I didn’t know it, but I had already read Russell Hoban.  In fact, Russell Hoban may have been among the first authors I ever read.  He and his first wife wrote the Francis the Badger series that I read in first and second grade (and partly fell in love with Blue Willow China because of, as well as small animals wearing clothing).  One of his stories was made into a 1977 movie I liked called The Mouse and his Son, which I remember because of the pretty animation and the preoccupation of the father for treacle candy.

This book took a VERY LONG time to read.  A few weeks.  I can read about 40 pages an hour smoothly, but I was hard-pressed to do more than 10 a day with this book.  That’s because this book is not actually written in English, but a post-Apocalyptic pidgin that forced me to sound out most of the sentences, and created a very strange dynamic.  I couldn’t skim, and I had to think about everything I was reading, and still, I didn’t quite understand everything.  I felt like I was in the story, a slightly retarded little girl in a filthy shift trailing after the main characters.  I was interested in what they did, but I didn’t quite understand everything.  I was enchanted though, that I understood anything at all.  (Funny, the characters seemed to have the same feeling about what was happening to them.)  There’s never been a book that needed Cliff Notes more.  And this is one book I would have been glad to have them for.

Fortunately, there are a lot of internet sites dedicated to Riddley Walker with vocabulary lists, as Hoban has a lot of devoted fans in literature and mythology.  I was constantly looking up words to make sure they meant what I thought they did.  My favorite words were “larf” for laugh (because it sounds funny), and “arga warga” for “something bad happening to you,” which sounds like how the Cookie Monster used to eat cookies on in Sesame Street (which would make sense, since Hoban wrote children’s books), and myndy for “smart.” There were dozens of other cool words and thoughts, too.  Did I understand it all?  No.  Will I have the wherewithall (wherewithall = patience) to read it again to absorb more? 

Oh, probably not.  So much of this book confused me and I didn’t get.  What I did like is the main character’s Riddley pondering of things and what he thought those things meant, the way he watched his mind interpret things.  It caught a soulful, mysterious quality that I can only describe as “holy,” describing that which is felt, known, but not seen – seeing the water pushed up by the whale beneath, but not actually seeing the whale.  And of course, being post-apocalyptic, London is gone...

 What does Riddley Walker give me as a writer?  A useful tool – letting your characters ponder things that may not be directly related to the story.  These lines of thoughts can then flush a story out and make it greater when it all comes together. 

First, I bought the wrong book: Brave New World Revisited.  Then, I got the right one from Amazon.  Then, Chris picked up another one up at Book Man over Thanksgiving.  We are now well stocked in this 1931 classic.  I had seen the seventies movie, and part of the SciFi Channel (ick) movie.  I had not read the book before.

I was swept off of my feet by the magnificent first chapters of this book.  Although the characters rarely rise above their stations as essay-ic mouthpieces and none of them were truly sympathetic for me, I greatly appreciated the Shakespeare-quoting Savage and multitudinous points that struck home like Robin Hood on methamphetamine.  It’s no accident this book takes The Tempest as its jumping-off point.  This story chronicles a delirious insanity that doesn’t quite make sense and yet is obviously a pillar of a temple dedicated to our deepest secrets and needs.

Some of the reviewers on Amazon debated Huxley’s depiction of the future, but it seemed clear to me that he was mocking his own (and our) culture.  I can almost hear him: “Well, if we must be split into social classes, we should at least be humanitarian about it.  Make people be better adapted to their servitude.  In fact, make them enjoy it.”  For me, this isn’t a story about totalitarianism and lack of freedom – it’s a story about clinging to systems that work for us despite their amorality.  Then, I realized after reading the part on “The Absence of God as Proof of God” that the unquestioning following of a social system to its natural, though ludicrous conclusion, by absence of not discussing it, proves its existence as a theme.

Reading Brave New World, I was taken aback by my own reaction – given how unfair and frightening the world is now, perhaps this alternate variation would not be such a bad thing.  Is it really any worse than what we have now?  No!  And I think that’s the point of this story.

This book comes at an odd time for me in my own story-writing process.  I am working on The Red Road, and one of its themes is that civilization exists because humans are afraid of being lonely.  What did Brave New World give The Red Road?  This: society has many ills, but perhaps we prefer those ills since they also stand to protect us against our own innate fears.

Once again, an older work of literature informs and directs a story.  I’m not sure I have the fortitude to choose a work as nervy as The Tempest, but I could follow the lead of “Making a point by not making a point.”  (However, I wouldn’t choose it as a first or second theme, because it would be too obtuse and confusing for the reader.)  

 Oh.  There can also be more than one theme to a book.  That’s an important (and easier) lesson.

This is another delightful book from the fifties, a true “pulp” adventure, and a two-complete-novels-for-35-cents, with another book if you flipped it over by another author (Dome Around America by Jack Williamson).  How cool is that? 

Over-the-top characters and writing that let you feel every comic-book gasp and drop of sweat. “Princess of Mars” writing, not literature, and therefore a guilty, but genuine pleasure.  But the ending geared up to something exciting and amazing (and if only William Golding could have imbued his Neanderthals with that kind of drama!)  I also liked the character names in this story: Keiris, The Microfilm Mind, Haze-Gaunt.

Mr. Harness was a patent lawyer who also wrote, which gives the rest of us writers-in-the-after-hours some comfort.  He died just this last September, at the age of 85, and I am honored to have his little book on my list.  If not for the best sentences, then for my favorite metaphor – a horizonless chessboard – and for the last line of his book, which he had said was dedicated to his Texan poet laureate friend.

Not huge lessons, but nice ones.  Have a secret or a problem that pulls the characters (and the reader) relentlessly through the story.  Have a stunning last line.

I did not go down south with Chris for Thanksgiving, because I felt a cold coming on.  Chris is, however, going to BOOKMAN with another one of my needy lists in hand.  I instead am sequestered in our warm home, cozy, glad that rain has come, and reading books.

For Thanksgiving, I decided to read Make Room!  Make Room!  There couldn’t have been a better choice.  Aside from being my 33rd scifi book and marking the third-way mark in this amazing reading list, it is about overpopulation, poverty, the corrosion of humanity, the Millennium, and has a Thanksgiving Day in it.  Great things to ponder on a day where you count your blessings.  It is not about cannibalism, like the movie Soylent Green “based” on this book (I haven’t seen it, except for that famous last clip: “Soylent Green!  It’s people!”).  But cannibalism would have actually been a forgivable faux pax, given the grim setting of this book.

This is an extremely well-written book.  I think it has the best first paragraph of any book I’ve read so far, and it’s a doozy.  It also  tirades eloquently on a number of issues that are still hot spots today: water shortages, farms vs. cities, seawater intrusion (!), birth control, political corruption, poverty.  There is a long list of references in the back, although Silent Spring is not included, and I really thought it would.  I think what made the book really sing to me was to show how all these world trends really matter to us – because in the end, they will erode our relationships and love of one another – shown eloquently by the girl named Shirl, crying alone in a filthy, small room.

When you write, have a beautiful first paragraph.  That sure goes a long way.  Unperfect characters are wonderful, too.  No one in the book was above reproach, and yet, you felt for all of them. 

Perhaps because they weren’t perfect.

The weak shall inherit the galaxy.  And London (renamed Carter’s Snort) will be destroyed.

Well, this book is a first: StarWarsian space opera written before Star Wars, in Dickensian sensibility, and perfectly summed up by the Anarchist characters in this story, who fought their space wars as dandies, in alien ships with names likes Les Fleurs du Mal  and Atalanta in Calydon.  For the first half of this book, this tact doesn’t work well.  The flourished language and poetic descriptions get tangled in the feet of the action, coming off as somewhat psychedelic and unfortunately annoying, but by the middle of the book, they match strides and start to learn to run together.  By the end, some of the analogies and metaphors grow a little too cloying – perhaps trying too hard to be Ballardesque – however, there were other moments that deserve little monuments of their own in the Hall of Writing Greatness.

As I started reading this, I though to myself: this guy would be better as a fantasy writer.  When I went onto the internet, I saw that this was one of his first books, and as his career stretched out, yes, he did indeed go on to write fantasy.  One review said that if he had died young, The Centauri Device would have shown him to be a writer with a great future, instead of this just being one book in his talented canon.  I’ll have to add him to my fantasy list, I think.

I knew I was going to be in for a ride when I saw the quote that opened this book.  Mr. Harrison quoted from John Milton, but not from Paradise Lost.  It was from another work – Comus.  This told me “I’m a real writer, damn it, and I know what real literature is.  Watch out.”

Harrison makes good on the promise of his opening quote.  With beautiful language, The Centauri Device delivers that stunning literature: “Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial literals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition.  He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in.  From that first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more: and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize and moralize the grasping hand.”

“His dreams, those prices comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling around in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other.  Politics, religion, ideology – desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsiblity for his own actions: abdications.  His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest: but he’s always trying to hide the one behind the other.”

Is this point of view from the arcane Comus?  As an aside on the arcane, there are a zillion book reviews and lists of good books on Amazon, which I have used to guide and inform writing my list.  One reviewer has driven me into fits of Insane Jealousy because he gave his credentials to review fantasy only as “Cellar Door,” an Extremely Arcane Reference to J.R.R. Tolkein’s comment that “Cellar Door is one of English’s most beautiful sounds” and in fact saying, in two words, that this reviewer knows and believes in the beauty of language.  I am so jealous, I can’t stand it – both of Cellar Door and the quote from Comus.

And as beautiful and poetic as the metaphors of this book are, the real lessons of this book are in the heightening risks the protagonist takes until the end of the story.  Each chapter grows more and more perilous for him, and the stakes grow higher and higher.  Oh, also arcane literature references are a must.  Don’t ask me why.  But they are so cool, I just can’t stand it.

Here it is: the books of Ayn Rand, the philosophy of Abraham Lincoln, Heinlein’s Competent Man, and the Holy Quran as science fiction.  And a revelation that delights me no end: I think the reason these literary riffs work so well is for the same reason that Luz Behrmann (director of Moulin Rouge) refers to Story with a reverent capital “S” – on one level, Story is its own world with its own rules.  For that reason, as in this book, it is other stories and other writings that give it a glow of authenticity, perhaps with even more weight than events or science from our world.

Thinking about it.  The Drowned World and Heart of Darkness.  Brave New World and The Tempest.  The Man in the High Castle and I Ching.  Mefisto in Onyx and Faust.  The Door into Summer and Satyricon.  The Centauri Device and Comus.  And now, this book: Beggars in Spain and Fountainhead.

I so very much enjoyed reading this book, too.  I knew I would, ever since we brought it back from the used book store in Anaheim, last July.  I did have a false disappointment when I first started it, though.  The writing is imprecise; the science of sleep is skewed (long ago, I did have both a fascination with sleep and dreams, as well as ethology classes and Sleep Psychology in Irvine); it started with a juvenile character’s point of view.  These flaws placed boulders right in front of the starting gate, as far as I was concerned.  But imprecise writing is much more forgivable than pretentious writing (ala Octavia Butler, for instance), and given the deep history and life that swam out of the pages of this book, I was soon lost in the story, not noticing the writing at all, but living in the story itself – the sign of a great book.  There were parts I lost faith in, but the story quickly wound me back in.  Therefore, I look at this book as not so much as a piece of literature but as a living entity with its own flaws and outstanding virtues – an entity for whom I have great affection.

I know why I connected with this book so strongly.  It touches on many themes dear to my heart, but it touches on something that has plagued me in particular: the envy of others.  I have always dealt (and not well) with other people who were angry and hateful toward me because I could do (with my writing, my creativity, my comprehension, my sense of honor) what they could not – because, as my father put it when I was in first grade and ranting against the unfairness of it all, “They hate you because you are the bear with the brightest eyes.”  Well, finally, here was a story that understood that, and therefore, understood me.

Kress writes winning characters.  After looking up her website (I was wondering if she were local, because there are allusions to both Morro Bay and Monterey – she’s not), I saw that she had written a nonfiction book on characterization.  I bought it.  Sigh.  And because there was a discount, I bought another of her books on plotting.  Double sigh.  I’m an addict.

In anticipation that this would be a wonderful book, I had bought a fancy beaded and tasseled “Dragonology” bookmark to replace the worn paper one that I had bought at the natural history museum in Paris.  (That one was supposed to end up in the photo album.  It still might.)  It dawns on me that I have always admired those lovely, fancy bookmarks that are for sale everywhere (especially in bookstores), but have never bought one.  That will change.  It has pleased me so much, it is just ridiculous that a small piece of plastic can make me feel that rich and worldly.

This writing lesson is so valuable for me: that like our own world, other literatures act as a kind of physics in the world of Story.  There is a great lesson on character building, too.  Regardless of the flaws a character has, if they have some admirable qualities, they become sympathetic.  I loved Leisha’s “naive idealism” and light-filled joy, but I also loved Jennifer’s fierce ability to control her thoughts and create three-dimensional diagram trees in the bleakest of environments.

They might as well be jewels, the beglittered red and green plastic beads on my bookmark.  The bright red tassel might as well be antique silk.  They please me so much. 

I had been hesitant to read Flowers for Algernon because I had read the short story version back in sixth grade for my “language arts” class, and remember it almost too well: it is sad, sad, sad.   No surprise here – the adult, flushed out version, made me want to sob as I finished it.  I have had many emotional reactions to the books I’ve read, but this is the first time my vision has gone foggy with tears.  (John Crowley came close, but there was a slightly different texture (dread) in the emotion.)   However, this story has transcendent moments, moments of amazing tenderness and insight, and it was a lightning, don’t-want-to-put-down read.  I finished the book within hours of picking it up.

This is one of the books that Chris moved with him to Northern California – an old library book from the San Marino Public Library, with the typed pocket and card still inside the front cover.  It originally cost 75 cents, back in 1968.  This was also the perfect book to follow Beggars of Spain, and it very probably inspired that book: Charlie Gordon suffers the envy of his fellows for his fleeting genius, and knowing nods are given both to Plato’s The Republic and to Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Moreover, the character of Charlie is completely, absolutely riveting and compelling.        

This is a story about compassion and affection, and it shows in the very language.  A reader worries for Charlie’s safety, for a lab mouse’s safety, for the safety of the women who try to care for Charlie.  The merest details echo those themes: walls that are too plain and straight are not above the author’s concern.  Even the furniture occupies the reader: the mangy green couch, and the old mattress with wires gaping out of its sliced belly, were double-edged images – both poetically clear and evoking sympathy.

In other books, I’ve noticed that language reinforces the story and theme, but here it is in high relief.  Not only Charlie’s grasp and loss of language, but the care put into every image.  This is not done of f the cuff.  It requires planning.  

Is this a coincidence, or what?  Did this book on mistreated telepaths inspire both Flowers for Algernon and Beggars in Spain?  There are chapters named “Three Blind Mice” and “Beggars in Velvet!”  I also think, given the writing style and imagery, this author might have been a strong influence on Roger Zelazny.  (Actually, looking up Kuttner right now on Wikipedia, Zelazny is quoted as considering Kuttner a direct influence on Amber.  Man, am I getting good at this!)

I now know for sure that Flowers for Algernon did influence Beggars in Spain: I have read Kress’s book Beginnings, Middles, and Ends, and her first example of a great character is Charlie Gordon.  Now, that can’t be a coincidence.  This, though?  Suspicious, but I can’t be sure...

This is one of the used books I’ve ordered from the dealers on Amazon.com, a small old hardback from a British science fiction club, a 1962 printing of this 1953 story.  There is no doubt in my mind that this story could only have been written in the early fifties – after the horrors of World War II but before the wildly individualistic Summer of Love.

In Mutant’s loosely connected “Baldy” stories, nuclear war creates genetic mutants with telepathic abilities, as well as genetically-flawed telepathic “paranoids” and “psychotics.”  The premise here is that assimilation is absolutely necessary for survival, and that there is something hideously wrong with you if you don’t or can’t... and that murder is an appropriate response for those who don’t fit in.

Sheesh.

This is one of the stories that probably established telepathy/psychic as a science fiction favorite topic, and I think it examines the life of a telepath much better than many other books (although In Conquest Born is still my favorite story) and it almost describes how telepathy could work.  But not quite.  As an aside, Kuttner worked in close partnership with his wife, C.L. Moore, and it is noted that it is very difficult to tell which works are his and which are hers.  They also wrote under a dizzying number of pseudonyms, including Lewis Padgett and Kevin Kent.

Additionally, there was a word I didn’t know at all, which is rare, especially since this one has a biological definition as well as an English definition: tropism.  In biology, it is the tendency of a creature to turn or grow given a certain stimuli.  In English, it is an action that is done without cognitive thought.  Funny: both definitions could apply to my sentias in the story I am working on.

This is the book I read while at Christmas holiday in Orange County.  I also went to Bookman and found four more books for the list.  I also read Nancy Kress’s Beginnings, Middles, and Ends.  It made me look at this story in a different way, especially the opening.  It also made me realize there is much more that I need to learn.  I need to take that class on first chapters at the UC Extension, and I have to go to Clarion.  Going is no longer a choice.  I must go to Clarion.

I think (hope) it was Damon Knight who said “Science fiction isn’t describing a car.  It’ s describing the car crash.”  This story shows how effective it is to consider the ramifications and evolution of the telepaths’ consciousness.  I like it.  Need to do that with my own.  Well, on to Damon Knight.

Damon Knight is not listed on the “best lists” of others, but I wanted him represented on my list because he has contributed so much to science fiction, especially editing the Orbit short stories I devoured as a kid.  It brings back memories of countless afternoons in various libraries.

This book is very much like Variations on Brave New World: a world where people are trained to be consumers, where the author gives nods to a various somber evaluations on humanity, and where a cure for mental disease has turned into a cure for individuality.  It started out strong and good, a fine example of stellar Fifties scifi, but seemed to lose its footing by the end, so by the time it reached its conclusion, it seemed very scattered.  There was just no resonance, and I was  thinking “What was that?”  It felt like important information, or some overarching theme, was missing.  And that is a lesson in itself.

Also, I did it: I applied to Clarion East, where Samuel Delany, Joe Haldeman, Nancy Kress, and Gordon Van Gelder (who just rejected “Stormwind” with an encouraging note) are instructing.  I sent two sample stories, “Losing Face” and a Crows of Bedu excerpt.  I wanted to send “Praxitales,” but I couldn’t find a copy of it.  I found “Praxitales” after sending my application and thought to myself “Oh!  I’ll send this in, exchange it for the excerpt!” Then, I read it and thought “But I would need to make some changes...”

No.  This story was published in 1996.  I am not changing those stories.  That would be falling into the conceit of “The Star Wars Trap,” that I can make it better now that I know more, can do more.  No.  And when I get my writer’s website, I am going to post these beloved old stories for others to read, warts and all, because that’s what made them cool, and to show other writers that stories don’t need to be perfect, that my writing is not perfect, I am not on a pedestal and I don’t know more than anyone else.  So, I am standing by the stories I sent to Clarion.  I stand by my words. 

Theme not only makes a story cool; it provides the tendons that make the story snap into place, that let it stand tall.

“The deserted and utterly extinct city of London was under his feet.”

Gosh.  Here it is.  I paid $22 for this 1980 paperback, since I didn’t want to pay the $900 for the an 1885 first edition. As you can see, my “J’s” follow my “K’s.”  There’s a good reason for this.

Making my list, I could find any “I” or “J” books of note.  But it gnawed at me.  It bothered me.  I didn’t like reading through an alphabet’s worth of famous science fiction writers and not including all the letters.  So, I took up one of my good resources, John Clute’s Illustrated Science Fiction Dictionary.  I went through it to glean out possibly promising authors in the I, J, Q, and X categories – perhaps not the best books, but at least books of note.

I found everything except X.  (But I’m not giving up.)  And I think this book is an excellent choice.  It represents some of the earliest science fiction, and probably the first to address one of the common themes of science fiction, which is of course, the utter destruction of London. 

Richard Jeffries was best known as a nature writer, and that shows here in this novel.  The first third  of this book gives the setting– not the story –and elegantly describes the natural processes by which England becomes wild after “the fields were left to tend to themselves,” as well as the animals and people that inhabit the dense forests and bogs.  When the book goes to the main story of Lord Felix Aquila, living in a rustic fortress with his farming Baron father and calm, athletic brother Oliver, some of the best parts are descriptions of skills needed to live in the great forest and the natural observations about seasons and animal behavior.  The last chapter describes the world again: a vicious Ice Age style winter that destroyed London and England in the first place, written as a letter from someone living there.

1885.  This is the oldest novel I have read for this list so far, and I think its age offers some gifts that younger books do not.  It is written in loose omniscient, and Jeffries often stops the story to describe the background of characters or what their motivations are, history, or other explanation.  Although it makes slower reading, it gives more depth to what happens, and more impact with the story that follows.  Also, Felix is far from a perfect, showing flaws that few modern authors would be willing to give their characters.  He is moody, pensive, frustrated, easily mocked, physically slight, and prone to fainting when upset.  Additionally, this book has some “Jane Austinisms,” in which the set-up allows the reader to intuit where the story would go next, which is strangely satisfying.  The story isn’t predictable, but you don’t go into it completely blind, either.

Being what if often called proto-science fiction, much of Wild England does not seem scifi-y: Felix leaves the safety and comfort of his world to enter Wild England, hoping to make a name for himself to impress his lover Aurora’s father, and wanders through the wilderness is a canoe he cut by hand.  However, it does reach into the best that science fiction has to offer when Felix trips into the ruined graveyard of London.  This section is highly imaginative, emotional, charged with tension and danger, and presciently describes what the grounds of a nuclear strike would be like... which the author attributes to noxious fumes seeping from chemical tanks.

This is the fortieth book I have read on my list.  I have learned so much from these books, and often I make even more observations quite a while after I read them.  For instance, it dawned on me that Aldous Huxleys’ Brave New World (written in 1932) is also a vicious parody of Hugo Gernsback’s Ralph 124C 41+, which was written in 1925.

As a nineteenth century author, Richard Jeffries reminds us that depth of meaning is an important part of writing.  This is a technique that I would like to imbue into some of the future stories I am thinking of doing, perhaps Stone Woman, or even Seaborne.