SF Book Reviews

Book Review: Gladiator-At-Law, Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (magazine publication 1954)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1955 edition)

3.25/5 (Good)

In honor of Frederik Pohl, who recently passed away, I decided to pick up one of his works from the dark maw that is my extensive and overwhelming to read pile.  The last Pohl novel I attempted was a complete disappointment — Slave Ship (1956) — but his collaborations with one of my favorite 50s short story authors, C. M. Kornbluth (who died in 1958 at 34), are often highly readable.   Perhaps the most famous writing duo in SF history, Kornbluth and Pohl produced five novels together including the SF classic The Space Merchants (1953) and multiple short story collections.  The dystopian satire Gladiator-At-Law (1954), although far from the heights of The Space Merchants, is a fine example of their fruitful collaboration.

The world they create is downright fantastic: A future where youth gangs rule the tough streets of Belle Rave (known as Belly Rave), fantastically brutal arena spectacles where old people clubbing each other draw large crowds, lavish bubble houses that supply virtually all needs and are given only Continue reading →

Book Review: Of Men and Monsters, William Tenn (1968)

/ Joachim Boaz / 40 Comments

MNNDMN1968

(Stephen Miller’s cover for the 1968 edition)

4/5 (Good)

There’s a small pile of novels on my shelf that wait ever so patiently to be reviewed months and months after I’ve read them — J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), Robert Silverberg’s The Masks of Time (1968) and Dying Inside (1972), David R. Bunch’s Moderan (1972) (among others), and, until now, William Tenn’s Of Men and Monsters (1968).  Perhaps I was put off by the three mysterious pages filled with small chicken scratch composed by some earlier reader– “224 PKNY, 248 MINCED, 219 M in OKST” — that hinted at some arcane undercurrents or masonic messages that had alluded me.  Perhaps it was my confusion over Tenn’s Heinlein-esque female character, who, in a work of satire, could indicate something so much more progressive than Continue reading →

Book Review: Armed Camps, Kit Reed (1969)

/ Joachim Boaz / 8 Comments

Screen shot 2013-08-29 at 9.24.15 AM(Bob Haberfield’s cover for the 1969 edition)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

“[…] and the men were on the way to the bar, they were talking about the performance, they had to compare it to every other performance, they had to link them all and form them into something continuous, something to keep away the dark” (19).

Kit Reed’s first SF novel Armed Camps (1969) is all about characters constructing narratives and conjuring visions in order to keep the aphotic tides of societal disintegration at bay.  The two paralleled narratives — a woman (Anne) running from her past and a man (Danny March) slowly recounting what led to his own downfall — are two different ways of fighting off what is bound to come.  An oppressive melancholy that never lifts soaks the passages, presaging the motions of the characters as if they are trapped in some Thucydidean manifestation of the cyclicality Continue reading →

Book Review: The Deep, John Crowley (1975)

/ Joachim Boaz / 36 Comments

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1976 edition)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

The Deep (1975) was John Crowley’s first published novel and his first of three SF works from the 70s (The Deep, Beasts, Engine Summer).  He is best known for Engine Summer (1979) and his complex/literary fantasy — Little, Big (1981) and the Ægypt sequence (1987-2007).  In the two novels of his I’ve read (the other is Beasts), Crowley’s prose is characterized by an almost icy detachment, an adept construction of unusual images, and dialogue that says only what is needed.

The Deep deploys, in minimalistic fashion, the standard tropes of the fantasy genre mixed with distinctly SF elements: namely, an android visitor whose blood “was alive — it flowed  Continue reading →

Book Review: Darkover Landfall, Marion Zimmer Bradley (1972)

/ Joachim Boaz / 25 Comments

(Jack Gaughan’s cover for the 1972 edition)

3/5 (Average)

Marion Zimmer Bradley (1930-1999), most famous for her Arthurian fantasy novel Mists of Avalon (1983) from late in her career, published countless SF works starting in the late 1940s.  Her first novel The Planet Savers (1958) introduced readers to the massive and complex Darkover sequence of works — by far her most famous and iconic contribution to SF.

Darkover Landfall (1972) is a somewhat routine adventure (with a good dose of social commentary) which, according to internal chronology, is the beginning of the vast Darkover series.  Although I cannot speak for the rest of the sequence as this is the first of Bradley’s novels I’ve read, I found Darkover Landfall a problematic and Continue reading →

Book Review: There Will Be Time, Poul Anderson (1972)

/ Joachim Boaz / 21 Comments

(Fernando Fernandez’s cover for the 1973 edition)

4/5 (Good)

Nominated for the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novel

(Hugo Award related tangent: how Silverberg’s Dying Inside lost to Asimov’s The Gods Themselves is beyond me.  There Will Be Time is the lesser of the three)

Frequent readers of my reviews will have noticed my general dislike of time travel themed SF.  I have two central qualms: Firstly, I am frustrated by the tendency of authors to expound endlessly on the nuances of the particular temporal theory they have chosen to deploy;  secondly, the common obsession with “understanding how the past really was” strikes me as an incredibly superficial/fallacious analysis of the nature of history and historical thinking — individuals today cannot understand “the true nature of the present” simply by existing in it yet alone a different historical period.  Rather, perspective taking, Continue reading →

Book Review: Godling, Go Home!, Robert Silverberg (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 28 Comments

(Uncredited cover for the 1964 edition)

3.25/5 (Average)

Before Robert Silverberg wrote his late 60s and early 70s New Wave masterpieces (A Time of Changes, Dying Inside, The World Inside, etc), he produced a vast quantity of pulp science fiction novels and short stories.  Godling, Go Home! (1964) is a surprisingly solid collection of 50s shorts that can, at times, be surprisingly meditative (on death, exploration, civilization).  That said, expect rather naive messages — à la “we travel in space because we can!” or “Alien contact requires out-of-the-box thinking” — grafted onto a by the numbers pulp plot.

A fun collection — recommended for fans of slightly more intelligent than normal pulp SF, Silverberg completes, and 50s SF.  “Godling, Go Home!” (1957), “Why?” (1957), and Continue reading →

Book Review: Chronocules (variant title: Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something that Might have been Castor Oil), D. G. Compton (1970)

/ Joachim Boaz / 12 Comments

(Diane and Leo Dillon’s cover for the 1970 edition)

3/5 (Average)

D. G. Compton has long been one of my favorite SF authors.  Regrettably, his readership remains small and he has ceased publishing SF.  Novels like The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (variant title: The Unsleeping Eye) (1973) and Synthajoy (1968) are first rate masterworks with Farewell, Earth’s Bliss (1966) and The Steel Crocodile (1970) close behind.  All of his works have a distinctly English feel with solid, and occasionally beautiful, prose.

Chronocules (1970), with its outrageous variant title Hot Wireless Sets, Aspirin Tablets, the Sandpaper Sides of Used Matchboxes, and Something that Continue reading →

Book Review: As on a Darkling Plain, Ben Bova (1972)

/ Joachim Boaz / 17 Comments

(Chris Moore’s cover for the 1981 edition)

2.75/5 (Average)

Unfortunate title aside (“darkling” sound like a small evil creature in a work of fantasy), Ben Bova’s As on a Darkling Plain (1972) is a middling fix-up novel in every respect.  It is worth noting that Chapters 5 (‘The Jupiter Mission’) and 6 (‘The Sirius Mission’), which comprise a great majority of the novel, appeared earlier in If February 1970 and Galaxy January 1969 as “Pressure Vessel” and “Foeman, Where Do You Flee?” respectively.  I’m not sure how much was expanded or subtracted.  If anyone knows please leave a comment — I find that the act of revising earlier work interesting in itself.

Bova’s novel inspired my recent cover art post on Future Archeology and Mysterious Artifacts.  The premise is a standard one: A mysterious artifact Continue reading →