An unwritten rule of dystopia: Everyone Dies.  The protagonists do not meet with merry endings in these stories, not a one.  This particular one is environmental dystopia, fresh on the heels of Silent Spring.  It made me realize something I probably should have already, that dystopias are “problems writ large,” not necessarily a prediction of what the future may bring.  Brunner’s polluted planet that collapses into war and plague seems a bit dire forty years after this book was written, but his concerns are realistic.  E. Coli outbreaks, terrorism attacks with airplanes, and an obtuse president (Prexy) who would consider a Nobel Peace Prize a direct affront to the United States? 

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. 

I’ve wanted to read this book since I heard about it.  I love the title, from Milton’s Lycidas.  When this was written in 1972, he’d already written 70 books, including the Hugo winning Sands of Zanzibar.  Jealousy ensues.

So, in jealous pique, I will bring up one of the worst “puh-lease” reactions I’ve ever had to a book in my life.  Black man is foully killed in misunderstanding after being found grasping at white woman with torn clothing and bleeding (from menstruation).  What’s worse than a reveal?  A completely artificial setup only to achieve an effect.   

Another great 50's book, another book about hive (or here, gestalt) intellect, and another foundation writer.  I do not see how Mr. Sturgeon could not have influenced Stephen King, Peter Straub, Peter S. Beagle, Frank Herbert, John Crowley, and so many other authors.  This book addresses telepathy, teleportation, telekinises.

I really enjoyed the story, it was so complete and encapsulated upon itself,  it was difficult to tease out a lesson from it.  Therefore, I am going to steal from Delaney’s On Writing, which has a section addressing suspense, surprise, drama, and violence.   Chip advocates that violence makes the reader shut down, and that suspense, surprise, and drama are better forms for the novel.  This book may very well be proof: you never see Lone die, or Janie abused, the twins beaten, but the suspense is flavorful and memorable.  It works.

This one belongs on the list.  Fractured, dangerous characters, imaginative science, plot ante-ups.  Written in 1985, it covers micro-sentience much more refreshingly than Brain Plague would fifteen years later.  Added treats for me were the familiar settings – La Jolla, Livermore, Salinas, Highway 5 south, Irvine, the San Luis Reservoir, Carmel, and even ending up in Wales.  I thought the science was wonderful, but I’m not sure how much a novice without a few years of Biology classes under their belts would glean from it.  It was book candy for me.

It’s also a book I couldn’t put down, and I read it in a few days. The style of it is a really intoxicating merge of the wistfulness of Gene Wolfe and John Crowley, with the visual, visceral immediacy of Stephen King and Alec Effinger.  Smooth and gritty at the same time.  How do they do that?

The flaws of the primary character, presented early and clearly, drive this story: Vergil I. Ulum does not understand consequences of action.  It is a great lesson, in high relief: it is not the heroic parts of a story that make the fireworks.

When I first embarked on this reading list, I had intended Roger Zelazny to be my last book, a fitting honor.  I had intended on reading authors A through Z, roughly four books a letter.  But I had not known that there were authors I would have to set aside, books I would have to skip, and letters which are not represented by any authors at all.  Besides, I don’t count terribly well.

So, I have seven more books to go to make the titular hundred.  This gives me a chance to include Dune and Ender’s Game which surely belong on this list but I had left off because I had read both so many times.  And it gives me a chance to add a few more authors whom I have not had the opportunity to sample, and who may, or may not have a place here.

Continuing on, I already knew I would pity the author who would have to follow Roger Zelazny. Let’s see.  Who shall it be?  I chose Thomas Pynchon.

Thomas Pynchon is considered a writing phenomenon, a writer of real literature, and is honored by all sorts of people.  Praise has been liberally dumped on him for several of his books.  Gravity’s Rainbow is introduced as a story about a guy who gets erections prior to WWII bombings – pass on that one – and V was nine hundred pages, so I decided the cowardly route: the much lauded 152-page The Crying of Lot 49. 

Oh, it sucked.  Post Modernism.  Bleah.  I hated it with Delany,  Disch, and Russ, and I hate it here.  There is no science fiction here, either; so I finally decided not to include it in my reading list, even though I did sort of finish it.  Because it was short and billed as masterful, I skimmed it through, and found nothing even remotely appealing.  What were people thinking?  Worse, it is billed as satire, but as a dorky precursor to The DaVinci Code, it only comes off as extremely pretentious writing of the“Oh, look how cleverly ditzy and satiric my sentences are!” ilk.  Yech.

Okay, I’ve been thinking it for quite a while, but I am now saying it here.  You know the quip that Ginger Rogers was a better dancer than Fred Estaire because she did everything he did, but backwards and in heels?  Fine science fiction as a genre is better than “literature” because it has to do everything that literature does – build a Story with cadence, timbre, poetry, thematic resonance, everything – and it must also effectively braid in scientific elements to support all of those things.  Moreover, those scientific elements have very heavy work to do: in addition to their duties to the story and plot, their effects on human condition and character must not only be anticipated, but prognosticated.

First, I felt embarrassment and shame at even thinking of offering critique or thought on a book by Roger Zelazny. I worship Roger Zelazny.  He is a Writing God.  My shame was so deep I questioned my arrogance in trying to critique the 92 books that had come before this one.  How dare I offer my opinions and feelings about these books!  Oh, it just completely unglued me.

Zelazny.  Zelazny. 

I wrote to him and he wrote back the year before he died.  And my novel The Crows of Bedu has its origins as a paean to Amber.  I began reading Roger Zelazny back in junior high, and even though most of his books are in my pantheon of classics – Chronicles of Amber (of course), Roadmarks, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Doorways in the Sand, Jack of Shadows, The Dream Master – there have been other books of his that I have not managed to get through, one of which is Lord of Light.  I had a copy of it, had tried reading it a few years back, and had dropped off in the middle.  Because of that, and because many critics deem it his best work, it seemed the best choice for the reading list.

And what is worse than facing God?  Coming to the horrible realization that God may not be all that He is cracked up to be.  Oh, I should have known this was coming: imperfection has pretty much been foreshadowed by this entire reading list, but it was still pretty hard to take this particular time around.

In the first portion of this book, Zelazny used a high-priest religious voice that made it difficult for me to get into the story.  The tone and pace pushed me away, though I could see exactly why he chose to use it. I could also see why I had never finished the book.  And as I read farther than I ever had before, I also became very confused: I couldn’t follow what the characters were doing, or why.   

It reminded me of what Taryn and I used to observe in Shakespeare plays: some actors can do Shakespeare, and some can’t.  The ones who can seem to speak directly to you in clear English, regardless of the four hundred year old words; the ones who can’t are speaking gibberish.  This archaic style seemed gibbery to me.  I don’t think it was worked enough in these early parts, brought to its final and best form, because I now know Roger Zelazny can do better.  He does so in this book, later. 

Oh, it’s always nice to be redeemed and welcomed back into the fold, especially when living in terror that I had been worshiping a false God all these years.  Oh, He’s there, man.  In spades.

After the first half of the book, confused and shocked, I was cruising Amazon where I learned the book is not written in chronological order: the first part is actually the last part of the story. When I learned that, I asked “Why?” and “How was I supposed to figure that out without reading Amazon?” ... and then I realized... this is a story about a far future Hinduism and reincarnation.  If you are continuously reincarnated, there really isn’t a beginning or an end.

It’s unbelievably brilliant.  So Roger Zelazny is not only Writing God, he is Writing Genius.  The middle and the end (minus battle scenes – I am remembering I am not a fan of battle scenes and Zelazny is and I feel no shame in saying these things now because I’ve suffered too many epiphanies with this book already) are electrocuting, lightning-bolt genius. 

An example: “At the place called Worldsend, where there is nothing beyond the edge of Heaven but the distant flicker of the dome and, far below, the blank ground, hidden beneath a smoke-white mist, there stands the open-sided Pavilion of Silence, upon whose round, gray roof the rains never fall, and across whose balconies and balustrades the fog boils in the morning and the winds walk at twilight, and within whose airy chambers, seated upon the stark, dark furniture, or pacing among the gray columns, are sometimes to be found the gods contemplative, the broken warriors or those injured in love, who come to consider there all things hurtful or futile, beneath a sky that is beyond the Bridge of the Gods, in the midst of a place of stone where the colors are few and the only sound is the wind – there, since slightly after the days of the First, have sat the philosopher and the sorceress, the sage and the magus, the suicide, and the ascetic freed from the desire for rebirth or renewal; there, in the center of renunciation and abandonment, withdrawal and departure, are the five rooms named Memory, Fear, Heartbreak, Dust and Despair; and this place was built by Kubera the Fat who cared not a tittle for any of these sentiments, but who, as a friend of Lord Kakin, had done this construction at the behest of Candi the Fierce, sometimes known as Durga, and as Kali, for he alone of all the gods possessed the Attribute of inanimate correspondence, whereby he could invest the works of his hands with feelings and passions to be experienced by those who dwelled among them.”  (What is this?  Why, this, is a 276 word sentence.)

And another amazingly long one that shows he is absolutely the master of his prose: “...it was said by the poet Adasay that they resembled at least six different things (he was always lavish with his similes): a migration of birds, bright birds, across a waveless ocean of milk; a procession of musical notes through the mind of a slightly mad composer; a school of those deep-swimming fish whose bodies are whorls and runnels of light, circling about some phosphorescent plant within a cold and sea-deep pit; the Spiral Nebula, suddenly collapsing upon its center; a storm, each drop of which becomes a feather, songbird, or jewel; and (and perhaps most cogent) a Temple full of terrible and highly decorated statues, suddenly animated and singing, suddenly, rushing forth across the world, bright banners playing in the wind, shaking palaces and toppling towers, to meet at the center of everything, to kindle an enormous fire and dance about it, with the ever present possibility of either the fire or the dance going completely out of control.”

And his always enviable dialogues: “This is not true,” said the god.  “You talk as if we desire perpetually this burden of godhood, as if we seek to maintain a dark age that we may know forever the wearisome condition of our enforced divinity!” 

And: “For that, your death shall not be a clean one.”

And: ‘It reads: “Go away.  This is not a place to be.  If you do try to enter here, you will fail and also be cursed.  If somehow you succeed, then do not complain that you entered unwarned, nor bother us with your deathbed prayers.” Signed, “The Gods.”’

I bow before Your Greatness, O Zelazny.  Please, I beg of thee,  forgive my doubting you.

I thank you for the gifts this story gives.  First, style is wonderful, but only to the point it includes readers, not excludes them.  And for protagonist Sam, who dies several times throughout this story, thank you for making it absolutely clear that a story’s stakes must become more and more dire. 

According to Wikipedia, Yevgeny Zamyatin was synesthate, which may have made him, at his core, at the genetic level, a poet. 

“Algebraic rain,” and “You too must have drops of sunny forest blood” hint at his ability.  More tellingly: “I had never known this before, but now I know it, and you know it: laughter can be of different colors.  It is only an echo of a distant explosion within you.  It may be festive – red, blue, and golden fireworks; or– torn fragments of a human body flying up.”  His ability also leads to more abstract emotional cross-overs:“It was like holding up your hands and shouting to a bullet: you still hear your ridiculous “Don’t,” and the bullet has already gone through you, you are already writhing on the floor.”

But Zamyatin took this innate ability that allowed him to see a cold pale blue along with the letter “L” out of simple poetic imagery and used it to examine and demonstrate the less visible properties of the human soul.  It’s amazing. 

“It has never occurred to me before, but this is truly how it is: all of us on earth walk constantly over a seething, scarlet sea of flame, hidden below, in the belly of the earth.  We never think of it.  But what if the thin crust under our feet should turn into glass and we should suddenly see... I became glass.  I saw within – myself.”

This eerie poetry is not the reason that We is on most science fiction reading lists: written around 1921, it is also the first dystopia of note, making an obvious trail which was eventually followed by Brave New World, 1984, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and apparently, Vonnegut’s Piano Player.

It’s not a perfect book, though I am finding there may be no such thing.  I carried this book around in my purse for a few weeks, reading chapters here and there, but I had to make a conscious effort to sit down and finish it.  The plot plods, in the way books of this vintage can.

If anyone wants to say, “I know science fiction,” I think they have to read this book.  It also has a critical lesson for writers: analyze and more importantly, describe, the human being’s ticking mind and beating heart beneath, and yes, their little hidden souls.  It’s the real story.

Story.

This book was a confection, pure reading pleasure, even with fairly non-sympathetic characters.  Jane Yolan is another writer from my adolescence, and now I know why she had such a strong pull on me.  I wish I could write with her movie star clarity and poetic poignancy.  This is another story that looks at euthanasia, but not as dystopia.   

“A Queen knows everything.  I know past and present and future.  I see so clearly I see the shadows.  Do you know that I am called Queen of Shadows?” Perfect.  And points for a three hundred pound heroine.

But the tricky question is: how do you get this to paper?  The writing here feels real, it makes you feel like you are there.  The best I can come up with is that the writer needs to feel like she is there when she’s writing.  How else could this be conveyed?

I chose this story instead of better known classics like The War of the Worlds or The Time Machine, because this is the book that is quoted often by Frank Herbert in Dune.  I’d never known where “The Sleeper Wakes”  had come from, but I could feel the resonance, the power,  in it.  It came from this book.

It is not a good book.  Frank Herbert must have taken on its mantle because he could feel the strength of the ideas within yearning to be better articulated – a person becomes a pawn for two governments vying for dominance in a crowded, industrial London.  There is no doubt that this book laid the ground for the dystopias that followed it, and there were chill ideas that pleased me, such as “euthanasy.”  But this is very much a Victorian story, with lots of fainting and gasping; I had to quickly skim the last third of it just to get through.

Okay, so it IS possible for a character to be TOO emotional.

“Wondering itself was never weighed.”

Often writers will make their protagonist a writer, but in the book, the writer makes the protagonist a philosopher.  There is an obvious reason for this. 

I had read this book before in my early teens, one of the wonderful books Taryn gave me.  One day, all women disappear.  In an alternate universe, all men disappear.  The story has not lost its glimmer after thirty years, even through the tarnish left by its time of blind racism and condescension towards homosexuals.  Unlike the books that followed this 1951 story, the characters here are not in any way caricatures of men and women; it deeply examines men and women... because the author is clearly a philosopher.  

And also a fine writer.  Points for this description: “His black Vandyke bristles as if its follicles were capable of pointing their separate hairs.”  Extra points for the mandola-church built by the philosopher’s neighbor and its possible influence on Vonnegut’s Bokononism.  Extra credit for making me almost cry in the Yuma Holiday Inn restaurant as I ate breakfast and read the ending because I was so grateful the main characters were reunited.

The real strength of this book was not its discussion and analysis of how people work but much more the great hardships the characters went through that were so grueling that it was their emotional state that was both changed and transformed by the ending as they were brought back together.  How do events effect people’s emotions?  How do emotions effect people’s characters? Important lessons.

Kirvin Engle (named after Madeleine L’Engle I hope) is a precocious young historian traveling back through time to the 1300s.  This book won both a Hugo and Nebula, with accolades from writers no less than Roger Zelazny himself, whiny old Harlan Ellison, and Gardner Dozois

For most of the book, I didn’t get it.  Yes, the medieval culture is fascinating, and the epidemiology predicts our bird-flu panic almost fifteen years before its time, but this book is more than twice as long as it should have been.  The pacing is interminable, repetitive, and very, very frustrating.  Kirvin doesn’t get to the 1300's until page 80, and is sick in bed until page 171.  What the characters learns comes long after a reader has known it and has been screaming for it for a 100 pages.  Kirvin is likable, as is her worried professor, Dr. Dunworthy, but you never feel like you are in their heads.

Do award winners really just have to present a good scientific premise and a hint of a really nice theme (God would have never sent his Son to Earth if He had known what would have happened to him), or was this the science fiction community propping up one of their own?

Perhaps they were won over by the saving grace of this book: the relationships between the characters.  This story became very touching as Kivrin cared for the noble children Agnes and Rosemund, and the poor priest named Roche.  As all the characters try to save each other from the forbidding black tower of bubonic plague, I liked this book very much at its end.    

Then I woke up in the middle of the night, angry at how emotionally manipulative the ending was.  Okay, the lessons: (1) Don’t dawdle, don’t repeat things over and over, (2) premise and theme, learn it and love it, (3) characters’ relationships are endearing, but it may not be enough in the end.