Novellas + other categories)

January 1, 2014January 8, 2014 / Joachim Boaz / 25 Comments

Everyone likes lists! And I do too…. This is an opportunity to collate some of my favorite (and least favorite) novels and shorter SF works I read this year. Last year I discovered Barry N. Malzberg and this year I was seduced by…. Well, read and find out.

Top Ten Novels

1. We Who Are About To…, Joanna Russ (1976): A scathing, and underread, literary SF novel by one of the more important feminist SF writers of the 70s (of The Female Man fame).

2. A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire, Michael Bishop (1975): A well-written anthropological clash of cultures novel. Slow, gorgeous, emotionally engaging….

3. Level 7, Mordecai Roshwald (1959): A strange satire of the bomb shelter… Everyday surrealism. Continue reading →

Book Review: The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction, Kate Wilhelm (1968)

December 23, 2013August 3, 2019 / Joachim Boaz / 13 Comments

(Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1968 edition)

4/5 (collated rating: Good)

By the late 60s Kate Wilhelm’s SF moved from generally uninspiring pulp (à la the collection The Mile-Long Spaceship) to psychologically taught and emotive mood pieces exploring the almost existential malaise of daily existence and the disturbing effects of “programmed” lives (especially the housewife). The fourteen short-stories in The Downstairs Room and Other Speculative Fiction (1968) (the term “speculative fiction” was coined by Judith Merril in the 60s) comprise a snapshot of Wilhelm’s best New Wave work. It should be noted that not all are SF.

Although some are less engaging than others, her harrowing portrayal of starlets subjected to endless psychological torments at the whims of their viewers in “Baby, You Were Great” (1967) (Nebula nominated) and the evocative tapestry of daydreams Continue reading →

Book Review: The Mile-Long Spaceship (variant title: Andover and the Android), Kate Wilhelm (1963)

March 25, 2013March 25, 2013 / Joachim Boaz / 11 Comments

(Richard Powers’ cover for the 1963 edition)

3/5 (collated rating: Average)

Kate Wilhelm, famous for her Hugo-winning masterwork Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976), started her writing career with more modest works. The Mile-Long Spaceship (1963) collects some of her earliest short stories from the late 50s and a few written for the collection in the early 60s — Clone, her first novel, co-written with Theodore L. Thomas would come out in 1965. However, her best sci-fi was published in the late 60s to the mid-70s. Before then her work tended to be straight-forward with an occasional interesting idea or poignant scene but generally unremarkable….

Three stories are worth reading in this collection: an early work of feminist science Continue reading →