SF/F Books: Chapter Two - What Are You Reading?

[Steve Roby]

I'm nearly halfway through China Mieville's Perdido Street Station, and liking it. I read his first novel, King Rat, a few years ago; it wasn't bad, but the one thing that made it unique was also something of a weakness (the focus on drum 'n' bass music -- it's not easy to write about the experience of creating music without slipping into the kind of OTT prose that sometimes happens when some writers try to do sex scenes). I've read a couple of his short stories and didn't really get as much as I expected out of them.

Mieville mentions Peake's Gormenghast and Harrison's Viriconium as influences, and you can certainly see them in the book -- it's also a bit like a cross between Moorcock's Mother London and a bunch of his fantasy and SF novels, in a way -- though the prose doesn't quite flow as smoothly as the best of those he's influenced by. Also, there's a certain subtlety to Peake, Harrison, and some others influenced by them in the New Weird scene; in some stories, Viriconium or VanderMeer's Ambergris could almost be our world. Mieville's New Crobuzon, on the other hand, is overflowing with strangeness, its human residents sharing the city with a wide variety of nonhuman lifeforms. It's very much not our world. But the book is wildly inventive and I will certainly be reading more Mieville.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Just finished John Varley's "The Ophiuchi Hotline"... started with Isaac Asimov's "Foundation's Edge".

 

[Skywalker]

Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover.

 

[JM1776]

Reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire

He's an excellent wordsmith, but ... the jury's still out.

 

[Brian]

^ It took me a bit to get into Wicked, but by the time I finished it I really enjoyed it. If you like it, there are two follow-ups, Son of a Witch, and the recently published A Lion Among Men.

 

[Mistral]

Just finished one of Tom Kratman's ultra-right-wing war stories, A Desert Called Peace. Although taking place on another world, it re-tells recent events from 9/11 to the present. Typically, the "Islamofacists" are the dyed-in-the-wool bad guys, along with groups like Amnesty International and the press. If you can compartmentalize his philosophy, such as it is, the story itself reads like David Weber meets Robert Heinlein. As such, it's kinda engrossing(when its not being totally gross) but the Ann Coulter-like viewpoint jars you out of the story sometimes. On a 1-10 scale, call it a 6 begging to be an 8, but failing through its extremism and unwillingness to admit that no single political viewpoint is ever one hundred percent right.

 

[Steve Roby]

Life is too short to spend time reading stuff published by Baen.

Okay, I exaggerate. They've published books by Jack Vance and Michael Shea and reprinted stuff by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, James Schmitz, Cordwainer Smith, Robert E. Howard, etc. But in general... urgh. And their book covers are worse than their politics, which takes some serious effort.

 

[Mistral]

What about Eric Flint and the 1632 universe? I'm hooked on those....

 

[DanTheGrey]

Finished Shadows of Mindor, Star Trek - Resistance, now on to Star Trek - Fearful Symmetry.

 

[Steve Roby]

What about Eric Flint and the 1632 universe? I'm hooked on those....

Haven't read any of Flint's stuff, because the basic premise doesn't really interest me a lot. But, googling a bit, it's neat to see how the whole thing's taken off, with the Grantville Gazette and all that.

 

[Maestro]

I've finally finished Scarlet, the ESB-ish installment of Lawhead's King Raven Trilogy. No Han Solo in carbonite at the end, but I'm sorry to say that our heroes find themselves pretty fucked.

I'm now on to Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi. I'm 50 pages in and it's hysterical. And also not coming off as super plausible, which only makes it better.

 

[DBR]

^ It took me a bit to get into Wicked, but by the time I finished it I really enjoyed it. If you like it, there are two follow-ups, Son of a Witch, and the recently published A Lion Among Men.

I have not read the third, but I preferred Mirror, Mirror over his others. Though, it too took a while to get into it.

 

[Mistral]

What about Eric Flint and the 1632 universe? I'm hooked on those....

Haven't read any of Flint's stuff, because the basic premise doesn't really interest me a lot. But, googling a bit, it's neat to see how the whole thing's taken off, with the Grantville Gazette and all that.

Steve, you gotta read 1632 and take it from there-what an awesome universe, rich, diverse, worth the investment.

 

[Steve Roby]

Well, I finished Perdido Street Station and liked it, though it's a bit overstuffed. I'll be reading more Mieville.

I started reading one of the Starfleet Corps of Engineers collections, in my ongoing attempt to catch up with what is a darn good series, but my copy of S.T. Joshi's new book The Rise and Fall of the Cthulhu Mythos arrived in today's mail. Here's the description:

"Noted Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi has authored a criticism of Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos fiction, beginning with the stories by H.P. Lovecraft that gave birth to the entities, locales, books, and other plot devices that have come to be known as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Joshi further details the works of August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and other. Joshi then expounds upon the "Derleth Mythos", and its influence on subsequent Lovecraftian fiction. Joshi then explores a new generations of Mythos writers and their respective expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos, including Richard L. Tierney, Gary Myers, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Walter C. DeBill Jr. and others. Finally, Joshi reviews some of the more modern authors who have taken up the Lovecraftian mantle: Jeffrey Thomas, Stanley C. Sargent, Wilum H. Pugmire, Thomas Ligotti, Joseph C. Pulver and many others."

Reportedly, Joshi's pretty scathing about a lot of the post-Lovecraft mythos writers. Even though I like a lot of that stuff, there is a hell of a lot of crap getting published because it mentions Cthulhu or the Necronomicon every few pages. This should be interesting. I think I'll pause between SCE stories and read it.

 

[Bluejay]

David Weber's At All Costs.

 

[Brendan Moody]

"Noted Lovecraftian scholar S. T. Joshi has authored a criticism of Lovecraftian and Cthulhu Mythos fiction, beginning with the stories by H.P. Lovecraft that gave birth to the entities, locales, books, and other plot devices that have come to be known as the "Cthulhu Mythos". Joshi further details the works of August Derleth, Frank Belknap Long, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and other. Joshi then expounds upon the "Derleth Mythos", and its influence on subsequent Lovecraftian fiction. Joshi then explores a new generations of Mythos writers and their respective expansion of the Cthulhu Mythos, including Richard L. Tierney, Gary Myers, Brian Lumley, Ramsey Campbell, Michael Shea, Walter C. DeBill Jr. and others. Finally, Joshi reviews some of the more modern authors who have taken up the Lovecraftian mantle: Jeffrey Thomas, Stanley C. Sargent, Wilum H. Pugmire, Thomas Ligotti, Joseph C. Pulver and many others."

Hmm. I absolutely agree with the premise that there's a lot of junk with Lovecraft(ian) nouns in it, but I've never found Joshi to be an insightful critic of work he doesn't like or "get." Rather than making an effort to recognize the mindset behind it, he just throws together a bunch of negative adjectives into a stew of sub-Dorothy Parker wit, the sort of stuff (ironically enough) that literary snobs aim at Lovecraft himself. The sections on Lovecraft and other writers Joshi admires, like Campbell and (to some extent) Ligotti, might be worth a look though. I'll see if a local library picks it up, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.

 

[Ensign_Redshirt]

Colin Greenland: Take Back Plenty

I'm not so thrilled by it though...

 

[Klaus]

An Evil Guest by Gene Wolfe... typical Wolfe, which means brilliant writing, byzantine plotting, and obscure things lurking at the edges of the action which are as interesting as the main tale. It's a sf/fantasy/noir mix which is a lot of fun and has some amazing moments and leaps as usual for GW.

I think he gets about 50 pages from the end of his books, calmly downs a fistful of peyote, and then proceeds to wrap things up....

 

[Steve Roby]

Hmm. I absolutely agree with the premise that there's a lot of junk with Lovecraft(ian) nouns in it, but I've never found Joshi to be an insightful critic of work he doesn't like or "get." Rather than making an effort to recognize the mindset behind it, he just throws together a bunch of negative adjectives into a stew of sub-Dorothy Parker wit, the sort of stuff (ironically enough) that literary snobs aim at Lovecraft himself. The sections on Lovecraft and other writers Joshi admires, like Campbell and (to some extent) Ligotti, might be worth a look though. I'll see if a local library picks it up, but I doubt I'll be that lucky.

I'm past the halfway point now and I think I'm going to be somewhat dissatisfied by the time I'm done, for a couple of reasons. First, Joshi talks about being able to tell what's a good story using purely objective esthetic yardsticks, which I find somewhat less than convincing. Second, there's so much out there to talk about and the first quarter or third of the book is about Lovecraft's work, discussing the extent to which Lovecraft consciously developed a mythos, which stories of his can be said to belong to it, to what extent he saw himself working collaboratively with other writers to develop such a mythos, and so on.

It really doesn't look like he's going to have space to take on all that much modern mythos writing. I've got maybe 110 out of 288 or so pages to go, and he hasn't gotten to August Derleth yet. He's gone through Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch so far, talking about stories in terms of whether they just use mythos trappings as window-dressing, whether they capture Lovecraft's cosmicism, whether they're good stories, and where possible and relevant he refers to correspondence and alternate versions of the stories to get at the extent to which the stories are inspired by Lovecraft.

Overall, there are some genuinely interesting insights, and it's certainly a good corrective to some writing about the mythos, but there's really not much so far that's actually new.

I think this is ultimately going to be seen as something of a first step, rather than the last word. Sure, Robert Price and others have written short articles about the development of the mythos, the part Derleth played, and so on, over the last thirty years or so, but someone out there needs to take on the state of the mythos today in a full-length work, and ideally someone more sympathetic to it than Joshi. Because I doubt there'll be much sympathy on display in the remaining chapters.

 

[stj]

Banks' Use of Weapons, Reynolds' Century Rain, Baxter's Transcendent, Sagan's Edenborn and Scalzi's Android's Dream. And Egan's short story collection Dark Intergers.