Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?
1. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972, trans. Olena Bormashenko, 2012)
Dominic Harman’s cover for the 2012 edition
From the back cover: “Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those misfits who are compelled, in spite of the extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artefacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the the alien products. Even the nature of his mutant daughter has been determined by the Zone. And it is for her that he makes his last, tragic foray into the hazardous and hostile territory.”
Initial Thoughts: One of those obvious holes in my SF knowledge… I certainly have read about the writing pair but I’ve only read a story here and there–for example “Wanderers and Travellers” (1963, trans. 1966)–and one novel that I never managed to review. My father has been pushing me to read more of their work. And yes, Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaptation Stalker (1979) remains one of my favorite movies. I took a History of Russian Film class in college and wrote my term paper on Tarkovsky’s use of color.
2. Philip K. Dick’s The Unteleported Man (1964) and Howard L. Cory’s The Mind Monsters (1966)
Harry Shaare’s cover for the 1966 edition of The Mind Monsters (1966) and Frank Kelly Freas’ cover for The Unteleported Man (1964)
From the inside page for The Unteleported Man (1964): “Nobody would go to the stars the long way when you could travel to your new planetary Utopia the instant-teleportation way. That is, nobody reasonable would want to spend eighteen years in a spaceship just to be stubborn about electronic transit.
Which is what made Rachmael ben Applebaum such a thorn in the side of the giant industrial combines that had made the Telpor what it was. Because Rachmael was all set to head for Newcolonizedland by his own starship-alone.
But just being eccentric and a doubter would hardly justify the incredible concentration of effort to prevent his trip THE UNTELEPORTED MAN suspect he was on the track of a secret too dangerous to get out–even after an eighteen year journey.
Yet even he did not guess how terrifyingly right he was!”
From the inside page for The Mind Monsters (1966): NIGHTMARE PLANET. When Terence O’Corcoran, solo operator of an exploratory Terran Planetary Survey Corps spaceship, crash-landed on an alien world, he awoke with no obvious injuries and a forever-useless ship.
The redheaded young Irishman grabbed his blaster and proceeded down the icy mountain slope. Once on level ground, Terence felt hostile eyes watching him from behind the forest’s dense growth. And then one came into a view: a bug-eyed monster! One after another, Terence shot them down, the most vile creatures imaginable.
But these were nothing compared to the things he would face once he got to the carnival capital of Mahtog…”
Initial Thoughts: I do not plan on reading the Corey’s The Mind Monsters (1966). It sounds absolutely atrocious. With that out of the way, the bit about the publication history of Dick’s The Unteleported Man (1964). Dick wrote 30k extra words for the novel version of his 1964 novella that first appeared in Fantastic Stories of Imagination (December 1964). However, the publisher rejected his additions and published the original novella version instead. That’s the version I own. In 1983, after PKD’s death, a novel version with the 30k words hit shelves. I do not own that version. This appears to be a Dick novel/novella that escaped my early pre-site obsession with his work.
3. Ward Moore and Avram Davidson’s Joyleg (1962)
Ed Emshwiller’s cover for the 1st edition
From the back cover: “Who was JOYLEG? The U.S. Government was paying him a veteran’s pension of $11.00 a month… and that’s all anyone knew.
Congressman Tully Weathernox thought it was a disgracefully small reward for one of Our Nation’s Defenders. Congresswoman Lucinda Habersham figured Joylef was a probably fraud. So–they checked.
Joyleg wasn’t a veteran of World War II-or World War I. Nor the Spanish American caper. Nor the Indian wars. Was it possible that he was a last survivor of the Boys in Blue? Not according to the records, he wasn’t.
There was an incredible speculation about what Joyleg might be… so Lucinda and Tully journeyed to the hills of Tennessee to investigate. They found out the secret of Joyleg, all right…
…a secret that changed the history of the world!”
Initial Thoughts: I’ve never got my head around Davidson’s SF. I’ve enjoyed some of the Moore I’ve read, for example, “Lot” (1953). We shall see about this one! I’ve not heard it is close to either authors’ best.
4. Muriel Jaeger’s The Question Mark (1926)
Uncredited cover for the 2019 edition
From the back cover: “In 1926 Muriel Jaeger, dissatisfied with the unrealistic utopian stories of H. G. Wells and Edward Bellamy, set out to explore “The Question Mark” of what a future society might look like if human nature were truthfully represented.
Her hero, disgruntled office worker Guy, is pitched 200 years into a future London where each citizen is offered free education and a personal “power-box” granting access to communication, transportation and entertainment. To Guy, the great challenges facing society seem solved, but its inhabitants tell a different story of fractured life in this supposed utopia.
Preceding the publication of Huxley’s Brave New World by 5 years, The Question Mark is a significant cornerstone in the foundation of the dystopia genre, and an impressive work of literary science fiction.
MURIEL JAEGER (1892-1969) was a prolific writer of history books, essays and science fiction, and was amongst the first women to receive degrees at Somerville College, Oxford. She later became associated with Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published her pioneering science fiction novels The Question Mark (1926) and The Man with Six Senses (1927).”
Initial Thoughts: I’ve been reading more early 20th century SF as of late, and I can’t pass up an early dystopia.
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Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations 
I ain’t sure whether you’re aware of the fact that Stugatskys hated all movies made based on their work, including Stalker. They stressed it is Tarkovaky’s work, not theirs
Yes, I am aware. To be honest, I’ve never put much weight on what an author might think about adaptations of their work, etc unless it was somehow relevant to a historical argument I am making. They’re different mediums and I expect a distinctive director to have a distinctive take on source material. In my view the goal is not to reproduce it “exactly” or even with any semblance of narrative fidelity. Instead, a director is hunting around for inspiration and I’m happy the Strugatsky brothers provided that inspiration! The goal is to create art.
The Mind Monsters sounds like something sufficiently dreadful that I’d enjoy reading it just for the fun of writing an absolutely ruthless review.
Haha, yeah. I look forward to anything you might put out about it. I’m not going to read it!
We just saw Stalker in the cinema again a couple of weeks ago. Almost exactly 10 years since we last went to the cinema to see it!
I remember being quite surprised by how the book and the film diverged when I first saw the film on tv in the late 1980s but it’s now decades since I last read the book so I’d better not dredge up half-remembered differences in case I’m embarrassingly wrong!
I think it would be lovely to see Stalker on the big screen. What an experience!
Maybe Oleksandr, who commented earlier, can explain some of the differences.
Very interested in the Muriel Jaeger, surprised I hadn’t heard of that one before given my recent interest in both fin-de-siecle sf and utopian novels in particular. Putting that one on my want-list.
I’ve read a smattering of the Strugatskys’ novels (which are thankfully much more widely available than they used to be). The translations and Soviet-era restrictions often felt like barriers to my enjoyment of them, and in some cases even just my comprehension – like I was missing analogies or cultural signposts that would have made their central ideas more digestible. I wouldn’t say they were bad, just alien in a way that was more perplexing than interesting. Static plots built around central premise that seems intriguing but is only explored by endless pages of dialogues between thinly sketched characters (surely meant to represent some specific viewpoints that are no longer clear).
Avram Davidson I have only read one giant compendium of his short fiction and a smattering of other stories in anthologies – not my favorite, too enamored of that heavy-handed ironic/comedic strain of sf. Time travel paradoxes, impish gnomes, silly twists etc. I’m sure there are probably some gems among the dross.
Me too. Glad it got a reprint. Kaggsy, who just commented, really enjoyed it. She has good taste in fiction.
Your description of Davidson is my take as well.
As for the Strugasky, this one is generally considered one of their best. Have you seen the Tarkovsky film adaptation?
Oddly while “Roadside Picnic” is their most widely available and canonical work, that’s actually one I never got around to. I read “The Time Wanderers” (aka “The Waves Extinguish the Wind”), “Definitely Maybe” (aka “A Billion Years Before the End of the World”), and I think one other I can’t recall. Tarkovsky I’m familiar with from viewing “Solaris” and “Stalker” 30+ years ago. My memories are hazy although I recall viscerally hating “Solaris” and being more engaged by “Stalker” due to some of its striking imagery.
I loved Solaris (novel and film) as well. Huge Tarkovsky fan over here. haha.
oh I know I’m an outlier on Tarkovsky, I get why he’s a big deal. Since you mentioned Solaris, Lem is an interesting contrast to the Strugatskys, maybe more easily digestible as his work was more in dialogue with (or endebted to) western sf than the theirs? Devoured all his books, never really had any problem grasping his perspective or what he was trying to do across his numerous experiments with style and form.
I haven’t read enough of the Strugatskys to agree or disagree! hah. I do love Lem and have read a large chunk of his translated work (in the few years before the site).
Interestingly, I have read two of these! The Strugatskys of course, fairly recently, and I was very taken with it. Quite different from how I recall Stalker (thought it’s decades since I watched it) but still very powerful.
And the Jaeger (I have a full set of the BL Sci Fi Classics) – I found it remarkably compelling and really thought-provoking. I think it definitely deserves to be better known.
Did you write about the Jaeger?
Yes! Here: https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/the-futures-uncertain-and-the-end-is-always-near-bl_publishing-sciencefictionclassics-murieljaeger/
Thank you. I’ll take a look in a bit.
Ah, the review is from 2019 — I feel less bad forgetting that you’d written about it.
The comment I left on your site: “Thanks for linking the review. It definitely sounds like she’s commenting on the nature of utopian works — there will always be some darkness beneath the surface sheen. Utopian fiction was dying out as a major movement in the aftermath of WWI so it’s not super surprising.”
I’ve only read the revised, complete text of The Unteleported Man, published as Lies, Inc.
While I love all of PKD’s fiction, I wonder if the edited, originally published version actually might read better. I found the Lies, Inc. version read as if the publisher haphazardly inserted the rediscovered missing pages into the manuscript gaps without considering how it flowed. The final version of Lies, Inc. reads somewhat off. It’s of importance that the complete version was made available, and I understand PKD was unhappy with the editor turning his novel into a novella, but it’s a shame that the originally published version of The Unteleported Man is no longer in-print to serve as a comparison to the published version of Lies, Inc. An enterprising publisher should put out a edition containing both versions for the historical value.
While Joyleg is certainly not at the level of Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, I found it read as more of a Ward Moore novel than an Avram Davidson novel, and I enjoyed it more than Greener than You Think, as far as Ward Moore’s genre novels. On the other hand, I seem to have more time for Davidson than your enjoyment of his writing.
What is the difference between the the 1983 novel publication of The Unteleported Man published after Dick’s death with the 30k words restored that he planned to expand his novella with vs. Lies, Inc (1984)? I assume they’re both the same? And just a UK variant title?
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?9601
Unless I’m misunderstanding, he originally wrote the book in novella form for Fantastic. Then he was going to turn it into a novel and added the 30k words. Then the editor refused to publish it in the revised version and instead published it as the original novella in an Ace Double. So it’s less what was cut and more what Dick wanted to shove into the story.
I just realized that the isfdb.org link explains that 1984 edition of Lies, Inc and the 1983 novel version of The Unteleported Man are the same. And then, as you imply, there’s another version that was discovered in 1985.
Oh yes, you are correct. The book has a very convoluted publishing history. I read the final edition which incorporated the “lost pages” found in 1985.
Despite the uneven quality of the version you read, what was your take on the novel itself? Maybe it’s worth going back and reading the original novella version as a nice point of comparison (before both revisions).
Having studied the different versions of the novel available, I now realize that it was actually the initially restored text of the novel which I most enjoyed.
I think it was the addition of the “lost pages” by the publisher of the final version of Lies, Inc. which made the novel read so uneven to me.
I guess the biggest problem is that there are almost two separate plots moving concurrently in the novel, as opposed to the novella. The originally published novella is a fairly standard science fiction stock plot. The first version of the novel which included PKD’s preferred text includes a secondary plot that is quite psychedelic and Borgesian. It is more what one would expect from PKD at that point in his career (1966). While I could see an editor feeling that the two overarching plots could distract from each other, the edited elements of the manuscript were actually the stronger portion of the novel.
The publisher then deciding to throw in the extra “lost pages” for a final version was unnecessary. I’m glad I discovered about the different versions of The Unteleported Man now, as it helps me understand my dissatisfaction with the version of Lies, Inc. I read.
I’ll have to check if I have a copy of the 1983 edition. It all seems very familiar. Maybe I have Lies, Inc. actually….
Joachim Boaz: ‘What is the difference between the the 1983 novel publication of The Unteleported Man published after Dick’s death with the 30k words restored that he planned to expand his novella with vs. Lies, Inc (1984)?’
The difference is 30,000 words or ninety-some pages of text that Dick apparently wrote — claimed he wrote, anyway — in his one experiment with writing while on LSD. Donald Wollheim at Ace excised the segment entirely and relegated the remaining The Unteleported Man to publication as one half of an Ace Double in 1966 —
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?49181
As Wollheim had published Dick’s first novels back in the 1950s and had been publishing much of the rest of Dick’s 1960s output that he churned out on amphetamines to pay off his alimony — novels like The Simulacra, Clans of the Alphane Moons, and Doctor Bloodmoney — as proper paperback singles, the fact that he made Unteleported one-half of Ace Double, the same status as he gave Vulcan’s Hammer, is evidence that Wollheim rated the later book as at the bottom of Dick’s output.
Wollheim was right. Of the 1960s Dicks, it’s about at the level of The Zap Gun and The Crack In Space. As for the 30,000 words Wollheim took out, when the full version was published as Lies Inc. in the 1980s, I got a couple of pages into the excised part and just gave up. Wollheim was right about that, too.
Yeah, I definitely mention that. The issue isn’t the 30k words. I was confused about the multiple VERSIONS published after Dick’s death with the 30k words which Chris’ comment implied and they later explained. I’ll quote isfdb.org just in case anyone wants to read about it in more detail: “Dick wrote approximately 30,000 extra words for the first book publication in 1966 of his 1964 novella “The Unteleported Man.” However, his book editor rejected the expanded text and reprinted the original novella version instead. A newly revised publication of Dick’s expanded text was planned towards the end of his life, but he died before its completion. Dick’s original expanded version from the 1960s was then used in the posthumous 1983 USA edition of “The Unteleported Man” (except for 3 gaps due to missing manuscript pages, which were published as is). However, Dick’s largely complete, revised version of the expanded text was used for the British publication in 1984, which carried the new title “Lies, Inc.” (with 2 remaining manuscript gaps filled by John Sladek). Dick’s original “missing pages” text for both of these expanded versions was then discovered and published in 1985 in the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter #8. In 2004, the novel was reprinted in the USA using Dick’s later revised “Lies, Inc.” version of the text, and corrected for the first time to include the “missing pages” text rather than Sladek’s bridging text. (However, there has not been a similar, corrected reprint of Dick’s original 1960s expanded text.)” https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?9601
Issues of additions out of the way, yeah, I don’t expect it to be a great novel. I do enjoy a lot of his work from that time period — The Simulacra, Clans, and Doctor Bloodmoney, as you mentioned.
Davidson explained the complications of coaborating and producing a pubishable text in a letter to the fanzine Yandro #121, February 1963
“According to the cover blurb, this is an expanded version of the serial which appeared in FANTASTIC” – well, actually, I don’t recall what the cover blurb said, but the obverse of the titlepage says that a shorter version appeared in FANTASTIC – not the same thing. Three texts exist. Text A – Complete – Unpublished – Unbought. Text B – Abridged by Ward Moore – this is the text in FANTASTIC. Text C – Abridged, though less than B, by Lorna (Mrs W) Moore – the paper back text. There is thus no such thing as an #expanded# text of the book. As for who wrote what: the original notion of a Rev. vet. living in Rabbit Notch on $11 pension was mine.. WM contributed the whiskey soak, Atomgrad. Oak Ridge may have been his or mine. I did the outline following discussion, he did draft 1, I did draft 2, he did draft 3, I subsequently did a bit more work not justifying being termed draft 4. The dialogue is most certainly not “pure Davidson” but thanks for the compliment. WM is every bit as much of an antiquary as I am, to say the least.”
Thank you for laying out the various versions. It seems to be the unifying thread of this purchse post! (with Dick’s The Unteleported Man). Did you end up reading the novel?
I think decades ago I read it. I enjoyed it, but then I’m a Davidson partisan. Most of his 60s glut of sf novels can be enjoyed for the first 15,000 words or so as richly detailed and interestingly styled, after which point there’s a feeling of contractual obligation to it all.
To tie this to Dick, I know I read a letter by Davidson in some late 60s fanzine that mentions in passing that he and Dick once spent an evening working up a novel they could collaborate on. I only know The Unteleported Man as the book where John Sladek had to do a little pastiching to carpenter it all together
A couple of years ago I wrote a meandering piece looking at Avram Davidson less as sf writer, and instead as a contemporary of Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz , Isaac Rosenfeld, Philip Roth, and Wallace Markfield – “…the brilliant, flickering style of Jewish American Writer-dom, animated action-paintings of the psyche… applied to the Roald Dahl/John Collier-type short story. …This self-attentive style is often employed by the Jewish American Writer on quasi-autobiographical materials, whereas Davidson is rarely so explicitly personal, instead employing it as the means of elliptically arranging the elements of his stories…”
https://efanzines.com/SFC/SFC122L.pdf
Matthew Davis: .’…Avram Davidson less as sf writer, and instead as a contemporary of…the brilliant, flickering style of Jewish American Writer-dom, animated action-paintings of the psyche… applied to the Roald Dahl/John Collier-type short story’
I think that’s close to it. I’ve admired a few things that Davidson wrote a lot — ‘The Sources of The Nile,’ for instance– but I never thought he was at all plausible as an SF writer, with the closest he came being The Masters of the Maze, and by the 1970s he’d fled even that for eccentric fantasy novels like the Vergil Magus books and various other historicity-related outings that his friends in the publishing world indulged him by publishing.
@Matthew Thank you for the link. There’s a dissertation — or academic monograph — waiting to be written about that cadre of Jewish SFF authors and their intersections with the Jewish literary mainstream. I’ve puttered around reading some scholarship, for example Ronnie A. Grinberg’s brilliant Write like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (2024) (I read it as I was thinking about Dann, Silverberg, Spinrad, and Ellison as a group) — but I’m a bit out of my depth on that issue. I’ll leave it to someone else.
Here’s a quote from the blurb about Grinberg’s Write like a Man that fits the group of science fiction authors I indicated to a tee: “Write like a Man examines how the New York intellectuals shared a uniquely American conception of Jewish masculinity that prized verbal confrontation, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation.” Ummm, Ellison? hah. Unfortunately, she does not include any SF authors in her analysis despite the fact that some of them lived in New York.
Copies of Grinberg’s “Write like a Man” came nowhere near where I live but I had fun reading reviews
I touched a little on how the future sf and literati share the same origins, the generation earlier than Dann, Silverberg, Spinrad, and Ellison as a group:
“It has been little noted that at high school and university they were also the coevals of the Futurians and other writers who would define so much of American science fiction in the 1940s and thereafter. They were all of the same generation, born in the years astride 1920, attended the same schools and then City College (with an attendance that was 90% Jewish as quotas excluded them from almost every other American university), the new Brooklyn College CUNY, or Columbia University’s holding pen for Jews, Seth Low Junior College. Memoirs from each group reveal, whether former socialist or science fiction fan, they were largely indistinguishable in milieu and personality traits as they came of age in the mid/late 1930s. (Their memoirs even share an unabashed harping-on about the unforgettable ugliness and stunning repellence of certain ill-groomed comrades.)
“They were young idealists passionately imagining a different America, and the forms their attention and energy took differed only as to whether their final goal was the global triumph of Marxism or science fiction. Many on the science fiction side also participated to some degree in the SWP and the Young People’s Socialist League, with the resultant suspicions of other science fictions fans. All these youths had the same fervour and studiousness. Their respective discussion groups roamed the same streets and neighborhoods of NYC with bundles of mimeographs, engaged in bickerings and factional manoeverings for positions. Each group a would-be intelligentsia, a self-selecting radical elite sustained by the feverish self-conceit their indispensable intelligence would deliver them the secret levers of the world, each equally secure their belief in a future of millenarian social transformation installed them in the inexorable vanguard. “Positions” on Stalin, labour and class liberation were mirrored by fixations on Hugo Gernsback, fanzines and first story-sale hopes.”
I’ve got a copy of Joyleg, but haven’t read it yet. Almost sounds like Way Station from the description.
I imagine you’ll get to it before me. Do you like Davidson’s fiction? I’ve struggled mightily with the handful of short stories (and singular novel) I’ve read. And I understand that I’ve not read his “best works” yet. I know Rich Horton, who stops by occasionally, is a huge fan of his.
Looking at his ISFDB page, I see I’ve read way more of his non-fiction than his fiction- I loved his “Adventures in Unhistory” pieces. I have read his Ellery Queen novel (On the Eighth Day) which I enjoyed very much.
I saw a very grainy and battered print of ‘Stalker’ at an Art Gallery Cinema in Sydney several years ago – perhaps not surprisingly it added to its sombre and downbeat tone throughout! Saw some clips from the Criterion release and the old comparison description ‘night and day’ instantly came to mind 🙂 Will have to catch up with the latter in full at some point.
I very much enjoyed ‘Roadside Picnic’ (read a year or so later). The meaning of that closing scene has prompted much discussion since! Looking to read more of their work in the near future – I see that a few titles are available either as SF Masterworks or in the Penguin Classic Science Fiction series.
Ah, I saw it first in my university’s audiovisual library as an undergrad. Unfortunately, it was NOT the Tarkovsky shown in my Russian Film class — we saw the much less interesting Ivan’s Childhood (1962). The professor was one of the pre-eminent authorities on Eisenstein and, for whatever reason, wasn’t a fan of Tarkovsky. Yeah, while I like tracking down the older editions, the new ones often have new and improved translations.
Roadside Picnic is consideret one of (if not the) Strugatsky masterpiece, and with good reason. It’s one of my all time favorites. The only Strugatsky I’d maybe rate higher is The Snail on the Slope, but I’m probably in the minority there.
I think I might have read the short version of The Unteleported Man in a collection a long time ago, but I don’t remember anything about it… which I guess means either that it didn’t make much of an impression on me.
The Question Mark sounds interesting!