avant-garde

Book Review: And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (variant title: Beneath the Shattered Moons), Michael Bishop (1976)

/ Joachim Boaz / 6 Comments

(Jonathan Weld’s cover for the 1976 edition)

4/5 (Good)

Michael Bishop’s And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees (variant title: Beneath the Shattered Moons) (1976) is a melancholic and allegorically inclined parable about a coming cataclysm that threatens a programmed and hierarchically rigid society (accomplished via genetic modification).  Bishop’s voice is an intensely humanistic once, futuristic technology is present but not a central concern…. The simple but effective plot is the perfect vehicle for his moralistic ruminations: a man forced into action, a world compelled — despite the external forces at play — to adapt.

 And Strange at Ecbatan the Trees is the first of Michael Bishop’s works I have read and I am definitely intrigued enough to place his supposedly superior Nebula-nominated first novel, Funeral for the Continue reading →

Updates: A New Classic SF Review Blog to add to your list

/ Joachim Boaz / 33 Comments

MPorcius, a frequent and well-read commentator on my site, has started transferring his numerous amazon reviews and writing new reviews of classic SF (a substantial portion is pre-1980s) to his blog.  Please visit him and comment on his posts!

queue rant: I’ve noticed a surprising lack of frequently updated classic SF blogs online.  Yes, many bloggers occasionally dabble in the distant era of SF glory or publish yet another review of the obligatory masterpieces because they appear on a some “best of” list (Dune, The Left Hand of Darkness, etc).  However, few are devoted to the period and make it a point to write reviews of books that very few people will ever actually read due to their obscurity i.e. blogs that don’t sell out by churning out reviews of new Tor releases (I have declined their offer) or endless 4/5 or 5/5 starred let’s pat each other on the back reviews of self-published (and generally awful) ebooks Continue reading →

Adventures in Science Fiction Cover Art: The Vaguely Defined Looming Man Shape

/ Joachim Boaz / 23 Comments

stewart01

(John Richards’ cover for the 1961 edition of Earth Abides (1949), George R. Stewart)

Note: if anyone can identify the artist for the first three downright spectacular covers I’d be very very happy.  I’m positive that they match stylistically (the vague human shape, the cityscape, the brush strokes, the textures).  Two of the three covers were made for Signet press and all three are from the early 1960s.  I suspect if I perused the covers from the Signet catalogue from that era I’d find even more….  Perhaps it’s the work of Sanford Kossin?  He was producing covers for Signet around the same time.  Solved: The cover artist is John Richard.

And now The Vaguely Defined Looming Man Shape Continue reading →

Book Review: The Bridge, D. Keith Mano (1973)

/ Joachim Boaz / 8 Comments

(Uncredited — but looks like Jerome Podwil’s work — cover for the 1974 edition)

3.25/5 (Good)

The Bridge (1973) is D. Keith Mano’s only “full-fledged” SF work (Clute on SF encyclopedia).  Mano’s profoundly unsettling dystopic New York circa 2035 is characterized by an unusual mix of radical environmentalism gone amok and Christianity misinterpreted beyond recognition.  In our current day of overwhelming evidence of Global warming and other types of environmental devastation caused by mankind, Mano’s near future will come off as unnecessarily alarmist.

Clearly Mano means his work to be a satire of the most draconian rhetorical flourishes of the environmentalist Continue reading →

Book Review: The View from the Stars, Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1965)

/ Joachim Boaz / 11 Comments

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1965 edition)

3.75/5 (Collated rating: Good)

Almost all SF fans have read Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s masterpiece A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) but few indulge in his shorter works.  By 1957 Miller had virtually quit publishing new SF (A Canticle is comprised of novellas published between 1955-1957).  His only work published later was Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997) completed by Terry Bisson and released posthumously.

The View From the Stars (1965) — containing five short stories, two novelettes, and one novella — is a cross section of his most productive decade.  Although I found that none of the works included should be considered masterpieces, “I, Dreamer” (1953), “Dumb Waiter” (1952),  “Big Joe and the Nth Generation” (1952), and “The Big Hunger” (1952) were wonderful.  All the others are readable Continue reading →

Updates: Recent Science Fiction Acquisitions No. LXXI (Malzberg, Bishop, Mano, Runyon)

/ Joachim Boaz / 14 Comments

Part 2 of 5 acquisition posts covering my massive haul from Dawn Treader Books in Ann Arbor Michigan….  I suspect that if I lived nearby I’d slowly migrate their entire SF collection to my shelves.  Two books below are by unknown authors (or at least to me) — Charles Runyon and D. Keith Mano.  Runyon is supposedly average to bad (one of my risk buys) while Mano polarizes readers — he tends to be rather right wing in his views so it’ll be intriguing to see what he does with the dystopic future in The Bridge (1973).  But, as with Runyon my expectations are low.

On the other hand, Malzberg’s The Men Inside (1971) seems to be one of his stranger works — I look forward to it.  And despite how well-known Michael Bishop is I’ve yet to read any of his works so I’ll be reading Beneath the Shattered Moons (1976) soon.

Thoughts?

1. The Men Inside, Barry N. Malzberg (1971)

(Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1971 edition) Continue reading →

Book Review: A Pail of Air, Fritz Leiber (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 23 Comments

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1964 edition)

4/5 (Collated rating: Good)

My only previous exposure to Fritz Leiber was his enjoyable and highly experimental Hugo-winning novel The Big Time (1958) — an unusual story (evoking a one-act play) whose characters are soldiers recruited from all eras of history relaxing in between missions during a vast temporal war.  The same sort of invention and incisive wit abounds in the collection A Pail of Air (1964).  Against a post-apocalyptical backdrop that runs throughout most of the stories, Leiber’s stories are chimeric (and satirical) parables on a vast spectrum of themes — the mechanization of the future, gender relations, endless war, media saturation…  The stories shift between whimsical delight and gut-wrenching despair.

This collection of eleven stories from the early 50s to the early 60s is highly recommended for all SF fans — especially the title story  “A Pail of Air” (1951),  “The Foxholes of Mars” (1952), 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 →