Note: My read but “waiting to be reviewed pile” is growing. Short rumination/tangents/impressions are a way to get through the stack before my memory and will fades. My website partially serves as a record of what I have read and a memory palace for future projects. Stay tuned for more detailed and analytical reviews.

1. George Alec Effinger’s The Wolves of Memory (1981)

4.75/5 (Near Masterpiece)

I read almost 150 pages of George Alec Effinger’s masterful The Wolves of Memory (1981) before setting it down almost two years ago. As is often the case, I do not have a single reason why. It certainly had nothing to do with its quality. Perhaps Effinger’s uncanny evocation of dementia (through a SF lens) felt a bit too real. Perhaps his ability to render deeply affective interactions hurt in a way I rarely feel in science fiction. The volume sat on my desk waiting to be completed. I picked it up a few days days ago and finished in one sitting. I’m glad I did.

The Wolves of Memory follows, in a non-linear manner, the story of the bumbling but kind Sandor Courane. After three failed jobs (pro basketball, science fiction author, and factory worker in Tokyo), TECT, a supercomputer who rules Earth, assigns him to a backwater planet. The planet exerts unusual properties on its inhabitants. A viral disease afflicts all who come with a debilitating memory loss. The handful of colonists, all sent to the planet by TECT, spend their days caring for the sick and dying, eking out a substance lifestyle, and explaining to the new arrivals the nature of the planet. It’s an existence filled with brittle, uncomfortable, conversations filled with loss and trauma. New friendships are made. New friendships inevitably unravel as memories fragment and fade away. The compressed timeline makes it all more harrowing. Sandor is selected by the community as the liaison to TECT in order to learn more about the disease. Inevitably, it, too, will afflict him.

It’s shocking The Wolves of Memory only received a handful of printings. Where is the Gollancz masterwork volume? At least Golden Gryphon Press published a collection with all the Sandor Courane tales in 2009. The two earlier US editions received forgettable art. I imagine it didn’t help sales. If you ask me for a list of criminally underrated SF novels that deserve more readers, Effinger’s The Wolves of Memory (1981) would be close to the top.

Highly recommended. It’s bleak. It’s funny. It hurts in a way that’s all too human. Thank you Mark Pontin and Rich Horton for recommending this one back in early 2024.

For more sustained reviews of his work, check out my review of What Entropy Means to Me (1972) and the collection What Entropy Means to Me (1972). There are also a handful of other Effinger reviews which you can access at the general index.

---

2. J. J. Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923)

3.25/5 (Above Average)

In attempt to understand more of the threads that make up the pre-WWII history of science fiction, I’ve been researching (and occasionally reading) a range of utopian and dystopian works. Sometimes, like E. A. Johnson’s utopian Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), they spawn a year-long research project (still working on it!), and other times I struggle to finish them. J. J. Connington’s Nordenholt’s Million (1923) falls into the latter camp. Alfred Walter Steward, under the name J. J. Connington, was a Scottish chemist and part-time novelist, who wrote mostly detective novels (wikipedia).

Steward’s first novel, Nordenholt’s Million (1923), traces the catastrophic impact of a denitrifying bacteria on the environment. While initially little more than an irritant as swathes of London’s lovely parks die, soon the true impact of the bacteria bears nightmarish and dystopic fruit as the food producing countries of the world horde their own produce and retreat inward. The story follows the narrator (and businessman) Flint who’s drafted to assist a secretive survival project funded by the mysterious plutocrat Nordenholt, who maneuvers the British government into using its vast resources (and force) to procure large swatch of the Scottish industrial Clyde valley: the “Nitrogen Area.” Along with Nordenholt’s adopted daughter (sheltered from the true reality of life outside the Nitrogen area), Flint is tasked with planning the contours of the new utopia that is bound to emerge from the ecological catastrophe.

Not sure what to make of this one. While its implied that a utopian solution my emerge from the wreckage, that manner that it comes about wreaks of dictatorial horror. This certainly feels like a novel written in the aftermath of the Great War. A few sections that transpire outside of the Nitrogen area, are filled with scenes of visceral horror, like coming across a trench filled with the victims of a gas attack. Like many of the era, Steward resorts to a romantic narrative in which the formulation and design of a future society feels secondary. This isn’t a happy story, however. It’s an interesting revision to the normal utopian fiction narrative so popular before WWI.

Somewhat recommended for those interested in the history of the genre. There’s a recent edition out via MIT Press.

---

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX