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| 0345331389
| 9780345331380
| 0345331389
| 3.81
| 58,279
| Feb 07, 1912
| Dec 12, 1985
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liked it
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Hugely Influential Planetary Romance from 1912 - A Pulpy Swashbuckling Tale This book may not be great literature, and the author was not ashamed to ad Hugely Influential Planetary Romance from 1912 - A Pulpy Swashbuckling Tale This book may not be great literature, and the author was not ashamed to admit he wasn't aiming for that, but he know he could write a pulp romance better than much of the pulp being published at the time, and made good use of his varied job experiences in mining, as a cowboy, training for the military, and having a Civil War Confederate veteran father. The story is full of bravado, fighting again impossible odds, preposterous plot, simplistic good vs bad characters, a beautiful princess who is constantly being captured and fought over, and an absurdly handsome, strapping, manly fighting here who has superhuman strength on Mars thanks to being used to the stronger gravity of Earth. It's pretty ridiculous stuff, but if you were a young impressionable reader back in those days, it must have been incredibly exciting to read. Famous scientist Carl Sagan took inspiration, and giants of the SF Golden Age as well, particularly Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein. One of the best aspects of the book is really the dying world and barbaric civilizations of Mars, which he does evoke with panache. It is a massive influence on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), the Bradbury's writing skills put Burroughs to shame. The influence on Jack Vance's Dying Earth books is equally obvious, so we must give credit for that. There is also a lot about racial ideas of character, bravery, empathy, cruelty, intelligence, etc, as Burroughs was a major believer in eugenics and the racial superiority of White Europeans. Because of the science fantasy tropes the non-white races are often aliens (except for the Red Martians), which masks some of the racism, but that unpleasant streak is far more evident in his even more iconic Tarzan of the Apes series. ...more |
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Mar 14, 2022
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Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 11, 2022
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| 0809556650
| 9780809556656
| 0809556650
| 4.15
| 729
| 1931
| 2007
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it was amazing
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The Most Eccentric, Baroque, Sinister, and Occult of Storytellers, on Par with Lovecraft The Big Three of Weird Tales in the 1930s were HP Lovecraft, R The Most Eccentric, Baroque, Sinister, and Occult of Storytellers, on Par with Lovecraft The Big Three of Weird Tales in the 1930s were HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Lovecraft is of course the most famous for his Cthulhu stories, Howard for his Conan stories, and Smith less well-known among readers for a lack of iconic stories or characters, but my goodness his prose puts Lovecraft to shame in terms of sheer baroque verbosity and lurking occult evil. Some may love it, others may find it purple and over the top, but I guarantee nobody will be left unaffected by the eccentric genius of a reclusive writer who read whole dictionaries front to back and taught himself several languages on his own, through an obsessive love of words and poetry (actually his first passion). Once I got used to his dark themes and doomed tales, I found them incredibly compelling. A one-of-a-kind writer who most undoubtedly influenced many generations of horror writers that came after. ...more |
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Mar 29, 2022
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Jun 04, 2022
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Mar 09, 2022
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| 3.75
| 195
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Aug 20, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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| 0871404060
| 9780871404060
| 0871404060
| 3.48
| 18,908
| Jun 30, 1962
| Jul 23, 2012
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really liked it
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The Drowned World: Diving into the pellucid depths of our racial memories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Drowned World (1962) is J.G. Balla The Drowned World: Diving into the pellucid depths of our racial memories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Drowned World (1962) is J.G. Ballard’s best apocalyptic work, the other two being The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), but if you are thinking of an action-packed adventure where a plucky group of survivors clings to decency amid the collapse of civilization, this is the wrong book. Ballard was interested in ‘inner space,’ and while he sometimes adopted SF tropes in his books and short stories, his works most often featured natural disasters, the collapse of civilization, lonely astronauts, grim future urban landscapes, and weird obsessions with technology and mechanization. His main intent was to explore the psychology of human beings trapped in modern urban societies (and what happens when these societies collapse), and most of his protagonists are fatalistic, detached, and not particularly concerned about saving the world. It would very interesting to compare this to Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), since both are literary works that employ genre elements but have vastly different agendas and conclusions about the human condition. J.G. Ballard is probably best known for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), relating the story of when he and his family were living in Shanghai and were placed in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. The book was made into a film by Stephen Spielberg in 1987, which brought the author much greater attention than before. However, his importance to the SF genre dates back to the early 1960s and 1970s, when he was a pivotal figure in the New Wave movement (inspired by experimental writers like William S. Burroughs), known for his efforts to inject more literary themes to a genre previously known for rocket ships, robots, and aliens. In 1962 he said “science fiction should turn its back on space, on interstellar travel, extra-terrestrial life forms, (and) galactic wars”. However, his focus on bleak psychological inner landscapes was certainly not always welcome to SF readers looking for fun, exciting escapes to exotic worlds. So there are plenty of people who don’t want Ballard associated with the genre, and my impression is that the author himself didn’t have a particularly close relationship with traditional SF fandom. He was, however, closely associated with New Worlds, a British SF magazine edited by Michael Moorcock from the early 1960s. Other major New Wave writers include Samuel R. Delany, Roger Zelazny, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Silverberg, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), and many others. Ballard said in a 1962 New Worlds article: I’ve often wondered why s-f shows so little of the experimental enthusiasm which has characterized painting, music and the cinema during the last four or five decades, particularly as these have become wholeheartedly speculative, more and more concerned with the creation of new states of mind, constructing fresh symbols and languages where the old cease to be valid. The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that need to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth. In the past the scientific bias of s-f has been towards the physical sciences – rocketry, electronics, cybernetics – and the emphasis should switch to the biological sciences. Accuracy, that last refuge of the unimaginative, doesn’t matter a hoot. …It is that inner space-suit which is still needed, and it is up to science fiction to build it! Although I cannot describe the full impact of New Wave SF on the genre itself in the context of this review, suffice to say that it had a strong reaction among SF readers and writers. It introduced new literary approaches to the traditional Golden Age stories and imagery, so the field now features a wide range of themes and styles, both old-school and experimental. Regardless of why type of SFF you prefer, it’s undeniable that the field matured and expanded tremendously during that period of the 60s and 70s. It’s no coincidence that society and the world itself were also undergoing profound changes as well. In any case, let’s get back to The Drowned World. The story outline is quite simple. An increase in solar flare activity has melted the polar ice caps, increasing ocean levels and flooding most cities and coastlines around the world. Mass migrations, starvation, conflicts, and chaos have reigned, but Ballard dispatches that period in a few pen-strokes, taking us far into the future of 2154 and a flooded London dominated by lagoons, tropical plants, lizards, bats, and intense heat and humidity. The city is deserted other than a scattering of human scavengers and eccentric holdouts. Our protagonist is biologist Dr. Robert Kerans, who is part of a small scientific survey team sent to catalog the flora and fauna of this transformed landscape. Here is a description from the book: All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life. Along with fellow scientist Dr. Bodkin, his only other companion is Beatrice Dahl, a woman who occupies one of the abandoned hotels and lives a life of bored decadence and ennui, living off the stored food supplies of a collapsed civilization, along with portable generators to power the A/C systems that can sustain comfort amid temperatures that reach 180 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. The two scientists languidly catalog their discoveries, but it is clear that this activity is pointless, because humanity will likely never reconquer the lost cities of its peak. There is also a military unit dispatched with them, partly for protection and partly to explore. However, Dr. Kierans and his companions begin to experience strange dreams of ancient lagoons and jungles, which they theorize come from humanity’s racial consciousness of events as far back as the Triassic Age. It seems far-fetched, but Ballard writes about it with conviction and detail: And how else can you explain the universal but completely groundless loathing of the spider, only one species of which has ever been known to sting? Or hatred of snakes and reptiles? Simply because we all carry within us a submerged memory of the time when the giant spiders were lethal, and when the reptiles were the planet’s dominant life form. These are the oldest memories on earth, the time codes carried in every chromosome and gene. Every step we’ve taken in our evolution is a milestone inscribed with organic memories. From the enzymes controlling the carbon-dioxide cycle, to the organization of the brachial plexus and the nerve pathways of the pyramid cells of the mid-brain. Each is a record of a thousand decisions taken in a chemical crisis. Just as psychoanalysis reconstructs the original traumatic situation in order to release the repressed material, so we are now being plunged back into the archaeopsychic past, uncovering the ancient taboos and drives that have been dormant for epochs. Ballard dives deep into his understanding of the human unconscious, and while it may not be in keeping with current schools of thought, and I unfortunately am not familiar with Jungian or Freudian psychology, I certainly found his ideas intriguing and seductive while listening to the audiobook, to the point where I went to the trouble to transcribe these passages for your reading pleasure: The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time. The further down the Central Nervous System you move, from the hindbrain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae… is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory ribcages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and the Triassic Eras. If you like, you could call this the psychology of total equivalence, let’s say neuronics for short, and dismiss it as biological fantasy. However, I am convinced as we move back through geophysical time, so we reenter the amnionic corridor, and move back through spinal and archeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch, each with a distinct ecological terrain, its own flora and fauna, as recognizable to anyone else as they would be to a traveler in a Wellsian time machine. Except that this is no scenic railway, but a total reorientation of the personality. If we let these buried phantoms master us as we reappear, we’ll be swept back helplessly in the floodtide like pieces of flotsam. When the military unit insists on returning north, Dr. Kierans and his companions contrive to remain in the enervating, intense heat of London. They encounter a sinister group of scavengers led by a diabolic but charming figure named Strangman, who takes a liking to Kierans and Beatrice in the hopes that they will share knowledge of where to find the best treasures in the drowned city. They dive to explore a submerged planetarium, which is described in hypnotic detail that explicitly recalls a return to the womb, but Kierans also experiences a near-death incident, which does not seem to overly concern him. When Strangman finds a way to shore up a lagoon and drain it, the exposed city is like the unveiling of the unconscious and breaking of the dream state that Kierans and his companions have fallen into. Fellow biologist Bodkins describes it well: To use the symbolic language of Bodkin’s scheme, he would then be abandoning the conventional estimates of time in relation to his own physical needs, and entering the world of total neuronic time, where the massive intervals of the geological timescale calibrated his existence. Here, a million years was the shortest working unit, and the problems of food and clothing were as irrelevant as they would have been to a Buddhist contemplative lotus-squatting before an empty rice bowl under the protective canopy of the million-headed cobra of eternity. That wasn’t a true dream, but an ancient organic memory millions of years old. The innate releasing mechanisms laid down in your cytoplasm have been awakened. The expanding sun and rising temperatures are driving you back down to the spinal levels into the drowned seas of the lowest layers of your unconscious, into the entirely new zone of the neuronic psyche. This is the lumbar transfer, total psychic recall. We really remember these swamps and lagoons. Finally, Kierans and Beatrice find themselves alone, freed from both the military unit and Strangman’s gang, and instead of the credits rolling as they look hopefully into the future, planning to rebuild civilization and learn from the mistakes of the past (like every ridiculous Hollywood post-apocalyptic fable), they instead languidly slip back into their neuronic past, satisfied to lose themselves in antiquity. The continued increase in temperature and the enervating humidity made it almost impossible to leave the hotel after ten o’clock in the morning. The lagoons and the jungle were filled with fire until four o’clock, by when he was usually too tired to do anything but return to bed. All day he sat by the shuttered windows of the suites, listening from the shadows to shifting movement of mesh cage as it expanding and contracted with the heat. Already many of the surrounding buildings had disappeared beneath the proliferating vegetation. Huge club mosses and calamites blotted out the white rectangular faces, shading the lizards in their window lairs. Beyond the lagoon, the endless tides of silt had begun to accumulate into enormous glittering banks, here and there overtopping the shoreline like the immense tippings of some distant goldmine. The light drummed against his brain, bathing the submerged levels below his consciousness, carrying him downwards to warm pellucid depths, where the nominal realities of time and space ceased to exist. Guided by his dreams, he was moving back into his emergent past, through a succession of ever stranger landscapes centered on the lagoon, each of which seemed to represent one of his own spinal levels. At times the circle of water was spectral and vibrant, at others slack and murky. The shore apparently formed of shale, like the dull, metallic skin of a reptile. Yet again the soft beaches would glow invitingly with a glassy carmine sheen, the sky warm and limpid, the emptiness of the long stretches of sand total and absolute, filling with an exquisite and tender anguish. He longed for this descent into psycheoneuronic time to reach its conclusion, repressing the knowledge that when it did, the external world would become alien and unbearable. There’s no question that The Drowned World is not everyone’s cup of tea, but I think it’s also fair to say that he wrote some of the strangest and most challenging books that have been associated with SF, even though many would reject them. The New Wave movement has left its mark on the genre. The most extreme examples of Ballard would be Crash (1973), his bizarre tribute to the eroticism of the car crash that was filmed by David Cronenberg in 1996, and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), an experimental collection of ‘condensed novels’ that was so controversial that Nelson Doubleday has the entire first US printing destroyed out of concerns for legal action, since stories had titles like “Plans for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” “Love and Napalm: Export USA,” and “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.” I doubt I would ever want to read these books, but it is important to note that they were written. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 25, 2015
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Oct 2015
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Sep 25, 2015
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| 188296828X
| 9781882968282
| 188296828X
| 4.08
| 17,862
| May 1944
| Jan 01, 2004
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it was ok
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City: Pastoral SF classic where Rover takes over Originally posted at Fantasy Literature City is a well-loved classic by Clifford D. Simak published ba City: Pastoral SF classic where Rover takes over Originally posted at Fantasy Literature City is a well-loved classic by Clifford D. Simak published back in 1952 and awarded the International Fantasy Award in 1954. It’s actually a collection of linked far-future stories written between 1944 and 1951 about men, mutants, dogs, robots, ants and stranger beings still. It’s told as a series of episodes that trace the evolution of the various species as they reach out to space, but also follows the fates of those groups that remain on Earth. I would describe Simak’s writing style as “pastoral,” “contemplative,” “philosophical,” and “understated,” and as he was born in rural Wisconsin, there is a recurring theme in his books of rugged Midwestern individuals who take greater pleasure in solitude and the countryside than in crowded cities. As his favorite pastimes were fishing, chess, stamp collecting, and gardening, it’s easy to see how his personality makes its way into his stories. He was designated a SFWA Grand Master and was well regarded in the SF field. However, for readers with more modern sensibilities, his books may seem very quaint and uneventful. Certainly I wouldn’t consider his books “fast-paced” or “intense.” But if your temperament is aligned with his, you might like his work. In City, we are introduced to the Webster family, who live in the countryside in a future where humanity has developed a decentralized society of independent farms and abandoned city life. As this is the exact opposite of how the world has developed in our world, it’s interesting to speculate how much of this is wish fulfillment for Simak, and how much is based on unbiased extrapolation. I’d hazard that after WWII, based on the explosive growth of suburbs and urban jobs, it’s hard to argue that people would move towards a more agrarian existence, although he does give the threat of nuclear attack as an incentive to live more decentralized lives on farms with their dogs and robots. The story proceeds to show how robots become increasingly sophisticated and start to develop intelligence, centered on a faithful robot servant named Jenkins (I wonder if he had the butler’s outfit or not). There is also a faithful dog named Towser. There are many hokey scenes of Webster men hunting with their dogs and going after squirrels and rabbits and so on, and these really bored me, but they might appeal to readers yearning for simple country life. The early parts of the book really lacked any kind of narrative energy, as very little happens, and I found it hard to care much about the main characters. From there the stories move out into space, as mankind seeks to colonize Jupiter, an inhospitable gaseous environment. To survive there, they must take the drastic step of transforming their bodies to a more suitable form, which opens up telepathic communication between man and dogs (who also went through the process). The new bodies and lifestyle are more appealing than human life back on Earth, and these creatures choose to remain on Jupiter. Later on, other humans decide to migrate to Jupiter as well, leaving on a small scattering of humans back on Earth. I found this story fairly hard to follow, even though the ideas were interesting. Later stories jump 10,000 years further into the future, when dog civilization has taken over the Earth, assisted by robots. Dogs have developed a pacifist society where all animals are respected and not eaten anymore. Dogs are less interested in the mechanical and intellectual pursuits of humans, but instead pursue more intuitive directions. Meanwhile, there are small enclaves of Websters (a synonym for humans) still surviving, but they live a lonely existence bereft of initiative, and many decide to go into hibernation in the hopes of seeing a better future for humans. At the same time, some new beings called “cobblies” appear, and apparently they can travel between worlds. The robot Jenkins (who is remarkably still around, still faithfully doing his best butler impression) finds a way to emulate this ability to enter other worlds, and decides that humans would be better off somewhere away from dog civilization. My interest at this point was flagging pretty badly, so I really had a tough time keeping up with the story’s details. In the finals parts of City, Simak returns his focus to Earth, which has now been taken over by an Ant City, a process first began by a mutant telepath in one of the earlier stories who has meddled in human affairs but has little sympathy for normal men. Throughout the stories the mutants co-exist with other beings only grudgingly. The ever-helpful Jenkins seeks a solution for the ants by consulting with the last Websters, but they merely suggest poisoning the ants to destroy them. As the dogs are a pacifist race, they opt instead to leave the Earth to the ant civilization. It took the entire book for me to figure out why it is called City, which I feel was a poor choice of title since it doesn’t really describe the storyline at all. If anything, the book could have been entitled “Country Living,” or “When Rover Takes Over,” or “A Man and His Dog and Robot Servant.” I’ve wanted to read Simak’s books for a long time, particularly City and Way Station, the latter having won the 1964 Hugo Award. I can certainly see the care he put into his writing, and City abounds with interesting SF ideas, but I found them extremely implausible and not very well explained. His characters also struck me as flat and uninteresting, and the storyline was frankly quite boring. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Peter Ganim, and he did a good job capturing the meditative tone of the story. However, that was a double-edged sword as I was continually struggling to maintain any interest in the book, and my concentration failed again and again. This might have been less so if I read a print copy, but then I’ve listened to many audiobooks and loved them, so I have to believe the story was the problem. Next time I read a story about the world going to the dogs (and robots), I’m hoping it will be more convincing. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2015
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Aug 08, 2015
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Jul 30, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 1595826521
| 9781595826527
| 1595826521
| 4.10
| 979
| Mar 22, 2011
| Apr 05, 2011
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0
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not set
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Jul 26, 2015
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Paperback
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| 1596062134
| 9781596062139
| 1596062134
| 3.98
| 1,992
| Jul 31, 2009
| Jul 31, 2009
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not set
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not set
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Feb 20, 2015
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Hardcover
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| 0671559915
| 9780671559915
| 0671559915
| 3.88
| 2,154
| 1984
| Nov 01, 1985
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liked it
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Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) is the final book in Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth. The book consists of three stories, “The Murthe”, “Fader’s W
Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) is the final book in Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth. The book consists of three stories, “The Murthe”, “Fader’s Waft”, and “Morreion”, so in structure it is more like the loosely connected stories of The Dying Earth (1950). This time around Cugel the Clever is not featured. Instead, we are introduced to the magician Rhialto (the Marvellous), a resourceful, clever, and somewhat vain and flamboyant member of a conclave of loosly-allied magicians in Ascolais and Almery in the 21st Aeon. Overall, I’d rate this as the weakest of the four parts of Tales of the Dying Earth, but still worth reading if you enjoy the wild imagination, high language, and deadpan humor of Jack Vance’s baroque tales set in the far-future dying earth. “Morreion”, the last story, is by far the best. It chronicles the journey of Rhialto and his fellow magicians to the edge of the universe to find a missing colleague who sought the source of the much-coveted IOUN stones (which are used in D&D, apparently). This story is filled with humor, wonder, high language, and the colorful imagination Vance is famous for. It could easily have been included in the original Dying Earth book. “The Murthe” is a very short and humorous story of the havoc that is wreaked by a powerful magic-user from the past, who starts to convert the magicians in Rhialto’s conclave into women without them realizing it through a process of “ensqualmation”. Their antics as they become more feminine are quite amusing, and her power is not easily vanquished. “Fader’s Waft” is the longest story, and unfortunately the weakest in my opinion. In this story Rhialto is the center of various schemes by his fellow wizards to defame his character and seize his magical possesions. In order to determine guilt or innocence he must travel back in time to retrieve the Percifex, a codex of the Blue Principles that the magicians must abide by. Although some of the situations are fun to read about, overall it gets fairly tedious at times and doesn’t measure up to Cugel’s stories. ...more |
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Feb 13, 2015
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Feb 20, 2015
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Feb 12, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0671559176
| 9780671559175
| 0671559176
| 4.24
| 2,971
| 1983
| Nov 01, 1984
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liked it
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Cugel’s Saga (1983) is the third book in the Dying Earth series, coming 17 years after The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and 33 years after The Dying E
Cugel’s Saga (1983) is the third book in the Dying Earth series, coming 17 years after The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and 33 years after The Dying Earth (1950). It’s also the second book to feature that thieving scoundrel Cugel the Clever, who often finds he is not quite as clever as he thinks, as his schemes generally end in failure at the end of each chapter, leaving him penniless and fleeing his enemies until he encounters the next adventure. This book is a similarly picaresque episodic adventure in the slowly crumbing world of the Dying Earth, as creatures, magicians and humans live their varied lives in the waning days of the fading red sun before it goes dark. What struck me about this entry is that Cugel has gotten less and less clever, and more often finds himself not in control of the situation. In fact, from the very start he falls into the clutches of a greedy old profiteer who is plumbing the depths of a mud pit for the scales of a fallen demiurge named Skylark from the Overworld, which are then being sold via a middle-man to Iucounu the Laughing Magician, Cugel’s nemesis in The Eyes of the Overworld. Cugel accidentally discovers the most valuable of the scales, the Pectoral Skybreak Spatterlight, which plays a prominent role in the book. As I mentioned in reviewing Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel is not nearly as clever as he thinks, and this time he ends of doing a series of odd jobs (part-time gigs, if you will) to get by, generally against his will, and while on occasion he manages to enjoy some fine foods and luxury, these moments end abruptly and his ill-gotten gains are soon lost. If this is a morality play, then it is quite repetitive. And though he is sometimes debonair and charming, there is a general lack of savoir faire in his predicaments. I can only guess is deliberate on Vance’s part, but why make your protagonist less charming and cunning, when he was already lacking in moral fiber to begin with? It’s a strange artistic choice, in my opinion. One aspect of whole series worth noting is all the strange social practices of the societies and towns/villages that Cugel encounters. The recurring theme throughout is how completely bound all these societies are to bizarre, meaningless traditions and practices that they slavishly adhere to. It is obvious to the reader that these practices are patently absurd, but not once does anyone question them except for Cugel, who believes in nothing but his own survival. It’s not a big leap to think that Jack Vance is poking fun at people’s dogged observance of social conventions, especially when are so exaggerated. For instance, in one village social status is denoted by the height of columns upon which husbands spend the day basking in the limited sunlight, the higher the better, and all the schemes of the wives to get their husbands higher in the world. Kinda like the corporate ladder, methinks. All in all, it’s an entertaining book, but some of the social comedy gets a bit tired and overextended in parts, and the drive of Cugel to get back to Almery and exact his revenge seems to have cooled greatly, so the story lacks that urgency and momentum. Also, Cugel seems to have lost some of his mojo, which is disappointing. I’m still happy to move onto the final installment, Rhialto the Marvelous, which doesn’t feature Cugel, to round out the series. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 27, 2015
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Feb 14, 2015
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Jan 27, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0671832921
| 9780671832926
| 0671832921
| 4.13
| 4,695
| 1966
| Feb 02, 1977
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really liked it
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The Eyes of the Overworld is a great book, but I'm going to take a contrarian stance and say that I actually preferred The Dying Earth. Yes, I can adm
The Eyes of the Overworld is a great book, but I'm going to take a contrarian stance and say that I actually preferred The Dying Earth. Yes, I can admit that I wasn't totally smitten by the amoral, not-so-clever misadventures of Cugel the Clever after he crosses Iucounu the Laughing Magician. Yes, this book contained all the same sly, tongue-in-cheek humor, the strong imagery of a decaying and run-down world, and the wonderfully-stilted high language used by all the humans and other creatures of this autumnal far-future world. Basically, Cugel is not a charming scoundrel with panache like James Bond or Arsene Lupin III. Instead, he basically is just morally bankrupt and self-serving with a thin veneer of suave talk. He doesn't hesitate to betray companions at the first opportunity, and has loyalty to no one. I think Jack Vance's take on the anti-hero is quite fresh, I find it hard to be sympathetic to Cugel, but on further reflection I think that it is his inept selfishness and repeated failures to achieve his goals that has endeared him to a lot of readers, an unwitting Inspector Clouseau in an epic fantasy setting. What I liked most about The Dying Earth was the amazingly rich imagery, strange characters, and self-contained storylines that the prevented it from being just a long string of episodes for the main character to extricate himself from. The sense of melancholy and sheer fatigue of an unimaginably-old Earth was somewhat lacking in The Eyes of the Overworld. Cugel's adventures are still miles above your average sword-and-sorcery tale, but fail to reach the sublime heights of The Dying Earth. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 20, 2015
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Jan 27, 2015
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Jan 20, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0671831526
| 9780671831523
| 0671831526
| 3.89
| 9,883
| 1950
| Mar 1977
|
it was amazing
|
There isn’t any other book is SF/Fantasy quite like Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, published as a cheap 25 cent paperback back in 1950 by Hillman Publi
There isn’t any other book is SF/Fantasy quite like Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, published as a cheap 25 cent paperback back in 1950 by Hillman Publications. I wish it had been picked up by Ballantine Books and published along with some other early classics of the early 1950s like The Space Merchants, Childhood’s End, More Than Human, Fahrenheit 451, Bring the Jubilee, etc. Despite this, the book has had an enormous influence on writers ranging from Gene Wolfe and George R.R. Martin to Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, the influence of Vance on Gygax and D&D is so obvious that he really deserved a cut of all the proceeds from that once-mighty franchise. Anyone who has played D&D will immediately recognize the idea that magicians can only memorize a few spells at a time (which takes great effort), and forget immediately after casting them. Even better are the crazy spell names that Vance has concocted (The Excellent Prismatic Spray, Phandal’s Mantle of Stealth, Spell of the Slow Hour, etc). Of note, Wikipedia indicates that Vance himself was influenced by earlier fantasy writers like H.G. Wells (The Time Machine), William Hope Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, The Night Land), Clark Ashton Smith (Zothique stories), and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Barsoom series). I haven’t read any of those writers other than Wells, but they sound like pretty good company. Since all art takes its inspiration from earlier works, it’s not a knock on Jack Vance that he shows his influences quite clearly. Instead, he deserves great credit for taking those earlier stories and giving them entirely new life though his amazing imagination, precise yet baroque writing style, and somewhat archaic dialogue that disguises an incredibly dry wit and skeptical view of humanity. I’ve read SF and fantasy all my life, and I can say with confidence that his voice and imagery are unique. If you’ve encountered anything like it, it’s most likely that those writers took their cue from Vance. The book is very short (around 175 pages), and is actually a collection of six slightly overlapping but self-contained stories set in an incredibly distant future earth where the sun has cooled to a red color, the moon is gone, and humanity has declined to a pale shadow of former greatness, and struggles to survive amongst the ruins of the past. The world is filled with various magicians, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, brigands, thieves, adventurers, etc. The events are episodic but are compulsively readable, and really beautifully written. The sense of melancholy and decline are ever-present, yet the characters themselves are not cowed by this situation, and strive to achieve their own goals even as the world moves toward a time when the sun will eventually snuff out like a candle. Despite this, many of the situations they find themselves in are quite funny, in a dark and ironic sort of way. The Dying Earth was later followed by The Eyes of the Overworld in 1966 (featuring Cugel the Clever) and two further sequels, Cugel’s Saga in 1983 and Rhialto the Marvellous in 1984. They are collected in the omnibus volume Tales of the Dying Earth, and it is a treat to be able to read them in succession with no gap it time. Unlike many other classics, the book has not aged at all because it occupies a place outside of time, where science and magic mix together with entropy, quirky characters, and vivid adventure for a unique world vision. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 17, 2015
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Jan 21, 2015
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Jan 17, 2015
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0671559303
| 9780671559304
| 0671559303
| 3.62
| 5,522
| 1962
| Dec 01, 1984
|
liked it
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Hothouse: Plant creatures gone wild! Human characters wooden Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Yeah, Hothouse (1962) was definitely written with s Hothouse: Plant creatures gone wild! Human characters wooden Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Yeah, Hothouse (1962) was definitely written with some chemical assistance. Maybe some LSD-spiked vegetable juice? It may have been written as a set of five short stories in 1961, but it’s a timeless and bizarre story of a million years in the future when the plants have completely taken over the planet, which has stopped rotating, and humans are little green creatures hustling to avoid becoming plant food. There are hundreds of fearsome carnivorous plants that would love to eat human morsels, but will gladly settle for eating each other instead. As the planet has come to a stop, a massive banyan tree now covers the sunny-side of the planet, with all other plants surviving in it’s shade. But there are gargantuan plant-based spiders called traversers who dwell above the plant layer and actually spin webs across space to the moon and other planets. Yeah, the science here is, well, complete and utter bollocks! But who cares when you can come up with the most bizzare plant species ever conceived in an amazing dying earth setting? And this book never lets up on the crazy vegetable creatures and pitiful rat-like humans. The main characters are continuously fleeing from one crisis to the next, and never have the upper hand. They encounter the most annoying creatures ever created, including the tummy-belly men, whose speech mannerisms make Jar-Jar Binks sound like Shakespeare. Then there is the fish creature carried by a crippled human called the Catch-Carry-Kind, a prophet who knows the sun is dying and Earth is doomed. He has great wisdom but meets his match with an intelligent, parasitic fungus called a Morel. In fact, the fungi is really a pretty fun-…no, I won’t go there. But, Aldiss was definitely tripping on some fecund and fertile thoughts. However, his human characters and dialogue are dreadful! This is the most amazing world-building but the most god-awful characters ever created. The storyline is so episodic it drove me crazy, but the malevolent Black Mouth with its irresistible siren cry and a brooding cliff with a 1,000 staring eyes were so cool that I was rooting against the puny humans. If only some other author like Jack Vance were allowed to use this world (like the Dying Earth), this could have been a contender. Oh, the humanity…or is it vegetality? Aldiss’ Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), and Greybeard (1964) were chosen by David Pringle for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, and they’ve been on my TBR list for years. In fact, the five short stories that make up Hothouse collectively were awarded the 1962 Hugo for Best Short Fiction. Last year I tried to read Non-Stop, one of the original generational starship stories, but I found the characters so clumsily-drawn that I couldn’t get past the first 100 pages. I don’t want to make an unfair assessment, but I feel that Aldiss, who has some great ideas, really isn’t very gifted in the characterization department. He’s been a major figure in British SF, and wrote a well-regarded history of the SF genre called Trillion Year Spree (2001), but I feel like he’s not one of the top authors from the 1960s. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 14, 2015
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Jul 26, 2015
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Jan 14, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 4.08
| 34,399
| Jan 27, 1956
| Mar 08, 2001
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it was amazing
|
The City and The Stars: Restless in a perfect future city (Also posted at Fantasy Literature) This a rewrite of his first book Against the Fall of Night The City and The Stars: Restless in a perfect future city (Also posted at Fantasy Literature) This a rewrite of his first book Against the Fall of Night (first published in 1948 in Startling Stories). There are plenty of adherents of the original version, but the revised version is pretty good too. As one of his earlier classic tales, this one features many familiar genre tropes: A far-future city called Diaspar, where technology is so sophisticated it seems like magic, a young (well not exactly, but close enough) protagonist who curiosity is so strong it overcomes the fear of the outside that all the other inhabitants share, and a gradually expanding series of discoveries by our hero Alvin (actually, would anyone really have a name that is shared by an animated chipmunk, one BILLION years in the future???) as he strives to discover the reality of his world, and the larger universe around him. Arthur C. Clarke’s specialty is “sense of wonder”, and he does a pretty good job here, gradually giving us the bigger picture, and expanding his scope to the larger universe, with his protagonist always driven by the desire to know more and refusing to settle for a comfortable existence. The writing isn’t particular eloquent and the characters are fairly flat, but hey, this is not China Mieville or Gene Wolfe we’re talking about. So if you’re willing to accept that, you can certainly enjoy the story. As I’ve said before, Arthur C. Clarke owes an enormous debt to another British pioneer of science fiction, Olaf Stapledon, who wrote on as grand a scale as any SF writer ever has, even including more recent writers like Vernor Vinge, Alasdair Reynolds, and Peter Hamilton. In fact, I think Stapledon deserves much more credit than he has received (you gotta read First and Last Men, Star Maker if you consider yourself a serious SF fan), and the ending of City and the Stars was actually a bit of a letdown for me. I’ll close this review with a couple images that basically sum up the story: [image] [image] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 10, 2014
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May 29, 2014
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Feb 15, 2014
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 1568658079
| 9781568658070
| 1568658079
| 4.22
| 4,305
| 1983
| Jun 01, 1998
|
it was amazing
|
The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many SFF readers as the greatest, most challenging, and most rewarding SF-fantasy epic ever written in the genre. At the same time, its baroque language, ambiguous plot, unreliable narrator, and depth of symbolism are likely to discourage most casual readers. Therefore, new readers need to dedicate themselves to unraveling the many layers of plot, religious symbolism, literary references, and narrative sleight-of-hand. They also need to understand that it is essentially a single integrated work, so reading individual volumes is not enough to render judgement. You need to read all four volumes to appreciate what Gene Wolfe has painstakingly crafted. If you do so, you will be rewarded richly indeed. I’ve actually read the entire series twice in the past two decades, and decided that I would listen to the audiobook editions narrated by the excellent Jonathan Davis to give me a new perspective on the whole creation. He is the ideal narrator for a work this ambitious, as he tackles the baroque story with gravitas, confidence, and enthusiasm. I can’t imagine a narrator better suited to the task. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is that type of work, one that rewards multiple readings and reflection and still retains many of its mysteries tantalizingly out of reach. If you are someone comfortable with complexity, mysteries, and a lack of explanations, you should be able to enjoy Wolfe’s elusive style. This time I also prepared myself by reading Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, an 826-page analysis covering Wolfe’s output through 1986, including all of his short stories and his novels The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, Free Live Free, and THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. Aramini’s analysis sheds much light on the key underlying themes of the story, namely the death and resurrection of the Urth via the coming of the New Sun, the ambiguous messianic nature of the protagonist Severian, the healing power of the Claw of the Conciliator, and Severian’s duty to undergo testing by alien powers to determine if humanity is indeed worthy of this rebirth. There are so many themes and ideas in Wolfe’s epic that it has spawned an informal school of analysis, including books such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus, Robert Borki’s Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and Peter Wright’s Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader. Therefore, it would be presumptuous of me to try to analyze his magnum opus in a brief review such as this. Rather, I will just touch on the most important themes of the book and dispense with a discussion of plot details, which you can discover on your own. To drastically simplify things, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is the story of the young apprentice Severian raised in the guild of torturers called the Seekers for Truth and Penitence. He recalls to the reader his complex path from lowly apprentice to the Autarch of the Commonwealth, the most powerful ruler on far-future Urth. This world lies millions of years in the future, to the point that our own world is no longer even a memory. It is a baroque fantasy world filled with mysterious terms such as archon, carnifex, cataphract, chalcedony, fuligin, hipparch, lazaret, monomachy, optimate, pelerine, psychopomp, quaesitor, thaumaturge, and uhlan. None of these terms are coined by Wolfe, but rather reflect his erudite love of obscure and archaic terms. They lend an air of incredible antiquity to the world of Urth, and the story takes direct inspiration from Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH. Severian encounters all manner of friends & foes, allies and enemies, lovers, thieves, soldiers, actors, priests, witches, commoners, malevolent creatures, inscrutable aliens, and other powerful beings whose intentions are unclear. What they all share is an interest in the fate of Severian, for though he does understand this himself for much of his journey, he is destined to not only become Autarch but to serve as the representative to the stars to determine if the dying red sun of Urth is worthy of being renewed in both a symbolic and literal sense, ushering in a New Sun and renewed era of humanity. It is an outcome that is constantly alluded to but never fully explained, though Wolfe later explored this is more detail (while still retaining much mystery) in a companion coda called The Urth of the New Sun (1987). The religious symbolism of the story is both explicit and complicated. Severian is positioned as the obvious messiah, the living embodiment of the New Sun, and as he wields the cross-shaped executioners’ sword Terminus Est, the Christ-like imagery is plain for any reader to see. And yet throughout the story, Severian himself is a naive and conflicted character, one who struggles first to set aside his training as a torturer and executioner, and later as a man fighting to understand his role as a possible bringer of redemption and resurrection to a corrupt and dying world. This goes far beyond a Christian allegory such as C.S. Lewis’ CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, for instance. Of equal importance is the religious talisman that comes into Severian’s hands by accent, the Claw of the Conciliator. This object seems capable of bringing the dead back to life and healing fatal wounds when Severian wields it, and is associated with the Conciliator, a figure of the ancient past who is both Christ-like and may also have extra-terrestrial origins. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN also incorporates a number of stories-within-stories, told by various characters and also in the form of stage plays performed by the characters (echoing the story itself from the author’s perspective) during key moments in the narrative. One could write a dissertation on interpreting the meanings of these stories as they relate to the overall themes of the book, and this effort is far beyond me, but Marc Aramini does discuss the implications of a number these stories in his book Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, including Dr. Talos’ play “Eschatology and Genesis”, “The Tale of the Student and His Son”, “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, “The Cock, the Angel, and the Eagle”, “The Armiger’s Daughter”, as well as some extremely vivid dreams of Severian. This literary device is equally vital to understanding the layers of meaning in his book Peace. The story is further complicated by the roles of Abaia, Erebus, and their servants the undines, underwater beings of great power that seem intent on conquering humanity, but at the same time provide aid to Severian at times and may even benefit from the inundation of Urth if Severian is to succeed in bringing the New Sun. They are constantly observing Severians’ progress, but it is unclear whether they seek to aid or prevent his quest. We also have the even more inscrutable role of the Hierodules, alien beings from other worlds that reside on Urth and also take a keen interest in Severian and his path to becoming the Autarch. Despite their implied powers, they sometimes seem to indicate that they serve him, but this in never made entirely clear. They appear to have a connection with the current Autarch, but it is not apparent whether they favor Severian over his rule. Finally, there is the ambiguous role of the reigning Autarch himself, and his mysterious advisor Father Inire. They obviously wield great power, and if they were to decide Severian were a threat to them they could easily have him killed. Yet they instead appear in various guises in his adventures, never clearly his ally or enemy, always with opaque intentions and tantalizing comments. Father Inire in particular seems to control the power to travel between the stars via the sinister power of mirrors and labyrinths (an obvious nod to Jorge Luis Borges), but does not demonstrate to what end he might use them. In the end, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN does not easily yield up its secrets to interpretation or analysis, but this is most certainly the source of its lasting appeal to discerning literary SFF readers over the last 35 years. There are layers of meaning that remain obscure even after multiple readings, but it is clear that Wolfe has crafted a masterpiece that is worth the attempts to conquer it, a literary Mt. Everest that every serious reader in the genre will be drawn to again and again, and there is much to be gained in each attempt, whether the peak is attained or not. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
Dec 19, 2016
|
Jan 22, 2017
|
Jan 16, 2014
|
Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0312890184
| 9780312890186
| 0312890184
| 4.34
| 13,355
| Oct 15, 1994
| Oct 15, 1994
|
it was amazing
|
The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many SFF readers as the greatest, most challenging, and most rewarding SF-fantasy epic ever written in the genre. At the same time, its baroque language, ambiguous plot, unreliable narrator, and depth of symbolism are likely to discourage most casual readers. Therefore, new readers need to dedicate themselves to unraveling the many layers of plot, religious symbolism, literary references, and narrative sleight-of-hand. They also need to understand that it is essentially a single integrated work, so reading individual volumes is not enough to render judgement. You need to read all four volumes to appreciate what Gene Wolfe has painstakingly crafted. If you do so, you will be rewarded richly indeed. I’ve actually read the entire series twice in the past two decades, and decided that I would listen to the audiobook editions narrated by the excellent Jonathan Davis to give me a new perspective on the whole creation. He is the ideal narrator for a work this ambitious, as he tackles the baroque story with gravitas, confidence, and enthusiasm. I can’t imagine a narrator better suited to the task. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is that type of work, one that rewards multiple readings and reflection and still retains many of its mysteries tantalizingly out of reach. If you are someone comfortable with complexity, mysteries, and a lack of explanations, you should be able to enjoy Wolfe’s elusive style. This time I also prepared myself by reading Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, an 826-page analysis covering Wolfe’s output through 1986, including all of his short stories and his novels The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, Free Live Free, and THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. Aramini’s analysis sheds much light on the key underlying themes of the story, namely the death and resurrection of the Urth via the coming of the New Sun, the ambiguous messianic nature of the protagonist Severian, the healing power of the Claw of the Conciliator, and Severian’s duty to undergo testing by alien powers to determine if humanity is indeed worthy of this rebirth. There are so many themes and ideas in Wolfe’s epic that it has spawned an informal school of analysis, including books such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus, Robert Borki’s Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and Peter Wright’s Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader. Therefore, it would be presumptuous of me to try to analyze his magnum opus in a brief review such as this. Rather, I will just touch on the most important themes of the book and dispense with a discussion of plot details, which you can discover on your own. To drastically simplify things, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is the story of the young apprentice Severian raised in the guild of torturers called the Seekers for Truth and Penitence. He recalls to the reader his complex path from lowly apprentice to the Autarch of the Commonwealth, the most powerful ruler on far-future Urth. This world lies millions of years in the future, to the point that our own world is no longer even a memory. It is a baroque fantasy world filled with mysterious terms such as archon, carnifex, cataphract, chalcedony, fuligin, hipparch, lazaret, monomachy, optimate, pelerine, psychopomp, quaesitor, thaumaturge, and uhlan. None of these terms are coined by Wolfe, but rather reflect his erudite love of obscure and archaic terms. They lend an air of incredible antiquity to the world of Urth, and the story takes direct inspiration from Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH. Severian encounters all manner of friends & foes, allies and enemies, lovers, thieves, soldiers, actors, priests, witches, commoners, malevolent creatures, inscrutable aliens, and other powerful beings whose intentions are unclear. What they all share is an interest in the fate of Severian, for though he does understand this himself for much of his journey, he is destined to not only become Autarch but to serve as the representative to the stars to determine if the dying red sun of Urth is worthy of being renewed in both a symbolic and literal sense, ushering in a New Sun and renewed era of humanity. It is an outcome that is constantly alluded to but never fully explained, though Wolfe later explored this is more detail (while still retaining much mystery) in a companion coda called The Urth of the New Sun (1987). The religious symbolism of the story is both explicit and complicated. Severian is positioned as the obvious messiah, the living embodiment of the New Sun, and as he wields the cross-shaped executioners’ sword Terminus Est, the Christ-like imagery is plain for any reader to see. And yet throughout the story, Severian himself is a naive and conflicted character, one who struggles first to set aside his training as a torturer and executioner, and later as a man fighting to understand his role as a possible bringer of redemption and resurrection to a corrupt and dying world. This goes far beyond a Christian allegory such as C.S. Lewis’ CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, for instance. Of equal importance is the religious talisman that comes into Severian’s hands by accent, the Claw of the Conciliator. This object seems capable of bringing the dead back to life and healing fatal wounds when Severian wields it, and is associated with the Conciliator, a figure of the ancient past who is both Christ-like and may also have extra-terrestrial origins. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN also incorporates a number of stories-within-stories, told by various characters and also in the form of stage plays performed by the characters (echoing the story itself from the author’s perspective) during key moments in the narrative. One could write a dissertation on interpreting the meanings of these stories as they relate to the overall themes of the book, and this effort is far beyond me, but Marc Aramini does discuss the implications of a number these stories in his book Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, including Dr. Talos’ play “Eschatology and Genesis”, “The Tale of the Student and His Son”, “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, “The Cock, the Angel, and the Eagle”, “The Armiger’s Daughter”, as well as some extremely vivid dreams of Severian. This literary device is equally vital to understanding the layers of meaning in his book Peace. The story is further complicated by the roles of Abaia, Erebus, and their servants the undines, underwater beings of great power that seem intent on conquering humanity, but at the same time provide aid to Severian at times and may even benefit from the inundation of Urth if Severian is to succeed in bringing the New Sun. They are constantly observing Severians’ progress, but it is unclear whether they seek to aid or prevent his quest. We also have the even more inscrutable role of the Hierodules, alien beings from other worlds that reside on Urth and also take a keen interest in Severian and his path to becoming the Autarch. Despite their implied powers, they sometimes seem to indicate that they serve him, but this in never made entirely clear. They appear to have a connection with the current Autarch, but it is not apparent whether they favor Severian over his rule. Finally, there is the ambiguous role of the reigning Autarch himself, and his mysterious advisor Father Inire. They obviously wield great power, and if they were to decide Severian were a threat to them they could easily have him killed. Yet they instead appear in various guises in his adventures, never clearly his ally or enemy, always with opaque intentions and tantalizing comments. Father Inire in particular seems to control the power to travel between the stars via the sinister power of mirrors and labyrinths (an obvious nod to Jorge Luis Borges), but does not demonstrate to what end he might use them. In the end, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN does not easily yield up its secrets to interpretation or analysis, but this is most certainly the source of its lasting appeal to discerning literary SFF readers over the last 35 years. There are layers of meaning that remain obscure even after multiple readings, but it is clear that Wolfe has crafted a masterpiece that is worth the attempts to conquer it, a literary Mt. Everest that every serious reader in the genre will be drawn to again and again, and there is much to be gained in each attempt, whether the peak is attained or not. ...more |
Notes are private!
|
1
|
not set
|
not set
|
Jan 04, 2014
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0312890176
| 9780312890179
| 0312890176
| 4.03
| 20,485
| Oct 15, 1994
| Oct 15, 1994
|
it was amazing
|
The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many The Book of the New Sun: SFF’s greatest and most challenging epic Originally posted at Fantasy Literature THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is considered by many SFF readers as the greatest, most challenging, and most rewarding SF-fantasy epic ever written in the genre. At the same time, its baroque language, ambiguous plot, unreliable narrator, and depth of symbolism are likely to discourage most casual readers. Therefore, new readers need to dedicate themselves to unraveling the many layers of plot, religious symbolism, literary references, and narrative sleight-of-hand. They also need to understand that it is essentially a single integrated work, so reading individual volumes is not enough to render judgement. You need to read all four volumes to appreciate what Gene Wolfe has painstakingly crafted. If you do so, you will be rewarded richly indeed. I’ve actually read the entire series twice in the past two decades, and decided that I would listen to the audiobook editions narrated by the excellent Jonathan Davis to give me a new perspective on the whole creation. He is the ideal narrator for a work this ambitious, as he tackles the baroque story with gravitas, confidence, and enthusiasm. I can’t imagine a narrator better suited to the task. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is that type of work, one that rewards multiple readings and reflection and still retains many of its mysteries tantalizingly out of reach. If you are someone comfortable with complexity, mysteries, and a lack of explanations, you should be able to enjoy Wolfe’s elusive style. This time I also prepared myself by reading Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, an 826-page analysis covering Wolfe’s output through 1986, including all of his short stories and his novels The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, Free Live Free, and THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN. Aramini’s analysis sheds much light on the key underlying themes of the story, namely the death and resurrection of the Urth via the coming of the New Sun, the ambiguous messianic nature of the protagonist Severian, the healing power of the Claw of the Conciliator, and Severian’s duty to undergo testing by alien powers to determine if humanity is indeed worthy of this rebirth. There are so many themes and ideas in Wolfe’s epic that it has spawned an informal school of analysis, including books such as Michael Andre-Druissi’s Lexicon Urthus, Robert Borki’s Solar Labyrinth: Exploring Gene Wolfe’s “Book of the New Sun” and Peter Wright’s Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader. Therefore, it would be presumptuous of me to try to analyze his magnum opus in a brief review such as this. Rather, I will just touch on the most important themes of the book and dispense with a discussion of plot details, which you can discover on your own. To drastically simplify things, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN is the story of the young apprentice Severian raised in the guild of torturers called the Seekers for Truth and Penitence. He recalls to the reader his complex path from lowly apprentice to the Autarch of the Commonwealth, the most powerful ruler on far-future Urth. This world lies millions of years in the future, to the point that our own world is no longer even a memory. It is a baroque fantasy world filled with mysterious terms such as archon, carnifex, cataphract, chalcedony, fuligin, hipparch, lazaret, monomachy, optimate, pelerine, psychopomp, quaesitor, thaumaturge, and uhlan. None of these terms are coined by Wolfe, but rather reflect his erudite love of obscure and archaic terms. They lend an air of incredible antiquity to the world of Urth, and the story takes direct inspiration from Jack Vance's THE DYING EARTH. Severian encounters all manner of friends & foes, allies and enemies, lovers, thieves, soldiers, actors, priests, witches, commoners, malevolent creatures, inscrutable aliens, and other powerful beings whose intentions are unclear. What they all share is an interest in the fate of Severian, for though he does understand this himself for much of his journey, he is destined to not only become Autarch but to serve as the representative to the stars to determine if the dying red sun of Urth is worthy of being renewed in both a symbolic and literal sense, ushering in a New Sun and renewed era of humanity. It is an outcome that is constantly alluded to but never fully explained, though Wolfe later explored this is more detail (while still retaining much mystery) in a companion coda called The Urth of the New Sun (1987). The religious symbolism of the story is both explicit and complicated. Severian is positioned as the obvious messiah, the living embodiment of the New Sun, and as he wields the cross-shaped executioners’ sword Terminus Est, the Christ-like imagery is plain for any reader to see. And yet throughout the story, Severian himself is a naive and conflicted character, one who struggles first to set aside his training as a torturer and executioner, and later as a man fighting to understand his role as a possible bringer of redemption and resurrection to a corrupt and dying world. This goes far beyond a Christian allegory such as C.S. Lewis’ CHRONICLES OF NARNIA, for instance. Of equal importance is the religious talisman that comes into Severian’s hands by accent, the Claw of the Conciliator. This object seems capable of bringing the dead back to life and healing fatal wounds when Severian wields it, and is associated with the Conciliator, a figure of the ancient past who is both Christ-like and may also have extra-terrestrial origins. THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN also incorporates a number of stories-within-stories, told by various characters and also in the form of stage plays performed by the characters (echoing the story itself from the author’s perspective) during key moments in the narrative. One could write a dissertation on interpreting the meanings of these stories as they relate to the overall themes of the book, and this effort is far beyond me, but Marc Aramini does discuss the implications of a number these stories in his book Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986, including Dr. Talos’ play “Eschatology and Genesis”, “The Tale of the Student and His Son”, “The Tale of the Boy Called Frog”, “The Cock, the Angel, and the Eagle”, “The Armiger’s Daughter”, as well as some extremely vivid dreams of Severian. This literary device is equally vital to understanding the layers of meaning in his book Peace. The story is further complicated by the roles of Abaia, Erebus, and their servants the undines, underwater beings of great power that seem intent on conquering humanity, but at the same time provide aid to Severian at times and may even benefit from the inundation of Urth if Severian is to succeed in bringing the New Sun. They are constantly observing Severians’ progress, but it is unclear whether they seek to aid or prevent his quest. We also have the even more inscrutable role of the Hierodules, alien beings from other worlds that reside on Urth and also take a keen interest in Severian and his path to becoming the Autarch. Despite their implied powers, they sometimes seem to indicate that they serve him, but this in never made entirely clear. They appear to have a connection with the current Autarch, but it is not apparent whether they favor Severian over his rule. Finally, there is the ambiguous role of the reigning Autarch himself, and his mysterious advisor Father Inire. They obviously wield great power, and if they were to decide Severian were a threat to them they could easily have him killed. Yet they instead appear in various guises in his adventures, never clearly his ally or enemy, always with opaque intentions and tantalizing comments. Father Inire in particular seems to control the power to travel between the stars via the sinister power of mirrors and labyrinths (an obvious nod to Jorge Luis Borges), but does not demonstrate to what end he might use them. In the end, THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN does not easily yield up its secrets to interpretation or analysis, but this is most certainly the source of its lasting appeal to discerning literary SFF readers over the last 35 years. There are layers of meaning that remain obscure even after multiple readings, but it is clear that Wolfe has crafted a masterpiece that is worth the attempts to conquer it, a literary Mt. Everest that every serious reader in the genre will be drawn to again and again, and there is much to be gained in each attempt, whether the peak is attained or not. ...more |
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Jan 04, 2014
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| 0312874561
| 9780312874568
| 0312874561
| 4.13
| 5,740
| Dec 1998
| Nov 2000
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really liked it
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Tales of The Dying Earth: A perfect introduction to Jack Vance’s work Originally posted at Fantasy Literature There aren’t any other books is SF/Fantasy Tales of The Dying Earth: A perfect introduction to Jack Vance’s work Originally posted at Fantasy Literature There aren’t any other books is SF/Fantasy quite like Jack Vance’s Tales of The Dying Earth. They have had an enormous influence on writers ranging from Gene Wolfe and George R.R. Martin to Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. These stories highlight Jack Vance’s amazing imagination, precise yet baroque writing style, and somewhat archaic dialogue that disguises an incredibly dry wit and skeptical view of humanity. I’ve read SF and fantasy all my life, and I can say with confidence that his voice and imagery are unique. If you’ve encountered anything like it, it’s most likely that those writers took their cue from Vance. The Dying Earth This book, first published in 1950 by Hillman Publications, is very short (around 175 pages), and is actually a collection of six slightly overlapping but self-contained stories set in an incredibly distant future earth where the sun has cooled to a red color, the moon is gone, and humanity has declined to a pale shadow of former greatness, and struggles to survive amongst the ruins of the past. The world is filled with various magicians, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, brigands, thieves, adventurers, etc. The events are episodic but are compulsively readable, and really beautifully written. The sense of melancholy and decline are ever-present, yet the characters themselves are not cowed by this situation, and strive to achieve their own goals even as the world moves toward a time when the sun will eventually snuff out like a candle. Despite this, many of the situations they find themselves in are quite funny, in a dark and ironic sort of way. For my money, this book is by far the best of the four and worthy of its classic reputation. The Eyes of the Overworld 16 years after The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) details the misadventures of the self-interested, not-so-clever scoundrel Cugel the Clever after he crosses Iucounu the Laughing Magician. It contains all the same sly, tongue-in-cheek humor, the strong imagery of a decaying and run-down world, and the wonderfully-stilted high language used by all the humans and other creatures of this autumnal far-future world. Basically, Cugel is not a charming scoundrel with panache like James Bond or Arsene Lupin III. Instead, he basically is just morally bankrupt and self-serving with a thin veneer of suave talk. He doesn't hesitate to betray companions at the first opportunity, and has loyalty to no one. I think Jack Vance's take on the anti-hero is quite fresh, but I find it hard to be sympathetic to Cugel. Still, on further reflection I think that it is his inept selfishness and repeated failures to achieve his goals that has endeared him to a lot of readers, an unwitting Inspector Clouseau in an epic fantasy setting. Cugel's adventures are still miles above your average sword-and-sorcery tale, but fail to reach the sublime heights of The Dying Earth. Cugel's Saga Cugel’s Saga (1983) is the third book in the Dying Earth series, coming 17 years after The Eyes of the Overworld (1966) and 33 years after The Dying Earth (1950). It’s also the second book to feature that thieving scoundrel Cugel the Clever, who often finds he is not quite as clever as he thinks, as his schemes generally end in failure at the end of each chapter, leaving him penniless and fleeing his enemies until he encounters the next adventure. This book is a similarly picaresque episodic adventure in the slowly crumbing world of the Dying Earth, as creatures, magicians and humans pass their waning days before the fading red sun goes dark. Rhialto the Marvellous Rhialto the Marvellous (1984) is the final book and consists of three stories, “The Murthe”, “Fader’s Waft”, and “Morreion” Overall, I’d rate this as the weakest of the four parts of Tales of the Dying Earth, but still worth reading if you enjoy the wild imagination, high language, and deadpan humor of Jack Vance’s baroque tales set in the far-future dying earth. “Morreion”, the last story, is by far the best. It chronicles the journey of Rhialto and his fellow magicians to the edge of the universe to find a missing colleague who sought the source of the much-coveted IOUN stones (which are used in D&D, apparently). “The Murthe” is a very short and humorous story of the havoc that is wreaked by a powerful magic-user from the past, who starts to convert the magicians in Rhialto’s conclave into women without them realizing it through a process of “ensqualmation”. Their antics as they become more feminine are quite amusing, and her power is not easily vanquished. “Fader’s Waft” is the longest story, and unfortunately the weakest in my opinion. In this story Rhialto is the center of various schemes by his fellow wizards to defame his character and seize his magical possesions. Although some of the situations are fun to read about, overall it gets fairly tedious at times and doesn’t measure up to Cugel’s stories. ...more |
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| 0553383159
| 9780553383157
| 0553383159
| 3.82
| 2,596
| Jul 01, 2000
| Oct 25, 2005
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liked it
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Viriconium: A baroque, decaying, phantasmagoric dream city Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is one of those compendiums that really isn’t a Viriconium: A baroque, decaying, phantasmagoric dream city Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is one of those compendiums that really isn’t a traditional sequence at all. Instead, it’s more like four disparate, elusive, and impressionistic paintings that try to capture the essence of an ineffable dream in the form of a city sometimes called Viriconium. The books and stories contained in VIRICONIUM were written over a number of years by the eclectic British writer M. John Harrison. He has also written The Centauri Device (1974), a bizarre space opera that may have been intended as a tribute to Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), some of the space operas of Samuel R. Delany like Babel-17 or Nova or a parody of the genre itself, and has inspired many later writers such as Iain M. Banks. More recently, he’s written some very free-wheeling and difficult-to-grasp books collectively known as THE KEFAHUCHI TRACT or EMPTY SPACE trilogy, consisting of Light (2002), Nova Swing (2006), and Empty Space (2012). Reviews are very polarized, with some loving them and many others unable to finish even one. I listened to the four individual books that make up VIRICONIUM in the Neil Gaiman Presents series of audiobooks meant to reintroduce classic lesser-known works in the genre. It is narrated by the excellent and versatile Simon Vance, so that is already a point in its favor. I’ll keep my reviews restricted mainly to my impressions, since I've already forgotten most of the story details of each book. The Pastel City (1971, 3.5 stars): This is the shortest book in the sequence, a tribute to Jack Vance’s seminal The Dying Earth (1950) and The Eyes of the Overworld (1966). Set in the twilight days of a world from which the Afternoon Cultures have already disappeared, it is steeped in mysterious ancient technology, primitive medieval city-states, and the strange being and creatures. An aging fighter named Cromis is asked to come to the aid of a young queen to fight against Northmen bent on toppling her kingdom. The plot is a typical sword-and-sorcery quest, including the assembling of a rag-tag group of companions and need to seek the aid of a mysterious recluse named Cellar the Birdlord, but really what distinguishes the story is the beautiful evocation of a world that has truly outlived its halcyon age and is slowly sinking into the mulch of its own history. While entertaining, it is certainly the least distinctive book in the sequence, essentially an early sketch that hewed too close to its Dying Earth inspiration. A Storm of Wings (1980, 4.5 stars): This was by far the best book in the sequence for me. In fact, I only knew about this book because it was selected by David Pringle for his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels. The opening paragraphs set an unmistakable tone: In this time, the Time of the Locust, when we have nothing to ourselves but the hollowness within us, in the Time of Bone, when we have nothing to do but wait, nothing human moves here. Nothing human has moved here for eighty years. Fire, were it brought here, would be pale and dim, hard to kindle. Passion would fade here on a whisper. Something in the tower’s fall has poisoned the air here, and drained the landscape of its power. White and sickly and infinitely slow, the hemlock creeps out of the water to run sad rubbery fingers over the rubbish in the fallen rooms. The collapse of the tower seems complete, the defeat of artifice accomplished. But the story is far more than a moribund description of decay and despair, though there is plenty of that. Something insectile and alien has detached itself from the moon and descended to the Earth, causing various strange and grotesque happening in the city of Viriconium. The Reborn Men are a group of ancient people revived from death, living in waking dreams, trapped between the present and vague memories of their past lives. Then there is Tomb the Dwarf, a tough and surly character who reminds himself he is “a dwarf and not a philosopher”. The leader of the group (if there is such a designation) would be Galen Hornwrack, another older mercenary tasked with finding out what all the ill portents imply. Their investigations take them through a city inundated with strange and disturbing images, severed locust heads, all manner of bizarre events, and it all forms a fairly disturbing malaise of weirdness, but the writing is so crisp, colorful, outlandish, and florid that it kept me in a fascinated trance as I listened. In fact, just a few days after finishing the series, I cannot really remember any specific events, only the striking images and melancholy moods that the story evokes. It’s interesting that what I liked about the book was exactly what Kat didn’t like. It is much closer to listening to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring than any other metaphor I can think of. If I were to listen to any of the VIRICONIUM stories again, it would be this one. In Viriconium (1982; 3 stars): This is the third book in the sequence, and in it Viriconium is beset by a mysterious plague that affects the artists quarter and drains their vitality and hope. As artist Audsley King slowly dies from the plague, her portrait artist friend Ashlyme tries to save her from this psychological malaise that seems to be taking over the city. This story abandons the sword-and-sorcery setting of the first two books in favor of a much grittier urban setting like an alternative London. It is a semi-comic, semi-tragic story of artists struggling against both the madness of their patrons and the strange loss of vitality that the plague brings. It is very much a metaphor for the struggle inherent in the artistic process, and being one of the most unartistic persons I know, I found it hard to care much about their travails. This book was Kat’s favorite among the sequence, mainly for its coherent storyline, humor, and evocative writing. For my part, I found my attention drifting fairly quickly, and can now recall almost nothing of the books events, much like a strange dream that fades upon waking. Viriconium Nights (1985, 3.5 stars): By the time I reached this point in the sequence, I felt like Harrison’s goals in writing these stories were those of the musical composer, painter, or sculptor. Viriconium, in all of its mysterious, contradictory, grotesque, and dreamlike unreality is the canvas upon which Harrison can try different paints, angles, lighting, themes, and ideas. In this case, he uses short stories, which I found more interesting than In Viriconium, and featured some of the characters of the previous books. In a sense I didn’t feel that he broke any new artistic ground with these stories necessarily, but they certainly shared the same positive qualities of the earlier books in the sequence. ...more |
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| 0061054429
| 9780061054426
| 0061054429
| 3.98
| 832
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| Jan 01, 1998
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Mass Market Paperback
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| 0380718197
| 9780380718191
| 0380718197
| 3.82
| 72
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| 3.81
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Mar 15, 2022
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Mar 11, 2022
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| 4.15
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it was amazing
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Jun 04, 2022
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Mar 09, 2022
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| 3.75
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Aug 20, 2016
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| 3.48
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really liked it
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Oct 2015
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Sep 25, 2015
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| 4.08
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it was ok
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Aug 08, 2015
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Jul 30, 2015
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Jul 26, 2015
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Feb 20, 2015
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| 3.88
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Feb 20, 2015
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Feb 12, 2015
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| 4.24
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Feb 14, 2015
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Jan 27, 2015
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| 4.13
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2015
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Jan 20, 2015
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| 3.89
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it was amazing
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Jan 21, 2015
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Jan 17, 2015
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| 3.62
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liked it
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Jul 26, 2015
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Jan 14, 2015
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| 4.08
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it was amazing
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May 29, 2014
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Feb 15, 2014
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| 4.22
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2017
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Jan 16, 2014
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| 4.34
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2014
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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Jan 04, 2014
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| 4.13
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really liked it
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Feb 18, 2015
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Oct 24, 2013
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| 3.82
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liked it
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May 22, 2017
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Oct 24, 2013
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| 3.98
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Jul 04, 2013
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| 3.82
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Jun 27, 2013
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