Beasts, Engine Summer ~ John Crowley
The Incredible Tide ~ Alexander Keys
Eden ~ Stanislaw Lem
Snow Goose ~ Paul Gallico
The Snail on the Slope ~ Strugatsky Brothers

Beggars in Spain ~ Nancy Kress
The Ship Who Sang ~ Anne McCaffrey
Goat Song ~ Poul Anderson
Great Work of Time ~ John Crowley
Surface Tension ~ James Blish
Dolphin's Way ~ Gordon Dickson
Balanced Ecology ~ James Schmitz
Driftglass ~ Samuel Delany
A Meeting With Medusa ~ Arthur C Clarke
Lot ~ Ward Moore
Air Raid ~ John Varley

The Hole Man
The Queen of Air and Darkness
A Meeting With Medusa
The Green Hills of Earth
Surface Tension

Martin is a good writer, but you can tell when writing is driven by pure emotion, and when it has something more going for it than just emotion. Take Blish's Surface Tension. The sublimation of science, or a scientific technique into emotion and character is difficult, but that's why the masters are the masters.

Krazy Kat
Pogo
World's Fair
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Course of the Heart
China Mountain Zhang
Air
The Separation
The Sparrow
The Female Man
Wild Life (Molly Gloss)
Gargantia on Verdurous Planet
Midsummer Night's Dream
The Tempest
Encyclopedia of Animals
The Mirror and the Lamp
Anatomy of Criticism
The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction
Archeologies of the Future
Paradise Lost
The Odyssey
The Road to Reality
Doctor Who

Yeah, I'm set.

SF Marathon Day 4: High Weir, by Samuel Delany

Delany pulling a Bradbury. Or is it a Zelazny?

SF Marathon Day 3: Surface Tension, by James Blish

Blish, Blish, Blish. You genius.

SF Marathon Day 2: The Death of Doctor Island, by Gene Wolfe

I wish there was a Gene Wolfe story I could come away from, feeling completely satisfied. It never happens. It didn't with this one either. But that's not to say it was not worth it.

A Gene Wolfe story will typically consist of conversations which you need to parse in order to make sense of what's actually going on in the background. It ignores, apart from a few exceptions, a traditional story structure. Large chunks of it might feel unnecessary. You might find yourself accusing it of not adding up to much of anything substantial. There will always be an ending, however, which will pretend to wrap up the mystery underlying all of the talk. But since Wolfe's characters reveal themselves via dialogue and action, rather than the narrator telling you that he or she is this or that way, you'll find yourself revisiting portions of the story which had felt enigmatic in how casual they were.

It's the same with this story. It involves a sentient Island run by an A.I, and three people who find themselves in it: a boy, a girl and a man. All three of them are there because mentally, all three are unstable, or not well. The island is there to cure them. Or at least, that's what is suggested. Before long, something more sinister is unearthed.

Wolfe's language and his fresh treatment of SF tropes are why I read him. I can forgive the occasional ambiguity, something I can't do with other authors. Also suspect is Wolfe's treatment of women, something I still haven't been able to put my finger on. This story is no different.

But all things considered, it was worth a read. Reminded me in its best moments of The Book of the New Sun, that flawed masterwork.

Up Next: Surface Tension by James Blish

SF Marathon Day 1: With Folded Hands, by Jack Williamson

 

Okay, I review this and head back to work. This will be short. But what an absolutely auspicious start! I'd read Williamson's The Metal Man in Tom Shippey's Oxford anthology and had been immediately hooked by his storyteller's voice. With Folded Hands is no different. The story itself is pure Golden Age goodness. What is ironical is how honest the message felt, and yet it's entirely possible to enjoy this for the images it evokes rather than the message at hand. The story—about benevolent robots taking over the world, is nothing you haven't seen before; however, I really enjoyed the character of the scientist and the everyman caught in the midst of it all, two stereotypes that never seem to get old when you're dealing with Golden Age science fiction. I loved this most of all for the writing, however. Williamson had a far defter hand at penning tales than Asimov, and while The Caves of Steel kept flashing in my head throughout the story, it never once felt derivative. Had a very Philip K. Dick-like feel to it too, not to mention Pohl's classic Tunnel at the End of the World.

A classic, through and through.

Next Up: Surface Tension by James Blish.

Next Up

It's good to look forward to stories which you know will be worth reading:

Angouleme by Thomas M. Disch
Sandkings by George R. R. Martin
Voices of Time / The Terminal Beach by J. G. Ballard
The Ballard of Lost C'Mell by Cordwainer Smith
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
At The Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft
Great Work of Time by John Crowley
Balanced Ecology by James Schmitz
Surface Tension by James Blish
Persistence of Vision by John Varley
The Death of Doctor Island by Gene Wolfe
A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny
Driftglass / High Weir by Samuel Delany
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula Le Guin
Nine Hundred Grandmothers by R. A. Lafferty
Graveyard Reader by Theodore Sturgeon
With Folded Hands by Jack Williamson
Speech Sounds by Octavia E. Butler


Wait for reviews!

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

A story about remote controlled centaurs on Jupiter. Or a pseudo hard sf romp through a cripple's need to transcend his limitations. As always, the symbol of a horse is always liberating. As is a new, unexplored planet, with breathtaking vistas. I liked how the story alternated between the human controller and the controlled alien. The ending is life affirming.

Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death, by James Tiptree, Jr.

Probably the finest short story written in science fiction, which does not feature any humans. Some have found Tiptree's garrulous voice to be unnecessarily difficult and excessive, but like others have been quick to point out, they enhance the alien's viewpoint. How does it do so? Well, for starters, if we consider that the only reference to fall back on when creating truly no n-human aliens are other animals, then it's easy to assume that when other animals communicate, it's by utilizing a frequency that is massively more emotional than the stunted, crippled language of the average human being trying to appropriate true 'emotion'. So, perhaps then, when we 'translate' into English, Tiptree's style is not very far-fetched. These creatures have no time for intellectual games involving logic. They are born, they grow up, cope with the environment, mate, and die. Does that suggest that language in such a world is useless? I don't think so, and neither does Tiptree. This is yet another of Science Fiction's beauties: to reinforce certain beliefs by constructing a justification, utilizing fiction.

Creature by Carom Emshwiller

I rushed through this story, and will probably have to read it again. It's about a lonely man who meets a dinosaur-like creature. It is revealed before long that the creature isn't merely a dinosaur, but have some aspects of the human in her.

Almost all instances of SF dealing with human contact with aliens who do not want to hurt you are immeasurably tragic in their resonances. I find this in 'Black Charlie', in 'And I Awoke and Found Myself...' and in 'Out of All Them Bright Stars'. Why is this so?

To find out, one need simply look into the eyes of another animal.

Why Science Fiction?

I think it's odd when you find yourself, back against wall and nowhere to go, having to depend upon one thing and one thing alone to get you through the day. It's odd because you look back and marvel at the sheer number of things that could get you worked up and excited once upon a time, but now linger on as mere traces instead. If you do revisit those things, it's more out of inertia than anything: because you do not know any better.

For me, this one thing I find myself keeping on revisiting is science fiction. It's an interesting development, since I've always been in love with fiction that gave itself up to the very human drive of imagining, or finding joy in linking disparate elements together and coming up with a story. All fiction does it, to some extent. This is why I read: to find this drive thrumming in the words making up a paragraph, giving it direction, shaping it into something that understands that the only way to get at truth is to indulge in a game, a game involving, among other things, recreating the world around you, it's patterns into something you can perhaps put a finger on.

Then why science fiction?

You read too much of this stuff, and you are more than liable to get tired of the various permutation combinations authors have indulged in. At times, they'll all seem like they're trying to outdo one another when it comes to ideas. But ideas are only as effective as their treatment. When you're small, the treatment recedes into the background and the idea seems to pop out. Then, with time, the ideas reveal themselves to be merely an excuse for you to carry on reading, and suddenly that doesn't quite cut it anymore. What then?

Then you chance upon an author like Theodore Sturgeon, or James Tiptree Jr. You might not know who these people are. But it's very evident from their writing that they weren't simply happy with ideas in themselves. Something else was forcing itself out through the words, something distinct and at once terrifying in it's loneliness, in it's capacity to lay itself bare. That they found science fiction a good platform is not merely happen chance.I know, because I'm going through something similar. It's the same impulse that drives me, time and time again, to sit with a new story everyday, bad or good.

A different way of looking at things. Not mere wish-fulfillment.

But I ask myself: isn't that a kind of escape too?

Great SF

If I ever find myself teaching science fiction, I'll most definitely use the following short stories:

A Saucer of Loneliness
I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon
Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
Options
Black Charlie
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas
Problems of Creativeness
Billenium
Exhalation
Passengers
Snow

The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn, by Vonda N. McIntyre

If the reason I'd made this blog wasn't to primarily critique science fiction short stories as seriously as I can, I would have been waxing eloquent about this story right from the first sentence. As it is, it's proving very difficult to not do so. So let me just say this: this story made my day. I'm very happy right about now.

The Mountains of Sunset... features no human beings. (For another beautiful story which features no humans, read Second Dawn by Arthur C Clarke). Therefore, part of the difficulty underlying the story is in figuring out how these beings think, and why they think this way. A space-faring race is shown to be slowly changing and developing into a somewhat more benign and less wilder version of the species that they had been originally. In the midst of all of this, a lone old female lives on, missing the past, and finding herself out of place amongst the young. The latter have given up on flying, which she cannot bring herself to excuse.

I'll write a more detailed review as soon as I find time.

Good News From The Vatican, by Robert Silverberg

"Science Fiction is the internal (intracultural) literary form taken by syncretism in the west. It adopts as it's subject matter that occult area where science in decay, elaborately decorated with technology, overlaps the second religiousness."  So said the late, great James Blish.

The religious aspect of SF owes as much to the act of reading SF, as from the imagery associated with it. You can look at SF in two ways, none of which is exclusive of one another: it is both intensely visual, and at its best, encourages contemplation on everything under the sun. That it can achieve this from within the confines of a short story as well as a novel bears testimony to its often densely fabular nature, where anything that does not directly address the theme of the story in it's barest, most essential form is left out. This might also be why SF has often falsely been classified as children's literature.

Then there are stories, like this one, which are overtly about the intersection of religion and technology. But unlike SF protagonists in tales such as A Case of Conscience, The Quest for St. Aquin or The Way of Cross and Dragon, Silverberg's isn't actively involved in the proceedings. Nor is the treatment didactic, or fabular. He posits a future where a robot is in the running for the position of a Pope. This has caused quite an uproar throughout the world, among both humans and robots alike. But the story is told not by someone in the know, but by a man sitting outside at a cafe with his colourful group of friends, some of whom are of a religious bent of mind, some who aren't, and speculating, through the course of a conversation, on the outcome. His tone is enthusiastic, and the times he does find it all very funny, and has a good laugh at the expense of the hysteria spreading across the globe at the possibility of a robot Pope. However, one senses an interest in Catholicism in what he says, and how he says it, implying that perhaps the incursion of science into something this sacrosanct can only be a good thing for a change, especially if it gets people who are otherwise oblivious to such matters interested.

In a medium such as SF, this is a very interesting approach, especially since more often than not,  protagonists go and do things, and don't just sit around talking about what may happen. (Note to self: Tom Shippey's distinction could be relevant in this regard, on how SF has no heroes). In this, it is very similar to Gene Wolfe's How the Whip Came Back, which also uses a conversation to slowly unveil what seems to be going on, and Ballard's Billenium, which uses a seemingly ineffectual protagonist to make a statement regarding a larger whole.

The ending to the story, where the Pope rises above the crowds and flies away into the air, hovering above them, is quietly sublime.

Read in: The Best from Universe, edited by Terry Carr

You can also find the story in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by Ursula Le Guin and Brian Attebery.