What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. IX

/ Joachim Boaz
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelf

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s January’s installment of this column.

When I’m not reading science fiction, I’m more often than not devouring history that touches on my decades of focus: 1945-1985. Recently that’s meant lots and lots of monographs on Cold War culture: from fallout shelters, suburbia, to analysis of the drama of morality and terror that characterized nuclear deterrence. And in Guy Oakes’ transfixing The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994), I came across a fascinating collision of science fictional thought and public policy.

A few months into Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, the Public Affairs Office of the Federal Civil Defense Administration released a short pamphlet that analyzed the “relation between national will and nuclear terror” under the ridiculous title “Civil Defense Implications of the Psychological Impact and Morale Effect of Attacks on the People of the United States” (April 1953). In this pamphlet, the authors imagine the effects of nuclear war. They suggest that some survivors would “isolate themselves from the terrifying consequences of nuclear war by effecting a pseudo-escape into an interior psychological reality.” I thought immediately of Richard Matheson’s brilliant “Pattern for Survival” (1955), in which a SF author reenacts the process of writing and publishing a story to escape the reality in which he lives. The pamphleteers further imagine a political reality dominated by “mystical sects and cults, enthralled by the vision of an immeasurably happier future in an inner fantasy life of an extramundane kingdom of bliss that transcended the brutal empirical reality of nuclear destruction” (41). Early Cold War policy makers and consultants as science fiction authors!

50s paranoid future visions aside, let’s turn to the books in the photo and what I’ve been reading and writing about.

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

  1. Why is this novel not better known? I described Gerrold’s Moonstar Odyssey (1977) as “a careful and introspective reflection on identity and gender set in a fascinating world made habitable by terraforming.” My only complaint is that I wish it was a bit more fleshed out. The map and all its details that don’t appear in the novel suggest he had a grander vision of the world that never came about. Alas. Recommended for thought-provoking SF in the mold of Ursula K. Le Guin.
  2. James Davis Nicoll recently described Ron Goulart as a “poor man’s Robert Sheckley.” It led me to think a bit about why I enjoy Sheckley as much as I do as he’s just as jokey as Goulart, whom I’ve never enjoyed. Despite my struggle with joke SF stories, there’s something about Sheckley that I respect. He’s legitimately funny and prone to delightful experimental dalliances. Citizen in Space (1955) contains quite a few crisp and thought-provoking satires.
  3. As I’ve recently reviewed a handful of Simak stories, I couldn’t help but include his masterpiece in this month’s post.
  4. At one point I was high on C. J. Cherryh’s paranoid space operas. Merchanter’s Luck (1982) heightened the tension by restricting the narrative space to one cargo ship and its crew. Note: One of the earliest reviews on my site (it’s rough!).

What am I writing about?

Recent reviews include Clifford D. Simak’s intriguing collection of 50s stories Worlds Without End (1964) and a post remembering the contribution of three authors who passed away this year — Howard Waldrop, David J. Skal, and Tom Purdom. I’m currently working on a Brunner review that is taking far too long.

What am I reading?

So many projects. So little time. I recently completed Carl Abbott’s intriguing look at various permutations of science fictional cities: Imagining Urban Futures: Cities in Science FIction and What We Might Learn from Them (2016). Despite the title that sounds a bit like a marketing ploy, the book contains little about “what we might learn from them.” Instead, it’s a good survey with occasional points of deeper analysis of various types of future city. I imagine I’ll reference it in future installments of my new series on the same topic.

A Curated List of SF Birthdays from the Last Two Weeks

Feb. 3rd: Author Paul Auster (1947-). While a bit outside of the site’s range, Auster’s In the Country of Last Things (1987) sounds like my cup of tea. I have a big crush on epistolary novels.

Feb. 4th: Author Russell Hoban (1925-2011). Still haven’t read Ridley Walker (1980)….

Feb. 4th: Author and editor Ted White (1938-).

  • H. R. Giger’s Necronom IV (1976)

Feb. 5th: Artist H. R. Giger (1940-2014). I’m glad I didn’t watch Alien (1979) as a child!

Feb. 5th: Author William S. Burroughs (1914-1997).

Feb. 7th: Author Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951). I read but never managed to review It Can’t Happen Here (1935): a dystopia account of a fascist American politician’s rise to the dictatorship.

  • Jean-Michel Nicollet’s art for the 1980 edition of Philippe Curval’s Les sables de Falun (1970)

Feb. 7th: Artist Jean-Michel Nicollet (1944-). His covers for J.-C. Lattè’s Titres SF publication series are fantastic and bizarre.

Feb. 7th: Author Karen Joy Fowler (1950-). I still need to read her earliest SF short stories!

Feb. 9th: Artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010).

  • Gary Viskupic’s cover for the 1st edition of F. M. Busby’s Cage a Man (1973)

Feb. 9th: Artist Gary Viskupic (1944-). While I can’t say I’m a fan of the majority of his covers, he produced a disquieting visual masterpiece of F. M. Busby’s Cage a Man (1973) (above).

Feb. 10th: Author John Shirley (1953-). I can’t forget Shirley’s City Come A-Walkin’ (1980). I need to tackle Eclipse (1985) this year. Or maybe I’ll continue to putter around with his earliest novels and give Three-Ring Psychus (1980) a shot.

Feb. 11th: Author Daniel F. Galouye (1920-1976). Galouye’s masterpiece Dark Universe (1961) is one of the earliest reviews on my site.

Feb. 12th: Author Hilbert Schenck (1926-2013). While I was ambivalent towards A Rose for Armageddon (1982), I have yet to read any of his four Hugo Award-nominated short fictions from the early 80s.

Feb. 12th: Author Terry Bisson (1942-2024). I plan on reading one of his early novels this year to commemorate his recent passing.

Feb. 14th: Author J. T. McIntosh (1925-2008).

Feb. 14th: Author Gwyneth Jones (1952-). One of the rewards of posting SF birthdays daily on Mastodon is that I remember books I own and had forgotten. Jones’ Divine Endurance (1984) is case in point. While I haven’t read any of her fiction, I adored her 2019 monograph on Joanna Russ via. U. Illinois Modern Masters of Science Fiction series.

Feb. 15th: Author Jack Dann (1945-). Another hole in my SF knowledge…

  • Ed Emshwiller’s cover for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (May 1956)

Feb. 16th: Artist and experimental filmmaker Ed Emshwiller (1925-1990). He’s a favorite of mine. He combines a surreal touch with often noir pulp stylings.

Feb. 16th: Author Wilhelmina Baird (1935-). She published a handful of short short stories in the early 60s as Kathleen James before returning to the field in the early 90s with her cyberpunk trilogy Crashcourse (1993-1995).

Feb. 16th: Author Iain M. Banks (1954-2013). While primarily outside of my area of study (most of his SF appeared after 1985), what I have read of his appeals — The Wasp Factory (1984) for example. I wish I had discovered him when I read SF more widely (i.e. my late teens). Looking through his bibliography yesterday, I went ahead and snagged Banks’ Walking on Glass (1985).

Feb. 17th: Author Margaret St. Clair (1911-1995).

Feb. 17th: Author Andre Norton (1912-2005). Another author I wish I knew about earlier in my reading career — it would have given a welcome relief to my glut of Heinlein juveniles in my teens. Hah.

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

84 thoughts on “What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. IX”

  1. So last time I told you what I was reading, it was EE Smith’s Skylark of Space. And I agreed with you that it wasn’t a very good read. Well, I just finished John W Campbell’s Invaders From the Infinite, and it made Skylark look like a literary masterpiece. EEK!

    Reply

  2. I just finished Octavia Butler’s “Mind of My Mind.” It was a leap in quality from “Patternmaster,” very good. I have a few authors I’m reading in publication order (as best as I can tell) and it’s interesting how much some of them improved so quickly — like Le Guin’s leap from “Rocannon’s World” to “The Left Hand of Darkness” over just a few years. What a loss it might have been if their early works hadn’t been picked up.

    I haven’t read any Matheson yet — I’ve checked out “I Am Legend” a couple of times from the library, but haven’t managed to get to it. I have a bunch of Sheckley collections on ebook that I think I picked up free at some point. I’m thinking I must have read a few Sheckley stories over the years, but I don’t remember any of them.

    Reply

    • Hello Hestia,

      I “enjoyed” (if that’s a word I can use to describe the immense emotional horror of her fiction) Mind of My Mind. I will get to Patternmaster this year, or another volume of the same sequence.

      I reviewed I am Legend. I actually upped the rating I gave it after a few months as I caught myself thinking about it… https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/07/06/book-review-i-am-legend-richard-matheson-1954/

      I’ve reviewed many many many Sheckley stories over the years. Here are my favorites so far.

      “Shall We Have a Little Talk?” (1965)
      ‘The Prize of Peril’ (1958)
      ‘The Store of the Worlds’ (1959)

      And his novel Journey Beyond Tomorrow (1962) was a narratological delight.

      Reply

    • I just read PATTERNMASTER and found it disappointing relative to the rest of Butler’s work — long ago I read MIND OF MY MIND and CLAY’S ARK and they were excellent. PATTERNMASTER was her first novel and it shows.

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        • Hestia,

          Some readers, maybe you, don’t like reading reviews before reading a book — I get it.

          But… if you get to I Am Legend, I want to list two short things that made it FAR BETTER than I thought it could be as I hate zombies.

          First, they aren’t really “zombies.” Haha. They still talk and think through things.

          Second, the novel is a weird expose of “The Male Sex Drive in the Wasteland” — I’ll quote one (and I hope tantalizing) bit of my review:

          “Elaine Tyler May [in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era] analyzes the juxtaposition of sex symbols with nuclear devastation in American popular culture–think bikini bathing suit, an attractive woman as “bombshell” or “Bill Haley and His Comets singing about sexual fantasies of a young man dreaming of being the sole male survivor of an H-bomb explosion” [2]. The home provided a form of “sexual containment” [3] that would be released in terrifying forms in the case of apocalypse. If the home falls, society falls. And Richard Neville [the main character in the novel] attempts to preserve his home in I Am Legend and avoid the endless temptation of flesh in the burnt wreckage of suburbia that surrounds him. ”

          So as an allegory on nuclear terror, I Am Legend works as strange story about the death of the suburban dream and the American man… As a lens into Cold War anxiety, I’m all for it.

          Reply

          • Honestly, this sounds great…I’ll move it further up my TBR list.

            I remember that the characters that kept trying to kill Charlton Heston in The Omega Man weren’t really zombies. (Though I have no idea if anything else in that movie follows the book.)

            I’m not a huge zombie fan, either, so this is a plus.

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  3. Thanks for the recommendation on the Richard Matheson story, that looks really good. I’m gonna check that out in a minute here. I also ordered the book on science-fiction/ architecture, as it looks interesting too, so thanks for that recommendation as well.

    I’m still reading “Burning Chrome” and enjoying it very much. I’m also doing video reviews of it. After that I plan to start reading “102 H-Bombs” by Thomas M. Disch.

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  4. I’ve just finished two novels first published in English in 1975. One is French author Gerard Klein’s THE MOTE IN TIME’S EYE, first published in France in 1965 as Les Tueurs du Temps. (Which really means THE KILLERS OF TIME, but Wollheim changed the title presumably to capitalize on the recent success of the Pournelle/Niven novel THE MOTE IN GOD’S EYE.) It was — not great. I’ve reviewed it for Black Gate, though the review won’t appear for a while.

    Likewise I read a sort of bottom of the barrel piece by Laurence James, BACKFLASH (#3 in the Simon Rack series.) Really minor SF adventure fiction further marred by some remarkably homophobic passages. My review of it will also appear in Black Gate, probably not for a month or so, though. (I’m doing a series of looks at obscure SF from the ’70s and ’80s there.)

    Silverberg’s REGAN’S PLANET (1964) is on deck. As mentioned upthread, I read Octavia Butler’s PATTERNMASTER, her first and, I think, weakest novel. And I read FIFTY-ONE TALES, by Lord Dunsany (1915) — not SF, but decent very very short fantasty tales.

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    • I look forward to your Klein review — despite the iffy quality of the novel. I’ve been meaning to read some of his work. I have a copy of Starmasters’ Gambit (1973) and The Day Before Tomorrow (1972).

      And of course Silverberg…

      Reply

      • Based on the SF Encyclopedia entry, I’d guess that STARMASTERS’ GAMBIT might be the best of his novels available in English. They had praise for it, and also suggested that his later work moved in a direction more explicitly emulating American SF. (STARMASTERS’ GAMBIT is one of his earliest novels, from 1958.)

        I’m also slightly tempted by THE OVERLORDS OF WAR, only because it was translated by Brunner.

        REGAN’S PLANET is from 1964, so theoretically on the cusp of his remarable middle period increase in ambition, but it looks to me more like the last of his ’50s hackwork period than it looks like the first of his later ’60s brilliant work. But who knows? I’ll see when I read it.

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  5. I read A. Bertram Chandler’s THE BIG BLACK MARK, a competent and entertaing space opera whose plot was inspired by the Bounty mutiny. Then, I read THORNS by Silverberg, which was alright but not the author’s best. After that, and in spite of the highly critical reviews that can be found online, I read Fritz Leiber’s THE WANDERER, which I found rather too long and dull, although with occasional passages of interest here and there. Finally, “No, No, Not Rogov” by Cordwainer Smith was a good story, in which I felt the author’s style was somewhat restrained in comparison to other Instrumentality stories, probably due to the Cold War setting.
    I’m currently reading Heinlein’s BETWEEN PLANETS and enjoying it quite a bit.

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  6. Recently finished Crawford Kilian’s 1983 disaster/post-apocalypse follow up to Icequake, Tsunami. Also finished Frederik Pohl’s and Lester del Rey’s Preferred Risk (another satire of the world run by a business, here an insurance company) from 1955.

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      • I reviewed Icequake recently. A well-done disaster novel and notably short. I suspect no publisher would tolerate something so short now.

        Preferred Risk was a lot better than I expected. It was a guaranteed winner of a novel contest Horace Gold held — and didn’t get any satisfactory entries for, so he commissioned the novel from Pohl and del Rey.

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    • One of my favorite Silverberg novels. I wrote a review years back. I remember it was a deeply effective commentary on colonialism. I’m pretty sure I read the Conrad novel in high school, it’s been a while for sure.

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  8. Reread the Auctioneer, a completely mundane horror story. Review in a week and a day. Tomorrow will be a Terry Carr Best Of annual.

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  9. Just finished reading a Strugatsky brothers story, will be writing about it. Pretty interesting and humorous look at robotics as understood in the ‘50s.

    No SF books right now. Reading the horror and dark fantasy anthology Dark Forces, and R. A. Salvatore’s Dark Elf trilogy.

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  10. Have just tackled ‘The Sheep Look Up’, on the subject of Brunner.

    As far as I can see it’s out of print in the UK at the moment but its time may come round again, given its subject manner and the tone of complete pessimism. In a PKD manner he plonks fairly normal working characters into the novel and sees how they get on with things, Unlike PKD characters, who generally muddle on through and make the best of what’s put in front of them, Brunner’s characters struggle with respiratory problems, and much worse, and often die in truly horrible circumstances. It’s not a light read. I did chuckle at the idea of the mob running the organic food industry, which of course transpires to be anything but.

    While I’m here, I noticed you’d made a couple of comments re ‘Born with the Dead’. Leaving it until last isn’t a bad idea. I know where you’re coming from – that sense of slowing down with an author as you run out of their work. Leaving at least one or two things unread. ‘Born…’ does at least contain a couple of other strong novellas. The whole colection is quite refreshing in that Silverberg is fairly buttoned-up, by his standards. I read ‘Book of Skulls’ fairly recently and found the endless lasciviousness a bit wearing, even taking into account the ages of his protagonists. Anyhow, ‘Dead’ and its fellow novellas seems to have moved on from that.

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    • I think the flawed and struggling characters is one the reasons I consider The Sheep Look Up to be head and shoulders above Brunners other classics – both Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider had these super geniuses that seemed able to solve everything deus ex machina-style, but in Sheep even Austin Train, the one who has sort of figured everything out, is a crushed and exhausted man full of doubt and despair.

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      • If I am keeping my delightful memories of reading Brunner’s masterpieces straight (again, late teens/early 20s), I’d rank Stand first, then The Sheep Look Up, The Shockwave Rider, then The Jagged Orbit. I can’t say much more about any besides Stand which is the most firmly entrenched in my mind — it’s my single favorite SF novel.

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      • My memory of ‘Zanzibar’ is that I preferred the first half-ish of the novel – the part where all the information / intelligence is floating around. That’s all enjoyably immersive. If memory serves though it all gets a bit James Bondish towards the end.

        Yes I liked the fact that Austin Train, who in other novels would come through and save the day, does anything but. The forces ranged against every character in the book are simply too strong to resist.

        It will be interesting(ish) to see if it gets back into print.

        Reply

        • I can’t say the plot is the main reason I liked Zanzibar. I liked the tapestry, the attempt at information overload, the ruminations on the social and political ramifications of overpopulation, the interweaving of real historical events (the 1966 University of Texas Tower Shooting for example) into the near future world, the layered quotations and interrelated meanings between the quotes and the story, its unnerving encyclopedic eye, etc.

          To give a bit of context, I first read the novel in the University of Texas tower Chemistry Library as an undergrad (in ~2005/2006? I can’t remember the exact year) and my PhD is on encyclopedias (more precisely, medieval examples) so anything metatextual that relies on meaning generated from interwoven texts speaks to me. And Brunner is one of the best at it. The plot is functional and it moves everything forward — you almost need a Bond-esque plot to not overwhelm the reader ever further.

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  11. I have been reading three vintage soviet SF books that I got my hands on completely unexpected – all from “Mir publishing”, who mostly seems to have translated soviet popular science books for the english speaking market, but also had room for a few SF books.

    I always find soviet SF fascinating, there’s a very distinct feel to it, even when it’s not particularly good, as in this case the novel “The Crew of the Mekong”, a Verne-like mixture of engineering oriented hard SF and mystic adventure. The other two were short story collections, and especially “Everything But Love” had some really good and original stories.

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    • I have collected many many many volumes of Russian Soviet SF but have only read a few stories here and there. None from Mir Press though… I’ve looked through the listings but haven’t grabbed them. Lem, on the other hand, I read religiously before I started my site.

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  12. I just finished reading Christopher Priest’s THE GLAMOUR (1984) an hour ago.

    Hoo boy. What did I just read?!

    Of Priest’s novels, I’d only previously read THE SPACE MACHINE back in the day and THE PRESTIGE, which latter I could apply the conceptual shorthand of ‘ROGUE MOON in Victorian drag’ to and comfortably make sense of it. (And, yeah, I’ve read ‘An Infinite Summer’ and ‘Palely Loitering’ and some of Priest’s short fictions, and they’re fine.)

    But this one ….

    In Priest’s writing bio, THE GLAMOUR was preceded by THE AFFIRMATION, which I’ve seen, JB, resisted your attempt to review it, presumably because it pulls all sorts of tricks with shifting narrative realities.

    THE GLAMOUR, I suspect, opens even more trap doors in terms of M.C. Escher/Moebius strip-type reality games than THE AFFIRMATION (which I’ll now have to read). Nor is it an an SF novel by any normative understanding of SF.

    If I sat down with it tomorrow and analyzed on a couple of sheets of paper what happened in each segment of it, THE GLAMOUR is probably pretty simple. On paper, I might even say “this doesn’t really work, especially that ending.” But in part because of the contrast between the ‘events’ described and its flatly realistic, super-controlled prose, it continually surprised the **** out of me while I was reading it.

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    • If I remember correctly, I simply waited too long to review The Affirmation. It happens. But yes, I have a copy of The Glamour and your comments reaffirm what I’ve read about the novel. I assume I’ll adore it as much as The Affirmation and Priest’s best short fiction.

      Thank you for the reminder!

      Reply

  15. Just finished Eric Frank Russell’s Three to Conquer, published in 1956 but set in 1980, and it’s quite astonishing how many things he got wrong – personal helicopters (that cost $2000!), moonbases, everyone wears hats, and a mission to Venus the US government managed to keep secret… It’s pure pulp fiction, quite pacey but unfortunately structured around a telepath who is more annoying than heroic.

    Now reading Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100 but I’m not sure why as its contents were included in The Past Through Tomorrow, which I read a couple of years ago.

    Reply

      • Not a yardstick, just an indication of how much effort the author has put into their novel. In this case, absolutely zero beyond the plot. The characters all talk alike, the woman all slot into neat pulp female roles, and the prose is only remarkable in as much as it’s by a UK writer doing a pretty good pastiche of US pulp fiction.

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        • But . . . but . . . William S. Burroughs was a great admirer of THREE TO CONQUER!

          PM: You read a lot of science fiction, and have expressed admiration for The Star Virus by Barrington Bayley and Three to Conquer by Eric Frank Russell. Any other science fiction books that you have particularly liked?

          WB: Fury, by Henry Kuttner. I don’t know, there are so many of them. There’s something by Poul Anderson, I forget what it was called, Twilight World. There are a lot of science fiction books that I have read, but I have forgotten the names of the writers. Dune I like quite well.

          https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/2013/08/02/a-conversation-with-william-burroughs-by-philippe-mikriammos/

          Reply

          • THE STAR VIRUS, at least, has the Barrington Bayley utter weirdness thing going for it.

            I read THREE TO CONQUER in its serial form as “Call Me Dead” several years ago (or more) and I remember thinking it just OK.

            Reply

            • John and Ian: I mean, I love Malzberg but one of his favorite authors is Hal Clement… and I can’t get behind that (maybe because I didn’t read Analog in the 50s as a teen — haha).

            • I read THREE TO CONQUER in the Avalon hardcover in about 1958 and thought it was peachy keen. I am sure I would be less enthusiastic about it now, though I think I do have a copy of it lurking somewhere. (When I was ten years old, EFR was my favorite SF writer.) But as to Burroughs, in other sources than the one I snipped, he has said he was impressed with the idea of a virus intelligence.

  16. I’m currently reading A Sweet, Sweet Summer by Jane Gaskell (published 1969). It’s been out of print for decades, but I finally secured a copy. Aliens invade and isolate the UK but the focus is on the young residents of a seedy London flat who have to deal with fascist groups (given free rein by the aliens) terrorizing them.

    Very much a product of its time but a fun new wave read to add to your list. If you like A Clockwork Orange it’s very similar to that in its depravity and sexual violence.

    Reply

  17. Currently reading A Sweet, Sweet Summer by Jane Gaskell. An interesting new wave novel about aliens invading and isolating the UK from the rest of the world. The aliens communicate through silver orbs they drop down to the cities. At the same time they allow the worst elements of society to run rampant in the streets to prevent a British counterattack.

    Kind of mixes the depravity and sexual violence of A Clockwork Orange with the cynical philosophy of Thomas M. Disch in places.

    Reply

  18. I read Kuttner and Moore’s “Rite of Passage” out of the magazine shown and was but a child then and couldn’t figure the story out.
    I looked up what a rite of passage was and it was the rite where a boy became either an adolescent or a man. I could see that I was civilized and needed not to worry that something like that would come up. Then re-reading the story it seemed to show that primitive things happened in civilized places in a different form. I figured though that that was at some remove to us where I was. It was rough coming into adolescence, though, and I decided we might all be receiving these rites en masse. In our beginning at high school we were all stripped and run through a shower room including a foot bath in case we had a foot disease and then put in a swimming pool. This was a physical education interval in the scholastic events. A conversation about whether we liked looking at one another naked became a fight that erupted out of the locker room, and the women from the other side got into the fight. It seemed to me that this exactly resembled the rite of passage as I had read of it in my research.

    Reply

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