Black Gate

The March/April Intertzone has a short interview with Bruce Sterling in promoting his latest novel, The Caryatids (haven’t read it yet, but sounds intriguing). Here’s one question: “Couldn’t it be argued that SF itself is a long running ‘War on Wonder’? Is our tolerance for spectacle increasing with each passing year — we’re demanding more eyeball-kicks for the bucks?” To which Sterling replies: “If that were the case, why would anybody read Verne, Wells, Orwell or Huxley? Yet they do.”

Now, I’m not all together certain I understand either the question or the response. I think the point is that people who watch SF-inspired movies may not read SF because it isn’t as exciting. Well, maybe, but those folks don’t read in the first place. I suspect readers are, for the most, disappointed in most cinematic SF, Battlestar Gallactica, notwithstanding. Of course, I’m guessing that’s the case based on my own perception as a reader of SF.

But as far as Sterling’s response goes, I wonder if people still read Verne and Wells. Orwell and Huxley are typcially assigned in school (and I once assigned The Time Machine to an eighth grade English class), but do people still read these guys for entertainment, let alone to consider their ideas, outside of  academia or people who really care about SF as a genre and seek to be knowledgeable about its historical development?

And my guess is that most people who went to see the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds (a flick I never bothered with) didn’t pick up the source material. Or, if they did, wouldn’t have finished.

Or am I just being a snobbish elitist?

I just reviewed Jeff and Ann Vandermeer’s The New Weird anthology, and if you’re interested in varying offshoots and antecedents, you might want to check out my reviews of:

The New Wave Fabulists

Paraspheres

Cyberpunk

Slipstream

Should be enough homework for today.

Well, I’m now about halfway through Neal Stepehenson’s Anathem and, while I’m enjoying it, the going is slow.  When I was in graduate school, my 18th century British Lit class had as required  reading a 1500 page epistolary novel by Samuel Richardson called Clarissa which recounts the seduction, rape and subsequent suffering of said title character.  Correctly suspecting that perhaps not everyone would read it thoroughly, the professor assigned the students sections that we would each summarize and present to the class as we worked through the reading.  My section was some 500 pages into the story, and I remember starting my presentation by saying, “I was fortunate to be assigned the part of the book where something actually starts to happen.”  Which is sort of how I feel about Anathem about now.

I’m not overly obsessive, let alone concerned, about world-building.  I don’t look at the maps, or the etymology of a sword’s name, or get overly concerned about any of that stuff. I don’t get upset if there’s some inconsistency in the imagined world; hell, the real world is inconsistent enough for my taste.  I’m more interested in metaphor, or even just whether it’s a good read.  In Antathem, Stephenson is poking fun at the world-building fetish (I think) but, at the same time, is a practicing adherent.  A dangerous thing for an author known to never hesitate to let the reader just how much he knows.

Certain sections of the book begin with definitions of the Earth-like society’s terms, sociological classifications, and historical events.  Here’s Stephenson reading these definitions.  If you like this sort of thing, you’ll love the book for this alone.

One of the advantages of living near a college town is The Virginia Festival of the Book.  The two things that persuaded me to move to Charlottesville were the extensive music scene  — the hometown of Dave Matthews with venues for just about any major artist from Dylan and Springsteen to Bill Frissel and Jane Siberry to locals such as Devon Sproule ( just this past week I saw Joan Baez and Ani DiFranco); and the home of WTJU, one of the last remaining noncommercial free form terrestrial radio stations where they even let someone like me spin discs on a Saturday night —  and the fact that in the downtown there are literally a half dozen used and independent book stores  all within strolling distance.  This year’s book festival has Mary Doria Russell, though she’s assigned to historical fiction which has been her genre of choice lately, but it also has some comics, fantasy, SF discussions that I’ll probably attend, though I’m not overly familiar with most of these authors. The danger, of course, is the likelihood of adding even more books to the already overweighted “to be read” shelves.

Check it out, if you’re in the neighborhood.

You may have heard that a fairly good copy of the iconic first issue of Action Comics that introduced the character of Superman — the first superhero — is on the auction block.  Recession be damned, some estimate a winning bid could be as high as $400,000.  For a comic book.

Like any other red-blooded American boy in the Cold War era, I was a comic book collector.  But, as my childhood chum and fellow collector once remarked, “The trouble was we actually read these things, so pages would be torn and folded.  So, even if we didn’t end up throwing them out,  they probably wouldn’t be worth much today as collectibles to people who are more interesting in owning the things as an object, rather than what they were originally intended for – something to make being a kid more bearable.”

I think I started collecting comics at around third or fourth grade, but by the time I got to junior high school it was, to use a Biblical phrase that has come into use of late in the political realm, time to put childish things away.  I had graduated to the tales of Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke and real books without pictures.  I wasn’t (or at least didn’t want to be treated like) a kid, anymore.  Consequently, I emptied my drawers of comics and sent them, I don’t really remember where.
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Read More Read More

I just started the latest from Neal Stephenson, which I notice has already hit the remainder tables after coming out in late 2008. It’s a little slow going, in large part because Stephenson really wants you to understand what he’s making up. Opening at a random page, here’s a random paragraph:

The praxis had done it with water power.  Far outside of our walls, upstream of the cataract — therefore, at an altitude well above our heads — they had carved a pool, like an open cistern, out of the river’s stony course, and made it feed an aqueduct that cut due south towards the Mynster, bypassing the cataract , the bridge and the bend.  After rushing through a short tunnel and loping on stone stilts across half a mile of broken terrain, this dove into the ground and became a buried pipe that passed beneath what was now a settled neighborhood of burgers.  The water in the pipe, pressurized by gravity, erupted in a pair of fountains from a pond that lay just outside of the Day Gate.  A causeway ran across the middle of that pond, connecting the central square of the burgers’ town, at its northern end, to our Day Gate at its southern, passing between those two fountains.

Geez, I would have just been happy to know there were two fountains in front of the gate that flanked the town’s central square!

 

I just finished Matt Ruff’s Bad Monkeys, which, as anyone familiar with his work might expect, is thought provokingly funny. The main character, Jane Charlotte (and,yes, as fans of Ruff also know, he’s never met a literary allusion he doesn’t like) is in a detention center, has evidently killed someone, and also seems crazy. A psychiatrist seems to be trying to determine the underlying cause of her psychosis, which forms the novel’s narrative in which Jane recounts her fantastic adventures in a secret organization dedicated to the elimination of murderers, child molesters and other purely evil people. Of course, we’ve been down this road before — is she crazy or is there really some sort of alternate universe where good does triumph over evil. All through the book you’re trying to figure out how Ruff is going to turn the tables and come up with an ending that is something more than an average Twilight Zone denouement. And he manages to pull it off.

Fun stuff, though his previous book, Set This House in Order, is his best and the one I’d recommend first if you haven’t read him before. His other two novels are Sewer, Gas & Electric and the cult-classic Fool on the Hill, which was one of the first reviews I did for Black Gate publisher John O’Neil when he was helping to start the whole on-line reviewing thing at SF Site.

It’s been almost four years since I’ve moved, and half of my library is still in boxes, mainly because the bookshelves I’ve been wanting to install haven’t been.  Instead, there are some rather rickety temporary structures that weren’t really designed to hold books (more to display things) which are sagging under the weight of the volumes I’ve so far unpacked.  As it happens, I hope this weekend to get started working on the library, not so much the bookshelves as reorganizing what I already started, and soon realized I’d planned wrong, doing some painting and generally getting ready to install real bookshelves at some point.  I’m actually looking forward to delving into my collection and dusting off some stuff I’ve forgotten about (and/or haven’t gotten around to read).  In fact, the only thing I liked about moving was the chance to start reorganizing my books/records/CD collections, though, as the date of the move got closer, there was too much last minute stuffing into boxes hat I’m not entirely certain if all my “L” authors really are in the boxes with the “L” on them.  Could mean “late additions.”  We shall see…

Which brings me to this thing, an online way for you to catalog your stuff and get recommendations from people who like the same stuff you do. At this point, the last thing I need is more suggestions on what else I should be reading in addition to what I already haven’t caught up with, and I really don’t need a database, but I have started to add titles to the list as I finish them. I really don’t know why I’m doing this, other than that I can. Eventually, I hope to have everything shelved in a real library so that if I need something, I can physically see and retreive it. That, to me, is part of the enjoyment of books as objects after you’ve read them. But, seeing as how we are all moving, like it or not, to a virtual life in which we download pdfs and mp3s, it seems like a good place as place as any to start building these other shelves. At least they don’t cost nearly as much…