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

/ Joachim Boaz
  • A selection of previously read novels from my shelf

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

Last month I waxed rhapsodic about a powerful interaction with a professor in graduate school… this month I’ll show you a recent obsessive territory I’ve been reading and ruminating about: 1940s and 1950s (and a few from the 60s) social commentary on American affluence, technology, and media. It all started with my media landscapes of the future series–I could not write on the topic unless I read some Marshall McLuhan. And then I had to read about C. Wright Mills to write about Clifford D. Simak and organized labor. And then I needed to track down other popular authors of social commentary published in era. It should not be surprising so much 50s SF revolved around social commentary — it was in the air. You get the idea. This pile represents some of what I now own:

…and there are more on the way. And I imagine there’s another project brewing in all of this, I’m not exactly sure what it is, I have to read more (and more) first.

Let me know what pre-1985 science fiction you’ve been reading!

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

  1. If you’re new to SF in translation, Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) is a great place to start. I suspect it was the first SF novel in translation I’ve read, and I promptly devoured fistfuls of his work in the years leading up to creating my site.
  2. I was thrilled to learn that Faber & Faber recently published a new edition of Sven Holm’s wonderful post-apocalyptic novel Termush (1967). I reviewed it in the original 1969 translated edition back in 2020.
  3. C. J. Cherryh’s Downbelow Station (1981) used to be the type of Sf I gravitated towards after my shift from fantasy. You know, the epic space opera with far too many characters and references… Despite my current views on space opera, I appreciate Cherryh’s ability to layer on the paranoia.
  4. D. G. Compton’s Synthajoy (1968). I bizarre rumination, with a strong female lead, on strange new technology that can record emotions. Highly recommended!

What am I writing about?

I recently perused Eric Garber and Lyn Paleo’s indispensable Uranian Worlds: A Reader’s Guide to Alternative Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy (1983, second ed. 1990), my eyes were drawn to a handful of stories that I’ll post about in the coming months.

This month I’ve finally posted promised reviews of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959)! I’m currently prepping another post in my series with Rachel S. Cordasco on SF in translation. She, prompt as always, already sent me her review… Stay tuned.

What am I reading?

As my Clifford D. Simak project on his depictions of organized labor winds to a close, I eager look forward to returning to my media landscapes of the future series. It’s been a while. I am eyeing works on the theme by Algis Budrys, Frederik Pohl, M. A. Foster, Edward Bryant, and Helen Urban.

A Curated List of SF Birthdays from the Last Two Weeks

August 10th: Ward Moore (1903-1978) was born on this day. As I am increasingly interested in the evolution of radical leftist thought amongst SF authors in the post-WWII world, I should should address Moore’s work more systematically. Mike Davis, in “Ward Moore’s Freedom Ride” which appeared in Science Fiction Studies (November 2011), describes him as a “whirling dervish of unorthodox opinion and radical sensibility, a Trotskyist and a libertarian.” I reviewed Moore’s disturbing “Lot” (1953) for my 1950s sex and sexuality review series.

August 10th: Alexis A. Gilliland (1931-). Best known for the Rosinante sequence. I haven’t read his work.

August 10th: Curt Siodmak (1902-2000). Best known for Donovan’s Brain (1942), which he adapted into a 1953 film by the same name. He was publishing SF as late as 1992 — a career of 66 years.

August 11th: Alan E. Nourse (1928-1992). I’ve only read his medical-themed The Mercy Men (variant title: The Man Obsessed) (1955).

August 12th: Chan Davis (1926-2022). I read my first Chan Davis stories last year — “The Nightmare” (1946), “To Still the Drums” (1946), and “The Aristocrat” (1949).

  • John Berkey’s “Nasa”

August 13th: Artist John Berkey (1932-2008). His work is iconic and not to be missed. Click the name for an index of his wonderful covers.

August 13th: Author and editor Martin Bax (1933-). I reviewed his only (unfortunately) SF experiment–The Hospital Ship (1976). If you enjoy Ballard at his most experimental, Bax might be worth tracking down.

August 14th: Alexei Panshin (1940-2022). I still have not read any of his work.

  • Darrell K. Sweet’s cover for the 1975 edition of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958)

August 15th: Artist Darrell K. Sweet (1934-2011).

August 15th: Author Robert L. Forward (1932-2002).

August 16th: Author and editor Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967).

  • Paul Lehr’s cover art for the 1st edition of Emil Petaja’s The Nets of Space (1969)

August 16th: Artist Paul Lehr (1930-1998). If you own any older SF books, you probably have seen his majestic covers. He’s a favorite of mine!

August 17th: Rachel Pollack (1945-2023). I’ve only reviewed Alqua Dreams (1987). On Facebook, before her recent passing, she called my review “fair.”

August 18th: Brian W. Aldiss (1925-2017). Another Joachim Boaz favorite. Check out my review of Hothouse (variant title: The Long Afternoon of Earth) (1962) if you haven’t already.

August 19th: D. G. Compton (1930-2023) crafted a fascinating range of SF novels — I recommend The Unsleeping Eye (variant title: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe) (1973), Synthajoy (1968), and Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (1966) in particular. In 2021 he rightly won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award.

  • H. W. Wesso’s cover art for Astounding Stories of Super-Science (May 1930)

August 19th: Artist H. W. Wesso (1894-1948) was one of the iconic Astounding Stories artists.

August 20th: Artist H. R. Van Dongen (1920-2010).

August 20th: Greg Bear (1951-2022). In my more expansive SF-reading days, I consumed Bear’s Darwin’s Radio (1999), Blood Music (1985), and Eon (1985).

August 20th: H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). If his work tickles your fancy, definitely check out Bobby D.’s wonderful website Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein. I’ve only read a few stories here and there.

August 21st: Anthony Boucher (1911-1968). I’ll be on a podcast in the next few months on one of his stories.

August 21st: Miriam Allen deFord (1888-1975). Check out my review of her Xenogenesis (1969) collection.

  • Ron Walotsky’s “The Architects of Hyperspace” (1987)

August 21st: Artist Ron Walotsky (1943-2002)

August 21st: Lucius Shepard (1943-2014).

August 22nd: Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).

August 22nd: Chuck Rothman (1952-). A completely new author to me — he apparently wrote a generationship novel Staroamer’s Fate (1986), which I recently acquired.

August 24th: James Tiptree, Jr. (1915-1987). There are so many authors I need to read more extensively, and Tiptree ranks near the top of the list. I’ve covered the following: “A Momentary Taste of Being” (1975), “A Source of Innocent Merriment” (1980), “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976), and “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” (1973).

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX

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

  2. Not for this weekend but one I finished while at Worldcon: Christopher Priest’s Fugue for a Darkening Island.

    It is… bleak. Yessir.

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      • I will indeed be doing a written review for my website. Priest did a major revision of the book in 2011, in part to help blunt some of those critiques. But it doesn’t change the fact there’s inescapable racism baked into the premise, even as Priest is taking an extremely harsh view towards white nationalist rhetoric. The story has a terrifying prescience to it (some acts of anti-immigrant violence it depicts are nearly identical to what happened in the actual UK riots earlier this very month), but that does not make the experience of reading the novel any more palatable.

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        • Yeah, I think I remember reading about the revision. I, personally, am never going to read an updated modern version of a 70s novel. I am interested in what science fiction says about the era in which it was written, and I’m not interested in history in 2011 — haha. But yes, it sounds like a review where you have to say, “racist premise yet simultaneously condemns far right anti-immigrant rhetoric.”

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            • It was Fugue for A Darkening Island that my mind went to during the disturbances earlier this year. It has been a good 18 months since I read it but the rhetoric in the media and the language used by politicians during the election campaign and before certainly echoed some of the prose from the novel. And yes, the novel is very bleak.

            • Right. Mind you, I only picked the book up at all because the Worldcon freebie tables were absolutely piled high with books, and among them, someone had left a substantial stack of Priest’s backlist titles (in their current Gollancz editions). So I took the opportunity to grab almost everything, as they don’t have easy-to-find US editions.

              If Priest wanted his revised edition of Fugue to be considered as definitive, I’m okay respecting that decision (though I often tend to find a lot of video “director’s cuts” of movies to be inferior to their theatrical versions). The fact that, even after his revisions, Fugue is as repugnant a book as it is can only hint at how the original might have read.

  3. Just finished revisiting Tim Power’s The Drawing Of The Dark as an audiobook. This time through I noticed a lot of echoes to C S Lewis’ That Hideous Strength that I didn’t pick up on the first time I read it.

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  4. Huh. Mills. Have not thought about him since 1980.

    I reread Wyndham’s The Outward Urge, which has a number of bold narrative decisions. Review a week tomorrow. Never assign a Troon to a space mission.

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    • I find Mills fascinating. I rewrote sections of the Simak article I sent you to more forcefully make the argument that Simak read Mills’ rumination on the radical potential of unions — The New Men of Power.

      I look forward to your review. That’s a Wyndham that seems a bit different than his normal fare.

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  5. You remind me I should go back to Lem – he’s wonderful, whether being serious or satirical (or both). The only vintage sci fi I’ve been reading is Jack Kerouac’s one foray into it. Not his genre, but interesting all the same!

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      • Back in the day pre-site, my favorite Lem novel was His Master’s Voice (1968) — also a first contact style novel that doubles as a philosophical essay about the nature of time. I also enjoyed Eden (1958), The Futurological Congress (1974), Memoires Found in the Bathtub (1961), and The Invincible (1964) (released recently with a NEW translation). Among many others…

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        • Cheers, a few titles I recognise there. I think I may actually have read The Invincible as well (while working my way through the Penguin SF series). Will have a look around and see what takes my fancy.

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          • The new straight from Polish translations are always worth tracking down. As you might know, many of the translations still in print weren’t originally from the Polish but used French or German intermediary languages which can’t be a good thing conveying the art of his prose.

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      • I would second pretty much all the suggestions here. His Masters Voice is indeed one of his best.

        I think Mortal Engines is the ideal starter to get to know Lem outside Solaris, as it’s a collection spanning most of his styles, and it contain one of his best stories, The Mask.

        I would also very much recommend The Star Diaries and the follow up Memoirs of a Space Traveller. They’re all over the place, with lighthearted silliness rubbing shoulders with long philosophical meditations, but some of his very best ideas are in there.

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        • I can tolerate Lem’s lighthearted silliness, sometimes. I do enjoy him when he’s more ruminative. I seem to remember a short story in which a society evolves on a chuck of trash tossed into space or a trash moon or planet (it’s been a while, the details have faded). It blended his best modes.

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  6. Allow me to second the recommendation of Compton’s “The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe” (the title of the edition I own) and add a recommendation of Bertrand Tavernier’s 1980 film adaptation “Death Watch.”

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      • Not currently reading any old SF. I am taking Edna O’Brien’s recent passing as an impetus to fix a hole in my personal curriculum by reading her “The Country Girls” trilogy. So far it is living up to it’s reputation.

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          • I have a clutch of classic Silverberg that I found in a thrift store that I was about to start on (not including “Those Who Watch”, unfortunately, because your recent review piqued my interest), but O’Brien’s death redirected my attention. Her short biography of James Joyce is quite good and she is a master of the short story, so it was time for me to try a novel.

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            • Which ones did you find? Yeah, I understand. I don’t read a ton of fiction to be honest. I read history (maybe close to 70% of what I read on a huge range of topics, but mostly covering 40s-60s recently), primary sources from the eras I study (the second photo above), and then science fiction, and maybe, every other year, a work of fantasy.

            • Downward to the Earth, Hawksbill Station, To Live Again, The Book of Skulls, and Nightwings. Some of those will be re-reads from my youth. The scientology angle of Those Who Watched has hooked me, so I may try to get a used copy from eBay or Amazon.

              Your reading through a lens of history is what I like about your essays. I have read about half of that stack of yours in the second picture. I can’t read science fiction for the “Gee whiz” of it (cough-Andy Weir-cough). There has to be a deeper subtext for it to involve me.

              My most recent history read was “The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It” by Corey Brettschneider. The arc of Frederick Douglass and the three presidents he interacted with was very good.

            • Thank you for the kind words. I used to review so much more fiction but after I was unable to find an academic job in my actual area of historical study (medieval history), I started to view my site as my main research arena so my output got more analytical and researched (and less like a reading log) and far slower. Stay tuned for my Simak article on his views on organized labor. I spent most of the summer writing it, and my site suffered a bit as a result.

              I’m a big fan of the first two you listed Downward to the Earth and Hawksbill Station. He’s a frustrating yet brilliant author.

              I’m with you on the “gee whiz” comment. There’s a reason so much of what I end up writing about is more of the societal commentary-style of SF.

              Sounds like a great book on Douglas. As I teach college-level American History, I might be tempted to assigned a selection in my class. Daniel Horowitz’s The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (2004) is my most recent history read. Highly highly recommended. And cheap!

            • I am looking forward to the Simak article. I am very late to Simak but have enjoyed the few novels and stories I have read.

              I would recommend the Brettschneider book to your students. It starts with Adams and the Alien and Sedition Acts and wraps up with Nixon and Ellsberg. It is briskly written and should appeal to a general audience.

              Thank you for the recommendation of The Anxieties of Affluence (the allusion to Harold Bloom is very amusing). I doubt I would have ever found it on my own.

              Regarding your specialty in medieval history, have you ever read Lauren Groff’s novel “Matrix”? It takes what little is known about the life of 12 century poet Marie de France and fleshes it out into a very compelling novel. I found it to be an excellent work, and a pretty much perfect novel.

            • While I have read many of Marie de France’s poems, I never was much of a fan of fiction writing about the period or historical fiction in general. Alas.

              Daniel Horowitz is a great scholar. I’d previously read his book on Betty Friedan — Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, Modern Feminism (1998). I have Horowitz’s Consuming Pleasures: Intellectuals and Popular Culture in the Postwar World (2012) and Vance Packard and American Social Criticism (1994) waiting in the wings.

            • Maybe my fantasy obsession in my mid-teens related to my interest in medieval history. But I abandoned that style of Tolkein-ripoff fantasy and moved to science fiction by my late teens. With a few exceptions…

  7. I am looking at that stack of books in your picture and realizing I own a fair number of those myself. I did a lot more reading of sociological non-fiction for leisure in my younger days. Now, I tend to gravitate towards genre fiction.

    I acquired a copy of Ward Moore’s novel Joyleg recently. I gave in and ordered a copy as I also wanted to experience more of Moore’s fiction.
    As to my recent reading, I finally found Josephine Saxton’s The Hieros Gamos of Sam and An Smith. A noticeable gap in my “New Wave” collection.

    Interestingly, I came across the name of Martin Bax recently. Moving away from strictly genre fiction (although there’s certainly crossover), I was looking into acquiring more 1960s-early ‘70s British experimental fiction. Bax figures highly in that regard, but vintage copies of The Hospital Ship (which looks very interesting) seem to be going for prohibitive prices online. There is a newer edition which is more affordable, but I find that part of the appeal to this era literature is having a mass-market paperback edition. I did hunt down some Emma Tennant novels instead.

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  8. I read William Whyte’s 1956 “The Organization Man” about a month ago and it was like finding the secret key to 1950s sf. Not so much in terms of explicit content (be it hard science, sociology or satire), but rather the ethos of the locations in which so many of these stories in “Galaxy” and “Astounding” occur: research facilities, university departments, institutions, the executive offices of businesses, bureaucracy and government. How interactions between characters in these environments are assumed to take form: hierarchies of merit and authority, compliance, conformity and also the forms that individualism, resistance to “groupthink”, nonconformity,  and rebellion take [sometimes merely a self-congratulatory sense of one’s excellence surmounting the curb of the weakly democratic herd, to be blunt]. Social engineering as a principle – the organisation of these societies, the idea that personalities are measurable/allocatable (incidentally creating hierarchies) in these societies, extending to directing/moulding these personalities and then corrupted into brainwashing covert/overt, taking in the efforts of PR/advertising men to influence thoughts (Pohl/Kornbluth, PK Dick, and so many other stories). In a way it doesn’t matter whether any of this is Factual and True, but that like C.S. Lewis’s “The Discarded Image” Whyte’s book provides a model and explication of the assumptions of this period and milieu. Why is this story taking place here and why do these characters behave like that? To writers of the time there could almost be no other options. An “easy” dissertation or PhD is out there for someone who wants to take quotes from Whyte and apply them to about 70% of “Galaxy” / “Astounding”. This book gets no mention that I can see in the vast welter of contemporary fanzines, but then at the time I suppose this is like expecting fish to define water, it’s all taken for granted.

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    • “I read William Whyte’s 1956 “The Organization Man” about a month ago and it was like finding the secret key to 1950s sf.” — precisely. I felt the same way. It’s one of the pile that I’ve read. I’ve encountered a really good monograph on science fiction that attempts to put 50s SF satires into a larger dialogue that’s happening in that era in sociological texts — M. Keith Booker’s Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism, 1946-1964 (2001). However, his analysis is limited to some well known SF novels and doesn’t dive too much into the short fiction. There’s a TON to be written. I am excited!

      On September 2nd (Labor Day), the guest editors of Journey Planet will release their issue. I wrote an article on Clifford D. Simak that tries to put him into dialogue with the sociological work of C. Wright Mills (and local radical politics of the day in Simak’s home state). I hope to write more about these types of intersections! I will post a few days later the actual article on my site as well. I hope you enjoy it.

      Thank you for your great comment. You are laying out a lot of threads that I’m interested in exploring. I hope my Media Landscapes of the Future series lays out some of where I might go. Post 1 if you want to follow the series through the years: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2022/01/22/the-media-landscape-in-science-fiction-short-stories-lino-aldanis-good-night-sophie-1963-trans-1973/

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      • “I read William Whyte’s 1956 “The Organization Man” about a month ago and it was like finding the secret key to 1950s sf.”

        Heh. I once saw Philip K. Dick’s novella described as ‘The Precog In The Grey Flannel Suit.” I liked that.

        ***

        In other news, I just read Chris Priest’s A Dream of Wessex aka The Demon Lover, from 1977.

        It was okay. The Priest Effect — the inversion of a Priest novel’s apparent reality in some way as it proceeds — was present, but muted. Somewhat underdone and mechanical, actually.

        Priest’s usual prose method was to keep things factual-seeming and unpretentious, even to the point of being somewhat flat, so a reader gets all the information but doesn’t integrate it till Priest’s intended WTF moments, when he whisks the carpet out from under that reader. The Glamour from 1984 is, maybe, the ne plus ultra of this: more than two-thirds of that novel is nothing but grimy, distinctly unglamorous late-1970s/early-1980s Britain, so mundane as to be arguably anti-sfnal, but with certain things off — till Priest pulls a shocker move in the last half-dozen pages, at which point the reader realizes that the set-up was there all along.

        With A Dream of Wessex, I foresaw what was coming, and when it came it struck me as rather by the numbers. Overall, not a bad novel, but more like an early experimental, muted attempt at something Priest would pull off better later.

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        • Yeah, I’m a huge fan of Priest’s strangely flat style — especially when a story morphs from an almost hard science backdrop into the realms of surreal doubling or metaphysical descent and other, as you put it, wtf moments. The distances creates a fascinating reading experience. If I were to pick one small moment to show someone who didn’t know about Priest what we mean, the short story “Real-Time World” (1971) is the perfect example. It even has charts!

          I have copies of A Dream of Wessex and The Glamour but haven’t read them yet.

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        • Eh. I meant to write:- I once saw Philip K. Dick’s novella, ‘Minority Report,’ described as ‘The Precog In The Grey Flannel Suit.”

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    • As I am returning to my media landscapes of the future series, did he write anything that you remember on future versions of TV/advertising/memory recording/etc. that I could maybe squeeze in? I know a lot of his stuff was more medical themed — but that might also intersect with new medical technologies connected to media. I could easily imagine he wrote something like Silverberg’s “The Pain Peddlers” (1963), in which pain is recorded and sold to adoring fans in return for cheaper medical care. A truly horrifying short story!

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  10. On a HG Wells kick, finished the Time Machine, the Invisible Man and War of the Worlds and am now midway through the First Men in the Moon. Also picked up Silverberg’s the Masks of Time, Disch’s Getting Into Death (had been looking for that one forever), and Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers (which I believe I learned about from this site).

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    • I read, but never managed to review, The Masks of Time. I thought it was solid but far from his best from that period.

      I haven’t read that Pangborn yet. But yes, it was mentioned multiple times in the comments to my Davy review (I think, or another Pangborn review or mention in an acquisition post). I assume that’s where you learned about it if it was here 🙂

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    • I did not know. And then I saw “Resurrected through AI Technology” — I will not be partaking of it, that’s for sure. I assume they’re using AI to replicate his voice or something. I imagine Lehr, and vast number of other deceased artist from the pre-AI art era, would disavow such a product. I can’t really convey kindly how much I despise AI art, installations that use AI art, and films that use AI in any way. How disappointing.

      EDIT: I read some more. They are using AI to animate his head that will vocalize, with AI, answers to interview questions. If they can’t afford to pay an animator they should choose some other way to convey their material. Yeah, no thanks.

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      • Basically, it’s an Andre Norton protagonist (poor orphan with psi powers and a pet) recruited by a Poul Anderson trio (I Can’t Believe It’s Not Nicolas Van Rjin and two adventurers) for a quest for … I am not sure. Van Vogtian treasure? One of the star smashers, anyway. Surprised he didn’t cram Eric Frank Russell in there but maybe I didn’t look hard enough.

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        • It’s been a long, long time since I read any of the Polesotechnic League/Flandry books, and even then I think I only read two or three. I see they’re cheap from SF Gateway, so I might give one or two a go.

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          • I think I’ve only read one novel in that sequence. I’ll read a short story or two if they come up in one of my themed review series… But other than that, I won’t hunt them down.

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  13. My most recent read had been Solar Lottery by Philip K Dick. Having read quite a few of his novels now I found it ok, certainly got better as it went on, but not quite at the level of others that I’ve read.

    Picked up a small pile of Heinlein online to read through as well. Finished one of the juveniles ‘Tunnel In The Sky’ which was actually fairly good. A group of students stranded on an unknown planet and starting a civilisation before being located again and returned home. Building up to reading The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, but going to tackle another of his juvenile novels while work commitments reduce my headspace for anything more involved over the next couple of weeks.

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    • I have read all three that you mentioned. I had a similar response to Solar Lottery. If you haven’t read Martian Time-Slip (1964) yet, I remember that was my favorite of his earlier novels. Not sure what I would think now though. I have enjoyed the handful of PKD short stories I’ve featured on the site in the last few years. I struggle to write about his work (for a vast variety of reasons).

      As for Heinlein, he had a place in my reading landscape right when I moved to SF as my dad had read his stuff in his mid-teens (I found my dad’s teenage SF shelf and read it from end to end). I have moved away from his work in the last decade or so (before which I read a good 25+ of his novels and close to 50 short stories).

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      • Yeah Martian Time Slip is probably the next one I plan to try and track down (alongside Flow My Tears the Policeman Said, The Unteleported Man and The Man Who Japed). I think I actually saw a copy in a bookshop a few weeks ago but never picked it up for whatever reason. May need to pop back.

        Heinlein I’ve read a few of but there are so many out there. I do also have Stranger In A Strange Land in the to read pile as well. And Triton by Samuel Delany. Trying to save those ones for my holiday reading in October.

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  14. A great collection of books in that picture – the Cherryh is the only one I haven’t read, and the other three I’ve enjoyed a lot, with Solaris being my favorite book of all time.

    The closest thing to SF I’ve read since last time was John Keels “Our Haunted Planet”, the danish version of which was actually put out by that sketchy Stig Vendelkær publisher we talked about some months back. They marketed as SF, but it’s a run-of-the-mill Von Däniken-style ancient aliens/UFO-ology rant. Occasionally and unitentionally funny, but still one of the worst books I’ve read in a long time.

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    • The Cherryh won a Hugo, which is why I read it in the first place. There was a handy list posted at my local used book store. Of course, lots of great stuff didn’t win or were even nominated for awards but it was the way I started reading beyond what my dad had read as a teen.

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  15. Just posted a review of Francis Steven’s The Citadel of Fear. She had a short but memorable career in the late 1910s and seems to be experiencing something of a rediscovery.

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  16. My next selection for What’s The Worst That Could Happen? (a tour of terrible and difficult SFF) is almost certainly Spider Robinson’s Night of Power, which I am sure has aged well.

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    • Sometimes it’s not about whether it has aged well — sometimes it’s about what it tells us about the era it was written 🙂 Haha. It’s how I get through those cringey volumes for sure.

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  17. Recent reads from your era include Keith Roberts’ collection Machines and Men and J G Ballard’s The Disaster Area. It probably wasn’t the wisest of choices as the Roberts paled quite a bit in comparison. One of the stories evoked the Monmouth Rebellion with some vividness. The stories in the Ballard collection, mostly in his most moody and brooding vein, were in another league. But then Ballard is in the super league. In the main I’ve enjoyed his short stories more than his novels.

    I was interested to read the comments about Christopher Priest above. I recently read one of his more recent novels, The Adjacent and found it a reactionary load of twaddle. I know that Fugue has its critics along similarish lines but I’ve not read that one.

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    • As for the Ballard stories in that collection, I’ve read and reviewed “Manhole 69” (1957), “Build-Up” (variant title: “The Concentration City”) (1957), and “Zone of Terror” (1960) in various other collections. I especially adored “Build Up.”

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    • Kralin: I recently read one of his more recent novels, The Adjacent and found it a reactionary load of twaddle.

      Why? The IRGB — Islamic Republic of Great Britain — stuff?

      Does Priest actually indicate any particular opinion (i.e. approval or disapproval) about that background cultural detail — which is no more than the IRGB amounts to in that timeline of the novel — or are you just assuming he does?

      Seriously. I don’t think the novel is one of Priest’s best. But go back and look at what’s actually on the page. Priest never explains how the IRGB came to be or has much to say about it: it’s just one more estranging feature of a future Britain, which has far more unpleasant features, thanks to climate devastation, than the IRGB.

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      • I didnt detect any specific politics, although I will defer to UK readers for specific context. I just didnt find the disparate threads tied together in a compelling way, the overall narrative felt muddled.

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      • Do not fear, I read it carefully. In terms of it being reactionary I could probably start with three or so examples and build up from there.

        The IRGB stuff I did find very Mail Onelineish, not least the acronym itself.

        I found the text a little like being trapped with a bore in a pub who had no sense of his audience’s boredom but who just kept droning on. For example by the time we washed up on the shores of The Dream Archipelago I was praying for an adjacency moment myself where suddenly I’d be pitched into the ending of the novel or indeed the novel would disappear in a puff of smoke, just leaving a triangle. I honestly think by then I’d’ve found a technical manual about the Mebsher more interesting.

        I found the female characters’ willingness to drop their knickers in the blink of an eye very reminiscent of 1970s blockbuster thrillers – not a genre noted for its radical thinking or ideas.

        I had some hope that the final chapter would see all the characters flying mighty spitfires around, saving Blighty from the fiendish other, but no such luck.

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    • also recently read the Adjacent and found it mostly pointless. Much preferred Inverted World and The Affirmation. Still finding my way theough his bibliography.

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  18. I’m about halfway through The Steel Spring by Per Wahloo of Inspector Martin Beck fame. The main character is a policeman who left his authoritarian home country for a liver transplant, during which a plague wiped out most of the population. He returns to try to figure out exactly what happened. It’s a detective novel of sorts, but instead of a murder, he’s investigating an epidemic. Definitely worth a read. I’m really looking forward to finding out what caused the epidemic because there are hints that it may have to do with pollution.

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    • Yeah, I’d read that the series had some SF elements. I own The Generals (1965) — not in the same series — as it transpires in a near future fascist state. I should read it! I’ve had a great run with Scandinavian SF over the last fear years.

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  19. I’m going to read Hawksbill Station and then Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg. I attempted to read Book of Skulls a long while ago but it never clicked for me.

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      • The idea of college students seeking a death cult in The Book of Skulls was intriguing, but I felt that the revolving shift in POV among the four characters a bit excessive.

        All I’ve read of Silverberg is the decent collection Capricorn Games.

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  20. Been reading Silverberg for Galactic Journey—possibly more Silverberg than is considered reasonable, although he did write a lot in the late ’60s. I recently finished Across a Billion Years, which for Silverberg circa 1969 is on the tame side and a bit of a throwback to ’40s-era space adventures. It’s… fine. And I’m about to finish his To Live Again, published the same year, which is more interesting on its face but whose shortcomings are all the more frustrating. Both are held back by what would nowadays be considered almost cartoonish levels of misogyny, and even for the time I suspect some people would’ve found it a bit much.

    I’m also about to start Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1984 novel Icehenge, which was his second novel, published right after The Wild Shore but partly comprised of stories published before that novel. I’ve had mixed experiences with KSR, at times finding him riveting or really tedious, so we’ll see where this falls.

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  21. Just finished “Isle of the Dead” by Roger Zelazny and I’m torn between thinking it was rather mundane and boring and also possibly inspired and stunning. So I’m somehow settling somewhere in the middle of the two.

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