like sweeping up cinders. Yes, she's *that* Cinder-Ella.) In a recent discussion on the FictionMags listserv, it was pointed out that a similar plot was used by a story published in the 1940's. It was also pointed out that the movie version was tacky and tasteless and vulgar, a view with which I must reluctantly concur.

Differing with Dr. Donne, by Neill Megaw
These two sonnets published in the online magazine The New Formalist demonstrate that the sonnet is still a useful poetic vehicle.

The Pendragon Banner, by Sylvia Hamilton
Another Christmas gift from 2004. I enjoyed the beginning of the book, with its description of the aging Queen Guinevere and of King Arthur's legendary war standard falling into the hands of Viking raiders. The rest of the book is a reasonably good medieval adventure/detective tale but doesn't sustain the same level of interest.

Down the Road, Worlds Away, by Rahila Khan
Stories of young Muslim women and thick-headed young English men both trying to survive and find some kind of satisfaction with their lives in modern Britain. Originally published as part of the Virago Upstarts series of young female writers. The publisher was embarrassed when "Rahila Khan" turned out to be the pseudonym of a male Anglican vicar, rather than an Indian or Pakistani woman. (As Theodore Dalrymple points out, it seems they might have noticed that all the stories about young men were written in the first person, while all the stories of the Indian and Pakistani women were written in third person.) The publisher's spiteful response -- destroying all unsold copies and refusing to reprint it -- makes the book hard to obtain. I had to get it by interlibrary loan and then photocopy it in order to have a copy to refer back to. It's worth the effort, mostly for the stories about the young women and their difficulties in dealing with the gaping chasm between traditional (and frequently repressive) families and the culture around them that offers freedom mixed with prejudice. "Bleeding Hearts", in which a young Muslim woman tries to find spirital solace -- a "god for women" -- in a Catholic chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary, is one of the most effective. One can't help but think that the author drew on personal experience in writing that story.

The Moffat Road, by Edward T. Bollinger and Frederick Bauer
The Denver and Salt Lake Railroad was one of the most exciting stories in western railroad history. It was born out of the desire of Denver merchants to have a direct route to the Pacific. All the other transcontinental railroads -- even Denver's own Denver & Rio Grande -- had dodged the Rocky Mountain's formidable Front Range that towered west of Denver. No matter. The D&SL (then known as the Denver, Northwestern & Pacific) attacked the mountains head-on, scrabbling its way up a route that most dismissed as impossible. It crossed the continental divide at more than 11,000 feet elevation with a hair-raising "temporary" route that strongly resembled a roller-coaster built by a deranged giant, and used some of the first articulated steam locomotives ever built to haul freight and passengers over that "temporary" route from 1905 until 1928, when it was finally able to reroute its traffic through the Moffat Tunnel and avoid the worst of the mountain grades and winter snowfall. Meanwhile, its founder fell victim to financial ruin; speculators looted the public purse through contemporary versions of public-private partnerships; and the railroad eventually came under the control of its archrival the Denver & Rio Grande, which finally gave it a western connection for through traffic. A great railroad story, with plenty of atmospheric black-and-white photographs. I would have appreciated a more complete and better-organized set of maps, though.

Fiddle Hill, by James McCague
This story seems to have been inspired by the tales of the D&SL's terror-inducing "temporary" line over Rollins Pass. The fictional Fiddle Hill of the title is the most mountainous section of a transcontinental railroad, which has lately been rendered superflous by the construction of a tunnel that bypasses its stiff grades and a corporate merger that routes traffic away from it. The novel has an elegiac feeling and a smoky, atmospheric setting. The author has a feel for the ponderous, bulky gravitas of the articulated steam locomotives that trod such mountain paths, and for the stoic determination of the men who piloted them, forever vigilant against the dangers of runaway trains and wild weather. If his feel for the internal lives of the female characters is somewhat less sure, well, that goes with the territory.

The Black Diamonds, by Clark Ashton Smith
A curiosity. Smith wrote this Arabian-nights-influenced novel when he was a precocious teenager. It was never published during his lifetime. In truth, it's really not that good a novel. It's good for a teenager, but anyone other than the CAS completist needn't bother seeking it out.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling

Casa Loma : Toronto's Fairy Tale Castle and its owner, Sir Henry Pellatt, by Bill Freeman
I do enjoy some coffee-table books.

The God File, by Frank Turner Hollon.

Late addition: Enlightenment and Jigsaw, by Douglas Smith. These two chapbooks -- "For your consideration for the Aurora Awards" -- were handed out at the SF miniconference that Fiend & I attended in Sarnia earlier in the year. They're both built around the old-fashioned SFnal motif of the protagonist solving a problem. In Enlightenment, the population of a colonized world refuses to explain the purpose of its strange sculptural constructions, even under threat of death. Until the colonizers force their hand by threatening something *really* important.... I enjoyed the story but found the ending unconvincing. That's the problem with stories about enlightenment. Unless the author really is a bodhisattva, it's impossible to describe it. Jigsaw was a more satisfying story, possibly because it aims lower (both literally and metaphysically). It's an old-fashioned problem-solving exercise in story form. There's one rather embarassing engineering blunder in the story, involving a power failure on a spaceship:

The ship lurched again, and the light from the glowing walls blinked out. People screamed. Cassie stumbled and fell. And kept falling, waiting for the impact against the floor that never came, until she realized what had happened.

"The ring's stopped rotating," she thought. "We've lost artificial gravity."

She floated in darkness for maybe thirty minutes, bumping into others, surrounded by whispers, shouts, and sobbing. Suddenly, the lights flicked back on. Cassie felt gravity returning like an invisible hand tugging at her guts, followed by a sudden heaviness in her limbs....

Just why this is a blunder is left as an exercise for the interested reader. The main puzzle-problem in the story is better thought out, though. I enjoyed it. Sadly, though, I would not have been eligible to nominate the story for the Aurora Awards even if I had read it before the deadline and felt inclined to do so.

Th-th-that's all, folks. Next up: a scintillating account of my annual Christmas trip and associated reading. Also, a belated New Year's post. (Yay.)