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| 0441011950
| 9780441011957
| 0441011950
| 4.27
| 672
| Sep 07, 2004
| Sep 07, 2004
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Jun 04, 2022
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| 1435166183
| 9781435166189
| 1435166183
| 4.21
| 8,938
| 1849
| Apr 27, 2018
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it was amazing
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One of the Greatest Gothic/Romanticist American Writers, Dark and Macabre and Ironic by Turns Other than a few stories of required reading in English c One of the Greatest Gothic/Romanticist American Writers, Dark and Macabre and Ironic by Turns Other than a few stories of required reading in English class in middle or high school, this is the first time I have properly listening to a large number of Poe's more famous stories, and they did not disappoint. A real range of styles, topics, themes, and all written with great verse and skill, though clearly products of a troubled soul, the tortured artist. Anyone knowing his biography would not be surprised on its influence on his work. Still, his influence on generations of horror/suspense/mystery writers is enormous, and it was a pleasure to sample his works in audio format, brilliant stuff. ...more |
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Mar 16, 2022
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Mar 20, 2022
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Mar 16, 2022
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| 1587158612
| 9781587158612
| 1587158612
| 3.70
| 1,083
| 1893
| Jun 01, 2002
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liked it
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Strange, darkly sardonic, compact and tricky short stories Though I knew the name of Ambrose Bierce and the name of his most famous book The Devil's Di Strange, darkly sardonic, compact and tricky short stories Though I knew the name of Ambrose Bierce and the name of his most famous book The Devil's Dictionary, that was about it. Never read anything by him, just knew his name was associated with other early practitioners of creepy tales of the supernatural and the bizarre like Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, but what I didn't know what his very adventurous real life as a Civil War veteran and extremely sharp-tongued journalist and all-around critic of human affairs. So these stories really took me by surprise - they are very terse, spare, bizzare, disorienting, sardonic, darkly humour, and often end with a sudden one-liner that demands the reader actually think back to the stories events to understand what has gone before. Because I was listening to them in audiobook while fighting jet lag in bed at 3am in Japan, I don't think I could really give them their fair due of reflection, which is not the fault of the author. He expects you to untangle the puzzle after reading the final line, so be prepared to do that if you want to get the full effect. I think I'll have to revisit these in print someday, but I can certainly tell he was a skilled and very unique and unusual stylist, and that's no mean feat. ...more |
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Mar 16, 2022
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Mar 17, 2022
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Mar 16, 2022
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| 1596061782
| 9781596061781
| 1596061782
| 4.08
| 345
| Oct 31, 2008
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Feb 11, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0441015131
| 9780441015139
| 0441015131
| 4.12
| 8,898
| Jul 2006
| Jun 05, 2007
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really liked it
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Galactic North: Reynolds excels at shorter lengths Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Having read all the full-length novels in Alastair Reynolds’ Galactic North: Reynolds excels at shorter lengths Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Having read all the full-length novels in Alastair Reynolds’ REVELATION SPACE series, I knew I’d eventually get to his shorter works set in the same dark and complex universe. The main novels are Revelation Space, Redemption Ark, Chasm City, Absolution Gap, and The Prefect. Reynolds has produced a detailed future history, inspired by works such as Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, Larry Niven’s KNOWN SPACE, and Iain M. Banks’ CULTURE novels, and the stories in Galactic North (2006) fill in important details and serve as memorable tales of post-humans in a cold and inhospitable universe. When I read Reynolds‘ full-length works last year, one of my biggest complaints was that they were overlong, turgidly-paced, and heavy on exposition. Those problems are largely absent from this collection — these stories are action-packed, dense, and effective. They revolve around morally-complex, highly-augmented mercenaries, hive-mind humans, conflicted ships captains, ruthless pirates, and scientists, and often pack a nasty punch at the end — this is not a forgiving galaxy for humans of any kind. But when you get used it, it really draws you in. Now that I understand the chronology and scale of his universe better, I appreciate the events of the novels more. As with all Alastair Reynolds’ audiobooks, the stories are narrated well by John Lee, whose dignified British delivery is a good fit for his work. Reynolds’ milieu is fully developed. Mankind has colonized many worlds in our part of the galaxy, but has not developed FTL technology, so star travel is frequently done while in hibernation (“reefer sleep”), and the level of cybernetic technology has split humanity into a number of sub-groups, including Demarchists (moderately-augmented humans that practice real-time democracy via neural implants), Ultras (highly-augmented cyborg humans), and Conjoiners (mentally-linked humans with hive-mind traits). Humanity has also encountered the remains of many dead alien civilizations, illustrating Fermi’s Paradox of why we have not been contacted by other alien species despite the billions of potentially-habitable worlds in the universe. The stories are ordered in a rough chronology ranging from 2,205 CE in “Great Wall of Mars” to 40,000 CE at the end of “Galactic North.” These are the stories in the collection: Great Wall of Mars This is the earliest story in Reynold’s future chronology, the pivotal story of Nevil Clavain, a prominent figure in the main REVELATION SPACE series, and Galiana, the founder of the Conjoiner movement. It’s a tense tale of the fight between Coalitionists, Demarchists, and a rebel group led by Galiana holed up on Mars. The Earth forces have the rebels pinned down in their fortified construct (the “Great Wall”) which extends deep underground. Clavain and Galiana are ostensibly enemies, but events conspire to force them together, and a young girl with severe brain damage plays a surprising role. The first-hand description of the Conjoiners’ collective consciousness is fascinating, and the story is action-packed and gripping. Glacial This takes place shortly after the previous story, as Clavain and Galiana arrive on an ice planet named Diadem, where they discover an abandoned Earth colony in which the colonists have all died after apparently going insane. They find one survivor who has jury-rigged a form of cryo-stasis, and revive him enough to question what happened. His story sounds fairly plausible, but Clavain has a nagging suspicion some details don’t add up. This is a fairly typical SF setup — the abandoned colony, mysterious deaths, and a suspicious survivor. But to Reynolds’ credit, he adds in some interesting alien biology about ice-worms, and the resolution of the mystery was a surprise to me. A Spy in Europa This is a short but intense story of an undercover agent who goes to a city situated under the ice sheet covering Europa. He is embroiled in the power struggle between the Demarchists (controlling Europa) and the Gilgamesh Isis (who control Ganymede and Callisto). He undergoes dramatic surgical alteration to be equipped with gills to survive in the freezing waters under the ice, and sets out to discover crucial secrets that will aid his side and undermine the Demarchists, but encounters some unexpected beings instead, who seem to be allies at first… Weather This is one of the best stories of the collection. It’s about Inigo, the shipmaster of the Ultra ship Petronel, which is attacked by pirates while transporting colonists in cryosleep. By a stroke of improbable cosmic luck, the pirate threat is eliminated and they find a lone Conjoiner woman being held prisoner. She has a name that is completely incomprehensible to baseline humans, but since it’s origin is from the gas cloud formations of Jupiter, he calls her “Weather.“ Inigo tries to establish a friendship with Weather though she is technically a prisoner, but the Captain distrusts her deeply as a Conjoiner due to events in his own past. But when the Petronel is pursued by a sinister stealth ship and needs to escape, they discover that the Conjoiner drive is damaged and no baseline humans or Ultras have the ability to repair it. It’s an ingenious aspect of Reynolds’ universe — the Conjoiners have mastered near-lightspeed travel and have shared it with other human groups, but refuse to reveal the secrets of its working. The slightest tampering will result in the entire engine going supernova and destroying the ship and everything nearby. All of a sudden, the Conjoiner woman’s cooperation is the only thing that can save them… Dilation Sleep This is apparently the first story written by Reynolds in his REVELATION SPACE universe. It’s a shorter tale of a man who wakes from cryosleep aboard a ship that is fleeing the Melding Plague that has overrun Yellowstone (these events are covered in greater detail in Chasm City). He did not remove the neural implants that make him vulnerable to the plague, but did make a digital copy of his wife, whose simulation tells him he needs to operate on one of the other passengers immediately. I thought this was one of weaker stories, which may reflect it being one of the earliest written. Grafenwalder’s Bestiary This is a dark and baroque tale of wealthy and decadent collectors of rare and freakish creatures in Chasm City. Grafenwalder is the most renowned collector, and he deeply covets something that will impress his little circle. Initially he manages to acquire a live adult-sized hamadryad (a creature also featured in Chasm City), but later gets whiff of something even more rare and valuable — a living specimen of a genetically-engineered human-fish hybrid first created on Europa many years back. He gets a DNA sample from his dealer which seems legitimate, and arranges the purchase. When he gets his prized specimen he can’t wait to show it off to his closest rival, with unexpected results… Nightingale This is a novella-length story of a group of mercenaries sent to track down a criminal accused of war crimes. An team of mercenaries is gathered (one of Reynolds’ favorite themes), the usual assemblage of highly-augmented Ultras and baseline humans. They get wind that their target, Colonel Brandon Jax, may be hiding out on an abandoned hospital ship called Nightingale. During the war on Sky’s Edge, this ship was in charge of healing soldiers on both sides of the conflict, but since the war ended it has been left untended. However, when they arrive on the ship, it seems to be functioning more than should be the case for a derelict. Before you can say “Aliens or The Expanse,” it’s time to explore the ship’s innards. The team find increasingly strange activities aboard the ship, and when they encounter the AI intelligence running the ship, they’re in for a very nasty surprise… Galactic North This is another highlight of the collection, a wide-ranging novella that spans many centuries and covers many epochs of Reynolds’ future history, starting in 2,303 but ending far in the future around 40,000, covering some of the climactic events mentioned in Absolution Gap, the final book of the main REVELATION SPACE trilogy. At the end of that book, we learn of a new threat to the galaxy innocuously named Greenflies, but there are few details. In fact I found it quite frustrating for this to be introduced at the end of a massive trilogy (around 2,000 pages in total) along with several other mysterious alien presences and not enough explanation. Well, “Galactic North” explains what the Greenflies are and how they came to threaten the galaxy. The story centers on Captain Irravel Veda, who is ambushed by pirates when making an unplanned stop for repairs. She is guarding two types of valuable cargo — 20,000 colonists in cryosleep, and terraforming Von Neumann machines called Greenflies. They fall under the control of the sadistic hyperpig Run Seven (yeah, don’t ask). He manages to pry the security codes via torture and trickery and flees with the cargo (why do badguys always leave their enemies alive, one might wonder?). What follows is a cat-and-mouse chase through time and space as Irravel pursues the pirates to get revenge. Meantime, the Greenfly machines have malfunctioned and are dismantling every star system they encounter to build artificial habitats complete with plant-life (hence their name). Sounds great, except they destroy everything in their paths and don’t make exceptions for sentient beings or civilizations. It’s a particularly Reynolds-type of implacable disaster. Despite all the might of various space-faring civilizations, there isn’t much that even ancient races like the Nest Builders or Inhibitors can do but flee to the far reaches of the universe. There are some overlaps with Absolution Gap, but I’d be lying if I said there was total closure in this story. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 03, 2017
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Mar 19, 2017
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Mar 03, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0870541617
| 9780870541612
| 0870541617
| 4.10
| 167
| Jan 24, 1991
| Jan 01, 1991
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it was amazing
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The Ends of the Earth: Luminous, powerful stories of war, exotic locales, and supernatural horror Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Lucius Shepard The Ends of the Earth: Luminous, powerful stories of war, exotic locales, and supernatural horror Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Lucius Shepard had already created one of the best short story collections in the genre, The Jaguar Hunter, which won the 1988 World Fantasy Award and Locus Award for Best Collection, with “Salvador” winning the Locus Award in 1985 and “R&R” winning the Nebula Award in 1987. His work is steeped in magical realism, supernatural horror, Central America and other exotic locales, and hallucinatory depictions of futuristic warfare. In my opinion, Shepard is one of the best stylists to ever work in the genre. That’s why I can’t help including a writing sample from some stories in The Ends of the Earth — they’re just so good. It’s always tough to come up with a sophomore effort that lives up to the hype of the original. Fortunately, when you’ve lived as dramatic and eclectic life as Lucius Shepard, working a host of random jobs to support years of exploring obscure corners of the planet, that makes for fertile ground for great, memorable, and frightening stories. I’m always amazed by authors who can come up with fantastic tales just living in a quiet house in the suburbs, where the biggest event is when a squirrel sneaks onto the bird feeder or the neighbors’ dog gets loose. It’s a testament to the power of the human imagination, but nothing beats having BEEN to Central America and the Carribean, drinking rum at a beach-side shack with the locals late at night, and hanging out with the burned-out expats trying to escape our modern materialist society. And when you actually have the writing skills to craft stories that fascinate, repulse, and entertain, then you’ve got it made. And like The Jaguar Hunter, The Ends of the Earth also won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection in 1992. “The Ends of the Earth” (1989): This is a classic story that is immediately recognizable as a Shepard story. A successful writer named Ray has a failed affair with a married art gallery owner in New York and decided he needs to flee his life and civilization, and chooses an obscure town called Livingston in Guatemala. Being an author, he is fully aware of the artistic pretentious of seeking to escape to the ends of the earth to find inspiration in his own emotional pain along with the new environment so different from the busy streets of Manhattan. The bar — Café Pluto — was set in the lee of a rocky point: a thatched hut with a sand floor and picnic-style tables, lit with black lights that emitted an evil purple radiance and made all the gringos glow like sunburned corpses … I was giddy with the dope, with the wildness of the night, the vast blue-dark sky and its trillion watts of stars, silver glitters that appeared to be slipping around like sequins on a dancer’s gown. Behind us the Café Pluto had the look of an eerie cave lit by seams of gleaming purple ore. There he discovers the expected mixture of disillusioned ex-pats, impoverished locals, and drug-taking bohemian would-be artists. It’s all according to script, until he meets a rather unpleasant Brit named Carl who has set himself up as the top dog in the bohemian community, claiming to be writing an obscure academic work on local folklore and black magic, but supporting himself by selling drugs to other foreigners. Ray takes an instant dislike to Carl, not least because one Carl’s followers is an alluring young French woman named Odille, whom Ray is attracted to and who has her own emotional issues she is fleeing from. The scene is set for a classic love triangle in a tiny Guatemalan village, until one night Ray discovers a set of strange dolls that Carl has acquired from a local shaman. Supposedly they are part of an ancient game that Carl is studying, but he is very reticent to reveal more details, and when they all decide to get high on hashish and play the game, things quickly take a sinister turn… “Delta Sly Honey” (1987): Here is another Shepard story set in a war setting, this time behind the front lines in Vietnam. Randall J. Williams is a skinny and shy young Southern guy who transforms into the “High Priest of the Soulful Truth and the Holy Ghost of the Sixty-Cycle Hum.” Randall’s job is mainly to handle the bodies of dead soldiers, but one day a lifetime sergeant named Andrew Moon decides to make meek Randall his target of bullying. One day someone using the tag line Delta Sly Honey answers Randall’s broadcast, and he freaks out and goes AWOL. As the narrator investigates, things get more bizarre and horrific… “Bound for Glory” (1989): This is definitely a strange and memorable tale of a nightmarish train trip to Glory, a town in a post-apocalyptic Wild-West type of landscape where desperation triumphs over hope. The train passes through a strange series of border towns but the biggest danger is when it goes through the Patch, an area where the laws of physics, mysterious fauna, and behavior of the passengers all change unpredictably. Anybody who has read Jeff VanderMeer’s SOUTHERN REACH trilogy will recognize the eerie echoes of that occult sense of dread. The train guard Roy Cole patrols up and down the train cars, looking into the eyes of each passengers for the telltale signs of madness, and doesn’t hesitate to use his shotgun if he feels it is justified. When the narrator and his female companion Tracy go through the Patch and Tracy starts to transform, he is torn between protecting her from herself and Roy Cole, but he should really be more concerned about the changes that are happening to himself. The ending of the story truly turns things on their head, but you’ll have to read it to find out why. “The Exercise of Faith” (1987): Here’s a story that doesn’t resemble other Shepard stories I’ve read. The protagonist is a priest that heads a small group of parishioners. But he has an ability not generally available to men of the cloth. The opening paragraph describes it well: From my pulpit, carved of ebony into a long-snouted griffin’s head, I can see the sins of my parishioners. It’s as if a current is flowing from face to face, illuminating the secret meaning of every wrinkle and line and nuance of expression. They — like their sins — are an ordinary lot. Children as fidgety as gnats. Ruddy-cheeked men possessed by the demons of real estate, solid citizens with weak hearts and brutal arguments for wives. Women whose thoughts slide like swaths of gingham through their minds, married every one to lechers and layabouts. Knowing the innermost thoughts and sinful urges of his flock leads the priest to pursue some very deviant paths and deliver possibly the most perverse sermon of all time. Depending on your temperament, you may find it either hilarious or blasphemous. A very unusual story. “Nomans Land” (1988): This is the story of several sailors who get caught in vicious storm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard (which also features in Shepard’s story “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket”) and who find themselves stranded on a tiny deserted island appropriated named “Nomans Land”. The only survivors are Bert Cisneros, a mean-spirited Portuguese man, and the Irish cook Jack Tyrell. There is little friendship between the two, but they take shelter in an ominous bunker overnight. The next morning, Jack encounters a strange, haunted-seeming woman named Astrid who sees to be living alone on the island, an entomologist studying the ubiquitous tiny white spiders that seem to make their webs in every corner of the island. Jack and Astrid develop a lonely and desperate relationship that suddenly takes a turn to horror (Shepard’s favorite technique), and then goes far beyond, bringing our tenuous understanding of reality into question, as the little white spiders swarm over the island. “Life of Buddha” (1988): This is the first story in this collection that I just didn’t like. It’s the story of a heroin addict nicknamed Buddha that basically spends much of his time in a drugged-out stupor in a shooting gallery, ostensibly serving as security for his dealer. He has decided to shut out the painful memories of his family by losing himself in drugs, and encounters another lost soul who is also living in the margins and struggling with gender issues. There are some fantasy/horror elements, but I couldn’t care about the characters or the story much. “Shades” (1987): Here is a return to form for Shepard, as a Vietnamese man named Tom Puleo returns to Vietnam to cover a story about a young soldier named Stoner who died in a village called Cam Le. A Marxist mystic has invented a device that can summon ghosts, and Stoner’s ghost has come back to haunt the village, scaring the residents away and attracting foreign attention. As a fellow soldier with Stoner, the machine inventor wants to see if Stoner’s ghost will respond more to Tom. The story is filled with intense paranormal confrontations between Tom and Stoner’s ghost, and the ending is poignant. “Aymara” (1986): This was one of my favorite stories of the collection, another seamlessly-crafted take of revolution in Central America and the take of a gringo named Captain Lee Christmas who becomes deeply embroiled in Honduran politics at the turn of the century. The framing narrative is told by a political journalist named William who is fascinated by the story of Christmas and also looking to write a story about a mysterious US military facility and the growing presence of CIA agents around the town. As always, Shepard captures the details of the steamy daily life in the city, and when William begins a torrid love affair with an exotic dark-haired local woman named Ivie. The mystery behind the military facility involves scientists, exotic experiments, revolutionaries, and the two lovers in the middle of it all. The ending is wonderfully enigmatic, a great story. “A Wooden Tiger” (1988): Another classic Shepard tale of supernatural horror, embittered CIA agents, incarnations of the goddess Kumari, and sordid goings on in Katmandu. An ex-CIA chief named Clement decides to track down the most recent incarnation of the dark goddess Kumari, who regularly inhabits the bodies of young girls who are treated like goddesses until the spirit moves to the next one, at which point they are discarded and shunned. Clement tries to track down a former incarnation, now a mere mortal, and encounters his former mentor D’allesandro, who taught him all the dirty tricks in the book, but who was now gone rogue Lieutenant Kurtz-style. It’s all very murky and intriguing, exactly the type of story Shepard excels in without repeating himself. “The Black Clay Boy” (1987): This is a short and creepy story set in small-town Ohio, narrated by an old woman named Willa Selkie. She is a recluse, harassed by neighborhood boys with petty pranks. Then she reminisces back to hear early days as a beautiful young woman forced to marry a wealthy older man when she was just 18. Turns out Willa has a very intense libido that cannot be satisfied by her distant and old husband. When he discovers her pleasuring herself, he basically has a heart attack and curses her with his dying breath. She goes on to remarry, but again can’t get no satisfaction, turning to part-time prostitution just to get her fix, eventually setting her sights on a sexually-frustrated Reverend. As we flash back to the present, Willa turns now eyes on her Black Clay Boy, a type of voodoo doll, hoping for one last moment of pleasure… “Fire Zone Emerald” (1985): Another atmospheric and intense Shepard tale of high-tech soldiers in a Central American war zone, this time in the Guatemalan rain forest. The story begins with Quinn, a soldier injured and separated from his unit after an attack and explosion, finds himself alone in Fire Zone Emerald. He is hardly able to move, and when he gets an unexpected call on his com unit from someone named Mathis of Special Forces who seems sympathetic but may have gone rogue, Quinn is suspicious. The story becomes a cat-and-mouse game as Quinn tries to evade Mathis, with some very tense action sequences. What’s that you say? Where is the trademark dark supernatural element that distinguishes Shepard’s stories? Well, you should discuss that with the queen, who takes the shape of a tiger and can place thoughts in your mind… “On the Border” (1987): This was one of my favorite stories — a desert-based tale of desperate and marginalized hoodlums who try to rise above their origins, the classic pursuit of a reward for the kidnapping of the beautiful daughter of a rich man, and some magical realism in a surreal brujo in the desert and a bizarre mountain village that may be a total head trip into a psychedelic and violent denouement. It’s a taught tale with a lean and mean James Ellroy feel, but with the empathy of Shepard’s love of outcasts and the glimpses of sublime spiritual mysteries hiding in the sordid corners of our world. “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter” (1988): This is one of the longest stories in the collection and is part of Shepard’s ongoing series of fantasy stories about Griaule, the giant dormant dragon who has been trapped by a magician’s spell and has become a part of the local geography, but still exerts a subtle and sinister influence on the human communities that surround it. This story is about Catherine, the daughter of a scalehunter in Hangtown who makes his living chipping away loose scales to sell in the nearby town. She is beautiful, as the title states, but also vain and selfish, toying with the hearts of the young men and stealing them away from their girlfriends just for the malicious fun of it. One day she is resting alone and is assaulting by a village thug, and in the struggle to resist his attempted rape, she accidently kills him with her scaling hook. She is then forced to flee into the dragon’s mouth as his vengeful brothers try to kill her. Thus begins a very surreal odyssey inside the body of Griaule, which turns out to be inhabited by all sorts of bizarre and disturbing creatures much like something from Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth or Michael Shea’s Nifft the Lean, and more importantly a lost colony of humans called feelies, descended from a pair of retarded villagers many generations past. They have formed a strange and degenerate society that seems to be swayed by the inscrutable and dark influence of Griaule’s thoughts. Catherine is taken into this society and gradually falls into the rhythms of this subterranean world, a prisoner of both the feelies and the dragon’s pervasive presence. Then one day a young scientist enters her world, changing everything. This is one of those tales with metaphorical overtones that dares you to interpret both the situation and events and discover the hidden themes and messages. However, much like his award-winning story “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” while the story is fraught with meaning, the exact interpretation of what the dragon represents is elusive and will vary from reader to reader. Is the dragon a dormant god, exerting a sinister influence on human affairs for his own unknowable reasons, or an embodiment of a more subtle evil that is not divine in nature? Themes of free will, self-determination, and imprisonment are also explored, and the will to adapt to captivity. Guilt, revenge, love, escape, freedom, and good/evil; it’s all there in a fairytale format that also reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin’s short stories. “Surrender” (1989): The final story is a confluence of all Shepard’s favorite elements: a dismal Central American military conflict, corrupt militia groups involved in nefarious scientific experiments, jaded journalists who discover things are even more screwed-up than their cynical outlooks were prepared to handle, and dark gun battles against subhuman creatures in dark and dangerous jungles and caves. The narrator gives the story its sarcastic attitude and challenges the reader to have an opinion of the endless miseries of US involvement in Central American wars and state-building, its failures and hypocrisy, and what we think of it while kicking back with a cold one from the comfort of our sofas in front of the TV watching ABC news and Monday Night Football. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 11, 2017
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Nov 16, 2017
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Jan 06, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 1596064560
| 9781596064560
| 1596064560
| 3.97
| 419
| May 31, 2012
| May 31, 2012
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Jan 06, 2017
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
| 1846141656
| 9781846141652
| 1846141656
| 4.13
| 4,210
| 1997
| May 28, 2009
|
really liked it
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The Complete Cosmicomics: Cosmic Tales of the Universe’s Origins Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Along with his brilliant Invisible Cities(1972 The Complete Cosmicomics: Cosmic Tales of the Universe’s Origins Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Along with his brilliant Invisible Cities(1972 in Italian, 1974 in English), one of Italo Calvino’s most enduring creations was his series of whimsical and erudite stories inspired by the origins of the universe and scientific principles, labeled Cosmicomics (1965 in Italian, 1968 in English). They are narrated by a mysterious being called Qfwfq, who tells of the Big Bang and the time before that when the universe was a single point without space or dimensions. Qfwfq has a refreshingly frank and humorous attitude towards such momentous moments as the birth of our universe, the origins of life, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the first animals to crawl onto land, the early days of the Moon, etc. If you seek out these stories, you will find that the most recent edition includes much more than the original 12 stories. Now, for the same price you can buy in print or e-book all 34 collected Cosmicomics stories, published as The Complete Cosmicomics (2009). This comprises the original Cosmicomics (1965), t-zero (1967, also published in English as Time and the Hunter), and World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories (a collection never published in a single English volume, with eight new stories, seven of which are translated into English for the first time for the 2009 collection). It’s an overused expression, but these stories truly defy easy description. Calvino believed that modern fiction was not addressing the most important new developments in cosmology and science in the context of the mid-1960s and amid the space race between the US and Soviet Union. So he took it upon himself to address these topics with a literary approach, and on top of that add a whimsical tone to otherwise obtuse concepts like the Big Bang and dimensionless space. He also added a romantic element to these stories, as his protagonist Qfwfq is often pining after an elusive female companion, pursuing her across lunar landscapes, deep in the primordial earth, or in the farthest corners of the universe. So the big distinction with science fiction is that Calvino is fascinated with our origins, and at the same time uses the lens of literature to inform his comic tales. I will split my review into three parts to do justice to each section. Cosmicomics (5 stars) These are probably Calvino’s most accessible and enjoyable stories, and the first US edition translated by William Weaver won the National Book Award for a Translation in 1969. The first story in particular, “The Distance to the Moon”, combines all the elements I’ve described in a delightful tale of the early days when the Moon was much closer to the Earth, and the poignant love story that enfolds around it. It’s tells the story of Qfwfq, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, and Qfwfq’s deaf cousin, who took little boats on the ocean to harvest the milk of the Moon using a ladder, big spoons, and buckets. The distance between the Earth and Moon is so short that a tall ladder is enough to get there, and gravity reverses midway so you are drawn to the Moon past a certain point, and appear to be hanging upside down from the Earth perspective. Calvino’s descriptions of this bizarre and fantastic situation are wonderful: In reality, from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last rung, you could just touch the Moon if you held your arms up. I would cling first with one hand, then with both, and immediately I would feel ladder and boat drifting away from below me, and the motion of the Moon would tear me from the Earth’s attraction. Yes, the Moon was so strong that she pulled you up; you realized this the moment you passed from one to the other: you had to swing up abruptly, with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs over your head, until your feet were on the Moon’s surface. Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you, it was the normal position, and the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes you saw the sea above you, glistening, with the boat and the others upside down, hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine. There they harvest the milk of the Moon, which is a truly unique and somewhat stomach-churning concoction: Moon-milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes, as the Moon sailed over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetal juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. There develops a strange love triangle between Qfwfq, the Captain’s wife, and Qfwfq’s deaf cousin whose only passion is harvesting the Moon’s milk and exploring its scaly and alien terrain. I was surprisingly moved by the ending of this story, as I had initially expected Calvino’s story not to be centered on human relationships. This story is creative, literate, whimsical, and magical, and if you are interested in this collection I think it will win you over. The remaining 11 stories are of equally high quality and charm, and explore a wide range of concepts and themes. Taken as whole, they are an amazing achievement and unique in the annals of fantastic literature. Time and the Hunter (2 stars) This set of stories is a very different creature indeed. It consists of three parts, “More of Qfwfq”, “Priscilla”, and “t zero”. These stories are far more experimental, formalistic, complex, mathematical, and frequently impossible to follow. In many ways they bear little resemblance to the stories from Cosmicomics, so in reviewing them I gave them a 3 star rating. I will separately review each part. “More of Qfwfq” This part consists of four stories, “The Soft Moon”, “The Origin of the Birds”, “Crystals”, and “Blood, Sea”. These stories ostensibly are narrated by Qfwfq, but his presence is fairly limited, and the stories often occupy modern environments, but still exploring Calvino’s themes of the romantic pursuit of the Moon, the evolution of birds shown via cartoon strip, the elements that make up the Earth juxtaposed onto New York, and the story of how life in the oceans made its way into our bodies via blood cells. It’s a much more cerebral literary experimental, and much of the playfulness is gone, but it does represent Calvino’s tireless drive to reinvent literary conventions to tackle modern themes. “Priscilla” This is a set of three linked stories, “Mitosis”, “Meiosis”, and “Death”, and I found these stories almost impossible to read or understand, as this passage will show: So I am speaking then of the initial phase of a love story which afterwards is probably repeated in an interminable multiplication of initial phases just like the first and identified with the first, a multiplication or rather a squaring, an exponential growth of stories which is always tantamount to the first story, but it isn’t as if I were so very sure of all this, I assume it as you can also assume it. I’m referring to an initial phase that precedes the other initial phases, a first phase which must surely have existed, because it’s logical to expect it to exist, and also because I remember it very well, and when I say it’s the first I don’t in the least mean first in the absolute sense, that’s what you’d like me to mean but I don’t; I mean first in the sense that we can consider any of these identical initial phases the first, and the one I refer to is the one I remember, the one I remember as first in the sense that before it I don’t remember anything. And as for the first in the absolute sense, your guess is as good as mine, I’m not interested. My mind was reeling after pages of this type of exposition. It just went on and on, without any conceivable storyline. It’s very much a literary experiment, but for me these stories had no appeal. “t zero” This is the set of four stories that really go off the deep end of mathematical experimental literature, and I challenge anyone other than a theoretical mathematician with an advanced literature degree out there to make any sense of the stories at all. It was so completely impenetrable that I just skimmed through the pages until they became a blur. You’re welcome to give them a try, but don’t say I didn’t warn you. Again, a sample may help to illustrate what I mean: I find myself in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of the universe; after hundreds of millions of billions of seconds here the arrow and the lion and I and the bush have found ourselves as we now find ourselves, and this second will be promptly swallowed up and buried in the series of the hundreds of millions of billions of seconds that continues, independently of the outcome, a second from now, of the convergent or divergent flight of the lion and of the arrow; then at a certain point the course will reverse its direction, the universe will repeat its vicissitude backwards, from the effects the causes will punctually arise… it will be forgotten in the dispersal of billions of combinations of neurons within the lobes of brains, so that no one will know he’s living in reversed time just as I myself am not now sure in which direction the time I move in is moving, and if the then I’m waiting for has not in reality already happened just a second ago, bearing with it my salvation or my death. World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories (4 stars) These stories represent a welcome return to the tales of the world’s early days, narrated by Qfwfq in his inimitable style. After the incomprehensible mess of “t zero”, it was nice to read more of the fables of how the moon formed from the sea, waves of land thrusting themselves up from the primordial seas, carrying various odd characters on their crests (“The Mushroom Moon”), a very haunting story of the decrepit old Moon and it’s encounter with a modern-world junkyard and the efforts of an army of young women in an ultra-modern ultra-consumerist New York to save the Moon (“The Daughters of the Moon”). Here is a memorable image: We crossed one of the bridges that link Manhattan to the mainland. Now we were going along a multi-lane highway, with other cars alongside us, and I kept my eyes fixed on the road ahead, fearing the laughter and crude comments that the sight of the two of us was no doubt prompting in the cars on either side. But when a saloon car overtook us, I nearly went off the road in surprise: crouched on its roof was a girl with her hair spread out in the wind. For a second I thought my passenger was leaping from one fast-moving car to another, but all I had to do was turn my eyes round ever so slightly to see that Diana’s knees were still there at the same height as my nose. And it was not just her body that glowed before my eyes: I saw girls everywhere, stretched out in the strangest of poses, clinging to the radiators, doors, mudguards of the speeding cars—their golden or dark hair was the only thing that contrast with the pale or dark gleam of their skin. One of these mysterious female passengers was positioned on every car, all stretching forwards, urging the drivers to follow the Moon. He also includes “The Stone Sky”, an inversion of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which two being dwell within the Earth’s core, but the female named Rdix has this irresistible urge to explore the upper layers near the crust where ephemeral beings (like humans) dwell. Calvino’s imagery here is again unique and refreshing - he delights in inverting our conventional perspectives and examining non-human perspectives: Border areas, passages between one earthly layer and another, gave her a mild vertigo. We knew that the Earth is made up of superimposed roofs, like the skins of an enormous onion, and that every roof leads you to a roof higher up, and all of them together prefigure the final roof, the point where the Earth ceases to be Earth, where all the inside is left on this side, and beyond there is only the outside. For you this border of the Earth is identified with the Earth itself; you think the sphere is the surface that wraps it, and not its total volume; you have always lived in that flat, flat dimension and you don’t even imagine that one can live elsewhere and in a different way. For us at that time, this border was something we knew existed, but we didn’t think we could see it without leaving the Earth, a prospect which seemed to us not so much frightful as absurd. That was where everything was flung out in eruptions and bituminous spurts and smoke-holes, everything that the Earth expelled from its innards: gases, liquid mixtures, volatile elements, base matter, all types of waste. It was the world in negative, something that we could not picture even in our minds, the abstract idea of it was enough to give us a shiver of disgust, no, of anxiety; or rather a stunned sensation, a kind of—as I said—vertigo (yes, that’s it, our reactions were more complex than you might think, especially Rdix’s), into which their crept an element of fascination, a kind of attraction to the void, to anything double-faced or absolute. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 19, 2016
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Mar 11, 2017
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Dec 19, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1481451391
| 9781481451390
| 1481451391
| 4.43
| 1,696
| Oct 18, 2016
| Oct 18, 2016
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it was amazing
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The Found and the Lost: Masterful stories by one of the genre’s greats Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Found and the Lost is the companion v The Found and the Lost: Masterful stories by one of the genre’s greats Originally posted at Fantasy Literature The Found and the Lost is the companion volume to The Unreal and the Real: The Selected Short Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, a hefty 816-page book or 34-hour audiobook collection of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novellas. It contains most of the stories that make up Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) a set of linked stories in her HAINISH CYCLE, about the two worlds of Werel and Yeowe, and explores the themes of slavery, oppression, revolution, and redemption. It also contains several stories set in her EARTHSEA CYCLE from Tales from Earthsea (2001). One of my other favorites was “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” about communications with alien intelligence somewhat reminiscent of Stanislaw Lem‘s Solaris (1970). “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” makes pointed social critiques of modern society from the viewpoint of Native American animal deities. Overall the collection is excellent and provides a broad overview of her favorite themes, and should be a perfect way for fans to revisit her stories or for new readers to discover one of the greats of the genre. Here are reviews of my favorite stories, which got much longer than I planned because each story has so much worth mentioning. Vaster than Empires and More Slow: This is one of my favorite early Le Guin stories set in the HAINISH universe. It tells the tale of a scientific expedition sent to explore and catalog unknown planets in the galaxy. Because they travel at near light speed, expedition members know they will never see their loved ones again. Therefore, they choose neurotic personalities willing to tolerate long spaceflight. Their most difficult member is Osden, a former autistic who has been “fully cured” but is now hypersensitive to the thoughts of all sentient living things in range. This proves to be a massive liability for him, because he can acutely sense every thought of all his neurotic crew-members. His response is to be insulting, combative, and vitriolic. This feeds into a negative loop, creating a very toxic environment among the crew. When they finally reach their destination, they discover a very green planet covered with fauna, concentrated into just a small number of species. As they explore, they sense a feeling of foreboding and fear. Ogden is particularly sensitive to it, and strange things begin to happen. It’s almost as if the forest itself were exuding the fear. The crew frequently debate the merits of their mission, exposing hidden jealousies, rivalries, the limits of empathy, and how much we hide our true emotions in order to coexist. Even Ogden gives his side of things, complaining “I agree that even autistic withdrawal might be preferable to the smog of cheap secondhand emotions with which you people surround me.” His reaction is both self-defensive and vindictive, but he himself is a victim of his “gift” and the story’s denouement presents him with a surprising opportunity for redemption. Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight: This takes a very creative approach to the Native American mythos of the trickster Coyote and a menagerie of animals in the American Southwest. A little girl is involved in an airplane crash and finds herself taken in by talking animals who don’t make a distinction between various “people,” whether human or animal. Coyote is constantly telling stories and boasting, but shows a rough kindness and takes her to her village. There she meets many animals of different persuasions like Bluejay and Grandma Spider, who don’t seem to mind her presence. As she gets to know them, she learns about their lives and history and how they have had their territories encroached upon by the “new people,” namely humans. And yet they don’t seem to hold a grudge. Their open acceptance is contrasted with the crass behavior of humans in their towns and hunters with their guns who treat the natural world with contempt. This story has a playful tone, but beneath the surface is a condemnation of what humans have given up in favor of technology and modernization, and the dignity and resignation of the “old people” in the face of this. By telling the story through the eyes of an innocent child, Le Guin strips all the layers of the adult civilized world away to reveal the essential spiritual wasteland of the modern world. The Matter of Seggri: This was one of the highlights of this collection. It is a brilliantly developed study of a society in which women are dominant in the economy, politics, education, and all practical professions. That leaves the men with just two roles, isolated in their castles — sports and breeding (siring children and serving as sex workers). In fact, women pay them for their services. While this may seem at first like an enviable position for men, Le Guin meticulously shows us their utter powerlessness. They are reduced to prized breeders and are given no other outlets or means of self-fulfillment except macho displays via violent sports. Switching around familiar gender roles forces the reader to confront all the biases and rigid social barriers that form the basis for men and women’s roles in societies throughout human history, and brings home just how soul-crushing a position women have been frequently subjected to, even in this day and age. In particular, the cruel behavior towards men who are not prized as breeders parallels the intolerant treatment of women who cannot bear children. Towards the end of the story, we also see the vicious in-fighting among the men themselves. There is even the equivalent of an Equal Rights Movement, and it is bittersweet to see the men struggle to gain respect even after they are granted the right to higher education and other roles in society. I think this story is a real eye opener for younger readers in the West who have benefitted from far greater sexual equality than prior generations. Another Story or a Fisherman of the Inland Sea: An inventive story that takes the ancient Japanese fable of Urashima Taro, the fisherman who rescues a turtle and is granted a visit to the undersea kingdom of the dragon god, and though he spends only three days by his reckoning, he discovers upon his return that three centuries have passed in his village. It is the perfect framing story for this exploration of instantaneous space travel. It’s an idea also explored in two other Le Guin stories not included here, “The Shobies’ Story” and “Dancing to Ganam.” What better way to illustrate the idea of time/space relativity than with a young man growing up on the world of O, who desires to visit humanity’s home planet of Hain to study temporal physics. He knows that nearly-as-fast-as-light-travel (NAFAL) means that if he chooses to return to O, his family members will have aged far more than him. Hideo devotes himself to studying Churnten theory, spending 10 years to experiment in instantaneously transporting objects across space. He decides to transport himself via transilience to a different location instantaneously, which goes fine, but when he transports himself back there is a “fold” or “wrinkle” in the Churn field, and Hideo finds himself in a very unexpected place and time. I won’t spoil the details, but if you recall the name of the story you might imagine what happens. It’s a very profound and understated crisis that he faces in a mature but bittersweet way. Forgiveness Day: Here Le Guin introduces a pair of worlds named Werel and Yeowe. Werel has a firmly entrenched system of slavery, and the shock of encountering the Ekumen prompts the Werelians to colonize the planet of Yeowe using an-all male population of slaves (which they label “assets”). Later on, these slaves of Yeowe stage a revolution and throw out their Werelian owners. Forgiveness Day is the story of Ekumen envoy Solly, a brash young female agent assigned to the small kingdom of Gatay. She feels confident that she understands the rigid two-class social structure of Werel, in which owners are real people and bondspeople are slaves and not human at all. Solly is assigned a taciturn guard from Voe Deo named Teyeo. He is offended by her overt sexuality and boldness in dealing with the conservative men of Gatay, and her naïveté towards the complex political situation is alarming. Voe Deo is the more powerful nation but is stinging from defeat in the slave revolution on Yeowe, which is where Teyeo served as a soldier on the losing side. He developed a reluctant respect for the Yeowen slaves he fought, but cannot break out of the owner-slave mentality. Events take a sudden turn when Solly attends a festival called Forgiveness Day, but is attacked and kidnapped by anti-Ekumen nativist forces in Gatay, who are opposed to their government’s efforts to be accepted into the Ekumen. They fear the social upheaval of having their two-tiered hierarchy of slavery and the subordination of women threatened by alien Ekumenical ideas of equality among races and men & women. A Man of the People: Le Guin’s HAINISH stories frequently feature envoys from the Ekumen, the alliance of worlds that were seeded by the Hainish people. She likes to use the objective lens of the ancient and sophisticated Ekumen as she explores the more exotic and primitive human societies as a means to analyze our deeply-ingrained social beliefs and assumptions. However, it is quite rare to actually get a glimpse of life on Hain itself. With three million years of history, the legacy of the past weighs heavily on Hain. In a small pueblo called Stse, a young man named Havzhiva grows up in a quiet agrarian society, indifferent to the greater world or the weight of history. We get intriguing details on the complex social hierarchies and religious beliefs of Stse. However, Havzhiva is drawn to the teachings of the local temple, and yearns to study with the other major social group on Hain, the Historians. Finally Havzhiva is sent to Yeowe as a historian. His job is to assist the newly-emerged society in leaving behind its brutal legacy of slavery and reinvent itself. He learns from his nurse that the women of Werel remain powerless and slave-like in status despite the successful rebellion against the owners. Despite their efforts to support the resistance, they remain voiceless. She asks him to assist in empowering them with the assistance of the Ekumen, triggering major consequences. A Woman’s Liberation: This is a companion piece to the previous two stories, this time from the perspective of a young female slave (“asset”) named Rakam who grows up on the planet Werel. It follows her life as we see the brutal slavery of the Shomeke family in the land of Voe Deo (where Teyeo from “Forgiveness Day” comes from), a powerful nation that originally colonized Yeowe with slave labor. This allows Le Guin to show us the inner workings of a slave-owning ruler class and their bondswomen and bondmen. It is a harsh and cruel system, which should come as no surprise to anyone, but she certainly pulls no punches. Slaves are disposable objects that can be treated like garbage or killed with impunity. When the slave revolt on Yeowe is successful, this has repercussions for the slaves of Werel as the owners fear the same will happen in their world. Rakam is caught up in the rebellion and finds herself and the other slaves “freed” by their lord. However, society is chaotic in the aftermath as the power vacuum is contested by various factions. We see how difficult it is eradicate owner-slave modes of thinking, even when the institutions crumble. Rakam begins publishing writings about liberation and government and we see the birthing pains of a new society through her eyes. When things become dangerous for her, she finds a way to escape to Yeowe, the planet of freed slaves. But she again discovers that freedom there only extends to men and not women. Her knowledge and teaching skills are not welcomed at first. She must battle for recognition against the forces of ingrained prejudices against women. There are interesting contrasts and parallels with “The Matter of Seggri.” She becomes a leader among the women of Yeowe, sharing teachings from Werel and the Ekumen and assisting in the building of a more equitable society. Old Music and the Slave Women: Though this story was not part of the four stories collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness, it is another story of Werel and Yeowe, this time centered on the Ekumen Special Envoy known as “Old Music,” who plays minor roles in the other stories. Like “A Man of the People,” this is also a story of an Ekumenical officer, this time to Werel. In fact it is Esdardan Aya, also known as “Old Music.” He is stationed at the Ekumenical Embassy on Werel as Chief Intelligence Officer. Though Yeowe has thrown off the shackles of slavery from the owners of Werel, there remains a bitter struggle among different chieftains and warlords to seize control, a subject also covered in “A Women’s Liberation.” When “Old Music” is careless in venturing outside the compound he is captured by insurgents and ill-treated. He gets embroiled in different sides hoping to utilize him as a bargaining chip with the Ekumen. He strikes up a friendship with some of the slave women trapped amid the factional fighting, as helpless as he is. It’s not exactly clear to me why Le Guin chose to write another story about Werel and Yeowe using similar themes and perspectives. We see the same cruelties and prejudices and in-fighting that come when one form of government is overthrown and new forms struggle for supremacy. “Old Music” is a wiser and more world-weary observer of this from previous characters, so perhaps the Le Guin wanted to further refine some of her ideas about the gap between ideals and reality amid a revolution. The Finder: This is the first of three stories from Le Guin’s Tales from Earthsea (2001) contained in the collection, and tells the early history of Earthsea set several centuries before the events of the main EARTHSEA TRILOGY. While the reader would benefit from having read that series first, it certainly stands on its own. It’s a lengthy tale of the events leading to the founding of the School of Magic on the Island of Roke, but it’s much more than that. The story centers on a young boy named Otter (his “use” name, not his “true” name) who grows up as an apprentice ship-builder to his father, who works for the local pirate-king. The boy shows a talent for magic, but in these times magic is a dangerous thing because most wizards and sorcerers are in the service of the warring lords and pirates of the Archipelago, and such attention could result in being put into servitude. I will not reveal any further plot details, but we learn much about the inner workings of Roke, its origins in the magic underlying the creation of Earthsea, the role of women’s magic in the world, and how the school of magic came to be created. It is a fantastic story, told with exquisite writing, economy of language, strong characterization, and a sense of ancient legend and history. Having not read the EARTHSEA TRILOGY since I was in junior high, I now have a burning desire to revisit that series for the first time in three decades. On the High Marsh: This is another tale of Earthsea, somewhat shorter, about a mysterious animal healer who shows up in the marshes on the Island of Semel. He is clearly more than he lets on, but his abilities to heal diseased cattle are undeniable, so the villagers seek his aid. He takes shelter in the house of a widowed woman named Gift, and provides several names though they are obviously untrue. He establishes himself as a mysterious but reliable healer, and one day a new stranger shows up on Gift’s doorstop, seeking after the healer. Without giving anything away, both the healer and his visitor are of far greater stature and share a more complicated relationship than Gift could ever have imagined. Readers will also appreciate the story more if they have read the EARTHSEA TRILOGY. Dragonfly: This is an EARTHSEA story that takes place immediately after the events of Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea (1990), the fourth book in the EARTHSEA series. It is meant as a bridge story linking Tehanu and the final EARTHSEA book, The Other Wind (2001). So while it is a good stand-alone story, you will get more from it if you know the larger story background. Dragonfly is a girl who grows up on an isolated property with an embittered, alcoholic father. Her mother died at childbirth, so she is forced to spend her time trying to maintain things. When her father refuses to grant her a true name ceremony, she goes to the village witch Rose and asks for it anyway. The witch grants it to her, but it is not the one she wanted, though true names are not something people can choose. Meanwhile, her more successful uncle hires a wizard from Roke named Ivory, who is still inexperienced and seems to bear a grudge against the masters of the school of magic at Roke. When Ivory discovers Dragonfly living not far off, he is intrigued by her headstrong character and beauty. She also shows some talent for magic, which grabs his attention. When he tells her stories of Roke, she is eager to learn more and vows that she will enter the school of magic and become a mage herself. The only catch is… women have not been admitted to the magic school at Roke for centuries. Paradises Lost: This is the final story in the collection, and takes on a SF staple, the generational starship. The ship Discovery is sent from Earth on a mission to explore and report back on a potentially-habitable planet many light years away. Because there is no cryogenic technology, this will be a multi-generational journey in which only the later generations of ship-inhabitants are likely to see the destination. The central event is the “rebirth” of religion in the form of the Bliss movement, which emerges after the death of the most senior zero generation member. It seems to spontaneously arise among many of the inhabitants, and slowly evolves over time, at first celebrating a general spirituality that binds together people, much like a friendly but harmless cult. Over time, however, it starts to infiltrate the power structures of the ship, and its belief systems shift to celebrate the sanctity of the eternal journey through space rather than the ostensible destination of the original mission. This takes on a sinister tone as the Bliss members show a profound lack of interest in actually arriving anywhere — they liken the outside of the ship to non-existence and worship only the journey. When the ship finally approaches its destination, the ship inhabitants are split between “voyagers” and “settlers.” The settlers are woefully unprepared to actually make a life on a new world after a lifetime of ease within the ship’s confines, and they are taken aback at alien things like wind, cold, shelters, shoes, food supplies, dirt, plants, and everything else on the new planet. The conclusion of the story is ambiguous and somewhat melancholy, as the settlers are unlikely to survival on their new home, whereas the voyagers are lost in a haze of religious fervor. All in all, it is very open-ended story that lets the reader draw their own conclusions. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 03, 2017
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Feb 13, 2017
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Nov 26, 2016
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Hardcover
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| 1481475967
| 9781481475969
| 1481475967
| 4.23
| 924
| Nov 01, 2013
| Oct 18, 2016
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really liked it
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The Unreal and the Real: Omnibus of anthropological SF and literary tales Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Everyone with even a passing knowledge The Unreal and the Real: Omnibus of anthropological SF and literary tales Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Everyone with even a passing knowledge of SF/Fantasy will likely have heard of Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the giants of the field whose work has transcended genre and literary categories. Her SFF works have ranged from mythical fantasy such as the EARTHSEA CYCLE to brilliant studies of gender, identity, and political ideologies like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. She proudly identifies herself as a SF writer, but one whose intellectual rigor and literary ambitions have forced mainstream readers and critics to take notice and acknowledge. Le Guin has produced a steady stream of fiction, poetry, criticism for over 50 years. She is a champion of feminism, political and intellectual freedom, and ecological preservation. There is even a documentary about her life and legacy being produced by Arwen Curry called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, which raised over $234,000 in pledges on Kickstarter in just a month, and is scheduled for completion by 2017. However, until recently it has been difficult to get her best short stories and novellas in single volumes. Fortunately, Saga Press has recently come out with two books that address this issue. The first volume collects her most famous short stories (it is by no means comprehensive, considering her output over many decades), which are selected by the author herself. This new handsome hardcover edition is currently available for $22.49 on Amazon, but the Kindle edition is available for only $7.99, which is incredible considering you get over 700 pages of some of the most challenging, literary, and intelligent short stories every produced in the genre. I have previously reviewed these stories in two separate volumes but am glad to see them now combined in this attractive omnibus edition. Part One: Where on Earth While the quality of LeGuin’s writing is consistently high, it’s undeniable that Part One: Where on Earth may be of less interest to dedicated fans of “speculative fiction,” or “genre fiction.” Having said that, Le Guin is brilliant, fearless, intellectual, and ethical, so anything she writes is worth reading. So it comes down to your personal preferences as a reader. I have always preferred “genre” fiction over “mainstream” or “literary” works, but I do appreciate literary elements in genre fiction. Part One: Where on Earth features four stories from her fictional Eastern European country of Orsinia, as well as numerous stories set in or inspired by Oregon, her home since 1958. Her prose is confident, luminous, fiercely honest, and firmly centered on people as they really are, flawed but with moments of strength and decency. She frequently sets her stories in small towns or the countryside — places where the sparse conditions let us focus on her characters. Even if you are not a fan of realism in your fiction, you will find elements of the “magic realism” of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, which can also be found in writers inspired by Le Guin such as David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon. While I admired the craftwork of her realistic stories, I struggled to enjoy the Orsinian and Oregonian stories. That is more a matter of taste than quality, but I think the stories more likely to interest genre fans would be “The Diary of the Rose” (winner of the 1976 Jupiter award), “The Direction of the Road,” and “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (winner of the 1988 Hugo Award and International Fantasy Award). “The Diary of the Rose” (1976): is about a psychotherapist who normally treats autistic children. One day she is assigned an adult patient labeled as psychotic, delusional, and violent. However, upon meeting him, he seems intelligent, well-spoken, and lucid. However, he quickly reveals his fear of undergoing electro-shock therapy. Initially she is skeptical of him, but as the sessions proceed she gains sympathy for him and starts to wonder exactly why he has been detained and whether he is truly mentally ill or not. To describe the any further would be to ruin the story, but suffice to say that many of the assumptions of her profession and world view are thrown on their head, and the ending is devastating. Another gem from Le Guin that explores her favorite themes of political and intellectual freedom. “The Direction of the Road” (1973): A short but imaginative story that uses a unique point of view to give a voice to the voiceless, and allows us to observe the folly of human affairs from a very unusual perspective. It’s got some great humor and gentle irony, and really forces the reader to rethink our view of the world around us. Moreover, it plays with the concept of “relativity” in a way I have never encountered before. It’s worth a re-read to capture all the subtleties. “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (1987, Hugo Award for Best Novelette, World Fantasy Award for Best Novella): Takes a very creative approach to the Native American mythos of the trickster Coyote and a menagerie of animals in the American Southwest. A little girl is involved in an airplane crash and finds herself taken in by talking animals who don’t make a distinction between various “people,” whether human or animal. Their open acceptance is contrasted with the crass behavior of humans in their towns and hunters with their guns who treat the natural world with contempt. This story has a playful tone, but beneath the surface is a condemnation of what humans have given up in favor of technology and modernization, and the dignity and resignation of the “old people” in the face of this. Part Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands This is essential reading (or listening) for all fans of SF who want to see why Le Guin is one of the giants of the SF/fantasy field. Part Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands contains a host of impressive stories, both her famous award-winners and lesser-known gems. All of them are intelligent, thought-provoking, understated, and beautifully written. It’s hard to underestimate the influence she has had on the genre, fans, and how much respect she has gained in the greater literary world. As we journey through the various imaginary worlds she weaves, many set in her shared far-future Hainish universe, what becomes clear is that Le Guin is an anthropologist at heart, which is hardly surprising considering both her parents were well-known anthropologists: Alfred Kroeber, a renowned Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and his wife Theodora Kroeber, both of whom did pioneering work on California native American tribes, including the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, named Ishi. The influence of anthropology, sociology, psychology, folklore and linguistics in Le Guin’s stories is pervasive, as well as tremendous writing skills that make her prose and stories seem effortless and timeless. While many SF authors use aliens as proxies for various human behaviors and cultures, Le Guin does something very different. In her Hainish universe, humanity arose on the planet Hain and seeded the stars with numerous human colonies (including Terra), but after this League of Worlds collapsed, travel among these worlds ceased and many human worlds lost track of this galactic civilization and their own origins. This allows Le Guin to explore a limitless number of human societies that are frequently at a primitive level of technology, have developed unusual social structures, and in some cases have been modified dramatically via genetic engineering (such as the androgynous characters of The Left Hand of Darkness). Le Guin’s stories are mainly focused on humanity in a myriad range of diverse societies and cultures. She dispenses with the easy metaphor of “aliens” to show the alienness of all human cultures including our own. The behaviors of these different humans is often bizarre, unexpected, disturbing, and yet familiar. One of her favorite literary tricks is to lull readers into false complacency with a seemingly-familiar setting before suddenly turning things on their head midway or at the end, exposing all the cultural biases and assumptions we bring to our reading experiences, like “Mazes,” “The Author of the Acacia Seeds,” and “The Wife’s Story.” This is particularly the case for gender biases and behaviors, which she explored brilliantly at full-length in The Left Hand of Darkness, but also with great effect in “The Matter of Seggri” and “The Wild Girls.” Highlights in this collection are: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1974, Hugo Award for Best Short Story): More of a parable than a story, a thought-experiment about the ethics of the greater good of an entire city vs. the suffering of a single child. Is it okay for a child to suffer, if an entire city of people can live rich and fulfilling lives? I understand this story is used in college classes and it is certainly well-suited to generating healthy debates. Semley’s Necklace (1964; initially “The Dowry of the Angyar”): The first story set in her Hainish universe, and tells the folklore story of Semley, a high-born woman on the planet Fomalhaut, who enters the underworld in search of a valuable family heirloom that has disappeared long ago. She makes contact with a representative of the Ekumen and gets her wish, but at a heavy cost. This story introduces many of the anthropological themes of her Hainish stories, with a strong mythic fantasy tone. Nine Lives (1968, Nebula Nominee for Best Novelette): A story about identity, explored by contrasting the friendship of two individual scientists in a remote outpost with a ten-clone, a group of 10 men and women cloned from the same man, John Chow, sent to assist. They seem to be more efficient, self-contained, and mentally stable than the two men, until a crisis situation exposes their weaknesses. The Shobies’ Story (1990, Nebula Nominee for Best Novelette): This is a fairly challenging story about a diverse crew from the Ekumen group of worlds that suffer the psychological stresses of faster-than-light travel. Using a process called transilience, they must establish a shared reality through story-telling in order to power the ship. Given all their different cultural beliefs and biases, this proves quite challenging. The concept of relativity is explored in very literal terms. Betrayals (1994): This story is a part of a connected series of stories set in the twin worlds of Werel and Yeowe in the Hainish universe (collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness). It’s the meeting of two people — a retired teacher named Yoss and an exiled leader named Abberkam, whose divergent pasts and beliefs are forced into contact in a desolate place. The Matter of Seggri (1994, Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette, James Tiptree Award Winner): This for me was the highlight of this collection. It is a brilliantly developed study of a society in which women are dominant in the economy, politics, education, and all practical professions. That leaves the men with just two roles, isolated in their castles — sports and breeding (siring children and serving as sex workers). In fact, women pay them for their services. While this may seem at first like an enviable position for men, Le Guin meticulously shows us their utter powerlessness. They are reduced to prized breeders and are given no other outlets or means of self-fulfillment. Switching around familiar gender roles forces the reader to confront all the biases and rigid social barriers that form the basis for men and women’s roles in societies throughout human history, and brings home just how soul-crushing a position women have been frequently subjected to, even to this day and age. In particular, the cruel behavior towards men who are not prized at breeders parallels the intolerant treatment of women who cannot bear children. Towards the end of the story, we also see the vicious in-fighting among the men themselves. There is even the equivalent of an Equal Rights Movement, and it is bittersweet to see the men struggle to gain respect even after they are granted the right to higher education and other roles in society. I think this story is really an eye opener for younger readers in the West who have benefitted from far greater sexual equality than prior generations. Solitude (1995, Nebula Award for Best Novelette): This is a deeply anthropological study of an female Observer who discovers her only means to study an isolated human society that maintains a strict code of men and women not mingling in adulthood is to use her own children to infiltrate their inner ranks and learn their social practices from within. What they discover is a harsh legacy of rampant overpopulation that led to a collapse in civilization and a warped social response. Women form aunt rings where they share stories and pass on knowledge. However, they otherwise do not speak to each other. This society is devoted mainly to silence and the development of the soul. The men face their own form of solitude — they spend their teenage years in harsh boy groups in which the strongest bully and sometimes kills the weaker members. For those that survive to adulthood, their fate is to live a hermetic existence in the forest, only being visited by women for child-bearing purposes. The most powerful part of the story is what happens after the mother takes her children away from these societies in order to gather the information they have learned from their experiences. The son is cooperative but the daughter is extremely resistant and desperately wants to return to her aunt ring and the cultivation of her soul. The conflict in values between mother and daughter is profound, and the difficult position of children bridging vastly divergent cultures is something I have seen first-hand. The Wild Girls (2003, Hugo Award for Best Novelette): This story also shows the strong anthropological influence of Le Guin’s upbringing. Here we see a practice that is not so unusual in more primitive tribal societies — in this case invading the Dirt people’s tribes and stealing away girls to provide new blood to the Crown people of Sky City. This story is filled with contrasts — the ruthless behavior of the men as they slaughter older people and take only the girls they want, and their fierce protectiveness of the girls as spoils of war. The gender roles of the society are sharply delineated, as are the gaps between the Dirt people and Crown people. The themes of formal slavery (Dirt people) and effective slavery (wives) are also prevalent. This is a grim story with a tragic ending. The Flyers of Gy (2000): This story reads like a field report about the Gy people, among whom a small minority develop functioning wings at adulthood. However, this is frequently viewed as a curse rather than a gift, and we are shown a myriad of brutal and repressive responses to this trait in various communities. Often the flyers are stoned to death or killed in even more perverse ways. Even when they are not immediately killed, their position in society is strictly proscribed, and the story ends with an interview with a lawyer who has valiantly overcome his “handicap” to be a productive member of society. This is a clear parable of discrimination against those who are different, and how they cope. The Silence of the Asonu (1998): Here we have a mysterious society that is probably unlikely, but intriguing as a concept. Imagine a society that voluntarily chooses silence after a normal childhood. And yet not a grim silence, but within a well-adjusted and caring social structure, but lacking in both verbal and non-verbal communication. In keeping with religious ascetics, their silence could be a form of spiritual wisdom. Or perhaps just a means of minimizing social conflict. Other people are fascinated by the Asonu, leading to a thriving tourist trade. Some go so far as to kidnap an Asonu child and try to force them to reveal their “secret wisdom.” We are left to draw our own conclusions. The Author of the Acacia Seeds (1974): Here is a little treat about therolinguistics, the study of animal languages. Written in academic journal style, it is both humorous and completely serious. It reminded me in some ways of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in its discussion of Solaristics, the study of a possibly sentient ocean by generations of academics. Only someone intimately familiar with academic disciplines could create a story so strange and yet totally convincing. The article asks “What if art is not communicative? If a non-communicative, vegetative art exists, we must rethink the very elements of our science, and learn a whole new set of techniques. But the problem was far greater. The art he sought, if it exists, is a non-communicative art: and probably a non-kinetic one. It is possible that Time, the essential element, matrix, and measure of all known animal art, does not enter into vegetable art at all. The plants may use the meter of eternity. We do not know.” ...more |
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(Review and Author Interview) Between Light and Shadow: A prodigious study of SFF’s most elusive writer Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Last yea (Review and Author Interview) Between Light and Shadow: A prodigious study of SFF’s most elusive writer Originally posted at Fantasy Literature Last year I tried twice (unsuccessfully) to finish The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Retrospective of His Finest Fiction, giving up in defeat. Gene Wolfe is frequently described as one of the most brilliant SFF writers in the genre by critics, authors, and readers alike. Some fans prize his books above all others, and there is a WolfeWiki page dedicated to discussing his work. But there are also many SFF readers that are baffled and frustrated by his stories because they are packed with metaphors, literary references, and hidden themes, and require extremely close reading to understand and appreciate. So I didn’t expect to make any more attempts in the near future. However, when the 2016 Hugo Awards were announced, I noticed that Marc Aramini’s Between Light and Shadow: An Exploration of the Fiction of Gene Wolfe, 1951 to 1986 was the runner-up in the Best Related Work category. It’s an 826-page analysis covering Wolfe’s output through 1986, including all of his short stories (no matter how obscure, including his earliest works) along with his novels The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, Free Live Free, and The Book of the New Sun. It is truly a work of dedication, a painstaking analysis of symbols, names, literary references, and themes of each story, and yet clearly the work of a fan rather than a dry scholarly study. I recalled that someone by that name had posted a number of very helpful and insightful comments on my initial, frustrated review of The Best of Gene Wolfe. Indeed they are the same person. And so here I am, making a third attempt to scale Mount Wolfe, armed with some serious firepower. My technique was to read the Wolfe story first, read Aramini’s analysis of it, and then, if it felt worth it, read the story again. This often revealed a great deal of insight as I picked up on many of the clues and allusions buried in the text, previously unrecognized. Each review in Between Light and Shadow contains a summary of the story, commentary on its themes, literary allusions, significance of character names, unanswered questions (there always are, even after exhaustive analysis), and connections with other works. Aramini even includes bibliographies that reference sources as wide-ranging as the Urth Mailing List, the Bible, The Wizard of Oz, The Arabian Nights, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Edgar Allan Poe, James Branch Cabell, Gore Vidal, along with scholarly works about Wolfe like 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. What this suggests is the incredible depth of literary knowledge Wolfe brings to his stories. It’s hard to imagine even the most well-read literature professor or critic catching most of Wolfe’s oblique references, so it’s incredible the amount of research and analysis that Aramini has done, of course with the assistance of the other contributors to the Urth Mailing List. I’m sure many of these insights came after years of discussions on the meaning of his stories. I wonder just how many of these references most of Wolfe’s fans pick up on. What’s equally impressive about Between Light and Shadow is that he brings this level of attention to every single story Wolfe has written between 1951 – 1986. The early stories, in particular, I didn’t even know existed. Aramini has indicated he plans a second volume to discuss more recent works like The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, Latro in the Mist, The Wizard Knight, etc. It’s the effort of a lifetime, and deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in Wolfe’s body of work. Below I’ve listed some of Wolfe’s most notable stories that would be a good entry point if you want to give Wolfe a try. I gained great insight into them from the analysis of Aramini, a truly dedicated Wolfe scholar and fan. He also has a series of YouTube videos explaining Wolfe’s major works — here is the first one with a general overview: Marc Aramini on Gene Wolfe and Literature, Part 1. If you think you might be interested in Between Light and Shadow, perhaps you can listen to some of Aramini’s YouTube videos first to get an idea of his erudition and enthusiasm. For detailed reviews of these stories, please see my review of The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Retrospective of His Finest Fiction. “The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories” (1970) “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” (1972) “The Death of Dr. Island” (1973) “The Hero as Werwolf” (1975) “Seven American Nights” (1978) “A Cabin on the Coast” (1981) “The Tree is My Hat” (1999) INTERVIEW WITH MARC ARAMINI Stuart Starosta: First off, congratulations on publishing this massive study of the first half of Gene Wolfe ’s body of work. It’s a tremendous achievement, clearly a labor of love. I assume it took shape from numerous discussions on the Urth Mailing List over many years. At what point did you actually start writing down your thoughts about his work, and when did you decide that you wanted to make this into a book-length analysis? Author Marc Aramini: I encountered Wolfe quite by accident in the fourth grade when my father’s friend, knowing I loved science fiction, gave my a box of books from the SFBC which included The Claw of the Conciliator. I had to track down a used copy of The Shadow of the Torturer, but the disparate attitudes of my immediate family, with my mystical and superstitious grandmother, my staunchly religious Catholic mother, and my pragmatic father, drew me in to the numinous and tense atmosphere of the book. When I was at college in the late 90s, I came across the postings of the Urth Mailing List and began to intermittently post, on and off, for years. I felt some of my insights were unique, but I had no idea that anyone would think much of my writings about Wolfe until I attended the Fuller Award Ceremony in Chicago in March of 2012, in which Wolfe was honored in an amazing ceremony. When I introduced myself to someone, a gentleman nearby recognized my name and came over to speak with me, and the sense that, at least in this small circle, I was well known, produced a vivid realization. As I talked with other prominent fans like Patrick O’Leary, Michael Swanwick, James Wynn, and Michael Andre-Driussi, among others too numerous to name here, we lamented the fact that all of the discussion seemed focused on the New Sun books, when the early work was also very rich and, at least in our opinions, important. I vowed to go home and start a chronological study of the neglected short stories, imagining myself as a facilitator on the Urth List. After about a dozen of those, I realized true discussion required thorough research and the willingness to make strong thematic claims, and by the time I got to about the sixtieth story or so I had started to normalize the format and realized I had enough for an actual book … which would require some serious editing for those first sixty entries in terms of both format and quality – something which became a little bit of an unending nightmare. Gene Wolfe’s works are notorious for being difficult for beginning readers to understand. The narrators are generally unreliable, and the surface story usually hides a wealth of themes, allusions, and hidden agendas. What type of reader is likely to become a Gene Wolfe fan? How much knowledge of classical and modern literature is needed to really appreciate his work? Do you immediately pick up his literary references or do you have to research them while or after reading? Does Wolfe really expect his readers to be as well-read as he is? Wolfe’s difficulty is real, and his attitude is one that requires a certain level of real engagement from the readers. I would by lying if I said he doesn’t enjoy tricking the reader: sometimes he isn’t telling you the story that you think he is, and this genre confusion is even present in The Book of the New Sun, which reads so much like a fantasy while playing with the tropes of SF, autobiography, and religious narrative (perhaps even hagiography). Sometimes you can just enjoy the book, but the vast historical backdrop behind a story such as “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun,” with its wealth of mythical and literary allusions, really brings home the beautiful theme of the story: all things pass away from their physical forms in time and risk being lost, but many things cast into the vast immensity of the sea, somehow, are still rediscovered, their oblivion but temporary. I must do research, though I fancy myself well-versed in both the history of SF and Fantasy and in English and American Literature. The most unfair thing Wolfe ever did was refer to a volume of Guy de Maupassant’s short stories in “In Looking Glass Castle” … I had to read a ridiculous amount of them before I realized he was riffing on “The Horla,” about a shadowy thing driving the main character to suicide. In that same short story, he refers to obscure works on mathematics by Lewis Carroll, the works of Kafka, The Cradle of the Deep by Joan Lowell, and is also in a dialogue with James Tiptree Jr and perhaps Joanna Russ as well – and one could easily imagine him throwing in a particularly Catholic symbol or two if he were so inclined. That requires an erudition and breadth of interest that I think is beyond the vast majority of readers, and I, too, have to do a fair amount of research at times, some of it coming to nothing (though I am a Catholic ex-scientist who loves classic literature, puzzles, and pulpy SF and Fantasy as well – I think some of my appreciation for Wolfe is in that close overlap of interests – though Wolfe is trickier and smarter than me, with a much firmer grasp on the currents of history). Wolfe’s stories are fun even if you don’t understand them, at their best. I don’t think Wolfe expects his readers to get every puzzle, but he does throw down a gauntlet. The irony is of course that many otherwise competent critics and readers seem to think that there is nothing behind the artifice: you are dealing with a Catholic engineer here, who uses symbols like a concrete scaffolding. Gene Wolfe has always been open about being a Catholic SF writer, and I believe his religious beliefs strongly influence his stories, particularly The Book of the New Sun. However, I think his ideas of sin and redemption, and the Christ-like role of Severian as a potential but flawed savior for the dying Urth, are much more complex than the overt Christian overtones of C.S. Lewis ’s Aslan in THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA. Do you think Wolfe explores these themes for his own personal reasons, or because he wants readers to think about them? Is there an agenda? The difficulty here is that Wolfe, unlike most extremely religious writers, is actually a brilliant and practical man. He can look at the world and see both the capacity for good and for evil in human beings, but he also focuses on something that Naturalistic fiction has suppressed: no matter the conditions, no matter the pressure, a human being has the ability to make choices which have real consequences, but also has the capacity to deceive themselves almost infinitely to justify those decisions, good and bad. I have always argued that if Wolfe deconstructs anything, it is actually subjectivity. The author or demiurge leaves his readers free to make subjective interpretations, all the while knowing that the backdrop of reality has been carefully constructed, and that Truth lurks somewhere, silent, and, even if unknown, not entirely unknowable. I think he loves symbols, but can’t help creating such complicated systems and narrative tangles, sometimes making allegories so complex that they lose the simplicity we associate with the form. At other times, especially in his short stories, he is clearly being allegorical, as the giant in “The Legend of Xi Cygnus” represents the natural world and its exploitation at the hands of evil dwarfs who even mine its blood for selfish resources to make their lives more indolent until some force greater than nature, which we should respect lest we perish, takes notice. The mythical creatures in that who serve the giant are of course the myths that hold a great respect for the natural world, and so forth. Somehow, even that isn’t obvious on a first read. His agenda is complicated, but first and foremost he wants to tell a rich, deep story that can be appreciated more than once. The entire SOLAR CYCLE constitutes 12 volumes, including The Book of the New Sun, The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun. I have read The Book of the New Sun twice and recognize it as a masterpiece that rewards repeated readings and listenings. However, when I tried the Long Sun series I found it a struggle to get past the first two books. The pace seemed painfully slow and the events unengaging, particularly the extended break-in of Blood’s house that stretched for 100 pages. Would you say that these latter two series are not as accomplished or reader-friendly as The Book of the New Sun series? For example, the The Book of the New Sun books have a total number of ratings in the thousands (from 14,872 ratings for Shadow of the Torturer to 3,790 ratings for Urth of the New Sun), but only 625-991 ratings for The Book of the Long Sun, and 905-1,113 ratings for The Book of the Short Sun. Can you explain the gap? I actually think Wolfe was trying to be MORE reader friendly in The Book of the Long Sun by dropping the archaic vocabulary and twisted sentences, as we can see a definite change in his style and a shift towards more minimalist techniques. However, his very need to do something different (save, of course, being cryptic as hell) every single time can alienate readers. I read The Book of the Long Sun when it first came out, and remember thinking, gosh, is this the same author who wrote The Book of the New Sun? However, the second time I read the entire cycle, after the release of Exodus from the Long Sun, I realized that it was just as deep, symbolic, and rewarding as The Book of the New Sun, without the baroque excess, and that this fit Wolfe’s new goal. They are all great novels, but Wolfe’s increasing reliance on subtext rather than text, moving the miraculous behind the scenes, definitely, in my opinion, keeps readers from truly appreciating these later works. (Which is a shame, because The Book of the Short Sun is the best thing he has written, in my opinion, working on every level.) The truth is that Peace, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and The Book of the New Sun are OBVIOUSLY great even if the reader puts in no work beyond the surface, and the wealth of analysis and help along the way make it quite clear that they are dealing with an author of genius, while Wolfe’s later works trade in the pyrotechnics and ornate embellishment for an ever increasing subtlety and economy of expression that is almost antithetical to our initial impressions of Wolfe as an artist from The Book of the New Sun: he is far more literary than we at first supposed. I believe you are planning to publish a second volume to cover the second half of Wolfe’s work, but I noticed in a recent comment you made in the Gene Wolfe Fans group on Goodreads that you might have to split volume 2 into two separate books due to length. What do you think is a rough timetable for the next two volumes, and what works are they likely to cover? This has been a difficult year for everyone. I had planned to be done by July with everything, but while I was busy with those plans, life happened, as they say. I have finished the analyses of all of the short stories, and am working on finishing up the Latro in the Mist and The Book of the Short Sun essays, which will be the capstone of the second volume, and thus need to be as perfect as I can make them. Luckily, I know exactly what I want to say and each of them is about halfway done. The second volume, Beyond Time and Memory, will contain write ups on Latro in the Mist, The Urth of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, There Are Doors, Castleview, Pandora by Holly Hollander, and all of Wolfe’s short fiction from 1987 to 2001. The project was simply getting too long to fit in one volume. The third, as yet unnamed, will have everything else up to now. For that, I must finish a write up each for The Wizard Knight, Soldier of Sidon, An Evil Guest, The Sorcerers House, The Land Across, and A Borrowed Man. So eight essays left total. In a project which spans almost 250 essays, that doesn’t seem like much, but the novels have to be as strong as I can make them, so I really can’t give you a time table yet considering that my editor must also look over the second volume. Luckily, I have done a much better job of editing as I composed this time and have also written in a format which can be immediately translated into an ebook with individual entries for a table of contents, something which had to be done after the fact last time. On my end, little editing is left. I hope to have them as soon as possible, but that will also rely on my editor Matthew King’s workload. I owe him a special debt – the first volume would have been a truly complex, dense, and impenetrable mess without his painstaking attention and patient effort. I hope this time around he will have to do much less. ...more |
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The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands: Brilliant SF tales of human anthropology Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is The Unreal and the Real, Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands: Brilliant SF tales of human anthropology Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is essential reading (or listening) for all fans of SF who want to see why Ursula K. Le Guin is one of the giants of the SF/fantasy field. Volume Two: Outer Space, Inner Lands contains a host of impressive stories, both her famous award-winners and lesser-known gems. All of them are intelligent, thought-provoking, understated, and beautifully written. It’s hard to underestimate the influence she has had on the genre, fans, and how much respect she has gained in the greater literary world. I can’t wait to see the upcoming documentary about her life and legacy being produced by Arwen Curry called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin scheduled for completion by 2017. As we journey through the various imaginary worlds she weaves, many set in her shared far-future Hainish universe, what becomes clear is that Le Guin is an anthropologist at heart, which is hardly surprising considering both her parents were well-known anthropologists: Alfred Kroeber, a renowned Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley, and his wife Theodora Kroeber, both of whom did pioneering work on California native American tribes, including the last surviving member of the Yahi tribe, named Ishi. The influence of anthropology, sociology, psychology, folklore and linguistics in Le Guin’s stories is pervasive, as well as tremendous writing skills that make her prose and stories seem effortless and timeless. While many SF authors use aliens as proxies for various human behaviors and cultures, Le Guin does something very different. In her Hainish universe, humanity arose on the planet Hain and seeded the stars with numerous human colonies (including Terra), but after this League of Worlds collapsed, travel among these worlds ceased and many human worlds lost track of this galactic civilization and their own origins. This allows Le Guin to explore a limitless number of human societies that are frequently at a primitive level of technology, have developed unusual social structures, and in some cases have been modified dramatically via genetic engineering (such as the androgynous characters of The Left Hand of Darkness). Le Guin’s stories are mainly focused on humanity in a myriad range of diverse societies and cultures. She dispenses with the easy metaphor of “aliens” to show the alienness of all human cultures including our own. The behaviors of these different humans is often bizarre, unexpected, disturbing, and yet familiar. One of her favorite literary tricks is to lull readers into false complacency with a seemingly-familiar setting before suddenly turning things on their head midway or at the end, exposing all the cultural biases and assumptions we bring to our reading experiences, like “Mazes”, “The Author of the Acacia Seeds”, and “The Wife’s Story”. This is particularly the case for gender biases and behaviors, which she explored brilliantly at full-length in The Left Hand of Darkness, but also with great effect in “The Matter of Seggri” and “The Wild Girls”. Highlights in this collection are: The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (1974, Hugo Award for Best Short Story): More of a parable than a story, a thought-experiment about the ethics of the greater good of an entire city vs. the suffering of a single child. Is it okay for a child to suffer, if an entire city of people can live rich and fulfilling lives? I understand this story is used in college classes and it is certainly well-suited to generating healthy debates. Semley’s Necklace (1964; initially “The Dowry of the Angyar”): The first story set in her Hainish universe, and tells the folklore story of Semley, a high-born woman on the planet Fomalhaut, who enters the underworld in search of a valuable family heirloom that has disappeared long ago. She makes contact with a representative of the Ekumen and gets her wish, but at a heavy cost. This story introduces many of the anthropological themes of her Hainish stories, with a strong mythic fantasy tone. Nine Lives (1968, Nebula Nominee for Best Novelette): A story about identity, explored by contrasting the friendship of two individual scientists in a remote outpost with a ten-clone, a group of 10 men and women cloned from the same man, John Chow, sent to assist. They seem to be more efficient, self-contained, and mentally stable than the two men, until a crisis situation exposes their weaknesses. The Shobies’ Story (1990, Nebula Nominee for Best Novelette): This is a fairly challenging story about a diverse crew from the Ekumen group of worlds that suffer the psychological stresses of faster-than-light travel. Using a process called transilience, they must establish a shared reality through story-telling in order to power the ship. Given all their different cultural beliefs and biases, this proves quite challenging. The concept of relativity is explored in very literal terms. Betrayals (1994): This story is a part of a connected series of stories set in the twin worlds of Werel and Yeowe in the Hainish universe (collected in Four Ways to Forgiveness). It’s the meeting of two people - a retired teacher named Yoss and an exiled leader named Abberkam, whose divergent pasts and beliefs are forced into contact in a desolate place. The Matter of Seggri (1994, Hugo and Nebula nominee for Best Novelette, James Tiptree Award Winner): This for me was the highlight of this collection. It is a brilliantly developed study of a society in which women are dominant in the economy, politics, education, and all practical professions. That leaves the men with just two roles, isolated in their castles - sports and breeding (siring children and serving as sex workers). In fact, women pay them for their services. While this may seem at first like an enviable position for men, Le Guin meticulously shows us their utter powerlessness. They are reduced to prized breeders and are given no other outlets or means of self-fulfillment. Switching around familiar gender roles forces the reader to confront all the biases and rigid social barriers that form the basis for men and women’s roles in societies throughout human history, and brings home just how soul-crushing a position women have been frequently subjected to, even to this day and age. In particular, the cruel behavior towards men who are not prized at breeders parallels the intolerant treatment of women who cannot bear children. Towards the end of the story, we also see the vicious in-fighting among the men themselves. There is even the equivalent of an Equal Rights Movement, and it is bittersweet to see the men struggle to gain respect even after they are granted the right to higher education and other roles in society. I think this story is really an eye opener for younger readers in the West who have benefitted from far greater sexual equality than prior generations. Solitude (1995, Nebula Award for Best Novelette): This is a deeply anthropological study of an female Observer who discovers her only means to study an isolated human society that maintains a strict code of men and women not mingling in adulthood is to use her own children to infiltrate their inner ranks and learn their social practices from within. What they discover is a harsh legacy of rampant overpopulation that led to a collapse in civilization and a warped social response. Women form aunt rings where they share stories and pass on knowledge. However, they otherwise do not speak to each other. This society is devoted mainly to silence and the development of the soul. The men face their own form of solitude - they spend their teenage years in harsh boy groups in which the strongest bully and sometimes kills the weaker members. For those that survive to adulthood, their fate is to live a hermetic existence in the forest, only being visited by women for child-bearing purposes. The most powerful part of the story is what happens after the mother takes her children away from these societies in order to gather the information they have learned from their experiences. The son is cooperative but the daughter is extremely resistant and desperately wants to return to her aunt ring and the cultivation of her soul. The conflict in values between mother and daughter is profound, and the difficult position of children bridging vastly divergent cultures is something I have seen first-hand. The Wild Girls (2003, Hugo Award for Best Novelette): This story also shows the strong anthropological influence of Le Guin’s upbringing. Here we see a practice that is not so unusual in more primitive tribal societies - in this case invading the Dirt people’s tribes and stealing away girls to provide new blood to the Crown people of Sky City. This story is filled with contrasts - the ruthless behavior of the men as they slaughter older people and take only the girls they want, and their fierce protectiveness of the girls as spoils of war. The gender roles of the society are sharply delineated, as are the gaps between the Dirt people and Crown people. The themes of formal slavery (Dirt people) and effective slavery (wives) are also prevalent. This is a grim story with a tragic ending. The Flyers of Gy (2000): This story reads like a field report about the Gy people, among whom a small minority develop functioning wings at adulthood. However, this is frequently viewed as a curse rather than a gift, and we are shown a myriad of brutal and repressive responses to this trait in various communities. Often the flyers are stoned to death or killed in even more perverse ways. Even when they are not immediately killed, their position in society is strictly proscribed, and the story ends with an interview with a lawyer who has valiantly overcome his “handicap” to be a productive member of society. This is a clear parable of discrimination against those who are different, and how they cope. The Silence of the Asonu (1998): Here we have a mysterious society that is probably unlikely, but intriguing as a concept. Imagine a society that voluntarily chooses silence after a normal childhood. And yet not a grim silence, but within a well-adjusted and caring social structure, but lacking in both verbal and non-verbal communication. In keeping with religious ascetics, their silence could be a form of spiritual wisdom. Or perhaps just a means of minimizing social conflict. Other people are fascinated by the Asonu, leading to a thriving tourist trade. Some go so far as to kidnap an Asonu child and try to force them to reveal their “secret wisdom”. We are left to draw our own conclusions. The Author of the Acacia Seeds (1974): Here is a little treat about therolinguistics, the study of animal languages. Written in academic journal style, it is both humorous and completely serious. It reminded me in some ways of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris in its discussion of Solaristics, the study of a possibly sentient ocean by generations of academics. Only someone intimately familiar with academic disciplines could create a story so strange and yet totally convincing. The article asks “What if art is not communicative? If a non-communicative, vegetative art exists, we must rethink the very elements of our science, and learn a whole new set of techniques. But the problem was far greater. The art he sought, if it exists, is a non-communicative art: and probably a non-kinetic one. It is possible that Time, the essential element, matrix, and measure of all known animal art, does not enter into vegetable art at all. The plants may use the meter of eternity. We do not know.” ...more |
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really liked it
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The Unreal and the Real, Volume One: Where on Earth: A selection of her non-SFF work Originally posted at Fantasy Literature http://www.fantasyliteratu The Unreal and the Real, Volume One: Where on Earth: A selection of her non-SFF work Originally posted at Fantasy Literature http://www.fantasyliterature.com/revi... Having just read two long, dense space opera epics, I was in the mood for shorter work, and who better than Ursula K. Le Guin, one of the giants of the SF/fantasy field, and a respected American novelist who has transcended genre and literary categories. I discovered two volumes of her stories available on Audible, with Volume One: Where on Earth set on Earth in what I would categorize as “literary realism” style, though in Le Guin’s introduction she challenges the convenient and inaccurate labels we apply, and the preconceptions and biases that accompany them. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that this first volume will be of less interest to dedicated fans of SF and fantasy, also known as “speculative fiction, or “genre fiction”. It is also undeniable that Le Guin is a brilliant, fearless, intellectual, ethical, and challenging writer, so anything she writes is worth reading. This really depends on your personal preferences as a reader, though. I have always preferred “genre” fiction over “mainstream” or “literary” works, but I do appreciate literary elements in genre fiction. Who says you can’t have it all - Ursula K. Le Guin is living proof of this. Just read her take on mythical fantasy, the EARTHSEA CYCLE, or her brilliant studies of gender, identity, and political ideologies, The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. These works established her as a genre writer that proudly identified herself as a SF writer and defended the genre, but whose intellectual rigor and literary ambitions forced mainstream readers and critics to take notice and acknowledge. Since then she has continued to produce a steady stream of fiction, poetry, criticism, etc. She is a champion of feminism, political and intellectual freedom, and ecological preservation. There is now a documentary about her life and legacy being produced by Arwen Curry called Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, which raised over $234,000 in pledges on Kickstarter in just a month, and is scheduled for completion by 2017. The volume of short stories at hand, subtitled “Where on Earth” features four stories from her fictional Eastern European country of Orsinia, as well as numerous stories set in or inspired by Oregon, her home since 1958. Her prose is confident, luminous, fiercely honest, and firmly centered on people as they really are, flawed but with moments of strength and decency. She frequently sets her stories in small towns or the countryside - places where the sparse conditions let us focus on her characters. Even if you are not a fan of realism in your fiction, you will find elements of the “magic realism” of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, which can also be found in writers inspired by Le Guin such as David Mitchell, Jonathan Lethem, and Michael Chabon. While I admired the craftwork of her realistic stories, I struggled a bit with the Orsinian and Oregonian stories. That is more a matter of taste than quality, but that’s the reason I gave this volume 4 stars instead of 5. I think the stories more likely to interest genre fans would be “The Diary of the Rose” (winner of the 1976 Jupiter award), “The Direction of the Road”, and “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight” (winner of the 1988 Hugo Award and International Fantasy Award). The audiobook is narrated by Tandy Cronyn, who has a warm and empathic delivery, well suited to Le Guin’s work. “The Direction of the Road” (1973): is a short but imaginative story that uses an imaginative point of view to give a voice to the voiceless, and allows us to observe the folly of human affairs from a very unusual perspective. It’s got some great humor and gentle irony, and really forces the reader to rethink our view of the world around us. Moreover, it plays with the concept of “relativity” in a way I have never encountered before. It’s worth a re-read to capture all the subtleties. “The Diary of the Rose” (1976): is about a psychotherapist who normally treats autistic children. One day she is assigned an adult patient labeled as psychotic, delusional, and violent. However, upon meeting him, he seems intelligent, well-spoken, and lucid. However, he quickly reveals his fear of undergoing electro-shock therapy. Initially she is skeptical of him, but as the sessions proceed she gains sympathy for him and starts to wonder exactly why he has been detained and whether he is truly mentally ill or not. To describe any further would be to ruin the story, but suffice to say that many of the assumptions of her profession and world view are thrown on their head, and the ending is devastating. Another gem from Le Guin that explores her favorite themes of political and intellectual freedom. “Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come out Tonight” (1987): takes a very creative approach to the Native American mythos of the trickster Coyote and a menagerie of animals in the American Southwest. A little girl is involved in an airplane crash and finds herself taken in by talking animals who don’t make a distinction between various “people,” whether human or animal. Coyote is constantly telling stories and boasting, but shows a rough kindness and takes her to her village. There she meets many animals of different persuasions like Bluejay and Grandma Spider, who don't seem to mind her presence. As she gets to know them, she learns about their lives and history and how they have had their territories encroached upon by the "new people", namely humans. And yet they don't seem to hold a grudge. Their open acceptance is contrasted with the crass behavior of humans in their towns and hunters with their guns who treat the natural world with contempt. This story has a playful tone, but beneath the surface is a condemnation of what humans have given up in favor of technology and modernization, and the dignity and resignation of the “old people” in the face of this. By telling the story through the eyes of an innocent child, Le Guin strips all the layers of the adult civilized world away to reveal the essential spiritual wasteland of the modern world. ...more |
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| 0061052655
| 9780061052651
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really liked it
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The Voice From the Edge Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories: Dark, powerful, and ironic stories that stay with you Originally posted at Fantasy Literatu The Voice From the Edge Vol. 5: Shatterday & Other Stories: Dark, powerful, and ironic stories that stay with you Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the final installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. It’s been quite a ride, and it’s hard to dispute that Ellison is a superb storyteller who can take an idea and run with it in the most original and twisted way, frequently delving into the dark and cruel side of human nature, but also celebrating moments of nobility and pathos along the way. His voice is powerful, unique, and very charismatic, so hearing him narrate his own work is a treat. Like Vol. 4, not all the stories in Vol. 5 are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the supporting cast are very skilled, and the stories really lend themselves to narration, so I didn’t have a problem with that. And again he throws in anecdotes about his life and writing that illuminate his creative process. This entire series can be listened to multiple times; it’s that good. This collection has a large number of award winners and nominees (he has a lot to choose from). The tone of most of them is quite dark, and they demand careful listening for full effect. The good thing about short stories is that it’s not a big time investment to re-listen to the ones you really like. In this case most of the stories are from his most experimental period in the 1960s and 1970s. While not as difficult as stories like “The Deathbird” in Vol. 4, I did have to give two careful listens to “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans,” but it was well worth the time. Below are my favorites from this collection: “Delusion for a Dragon Slayer” (1966; Hugo nominee): What if you could live as you always imagined yourself in dreams? Let’s say a 6-foot 3-inch chiseled Nordic warrior steering a ship on rough seas on route to fighting a fearsome dragon to save a beautiful damsel in distress. Ellison explores this male wish fulfillment fantasy by a meek 41-year old accountant who takes a detour on his way to work one morning. The descriptive passages are vivid and dramatic, and the story’s conclusion is anything but wish fulfillment. Very well done. “Shatterday” (1975; Nebula nominee): Ellison once again tackles the old chestnut of what you would do if you met yourself, and turns it on its head. Here a successful ad executive with a wealthy but shallow existence calls home one night only to discover… himself answering the phone. The two selves insist they are the real one, and as they examine their lives they discover they have not been a very nice for a long time. As always, Ellison leaves the denouement in suspense until the end, and it is a satisfying one that pulls no punches. “Basilisk” (1972; Hugo & Locus winner; Nebula nominee): I was waiting for an Ellison story about the Vietnam War, which dominated social debate during his most creative writing period. Well, “Basilisk” doesn’t disappoint. A soldier on patrol in Vietnam steps on a punji stick booby trap and wakes up in captivity, having lost his eyesight. He is repeatedly tortured until he spills all the information he knows. But one day when pushed to the edge he discovers that he has the power to destroy his enemies in terrifying ways. He is rescued and brought back to the US, but when he returns home he is viewed as a traitor to his country. His family has been driven out of town and his fiancée has married the town jock. When he confronts them, things quickly spiral out of control. It’s a very powerful allegory of what US soldiers experienced both in Vietnam and after returning home. “Shattered Like a Glass Goblin” (1968; Nebula nominee): This is a trippy story about a man who comes back from Army basic training to reconnect with his fiancée. He discovers she has shacked up in a large drug-house on a hill. The inhabitants of the house, including his fiancée, spend all their time high on various substances. He is the only normal one among them and serves as their connection to the outside world. However, when his fiancée convinces him to partake of their drug cornucopia, things get very weird and phantasmagoric. This is clearly a horror story about the dangers of the drug culture prevalent at the time. “Adrift Just off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W” (1974; Hugo & Locus winner): This is probably one of the most original stories in the collection, and certainly scores points for most creative and unwieldy short story title of all time. It’s a gonzo version of Fantastic Voyage, in which a man pleas for the opportunity to be shrunk to the microscopic level so he can enter his own body in order to find the geographical location of his own soul. Not content with that, his intent is to discover his soul so he can die in peace. After going through the process he begins to explore his body in an Odysseus-type voyage of rough seas until he finds the island where his soul is stored. I needed to listen to this twice to grasp the details, but it’s a very interesting and affecting story. “All the Lies That Are My Life” (1980; Hugo nominee): This is the longest piece in the collection, a highly autobiographical novella about a highly successful writer (sometimes of science fiction) who is brash, arrogant, brilliant, popular with the ladies, and frequently a jerk. Then there is his less successful writer friend with whom he has a love-hate friendship. When the writer dies in a spectacular high-speed highway accident involving road-rage and Latino thugs, it’s revealed at the funeral that he has left his final will and testament on video. Everyone is then subjected to a long invective-filled rant about his worthless sister, followed by props to the friends he approved of. This is about as self-indulgent a story as every was penned, even by the king of self-absorption, Harlan Ellison. And yet he is such a larger-than-life personality that I think it’s fair to conduct an analysis of his life in fictional form like this, a retrospective of his life and legacy while still living. Who wouldn’t want to control the image people hold of your life? It’s certainly quintessential Ellison, full of self-deprecation, oversharing, self-aggrandizing, and heaps of chutzpah. But because he is a natural storyteller, it’s definitely worth a listen. ...more |
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| 014017821X
| 9780140178210
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Deliciously dark, sensuous, horrifying, and beautiful adult reworking of fairy tales What a literary feast of gothic language with a very modern, wicke Deliciously dark, sensuous, horrifying, and beautiful adult reworking of fairy tales What a literary feast of gothic language with a very modern, wicked sense of humour and female protagonists, this was a fantastic introduction to the world of Angela Carter's fertile and fiercely intelligent storytelling. Amazing stuff, completely reinvigorates some very old tales that Disney has done it best to completely homogenize. Her stories would shock Disney fans and hopefully give them nightmares! The writing is simply stunning, I haven't read anything like it before, and will be going through her oeuvre with relish this year. ...more |
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really liked it
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The Deathbird & Other Stories: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 4: Some of his most experimental stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the The Deathbird & Other Stories: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 4: Some of his most experimental stories Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the fourth installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He captures the characters’ quirks and attitudes, and narrates with masterful pacing and tone. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years. Vol. 1 featured some of his best stories and narration, Vol. 2 was also excellent but not quite as brilliant as Vol. 1, and Vol. 3 had some top-notch stories and finished with two horror tales, the first narrated by Robert Bloch. Vol. 4 is the first collection in which not all the stories are narrated by Ellison himself. Fortunately the other narrators are very good, including Theodore Bikel, Stefan Rudnicki, and Arte Johnson. You can imagine that someone as picky and demanding as Ellison would tolerate nothing less. What distinguishes Vol. 4 of this collection is not just the large number of award winners and nominees, but the challenging nature of the stories. They are complex, elusive, erudite, and experimental. So much is implied; very little is spelled out. But they are also very rewarding if you listen carefully. I actually listened twice to the ones I liked best. In particular, Ellison’s endings often contain a twist that redefines what came before, so you need to make sure you don’t miss them. Stories from the 1970s and later have gone completely away from the early more pulpy stories of the 1950s. That’s why it’s strange that the longest story in the collection, “Run for the Stars” (1957), reminded me of Philip K. Dick’s earlier stories. Frankly, it feels quite dated and pales versus his later, more mature stories, so I’m not sure why it was included and narrated by Ellison himself. Having said that, it’s an impressive collection and these were my favorites: “The Deathbird” (1973; Hugo & Locus winner, Nebula nominee): This is the most challenging story in the collection. It tells a very unconventional story of the creation and destruction of the world. A shadow figure drifts through the layers of a desolate far-future earth to find a crypt in the center preserving Nathan Stack, a man who has been sleeping there for 250,000 years. The shadow figure is named Dira, and is also known as the Snake, who harks back to the Garden of Eden. Dira was left on the Earth by an earlier race to make sure that humanity knows the true story of creation. That is because the God we know has twisted the story of Genesis to his own ends, and the Snake has been on the side of humanity. And only Nathan Stack, essentially the avatar of mankind, has the power to confront God and end the pain of the world with the help of the Deathbird, whom Dira commands. This story is told in non-linear form, with several vignettes that seem like conventional stories, with the unifying theme of people letting go of loved ones. There are also odd snippets of academic-sounding comments, such as the opening lines of the story: “This is a test. Take notes. This will count as 3/4 of your final grade.” The central story is told in mythical, biblical style. It reminded me somewhat of the middle story in Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1973). Ellison lets the reader put the pieces of the story together gradually, leaving tantalizing clues throughout. I had to listen to this one three times to grasp its meaning, and I’m still not sure I understood everything. But the writing, imagery, and narration (which is done by someone other than Ellison, perhaps Stefan Rudnicki) are so hypnotic and intriguing that it’s worth it. On further reflection, the story’s concept of God as a sinister and not omnipotent creator mirrors the complex Gnostic concepts explored in Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981). “Croatoan" (1975; Hugo nominee): Here’s another story where it’s not immediately clear what is going on. A man named Gabe is sent by his panicked girlfriend to go into New York’s sewers to retrieve something very precious that they flushed down. The story also moves between flashbacks to put together the full picture of what led him to this point. He discovers that discarded crocodiles, and something far more sinister, infest the sewers. The story is more character than event-driven, and touches on a very sensitive subject in the US today. “The Beast Who Shouted Love at the Heart of the World” (1968; Hugo winner):Here is another complex and demanding story with a brilliant title. It takes a similarly elliptical approach, dropping incongruous details and not identifying the connections between story elements. The story begins with very newscast-like comments describing three terrorist-like mass-murders perpetrated by a man named William Sterog, who is clearly insane. The narrative then jumps to the far future in which an Earth expedition finds a giant statue with a beatific expression on its face, and a vague description of the crosscurrents of time, space, and existence. The story then shifts to a strange underground “level” containing an insane seven-headed dragon (which may be the same as “the maniac.” Two individuals, Semph and Linah, are arguing whether it is appropriate to “drain” the dragon or not. Although not immediately apparent, the “draining” process seems to involve removing the insanity of the subject and dispersing these bad essences elsewhere. The debate centers on what becomes of these essences. Semph is sentenced to death for opposing the draining, and a statue is built in his honor. Once again the narrative abruptly changes to the description of the meeting of Pope Leo the first and Atilla the Hun. Apparently Pope Leo managed to convince Atilla not to sack Rome, though at other times Rome did not escape this fate. The connection of this to the rest of the story is completely unclear to me. Finally, during the trial of Semph, it’s made clear that the draining of insanity keeps the future society of the Concord safe from madness, but that these essences have been beamed throughout the universe, and have arrived on the Earth. This may be an explanation for the insane actions described in the beginning, and for all other acts of madness by implication. “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore” (1991; Nebula nominee): This story defies easy description. It is strange, sympathetic, cruel, ironic, and filled with humor. Essentially it is a series of tiny vignettes featuring Levendis, a powerful but mysterious figure that goes about the world dealing out justice (with extreme prejudice) in some cases, standing by observing in others, and playing bizarre pranks in others. As it turns out, it appears that Lavendis may be how Harlan Ellison views the role of the divine in our lives — random, capricious, both good and evil, sometimes indifferent, but always unpredictable. God, if he exists, is not either the vindictive Jehovah of the Old Testament nor the merciful and sacrificial Christ of the New Testament. If anything, Lavendis may be Ellison’s way of saying “shit happens” in life and that we shouldn’t expect any rhyme or reason in the world. Life is what you see before you, and it’s up to you what to make of it. “Count the Clock That Tells the Time” (1978; Locus winner; Hugo nominee): This is a sweet little love story based on very original premise: what happens to all the time that we “waste” in our lives? Does it just disappear, or go someone else and accumulate? Ellison explores this question, and then expands on it by speculating on what happens when two people who have wasted their entire lives in solitude find each other outside of time and space. It’s pretty affecting and has a bittersweet ending as well. Excellent stuff. “How Interesting: A Tiny Man” (2010; Hugo winner): This is a short but effective story that could only be done full justice being narrated by Ellison himself. What if you were to create a tiny man who could fit in your shirt pocket? How would other people react? Would they simply remark “How Interesting! A tiny man,” or would their reactions be more extreme? The answers this story arrives at are a powerful indictment against the intolerance and close-mindedness of people, and the ending is very sad indeed. ...more |
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| 1433241684
| 9781433241680
| 3.94
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| Jun 23, 2009
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really liked it
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Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 3: Worth it for the title story alone Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the third in Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes: The Voice from the Edge Vol. 3: Worth it for the title story alone Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the third installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years. Vol. 3 has some top-notch stories like “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes,” and finishes with two horror tales, the first narrated by Robert Bloch to chilling effect. It’s also unusual in that it has six very short stories that accompany the artwork of Jacek Yerka especially for the book Mind Fields: The Art of Jacek Yerka, the Fiction of Harlan Ellison. While these may be very effective when seen with the artwork, they lack context alone and are too short to really have a major impact. I would have preferred that he include some of his huge back catalog of longer shorter stories instead. Ellison does sprinkle in a lot of biographical anecdotes that makes this audiobook a real treat to listen to. He may be cocky and abrasive, but he’s also charming and honest as hell. This collection is interesting for the number of stories that are nearly devoid of fantastic elements. Ellison is a masterful storyteller, so basically any ideas he chooses have the potential to be great. In this collection, you won’t find too many spaceships, robots, or futuristic societies except for “Kiss of Fire,” “The Discarded,” and “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World.” Some of the best work perfectly well without any real fantasy elements at all, like “Status Quo at Troyden’s” and “Valerie: A True Memoir.” These were the standouts for me: “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” (1967): This story alone is worth the money. Ellison absolutely tears into every word like a pack of Dobermans attacking a bloody-raw Porterhouse steak. I guarantee you have NEVER heard narration this intense, sinister, down and dirty and absolutely joyful. Ellison’s description of Maggie goes on for a long time, and in the afterword you understand this character had a real-life inspiration. It’s an incredible tale of a down on his luck loser in Vegas who finds a Silver Cartwheel Chief slot machine that gets him jackpot after jackpot after jackpot… but at a terrible price. The real show-stopper here is Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes, a high priced escort who shows in Vegas with her Sicilian hood boyfriend Nuncio and ends up staying in Vegas much longer than expected. I listened to this one several times and every character in it, including the sleazy pit boss, are done to perfection. Here’s a sample of Ellison’s writing: Outthrust chin, perhaps a tot too much belligerence, but if you’d walloped as many gropers, you too, sweetheart; narrow mouth, petulant lower lip, nice to chew on, a lower lip as though filled with honey, bursting, ready for things to happen; a nose that threw the right sort of shadow, flaring nostrils, the acceptable words: aquiline, patrician, classic, cheekbones as stark and promontory as a spit of land after ten years of open ocean; cheekbones holding darkness like narrow shadows, sooty beneath the taut-fleshed bone structure; amazing cheekbones, the whole face, really; simple up-tilted eyes, the touch of the Cherokee, eyes that looked out at you, as you looked in at them, like someone peering out of the keyhole as you peered in; actually, dirty eyes, they said you can get it. “Kiss of Fire”(1973): This is a fairly tricky story to grasp on the first time around. I listened several times to get the drift, but I came to appreciate it as a very daring story about creativity and at what cost, set far in the future. It’s also about a fatigued artist, and how far one can go when your work victimizes others. Strangely enough, the jaded and cynical far-future denizens strongly reminded me of the decadent members of Iain M. Banks’ CULTURE series. “Status Quo at Troyden’s” (1958): This is another perfectly narrated story by Ellison that has no fantastic elements. It’s the simple story of a down-on-his luck old man living in a flop-house on the minimal payments sent by his son. When his payment is cut, he is at a loss and asks the slimy building owner for a few bucks off the already-low rent. When he gets rejected, things take an ugly turn, and our previously-meek protagonist shows a surprisingly mean streak when the tables are turned. “Tired Old Man”(1975): This is a story based on a real life meeting in NY at a writers’ party between Ellison and one of his crime fiction idols, Cornell Woolrich. It is one of Ellison’s favorites, and features some pretty harsh ridiculing of the jealous little world of competing authors, and Ellison’s dislike for such literary circles. But when he encounters and has a deep and inspiring conversation with a very old man in a soft chair, he is shocked to find that nobody else at the party saw this guy, and that the person he claims to be has been dead for many years. “Valerie: A True Memoir” (1972): Here’s another excellent story that has no fantastic elements whatsoever. It’s simply a tale Ellison tells about himself as a writer, when he encounters a seductive woman named Valerie who takes him for a ride, and his efforts to get back at her. Ellison isn’t afraid to ridicule his own gullibility, while also suggesting he is quite the lady’s man. It’s a funny story, something you could easily imagine him telling over a beer. “A Toy for Juliette” (1967): This is actually a story by Robert Bloch (of Psycho fame) written for Ellison’s famous Dangerous Visions anthology in 1967. It may be the creepy soundtrack of any horror story I’ve heard. It’s about a young lady named Juliette in the far future who basically sits around waiting for her kindly uncle to bring her live ‘toys’ for her to play with (and dispatch painfully). Everything goes as usual until one of her ‘toys’ turns out to be much more than she bargained for. The story reads like an evil nursery story, with this inane toy store background music that wildly contrasts with the dark storyline. I loved it. “The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World” (1967): This story is a direct follow-up by Ellison to “A Toy for Juliette,” and takes place immediately after that story ends. As Ellison says in his afterword, this is the most violent and explicit piece he’s ever written, and I can understand why Kat would be sickened by it. When you realize who has been set loose in a decadent far-future dome society, you can imagine the mayhem that will ensue. It’s a pretty nasty story, and I actually liked the prior story better because of its sick sense of humor. But I give Ellison full credit for such a creative idea and not pulling any punches. ...more |
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 2: More incendiary audio performances Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral: The Voice From the Edge Vol. 2: More incendiary audio performances Originally posted at Fantasy Literature This is the second installment in Harlan Ellison’s 5-volume THE VOICE FROM THE EDGE series. He’s a born storyteller, without question the most passionate, intense and brilliant audiobook narrator I’ve ever experienced. He captures the characters’ quirks and attitudes, and narrates with masterful pacing and tone. This is the ideal showcase for him to read his favorite stories from a career spanning over 60 years. Vol. 1 featured some of his most famous stories and incredible voice narration, so it’s a tough act to follow. While his narration is just as exemplary in Vol. 2, I didn’t think the stories were quite as brilliant as those in Vol. 1. In part I think that’s because the stories in Vol. 1 are longer, while Vol. 2 has a number of shorter stories that didn’t grab me as much. Having said that, it’s still a great collection and these were my favorites: “Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral” (1995): This story is all about the oppressive weight and darkness of the depths of the Bermuda Triangle, and how that parallels the feelings of loss of a man whose father was killed in an industrial accident. As he dives deep below the sea, he encounters his father again in unexpected fashion. This is impressively described, with dramatic and hallucinatory imagery. An excellent story. “The End of the Time of Leinard”(1958): Here’s a story that is not SF or F at all, but rather a Western theme. It’s about tough-as-nails Sheriff Leinard, who had to do plenty of killing to civilize a rough border town, but once things have become more civilized, the town leaders decide they don’t need such a fierce peace-keeper anymore. Just when you think it’ll end in an epic shootout, it ends on a note of melancholy. The story may be a metaphor for the loss of that hard pioneer spirit as society gets more civilized. “Go Toward the Light”(1996): Since I’ve recently read Robert Silverberg’s time-travel book Up the Line, this was an interesting spin on the idea of travelling back in time to witness important historical or Biblical events. This one focuses on scientists involved in a time-travel project. They have an argument over who is the better Jew, and one of them goes back in time to witness a miracle at the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Despite all his training, he is torn about meddling in history, the cardinal sin of time travel. “Jeffty is Five”(1977): As Kat said, this is the highlight of the collection, and won the Hugo, Nebula, British Fantasy, and Locus Poll Awards. It’s about a boy named Jeffty who is stuck at 5-years of age, while his friend grows older normally. His parents are at a loss what to do, and seem emotionally paralyzed. Jeffty cannot go to school, so his only friend is the narrator, who keeps visiting him as he grows older but Jeffty remains the same. The story is filled with heaps of nostalgic trivia about all the old TV shows, cartoons, and books that Jeffty can miraculously continue to acquire long after they have disappeared from the modern world. The story has a tragic ending, a clear metaphor for the loss of that sweet innocence that we imbue the past with. “The Function of Dream Sleep”(1988): This story is more psychological horror, about a man who has a terrifying dream that a mouth has opened on his side and exhales a chill breath of death. He visits a group studying R.E.M. sleep and explores the idea that dreams are not a means of expresses subconscious thoughts, but rather a way to expel bad thoughts from the mind. After a very strange experience with a group of mental patients, the man is directed to find a reclusive man who may have the answer to his dreams. It ends with a strange encounter that I didn’t fully understand, but it was certainly a memorable story. There were also several humorous stories that featured great New Yorker accents, such as “S.R.O.” and “Prince Myshkin, and Hold the Relish.” These are great to listen to, and really show off Ellison’s sharp wit and skill with accents. There’s another story called “Rat Hater”, a fairly mean-spirited vignette about a gangster getting revenge many years later for the murder of his loved one. Then again, I like Mafia movies like The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc. The first story “In Lonely Lands” is a short piece about an old man dying and his Martian companion. It strongly reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, and just like that book I didn’t really connect with it. Overall, this was a very good collection that illustrates just what a skillful storyteller Ellison is, and also that his unique brand of story writing doesn’t easily fit the SF or Fantasy categories, but frequently contains fantastic elements in stories that are otherwise firmly grounded in our reality. This is yet again different from magic realism. It shows that Ellison is fully capable of telling an emotionally powerful tale with conventional settings, but borrows fantastic elements whenever they serve to enhance the story. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 04, 2022
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| 4.21
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it was amazing
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Mar 20, 2022
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Mar 16, 2022
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| 3.70
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Mar 17, 2022
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Mar 16, 2022
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| 4.08
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not set
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Feb 11, 2018
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| 4.12
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really liked it
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Mar 19, 2017
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Mar 03, 2017
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| 4.10
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it was amazing
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Nov 16, 2017
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Jan 06, 2017
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| 3.97
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not set
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Jan 06, 2017
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| 4.13
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really liked it
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Mar 11, 2017
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Dec 19, 2016
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| 4.43
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2017
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Nov 26, 2016
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| 4.23
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really liked it
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Nov 04, 2016
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Nov 02, 2016
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not set
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Aug 20, 2016
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| 4.67
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it was amazing
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Sep 28, 2016
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Aug 20, 2016
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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Sep 2016
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Aug 19, 2016
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| 3.76
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really liked it
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Aug 21, 2016
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Aug 12, 2016
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| 4.27
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not set
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Feb 28, 2016
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| 4.15
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really liked it
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Jan 13, 2016
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Jan 14, 2016
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Jan 22, 2022
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Jan 14, 2016
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| 4.22
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really liked it
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Jan 12, 2016
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Jan 12, 2016
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| 3.94
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really liked it
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Jan 10, 2016
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Jan 08, 2016
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Jan 08, 2016
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Jan 05, 2016
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