Deep into my reading list,  I am breaking my own rule and reading two books for this author.  Yes, the story is not complete until the end of the second volume, but it wouldn’t have been a selling feature for many of the authors I have read.  Dan Simmons is one of those authors I can admire, but will never be able to match his scope.  Instead of freaking out over the fact, I will merely enjoy the gifts he offers.

Yggdrasil makes another appearance, this time as a great tree-space-ship (which makes me think The Fountain borrowed a little too liberally from this book).  The Hyperion stories have been compared to Chaucer, but they are really epic love letters to John Keats and Beowulf.   The titles themselves are from Keats’s poems, and many characters are named after people in Keats’s life or in his writings.  Simmons is aware of his literary debts, and doesn’t ignore any of them.  For example, when the story get cyberpunky, he gives a polite nod to the “Cowboy Gibson.” 


Hyperion tells the stories of six pilgrims, all who become entangled in the seedier properties of immortality and time: a priest who is implanted with a living cross and its searing immortality, a warrior who knows he will play a part in the end of the world, a poet who needs a planet’s destruction to finish his greatest work, a scholar whose daughter is growing younger and younger, a private investigator whose lover leaves life and enters her head, and an emissary whose space-traveling time jumps keep him young while his lover grows older and dies.

The exception that really proves the rule, Fall of Hyperion is a mixed bag.  One part filler-to-make-another-story, one part review of the first book, and one part Dune-esquian holy grail that seems to end up as a muddle of themes created in the first book.  But there are truly transcendent moments in this sequel.  Rather than following the stories of different characters, this book twitches back and forth between the pilgrims still on the planet of Hyperion, and the recreation of John Keats himself.  I appreciated that the author never seemed to write himself into the persona of the poet he admires so much; and there were several passages that made slogging through the rest worthwhile.  As an instance: “Pain, he discovers, has a structure.  It has a floor plan.  It has designs more intricate than a chambered nautilus, features more baroque than the most buttressed Gothic cathedral.  Even as he screams, Martin Silenus studies the structure of this pain.  He realizes that it is a poem.”


Like pain, writing has a structure and form from which arises meaning.  Although this quote alludes to this, I received a more pointed lesson about it on the author’s website, where he  discussed the greatness of Hemingway and Gustav Flaubert.   I want to learn more about how beauty arises from the structure of a story.  It’s something I’ve always felt, always known was there, but it is beyond me to describe.


The books themselves also had a delightful lesson (also discussed in the website).  Strange surprises make a very readable story.  And reading this, I thought: I love science fiction because cities and planets are named after writers.   For this author, it was another bow of respect to other writers, as well as an artful manifestation of the relationship between words hobbled together to create a reality.  

Joan Slonczewski is a Canadian, a scientist, and a Quaker.  A quote from her book A Door into the Ocean prefaced my story “Demon in the Sea” in Challenging Destiny magazine.  For these reasons, I have always wanted to read her, and I bought a book by her as soon as I could.  I wanted to read A Door into the Ocean, but skipped it because it was a part of a trilogy.  I bought Brain Plague instead.  Which is also part of a trilogy.  Oh well.  Since purchasing this, I learned many authors create trilogies out of their popular books.  Live and learn.

The author and Nancy Kress are friends, Nancy is thanked in the opening, and I can see her influence on the opening of this book: is seems artificially structured.  Still, the book redeems itself through its ponderings on the nature of the divine and scientifically interesting pacing.  It only got hard to read toward the end, when its flaws started to accumulate.  The characters are not very different from one another, even between species, and especially in respect to dialogue.  Neither are the cultures.  The story is about different levels of sentiency, including microbial ones, but they all share a remarkably white bread existence: art shows, night clubs, drug users.  Also, the story is almost too simply written.  It is easy and quick to read thanks to the pacing, but it really doesn’t plunge you into these fascinating worlds, and sometimes undercuts emotional effects that should be deeper.  Still, in a few places where the author exercises some beautiful imagery: maggots biting each other, angels on their way to a wedding.


This started a line of thought for me.  I want to write stories that feel real, which I think relies strongly on the use of imagery and making the image come forward, but to make it readable can sacrifice some of that reality.  Hmmm.

The cover fell off my fifty cent “Ace Star” 1949 first edition paperback while I was reading it.  And for some reason,  a guy named Carl Halric signed the first page.  It all added to my enjoyment of this apocalyptic tale where disease wipes out most of humanity, and geographer Isherwood Williams and his wife Emma create a utopic Tribe of “just plain folk” in the hills above San Francisco.

We discussed utopias a little bit at Arwen’s Fare Thee Well party.  What does it take to make a utopia work?  In this book, no heros or mighty leaders.  Just a small number of people who all have the same values.  But once someone is introduced who doesn’t want to play by the same rules, things fall apart.

For that reason, this fragile and loving social structure, with its dog-drawn carts, and arrowheads beaten from pennies and dimes, was bittersweet.  My favorite part considered the past: “So in the first years work and play mingled always and there were not even the words for one against the other.  But for centuries flowed by and then more of them, and many things changed.  Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it.  But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and that last division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and walking.  Sleep came to be thought as a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job,” a heinous sin.  The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time-clock and the blowing of the whistle.  Men marched on picket-lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them.  And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.”

The author was an interesting guy.  Stewart, who was born in 1895 and died in 1980, was a professor at Berkeley, a specialist in the etymology of place-names.


It’s hard to draw a delineated writing lesson from this book.  His characters behaved in a very realistic way about their situation, and toward one another.  I think this realism lent itself to making the story memorable because otherwise, the characters were not drawn as deeply as I would have liked.

I first read Silverberg in high school, most memorable of which was The World Inside, a story about cities in towers.  The guy’s written a shelf or two of books, including an alternate history where Rome never lost its empire.  Those Roman tales should be really good, and I want to check them out.

In Man Plus, a human being is modified to live on Mars.  In Downward to the Earth, a man is modified to reflect the transformations in his soul.  Long sentences do not interfere inordinately with the fascinating world of Belzagor.  The only downside is that I guessed the planet’s secret because Orson Scott Card daintily stole the concept of transformation for Speaker for the Dead.  I would be quite surprised if Mr. Silverberg, who is in his eighties and living in beautiful Montclair in Oakland, is on speaking terms with The Great Orson over that transgression.

The setting of the world nods to The Drowned World and Heart of Darkness both.  The thought that went into its mobile, predatory foliage and fauna pleased me greatly, so much so that I’m not sure if the characters weren’t interesting, or weren’t as interesting.  The book is paced beautifully, and I read it in two days.  I will study it further in regard to its pacing, so I’m very glad I bought an expensive and beautiful “SF Masterworks Millennium” paperback addition.  (Were I extremely wealthy, I would have the entire collection.  They’re so cool.)
This story offers up information when you need it, just as you need it.  It makes reading a satisfying and quick experience.  That can’t be taken lightly.

Thanksgiving is here again.  I am thankful because I got to see the movie The Prestige, based on a story by Christopher Priest.  Twice.  For him, the theme of perception is woven through this story like metallic thread.  It is masterful.   I am thankful for finding a hitherto unknown used bookstore in Santa Cruz.  How could it be, such a marvelous treasure, hidden beneath stones I’ve tread across for years?  There, I scored more cheap books for my reading list: Olaf Stapledon’s First and Last Men and Philip Wylie’s The Day of the Triffids.  I am thankful that, after surviving another severe bout of the “doubties,” I got my butt in high gear and now have nine works riding the Carousel of Rejection.

And I am thankful I am done with this book.  It was never bad enough to quit, but it was hard to keep reading.  It took almost two weeks to get through, and I still ended up skimming the end.  


Pavane is an alternative history set in England, where the Catholic church dominates the world.  Published in 1966, it is surely a British response to the American 1959 A Canticle for Saint Leibowitz.  Canticle featured three loosely connected stories about post-apocalyptic monks; Pavane has six stories about people living under the tyrannical Pope John.  

Three stories feature men: Jesse Strange, heir to a steam engine family, a Signal Guildsman named Rafe Bigland, and a monk.  Three feature women: Jesse’s niece, a lobsterman’s daughter named Becky, and Jesse’s granddaughter, Eleanor of Corfe Gate.  Only two of these stories appealed to me: Rafe’s story, because he was apart of the fascinating and elaborate windmill signaling system used by a world where science was heresy; and Eleanor’s revolt against the Pope.

The other stories did not hold my interest well, and other than the stated setting, were not science fiction.  They read like dull, dry historical stories with convoluted sentences badly mimicking Dickens.  (I’m only surmising the last part, since I haven’t read Charles Dickens yet.)   It was a shame because every once in a while, there was a stunning idea, paragraph, or characterization. Unfortunately, it was a tedious trip between them.  The most positive lesson I can take away from this story is that I want to aim for such lovely paragraphs.  Interesting: this story references a Norse mythology – the Tree of Life and the God Yggdrasil.  The first time I’d heard about this myth was in the movie The Fountain, which I saw only two days before I started the book.  

I’m also thankful for such quirky coincidences.   


For me, this book was the flip side of The Female Man.  My complaint with Russ’s work is that a concept is not necessarily a story.  In this, a story is not necessarily science fiction.

I read A Wrinkle in Time in fourth grade, but I didn’t really dip into science fiction until I got to Carmel Middle School’s library. After that, I never hit the nonfiction side of any library.  And Simak was one of my first – and favorite – high school finds.

He has been called a “pastoral” writer who, like Rod Serling of the Twilight Zone, idolized the small towns of rural America.  But unlike Serling, Simak was optimistic and kind about the human race.  We are not evil, but immature.  We like to shoot, not because we want to kill, but because we love to protect.  We have faith, not because we are superstitious, but because we can sense a greater presence in the universe.  And in this story about Enoch Wallace, a Civil War soldier who takes over an alien way station in rural Iowa and keeps it running for a century and a half: “A million years ago there had been no river here and in a million years to come there might be no river – but in a million years from now there would be, if not Man, at least a caring thing.  And that was the secret of the universe, Enoch told himself – a thing that went on caring.”  

That deep kindness reminds me of both Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror for Observers.  Of course, this sentimentality can be as ignorant of reality as Heinlein’s Competent Man, but still, I have great affection for kindness.  I can forgive its failings.  My real quibble with this 1963 story was its pacing.  I found it hard to pick up and keep reading.  Despite the imaginative view of the galaxy and chilling dangers (such as the Stupidity Plague), it meandered laconically (like a country road) and I often lost track of what was happening.  There were things I missed or didn’t understand, which played important roles in the end.  That undercut the impact of the end.

Simak’s world-view was summed up on a headstone: “Here lies one from a distant star, but the soil is not alien to him, for in death he belongs to the universe.”  This imparting of a solid belief of how we relate to our world, or worlds, seems like a weighty tool in a writer’s bag.  The other lesson of this story: improper pacing can steal a story’s thunder.  

“His name is Spider?  Spider?” Chris asks.  We’re in bed, reading.  I flick my paperback over and look at the cover.  I’ve seen his name since I was a kid nosing through bookstores, so I’ve never really thought about it.  Spider?  Do people call him Spider?  How did he get that name?  It is kind of cool, but I never really thought about it.  “Yeah.  Spider.  I’ll have to look it up.”

Spider Robinson, according to Wikipedia, was born “Paul.”  His pen name may be due either to his inordinate skinniness or his respect to a blues musician of the same name.  His story felt skinny as well, a short story fluffed up to make a novel.  This was not helped by pandering allusions to Delany and other sf writers.  Additionally, this is a Heinleinesque book.  People “grok.”  Conveniently for the protagonist Sam, every self-serving desire he has is forgivable, if not downright noble: sex with his best friend’s wife, his standing back to allow pregnant girlfriend’s death-wish, and even murdering the time traveler Rachel and his friends. No surprise: Spider Robinson was just chosen to novelize a post-humus outline by Heinlein. 

Okay.  I guess I have it out with The Man before it gets any uglier.  I don’t mind the concept of the Competent Man.  Really, I don’t.  It just seems that every time he is invoked, there has to be a matching Incompetent Woman to make C. Man’s world-view work.

But still, this is not a bad book at all.  The Nova Scotia 1970s setting and hippie characters are readable and interesting. It delightfully builds up to its exciting best in the last quarter.  I liked the frank discussions (perhaps the upside of Heinleinism) on homosexuality, sexuality in general, religion, death, and telepathy.  My favorite part was one nice stacking of effect that created a real emotional punch: “You’re as smart as I am, brother.  Figure it out.  This ought to be the best documented age in human history to date.  We’ve got record-keeping even the Romans wouldn’t believe.  Print.  Computer files.  Microfilm.  Photocopies.  Words.  Pictures.  Moving pictures.  Sound.  Documentaries, surveys, polls, studies, satellite reconnaissance, censi or whatever the plural of ‘census’ is, newspapers, magazines, film, videotapes, novels, archives, the Library of goddam Congress – this is the best-documented age in the fucking history of the world so far, Snake, and we’re living in what has to be its best-documented culture; now you tell me: Why wouldn’t Rachel’s people have access to all that stuff?” 

A book like this is comforting for a writer like me.  This is not a masterpiece, but I know I can write at this level.  It means I can probably publish books.  (Talk about self-serving desires!)  But why isn’t it a greater book?  To quote Teresa Nielsen Hayden, “Plot is a literary convention.  Story is a force of nature.”  Where this tale fails, it is merely plot; where it succeeds, it is story.  This may be an artifact of trying to build a marketable story instead of letting the story work its way through.  And again, I find myself searching for the true nature of story.  I mean: Story.

This book is often called a masterpiece of “feminist science fiction,” but I don’t think it stands as a piece of “science fiction” on its own.   Ranting, even well-done and sometimes meaningfully ranting, does not a story make, and especially not the carefully knotted and cross-pinioned work that a science fiction masterpiece should be.  For writing, story, and literary leanings, Woman on the Edge of Time was a far superior book.  I don’t think I’m the best audience for feminist writing, anyway.  Or confounded post-modern writing, I hate that: I would have had no clue what this story was about without having read Wikipedia!

Not that there weren’t thoughts and line I didn’t enjoy.  One of many favorites: “If you want to be an assassin, you must decline all challenges.  Showing off is not your job.”  I did enjoy the last eighth of the book: Jael, the augmented assassin from the far future, her computerized home, and her boy-toy, Davy.  Not only was it interesting and surreal, but I’m pretty sure Jael (Sweet Alice) might be the original Competent Woman, and the basis for the Steppin’ Razors in Neuromancer.  Oh, and Russ taught at Clarion.

Once again.  The chorus: ranting alone does not a story make.