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#19:  334 by Thomas M. Disch

6/22/2013

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Oh, I was worried about reading this  one. Disch and Delaney are friends. What could I expect from this book?  Moreover, Disch has a number of books considered “best.”  I chose not to read Camp Concentration, his classic, since it has a similar storyline to Flowers for Algernon, which is also on my list. Still, this book treads on the edge of acceptability for other reasons entirely.  This is an “experimental” book, as far as style is concerned. When the author succeeded, he succeeded beautifully. But when he failed, it was either a little too “literature book club of the month” for me, or worse.

For instance, the book is written in “dippy omniscient,” which I define as “everybody’s point of view is covered, but nobody knows what the hell is going on.” Other readers had issues with the last two sections, which jump back and  forth in time, but my real concerns for this book was this rather double-jointed
movement of point of view from paragraph to paragraph (and too many damn pronouns, that’s for sure) and the predictably sad and pointless futures of so many of the characters.  I mean, there are people with pointless futures.   I’m just not sure I want to read about them. 
 
Another reason that 334 barely makes my list is that it is not so much a novel as a collection of stories and
novellas, all about people – often the same people – who live in a tenement building in the 2020s.  I don’t
know. I think this might have  worked better if the stories had been about entirely different people, giving a
bigger spectrum of experience. 
 
The quality of stories was really uneven  for the above reasons, but some of the stories were truly excellent, because  Disch has a harlequin grasp of language.  I really enjoyed “Bodies,” “Angouleme,” and “Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire” because the language and emotions were so fine.  I found my next favorite single sentence, too: “He loved, and what  seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more  metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer.”  But others were pointlessly tacky.

One of the things I enjoyed about this book was its premise was announced in the first few pages: the Dantean maxim that one creates one's own hell and carries it around with them. Also, I pleased myself by figuring out what an amorphous chart meant, the one that preceded the final time-hopping cantatas of 334. It mapped out where in reality and character the 40 little tales were. That was just going to nag me until the end of time if I hadn't realized what it was.

The lessons for writers: writing can be uneven, but it is better if it’s not. Describing a person in one or even a few sentences is an art.  The woman who doesn’t remember the name of a lover who once got a vasectomy for her.  The man as neat as a polka dot handkerchief.  These are gems, although they do need to be couched in a fine story and good science fiction.  If I could impart even a little of this to my stories, I would be pleased.
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#20: Permutation City by Greg Egan

6/22/2013

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Ironic that a story with this title should go on and on and on and on... Einstein on the Beach, indeed.  The first few chapters of this book were intriguing – you can’t imagine how The Matrix didn’t steal from this
story – but the remainder of it was as bland and flavorless as the automatons who populate the virtual worlds. It should have been thrilling.  It wasn’t.  And although I eventually figured out what was going on, the scientific explanations made no sense to me.

This was written in 1995, and is the youngest story I have read so far. It took forever to get through the back half of this book, and I skimmed a lot of it. There were paragraphs of passive sentences.  
 
At least I can say I’ve finished the first twenty books of my “100 Great Science Fiction Books” reading list.

A lesson – just because you can mention every permutation (ha) of what can happen in a story, doesn’t mean your story should just be a list of everything that could possibly happen in a speculative setting. 
For instance, this book suggested computer-generated weather control of hurricanes – an Einsteinic coincidence in this week of Hurricane Katrina – but it never became part of the story.  


Science is cool, but it’s cooler if it directly relates to your story. It’s also cool if your characters are actually
interesting.
  Yes, science is the backbone of science fiction.  But in a Story, if you can see the backbone, what you have is a compound fracture.
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    I read "100 Great Science Fiction Books" from 2005 to 2008, and they are described here, along with what I thought might could be good lessons for writers, gleaned from each.  Here is the INDEX for 100 GREAT SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS. 

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