Which books/covers/authors intrigue you? Which have you read? Disliked? Enjoyed?

1. C. J. Cherryh’s Serpent’s Reach (1980)

From the back cover: “The constellation of Hydrus, known as the Serpent, is compact and obscure as seen from Earth’s sky. Even in the great era of interstellar colonization it remained obscure. For it was under strict quarantine – harboring an intelligent race, powerful, alien, and inhuman.

Yet there were human colonies within the Serpent’s Reach, cut off from the galaxy beyond, with their own inbred culture, their Families and traditions, and their special relationships to the inhuman majat.

This is the strange and brilliant novel of Raen, the last of the massacred Sul Family, and of her lifetime pledge to find vengeance. It was to take her across the worlds of the Reach into the very center of the alien webwork, into the strands of thought and counter-thought that knit the forbidden constellation into a complex of interbred cultures that no outsider could hope to unravel.”

Initial Thoughts: My collection of Cherryh’s pre-1985 SF grows slowly. I still have a few of her pre-1985 SF novels (and short story collections) to track down. I do not know that much about this particular novel other than its place in her sprawling Alliance-Union universe.

2. Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: A Novel (1965)

From the back cover: “Europe After The Rain is a disturbing book, a creation and, no doubt for many people, a re-creation of the nightmare of utter devastation, of hope, of complete disillusionment and of re-affirmation. The author has taken his title from a painting by Max Ernst but the connection between the two works is far more complex. The painting prophetically depicts a vision of rampant destruction close to that which has become a terrifying reality in modern times. Alan Burns, taking the theme to its logical conclusion, shows man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival, both physical and moral, would be impossible.

The narrator is engaged in an arduous search for a girl. The ‘Europe’ through which he travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen both geographically and morally. Life and death are curiously intermingled with fear the motive force of men and women expressed through a cupidity and violence which takes on much more than a physical significance. The narrator brings an interested apathy to the horrific events he is forced to witness but never succumbs to complete despair or an easy cynicism. The book ends with a profound experience in love but the initial vision, original and deeply personal, is never marred by sentimentality.

Alan Burns has succeeded in presenting a picture of his age, has captured with disturbing realism what well may be the ‘collective unconscious’ of the twentieth century. And he has done this in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force.”

Initial Thoughts: Burns strikes me as a very J. G. Ballard-esque writer. I’m basing my assessment on Babel (1969) and Dreamerika!: A Surrealist Fantasy (1972), both of which I read but never managed to review. Both utilize collage and post-modern experimentation. At least there’s a new edition of Dreamerika!. When I read it more than a decade ago prices hovered around $150. I managed to ILL a copy through my university. As I’ve said many times before, I endlessly fall victim to British post-apocalyptic visions, especially those like Anna Kavan’s Ice (1967), where the physical landscape manifests the psychological afflictions of humanity.

3. Brian M. Stableford’s The Mind-Riders (1976)

From the back cover: “If millions pay today just to watch two men fight for a champion’s crown, tens of millions will pay for the additional thrill of being actually within the mind and body of the boxers themselves, to experience in person the tension and combat, to throw themselves into punch and counter-punch without having to feel the pain.

This is the story of Ryan Hart’s final fight. His was not the publicized name of the boxer. Nobody knew him but the insiders, because he was the man who operated the challenger, whose mind handled the boxer’s muscles, whose agonies were never felt by the E-linked millions, but who would be for a few dozen minutes the embodiment of half the human race!

It’s a novel of two unforgettable battles one the seen and obvious, the other the fight of a single solitary man to regain honor and self-respect in a world he had ceased to believe in.

Initial Thoughts: I’ve had little success with Stableford’s works. However, the plot of this one — sports as a SF vehicle for social commentary on commercialism, trauma, alienation, the media, and violence — is right up my alley. Check out reviews of William Harrison’s “Roller Ball Murder” (1973) and Gary K. Wolf’s Killerbowl (1975) for other 70s exemplars.

4. Irene Clyde’s Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909)

From the back cover: Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909) is “a pioneering 1909 feminist utopia. Mary Hatherley, an intrepid British explorer, finds herself transported to an alternate version of Earth. Arriving in Armeria, she discovers a society in which the very concept of gender is unknown. By avoiding the use of gendered pronouns, the story’s author–herself a genderfluid activist–challenges our assumptions about gendered social paradigms.”

Initial Thoughts: I’m a huge fan of the MIT Press Radium Age series. I’m all for bringing back more esoteric utopias and dystopia. For a great recent article on this book, check out Elizabeth A. Allen’s review over at Strange Horizons.

---

For book reviews consult the INDEX

For cover art posts consult the INDEX

For TV and film reviews consult the INDEX