paperbacks

Book Review: The Squares of the City, John Brunner (1965)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments
  • Murray Tinkelman’s cover for the 1978 edition

4/5 (Good)

Nominated for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel

John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965) transposes the moves of a 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900) and Mikhail Chigorin (1850-1905) onto a near future landscape of political intrigue. Inspired by Brazil’s planned capital Brasília (founded in 1960), the action takes place in Ciudad de Vados, the capital city of the imaginary Latin American nation of Aguazul.1 Conjured out of a “barren, rocky stretch of land,” Ciudad de Vados contains all the homogenized trappings of an ultra-modern metropolis (170). It’s sterile. Planned. Mechanized. Quickly the monumental urban regularity fades into the background and the intricate game across its squares takes over.

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. IX

/ Joachim Boaz / 84 Comments
  • A selection of read volumes from my shelf

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading or planning to read this month? Here’s January’s installment of this column.

When I’m not reading science fiction, I’m more often than not devouring history that touches on my decades of focus: 1945-1985. Recently that’s meant lots and lots of monographs on Cold War culture: from fallout shelters, suburbia, to analysis of the drama of morality and terror that characterized nuclear deterrence. And in Guy Oakes’ transfixing The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (1994), I came across a fascinating collision of science fictional thought and public policy.

A few months into Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency, the Public Affairs Office of the Federal Civil Defense Administration released a short pamphlet that analyzed the “relation between national will and nuclear terror” under the ridiculous title “Civil Defense Implications of the Psychological Impact and Morale Effect of Attacks on the People of the United States” (April 1953). In this pamphlet, the authors imagine the effects of nuclear war. They suggest that some survivors would “isolate themselves from the terrifying consequences of nuclear war by effecting a pseudo-escape into an interior psychological reality.” I thought immediately of Richard Matheson’s brilliant “Pattern for Survival” (1955), in which a SF author reenacts the process of writing and publishing a story to escape the reality in which he lives. The pamphleteers further imagine a political reality dominated by “mystical sects and cults, enthralled by the vision of an immeasurably happier future in an inner fantasy life of an extramundane kingdom of bliss that transcended the brutal empirical reality of nuclear destruction” (41). Early Cold War policy makers and consultants as science fiction authors!

50s paranoid future visions aside, let’s turn to the books in the photo and what I’ve been reading and writing about.

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Book Review: Worlds Without End, Clifford D. Simak (1964)

/ Joachim Boaz / 16 Comments
  • Richard Powers’ cover for the 1st edition

3.5/5 (collated rating: Good)

I’m a compulsive list maker. In the past few years I’ve gathered and submitted older science fiction short stories that depict worker unions–from Robert Silverberg’s “Guardian Devil” (1959) to Mari Wolf’s “Robots of the World! Arise!” (1952)–to the Hugo Book Club’s fantastic index. It’s about time I finally get around to reviewing a few of my submissions!1

Clifford D. Simak’s collection Worlds Without End (1964) contains two novellas and one short story that appeared in Robert W. Lowndes’ magazines (second/third tier SF markets in the 50s). Two of three–“Worlds Without End” (1956) and “Full Cycle” (1955)–speculate on evolution of the trade union after the breakdown of the state.

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Updates: Recent Science Fiction Purchases No. CCCXXX (Tim Powers, Octavia E. Butler, George Alec Effinger, and Tom Purdom)

/ Joachim Boaz / 36 Comments

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

1. Dinner at Deviant’s Palace, Tim Powers (1985)

  • Ron Walotsky’s cover for the 1985 edition

From the inside flap: “The civilized world had come to an end more than a century earlier, but in California life and society went on… taking strange, often horrifying forms.

Gregorio Rivas was a survivor–a proud, resourceful man who had, most recently, made his way from the corrupt, crumbling city of Venice to carve out a successful career as a musician within the walls of Ellay. He played his pelican with raw energy and flashy style, and people came from all over to hear him. But Greg’s real claim to fame had nothing to do with music. It was a part of his past he wanted to forget. And it had come back to haunt him…

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Short Story Reviews: Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” (1976), David J. Skal’s “Chains” (1971), and Tom Purdom’s “Courting Time” (1966)

/ Joachim Boaz / 18 Comments

Howard Waldrop (1946-2024), David J. Skal (1952-2024), and Tom Purdom (1936-2024) all passed away since the beginning of the year. As I’ve only read Howard Waldrop’s “God’s Hooks!” (1982), “My Sweet Lady Jo” (1974), and “The Ugly Chickens” (1980) and Tom Purdom’s “Toys” (1967), I impulsively thought I’d stich together a post featuring a tale by each.

Please note that I have not read enough to identify their best work and a negative review is not intended to be a statement about their entire oeuvre and impact on the genre. If you have any fond memories, recommendations for stories, or other tangents related to the three authors, let me know in the comments.

Terry Bisson (1942-2014) also passed away this year but did not publish any short fiction until the 90s. I’ll make sure to review one of his 80s novels—Wyrldmaker (1981) or Talking Man (1986)–this year instead. I’ve also procured novels by Purdom and Skal to feature later this year.

Now let’s get to the stories!

  • David Plourde’s cover art detail for the 1978 edition of Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection, ed. Gardner Dozois (1977)

4.5/5 (Very Good)

Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” first appeared in Orbit 18, ed. Damon Knight (1976). If you have an Internet Archive account, you can read it online here.

Nominated for the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Short Story. Lost to Charles L. Grant’s “A Crowd of Shadows” (1976).

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. VIII

/ Joachim Boaz / 96 Comments
  • A selection of science fiction novels from my shelves

I hope you’ve gotten off to a great reading start to 2024! What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading this month?

If you’re new and curious about my rationale for the perimeters of my site, check out this recent interview and podcast. And follow me on Mastodon if you don’t already as I no longer post on my Twitter account. Also make sure to check out the previous installment of this monthly column

And, most importantly, let me know what pre-1985 SF you’ve been reading!

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

  1. Adrian Mitchell’s The Bodyguard (1970) might be one of the oddest dystopias ever written.
  2. Kate Wilhelm’s Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976) is a fascinating peek into her vast oeuvre of disquieting visions. While I read it before I started my site, a friend reviewed it for my guest post series on Wilhelm’s fiction. As I recently covered Wilhelm’s far lesser known anti-Vietnam War novel The Killing Thing (1967), her work was on my mind.
  3. M. John Harrison is rightly famous for his Viriconium Nights sequence: The Pastel City (1971), A Storm of Wings (1980), and In Viriconium (1982). If you enjoyed them, I highly recommend tracking down his first novel — The Committed Men (1971). From my review: “Possessed by destructive melancholy, the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptical UK–where political powers have sunk into oblivion–attempt to recreate a semblance of normalcy.  Clement St John Wendover, teeth long since rotted, still administers to the skin diseases and ailments of his one-time patients although he cannot cure them. […] Gathering together a troop of “committed men” (and a woman!), Wendover sets off across the corroded landscape with a newborn mutant child: a new species for an altered Earth or an accidental abnormality….”
  4. I recently covered a Barrington J. Bayley short story in my cities of the future series and it reminded me of his most extreme moments of off-the-wall invention — The Garments of Caean (1976) immediately came to mind.

What am I writing about?

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Updates: Holiday Purchases! No. CCCXXIX (George Alec Effinger, Margot Bennett, anthology on Nuclear War, and Michael Conner)

/ Joachim Boaz / 40 Comments

Time for more holiday finds!

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

1. When Gravity Fails, George Alec Effinger (1986)

  • Jim Burns’ cover for the 1988 edition

From the back cover: “In a decadent world of cheap pleasures and easy death, Marîd Audran has kept his independence and his identity the hard way. Still, like everything else in the Budayeen, he is available …for a price.

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Updates: Holiday Purchases! No. CCCXXVIII (Robert Silverberg, S. P. Somtow, Janet Asimov, and a World’s Best Anthology)

/ Joachim Boaz / 21 Comments

Happy holidays. I hope you’ve been able to squeeze in a bit of science fiction reading.

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

1. Those Who Watch, Robert Silverberg (1967)

  • Gene Szafran’s cover for the 1971 edition

From the back cover: “CRASH LANDING FROM THE STARS.

Only three humans would ever know that the blinding flash in the sky on that night in 1982 was an exploding flying saucer. Only they would learn the truth about THOSE WHO WATCH–about the alien beings who came into this world in a crash landing from the stars. THOSE WHO WATCH is the strange, seductive novel of three accidental colonists from outer space whose chance encounter with Earth triggers interplanetary conflict. It is also the most unusual love story ever written.”

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What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading? + Update No. VII

/ Joachim Boaz / 48 Comments
  • A selection of read works from my shelves

What pre-1985 science fiction are you reading this week?

I’ve settled on a monthly schedule for this column. Check out the previous installment!

If you’re new and curious about my rationale for the perimeters of my site, check out this recent interview and podcast. And follow me on Mastodon if you don’t already as I no longer post on my Twitter account.

And, most importantly, let me know what pre-1985 SF you’ve been reading!

The Photograph (with links to reviews and brief thoughts)

  1. Judith Merril’s collection contains one of the feminist visions of the 50s — “Daughters of Earth” (1952). Reworking a standard pulp plot of alien contact, Merril recasts the encounter through multiple generations of women in one family. She adeptly inverts the Old Testament trope of tracing generations through fathers. Simultaneously, the story itself is a metatextual collection of rewritten family documents containing the lessons necessary for future daughters in the family. Brilliant and heady stuff.
  2. Barry N. Malzberg’s The Men Inside (1973) remains one of his strangest works. A perverse (and Freudian) metafictional (and literary) retelling of Otto Klement and Jerome Bixby’s Fantastic Voyage replete with filmic flashbacks… For Malzberg fans only — if you’ve missed this one, track it down.
  3. And now for something completely different: Murray Leinster’s S.O.S From Three Worlds (1967). I am unsure why I enjoy Leinster’s Med Service so much. Sometimes positivist stories about spacemen devoted to selfless service solving medical crises–and reigning in rampant unchecked capitalism–with their friendly tormals (think furry mobile petri dishes) bring a bit of warmth to my bitter heart.
  4. I sneakily consumed Joe Haldeman’s masterpiece The Forever War (1975) while working my first job as an oil change cashier. In-between angry customers and running domestic incidents, I relished every moment of Haldeman’s defiant Vietnam War satire. As I’ve only reviewed Mindbridge (1976) on the site (I’ve read a bunch more), I’ve been meaning to return his work — maybe a resolution for 2024.

What am I writing about?

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