Who is Harlan Ellison’s biggest fan? 
 
Harlan Ellison, of course.  Mefisto is a beautifully made small press book with cover art and  an introduction by Frank Miller of Sin City, an insult to Tor Book’s  refusal to publish this story, as well as two pages of the author’s works, and an opening blurb that says “What is this book about? Well, it’s Bester’s The Demolished Man as if it had been written by Jim Thompson or James M. Cain...Go ahead. Try for one potato chip. This sucker is relentlessly readable.”

You put yourself with some fine company there, Mr. Ellison.  And of course, it’s readable.  It’s not a book.  It’s a short story.  It took less than an hour to read.  There were paragraphs one just wanted to quote, but there were also painfully uneven characterizations. It was also a predictable story, though the ending was truly enjoyable. 
  
I’ve heard what you’ve done at the respected Clarion science fiction/fantasy writing courses, insulting students without even reading their work. When I get there next summer, God willing if you are there, I will tell you, “Mr. Ellison, you are a pony with one good trick. And Pony Boy, if you can’t play nice with others, I will roll your little wheelchair out into the hallway and let you just think about your behavior.”

But I should also thank you, Mr. Ellison, for saving me one early morning – and damn, it was already getting hot – during the summer of 1997, just outside of Modesto.  I was getting screamed at by one of my
psycho-hillbilly-rice-growers for stopping him from applying Category 1 pesticides without a respirator. 
This yahoo was telling me what a demon the government was, and he quoted you.

Whereupon I said, “Harlan Ellison? My story was just published in a magazine with his!”

Apparently, you do have another  fan.  And it’s not to say that your  one trick isn’t very good.  It is –
and that’s not even counting your hostile self promotion technique or your goofy titles (which reminds me, now I have to read Faust, ‘cuz I didn’t get the reference).  But there are many writers who are equal or
better.

Including Alfred Bester.

His one trick?  Ellison can describe characters in a way that makes them individuals, but also ties them into the rest of all humanity.  For instance, of Ally: “What it is, kind of person so in charge, so easy with they own self, they don’t have  to laugh at your poor dumb struttin’ Armani suit, or your bedroom done in
Laura Ashley, or that gig writing articles for TV Guide...” 

I was worried about reading this book. It was just over five hundred pages long, and it was about a war between two races, the Braxi and the Azeans.  I like war sci fi about as much as I like hard sci fi.

But hey, this wasn’t a book on war. It wasn’t hard sci fi.  Heck.  It wasn’t even written by a man.  “C” stands for Celia. That was a surprise, when I looked up the website – the male characters are more endearing in this story than the female.  And I loved this book so much, I wrote the author a thank you letter before I even finished the dang thing.  Now, I have to read her other works.

This was a sexy, intriguing story whose parts overlapped each other like the shingles on the roof of a really, really cool mansion.  Each portion moved, things happened, and the barbaric and arrogant Braxi were
the obvious superstars of this story. The plot twists and deviosity of it all was great fun. It was obviously influenced by Dune, but who among us hasn’t been?  I’m sure I will read many other books on this list that will show that tutelage. 
  
This story was my third and the best in a row of books on psychic ability – For Love of Mother Not and
Mefisto in Onyx – and not including the debonairThe Demolished Man or the insufferable Wild Seed.  Psychic phenomena are a common theme in science fiction, eh, although there is no suitable scientific explanation
for it in any of these books. I am glad that in my A Friend in the Dark  I am not going the psychic route and
there is a scientific explanation. It will make it stand out on its own.


Even better, In Conquest Born is not a perfect book.  That pleases me, because it’s proving my reading maxim: good doesn’t mean perfect. It means there is room for the rest of us to add to the collection.  As
Arwen had pointed out, this author’s language isn’t always spot on, and I never liked, related, or “got” Anzha. The last few hundred pages I thought were going to end in a completely lubricious liaison, which I dreaded, but thankfully, didn’t happen.   And the names sounded made up, and not like they followed any cultural system. (I’ll have to watch that in A Friend in the Dark).  Case in point, naming a gladiator Laun Set. 

Lawn Set?  Really? Do you  need a tarp to cover him in winter?  Never mind.

C.S. Friedman gives – aside from having a kickass cool race of beautiful warriors to play with  – each chapter a set up so it almost stands as its own story, with devilishly cool intrigue and plot twists within each. Plot twists! Go! Don’t wait until the end: do them all the time! That’s the lesson for writers.

As the fantasy artist Nene Thomas pointed out, never show complete nudity. There is lots of sex in this book, sex is actually a theme for the book, but no pornography – there are not graphic descriptions – and it makes the story superior. There’s no need to dip into the well. Readers are imaginative enough!

This story also has a flaw I would like to be wise of in my own work. I am not fond of stories where, against the odds of trillions of people in the galaxy, two people who have a specific background that stretches back
zillions of years, find each other. That coincidence just doesn’t work for me. However, it does not keep this from being a great story. 

Philip Jose Farmer is an author whose ideas are so very much cooler than his actual writing. Really, I desperately wish this story had been written by someone else, because it would have made a true reading gem.  What would this story have been like written by Effinger, or Zelazny? Blish? Incredible, probably. 
  
I wanted to skim most of The Unreasoning Mask because of the garbled paragraphs, where information was
placed in no specific order. Lines of thought were started in one paragraph, stopped for no reason, and picked up in another part of the chapter. The story was also told in an order that seemed to hinder, not help it, with many important scenes told afterwards in summary instead of what could have been heart-stopping scene.  It made the story difficult to understand, and almost impossible to become involved with.  For instance, if it had been my story, it would have started with the protagonist stealing the god-egg thing, not him sitting in a bar wondering what had happened. The story order got even odder as it went on.

And yet, he’s written 75 books. Farmer’s Riverworld series is well-loved and recommended, but I didn’t choose it because it is part of a series.  (I will try to catch the SciFi Channel version, and I think I would like to try at least to read To Their Scattered Bodies Go.)  The author also has some renown for creating the “The Wold Newton family,” which were “two fictional biographies of fiction characters (Tarzan and Doc Savage), that a radioactive meteorite fell in Wold Newton, England, in the late 18th century, resulting in genetic mutations affecting the occupants of a passing coach.  The progeny of these occupants were famous characters such as Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey” (thanks Wikipedia).  However, contrary to what his fans think, Farmer did not create cross-over fiction.  He only created a well-loved example of it. My guess is that the Wold Newton stories probably follow in the track of The Unreasoning Mask – wonderful ideas, weird execution. If Riverworld isn’t too wonky, I might try those stories, too.

His ideas are interesting, if pathetically executed.   It is highly likely this book was derivative of Campbell’s The Masks of Gods. Even more interesting is Farmer’s vocabulary.  His word choices suggest a deep understanding of meaning, experience, and culture – gavaged geese, cachinnating owls – and strangely, although he doesn’t seem able to cobble together a smooth sentence most of the time, his use of these words did not seem pedantic to me.  His best sentences are well-written and portend even deeper concepts.  My favorites: “In some ways, there is not much difference between eating the flesh of the god and eating crow,” and  “Pawns are not mere.  Nothing that is necessary is mere.”  This is the only story I know of outside of Effinger’s Budayeen Nights that feature a Muslim protagonist.

Lastly, the ending of this story has my total admiration and respect.  He ended this book exactly the way it should have – with a bang, not a whimper.  In his ending, the character learns what is important for himself, not exactly what the rest of the story needs for an ending.  It works beautifully.  This is the way I want to end books, with the story still rolling, but the story I wanted to tell having been told.

Lessons for writers: negative examples – art and craft are absolutely necessary to good story telling, especially (here) judicious use of scene and summary. Positive example – in addition to theme and craft, being able to load telling or sage observations on culture and humanity are really wonderful, and
make your ending sing with energy and meaning, but not completely wrapping up the story.  
 
Also, an aside lesson, stick to well known “Best of” list entries, kid. I bought this book because it was available at BOOKMAN in Anaheim.  I probably should have read To Their  Scattered Bodies Go. 
No problem in this instance, fortunately. The lessons are probably the same.

This is the story that the novels Bone Dance and When Gravity Fails, the movies The Matrix and Strange Days, and the television shows Dark Angel and Max Headroom absolutely owe their existence to.  Cyberpunk owes it gritty, in-your-face, neon high-relief to Neuromancer, which simultaneously defined the genre
and set the bar in 1984. I just can’t believe I hadn’t read this book before now, but I am very glad I have.

I didn’t read this book as closely as I should have, and will probably read it again in the future, because my dear darling Siberian Husky, Holly, had to be put to sleep this week. So, I’m not sure if my observation that the quality of the book dropped off toward the end is actually true.

I would also like to add that one of my favorite characters of all time, Frances from Bone Dance, probably can claim to be a direct descendent of Molly. One review I read called Molly “The Competent Man” of science fiction, which I immediately had to research. I’d never heard of it before, but I recognized it when I found an explanation of it.  The Competent Man is a Heinleinian motif, of the stolid individual who can rise above the seething masses, pull himselves up by his bootstraps, etc. I’ll have to look out for this in future books, especially the Heinlein I will be reading.  I can think of a few books that already exhibited this: Alas, Babylon, Andromeda Strain, and Mission of Gravity.  
 
The names in this book were jealousy-inducing.  Wintermute, 3Jane, 8Jean, Molly, Steppin’ Razor, razor girls. Language sings when it’s used the right way. Great names were laid over great characters – flawed, dangerous, fragile, history-steeped characters.  Yes, the science is here in spades, but poetic language draws out characters that drop you into this story as if you were in a matrix yourself.

I feel a certain amount of delight in how bad and cheerfully exuberant this book is – The Father of American Science Fiction was thrilled to death by the future of science, an obvious admirer of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and his story reminds me of ardent fanfic.  
 
Love, not art.           

Ralph brings together several stories written over ten years and published in Amazing Stories.  They feature the adventures of a man who has a “+” added to his name because he is one of the ten smartest men on the planet, and places a great reliance on ether, radium, and believe it or not, goat’s blood. The story serves as a platter to serve the real course – fascinating scientific possibilities.

I had to skim this somewhat to keep going, but there were some writing pleasures in here.  Gernsback showed a wonderful talent for explaining expressions on people’s face, and I really liked the last words,
reading Ralph’s name as “One To Forsee For One.”

The Hugo awards were named after Hugo Gernsback.  He was a Luxembourgian immigrant and an American entrepeneur who in 1925 created the first scifi pulp (“scientifiction” was his first try at naming the genre), Amazing Stories. It gives me comfort that such a magnificent genre found its genesis and support in
such humble and ardent exercise.  
 
Hugo Gernsback reminds us that one of the basic pillars of science fiction is not Story, or writing, or even science – it  is an absolute delight and joy in the fantastic.  This is a very important lesson in a way to generate excitement in a story.

Cyberpunk as water works. No kidding.  The character Spanner is another descendent of Molly in Neuromancer, I’m sure.  
 
Reading this book was a fluke – I added it to my list because I didn’t have a lot of “G’s” to read, because this book got the Nebula in 1995, and before I decided it was too dangerous to veer “off-list.”  I haven’t been too impressed with the Nebulas, to be frank. Just because it happened to be the best book that year doesn’t always mean it belongs on my best book list. By the time I got to this one, I was worried – many of my off-listers hadn’t panned out so well.  
 
This one was much better, a pleasant and readable surprise, and not only because the author had a firm understanding of how a sewage plant works (which strangely, I do too, because of my last job as Water Conservation Coordinator). I read it in a day or so, because I liked the triple-point of view and the setting and the characters. Other reviewers liked the themes of going down into hell and being forced to redeem oneself either successfully or not (Lot, Orpheus, some Babylonian dude), but the themes that really spoke to me were that of being an immigrant, not-belonging right inside your own world, or a strata of your world.  It was beautiful, wistful, dangerous, and lonely.

This was a finely written, autumn-poetic book that never quite got too literature-y, although I thought the ending was flawed, so much so that it threw the rest of the book off for me.  But it was lovely to read, I enjoyed the characters, and I am interested in reading Griffith’s first book, Ammonite. 
  
It’s hard for me to draw a lesson from this book, even though I truly enjoyed it.  Is it because she is not quite an Olympic writer (versus the Nationals, like in ice-skating?).  But it belongs on my list, none the less.  Maybe, finding themes in older literature that delineate the themes in my own story, and weaving references to that older literature back in?  Tricky to do, time consuming, but most certainly rewarding.  

Oh, and this is important: sophisticated inside knowledge (in this case, how waste water is handled, informs and strengthens a story as well.)

London, and the rest of the world goes by the wayside as several centuries churn over, and William Mandella is enlisted in an army that goes to war forever. Haldeman is a deft and wistful writer in the John Christopher and Roger Zelazny style that I lump myself into.  

So, even though this was war scifi – which I traditionally loathe – I enjoyed it.  This book had a deservedly happy ending that I was relieved to get to, and rewarded my suspicions as I read. Scientifically, it is very savvy. Given the relativity of time and space travel at times, your enemies can be from your future, or you can be from theirs.

I looked up the author’s website. He teaches science fiction writing at MIT.  And in his book, which was
written in 1974, the love interest of William Mandella has the same name as his wife.  That is totally cool.  I also think Orson Scott Card borrowed from this book liberally for Ender’s Game. 
 
Another thing that was very interesting about this book is that there were blocks and blocks of dialogue (something I have never found a reason to do,) as well as blocks and blocks of summary that worked really well.  Usually, those things suck. Why did his work?  Maybe because this story was about being far removed from things, and the writing reflected that?  Maybe because it was filled with lots of science?  I don’t know. So, I asked him.  
 
He said: Nye, I guess the complete explanation is not very helpful: I write a book that I would enjoy reading. I do like books with "lore" in them, whether they're sf or not.  
 
My niece, who is just starting to write sf, asked me a few months ago how to get around the problem of "infodumps" -- big blocks of information that the reader needs in order to understand the novel. I told her that if the information is presented in an entertaining way, the readers won't notice that they're getting their vitamins. To scramble a metaphor.

Joe H.  (Thank you, Mr. Haldeman.)

I decided not to read William Golding’s The Inheritors – it did not pass my “I must like it in twenty  pages.” No wonder its homage Quest for Fire bombed in the theaters...

On to Heinlein, one of the Big Guys. I read Have Spacesuit Must Travel  and his other children’s stories in middle school, and I loved them. I didn’t like the war stories, and just found Stranger in a Stranger Land painfully dumb, but I did like parts of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.  Although I often think of Heinlein as science fiction’s Hemingway with his simple prose, over-macho characterizations, badly-drawn women, and fixation on war, I have to say this.  Parts of those stories have stuck with me all those years. They have staying-power.  In Have Spacesuit, I always remember that the boy’s father had prepared for his education, but let the boy figure out a way to pave his own way. In Glory Road, I remember the guy who lost his memory and kept writing down his story and hiding it in a tin can so he could find it again.  In The Cat, I
remember that near the end, he reveals the protagonist is black, and of course, TNSTAAFL (There’s No Such Thing as A Free Lunch).

Picking a Heinlein was difficult. Many are loved by his fans and come highly recommended.  We had three
in our library, in one volume entitled A Heinlein Trio, so I went with the lovely title The Door into Summer.  
I’m glad.  It was good to read it and a good day to read it (Halloween), about his cat Petronius the Arbiter, and how much we love our pets.  But a book can’t start nicer than this book did; the first two pages of this story are absolutely perfect.  All of the dialogue is pitch-perfect, too. The book was short, only 160 pages, and about the inherent loops of time travel.  It for the most part worked.  Parts of it delighted me.

It’s not a perfect story, though. The object of the protagonist’s affection is kind of creepy when you think about it. The middle drags in spots. Heinlein writes with his thoughts black on his sleeve (which might not be
as cherished to all of us as they are to him), and without adjectives (this can make reading easy, but I think it also makes it a little dry in places). 
 
The cat Pete is named for a man who was either (historians are not sure) a free-speaking orator or Roman satirist who lived 27-66 AD and wrote the play Satyricon, which became a Fellini movie.  I’ll add that to the
reading list, along the other two stories included in this book, Puppet Masters and Doublestar.  I would also like to read his classic, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 
  
Concerning Heinlein’s Competent Man? Yes, he is here.  There might be more to him than the caricature I have drawn in my head.  Another reviewer said the Competent Man is based on a Nietzche construct.  According to Wikipedia, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzche describes the Übermensch.  By “will to
power,” The Superior Man destroys old ideals and moral codes, and then creatively overcomes nihilism and re-evaluates old ideals or create new ones.  Nietzche described Christianity as a nihilistic religion, because it removed meaning from this earthly life, and focused instead on a supposed afterlife. He also saw nihilism as a natural result of the destruction of the Christian conscience (God is Dead), a God-centered way of thinking, and insisted that it was something to be overcome, by returning meaning to the earth.  Placing belief or faith in anything transcendental is nihilistic, and would lead to the failure of man to become homo superior.  In short, Nietzche stated that everyone should take absolute responsibility for their own actions: that is the upside of the Competent Man.
 
A mouth-watering, jealousy opening introduction is a wonderful thing. Dialogue is character, so it is imperative to make sure your dialogue works. Find gorgeous ideas and build stories around them, and the ideas will sit in the readers’ minds, even if the writing and story doesn’t. These are great lessons.