I love 50's sci fi, I love apocalyptical stories, plus nature gets her revenge.  What’s not to love?  Again, London meets her demise, this time when the population is struck blind and “Audrey II” style plants of possible extraterrestrial origin start ganging up on the groping survivors.   The book is thoughtful, readable, and only suffers a little from the shallow characterizations that I am beginning to suspect are symptomatic of the 50's themselves.  The “heroine” is pert and heroic and wants babies; the “hero” works his tail off making sure she is safe.  That pretty much defines and explains everything these two characters have to offer.  It’s apocalyptical romance, which is why Brian Aldiss sniffingly referred to this tale as a “cozy catastrophe.”

Does Brian Aldiss not play well with other authors?  Ian Watson said the two of them were enemies, which seems a weighty word.  It also seems to me that the zombie movie 28 Days Later stole shamelessly from this story.  Both protagonists wake up in a hospital to find a disaster has taken place; both are drafted by militant survivalists who hole up in country mansions.

Characters also reflect cultural expectations of their times.  That’s important to remember.

I am now a Bokononist.  This book has changed my religion.  I believe in foma, karass, and wampeters.  I feel peaceful and enlightened.  I now believe everything Kurt Vonnegut writes, and this is the only book of his that I have read.  So far.

This book was put on my list last year when, during a miserably depressed weekend, I watched the entire first season of Dead Like Me.  I loved this show about an ungrateful teen who dies and inadvertently joins a rag-tag team of Grim Reapers.  In it, a copy of Cat’s Cradle gets tossed around.  So, I thought this book would be about death, but it is actually about our relationships to each other and reality, and the innate confusion of it all, which gives me new awe for both the show and this book.

Vonnegut created a vocabulary to explain the tenets of Bokononism with goofy sounding words.  He also created a weird, quite incomprehensible accent for his islanders.  This makes me wonder if his definitions are mangled island pronunciations of other words.  Is granfoolan actually “grand fools?”  It may take years for me to figure this out.

Kurt Vonnegut died just this last spring.  From his obituaries, he sounded like a sad, complicated man.  I think I would have liked him a great deal.  I did very much enjoy this wry Dr. Strangelovian, aloofly Zelazny-esque tale of a reporter whose fate pushes him toward becoming the husband of the woman of his dreams, the president of the an inconsequential island kingdom, and destroyer of the world in the space of an afternoon.

In my salute to Bokononism – sadly, I seem unable to pronounce the name of my new religion –   I will mention here that I got a great rejection slip from Sheila Williams, editor of Asimov’s Magazine.  It read: “Dear Nye, Thanks for letting me see “Chess’s Game.”  The idea is interesting and the story is nicely done, but I’m afraid it was too rushed, and a bit too predictable to work for me.  Please let me see your next one when you have it.  Sincerely, Sheila Williams.”

From this story and my new faith I have learned two things.  Nothing is really off-topic in a story, as long as it weaves the story toward its inevitable end.  (So too our lives).  Also, Vonnegut’s take on writing was “Don’t waste your reader’s time,” so I will amend that lesson to say “Nothing is off-topic as long as it doesn’t waste your reader’s time.”   Lastly, I need to learn how not to rush a story (well, that last part is from my rejection slip).  I’ll work on it.

 I don’t know what it says about me that I eat up apocalyptic stories like candy.  I really love these things.  Since March, I’ve only had time to read snippets of my books at lunch breaks, but for this one, I dove in on weekends and after work, taking precious time away from homework and friends and chores.

Yes, overpopulation has been addressed in 1984 and Make Room!  Make Room!, but Turner’s story takes its own route by examining how class and prejudices would be affected by global warming.  His world is populated by a few privileged Sweet and millions of gutter Swill.  The Swill have their own dialect, a kissing cousin of Riddley Walker’s marble-jawed language. The story jumps between several characters’ points of view, showing their changing relationships to other classes in  their exhausted world.  The reader’s relationship to the characters also changes: sometimes we like them, sometimes we don’t, depending what side of their personalities have been exposed to us.  This was a clever literary technique that shadows the themes of the book: the perceived differences between classes depends on where you have recently been.  

George Turner is the definition of why my reading list is precious to me.  I would have never come across this heartfelt Australian writer and critic on my own.  The book takes its cues from Hamlet, and was written in 1987: I have gone twenty years without knowing of it or his existence.  I looked him up to thank him, but with regret, I see that he was born in 1917, and he died in 1997; I am ten years too late.  It just about makes the points his book did: we cannot wait to do the right thing.

Wonderful lessons in characters – they have many sides, not all of them likable, not all of them appreciated by others.  As characters grow, they go through stages, and their qualities change, adapting or not adapting to the situation, as the case may be.  These qualities – which Vonda McIntyre also exercises in her writings – are revealed in the relationships between people.

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 am so glad I found this book in the Acres of Books bookstore in Long Beach.  I had not been expecting to find this fairly unknown, tattered little book, a 1972 printing of the 1955 story.  When I found it, I took advantage of the good fortune: I moved someone else off the list to make room for it.  The first ten pages were so dense and droning, I thought to myself: “Oh, what a shame.  This isn’t the good writing from the 1950s.”  But I was mistaken.  

This is a wonderful story.  If anyone ever asked me, “What is this science fiction thing about?  What kinds of things are covered in science fiction?,” I would surely recommend this book.  Einsteinian physics, the nature of reality, post-apocalypse, time travel, dystopia, utopia, alternate universes, and even steam punk all take a bow in this amazing tale of one Hodgins “Hodge” Backmaker, who wants to be a historian in a world where the South won the Civil War.  The pedantic writing of the opening quickly evaporates, leaving a dry wit and a thoughtful voice that examines ideas freely and in depth.  Although I was a little disappointed that I guessed the ending eighty percent in, it was still a very rewarding read.  

My favorite part of this world was the scholarly Haggershaven, where creative people of all stripe and background sequester themselves to further their own studies.  All of them contributed to the survival of this little enclave by doing chores, working crops, or doing odd jobs in town.  For me, it was utopic.  

Moore’s prose is free and is also given rein to say what it needs to say.  He doesn’t parse words.  A good writing lesson – Writer, give yourself room to say what you need to say.

Having just read R.A. Lafferty’s Catholicky Fourth Mansions and Fritz Leiber, it seemed fitting to read this book about a Catholic monastery dedicated to a sanctified Leibowitz, who may have been a nuclear arms technician... or a T.V. repairman. (In this story, time has erased the finer details of history.)  

The premise of this story is outstanding: just as they did in the dark ages, monasteries again become the last bastions of literacy when nuclear holocaust destroys the planet.  What makes this story wonderful for me is that it is an all-star performer.  It has everything a novel should have: character, location, science fiction, premise, theme, literary physics, fine writing.   This book is rightfully on everyone’s “best” list.  And was this a precurser for Dune, with its “Hark-Hannegan” ruling class?  Moreover, there are lines that just give chills.  

“I know I might have a soul.”

“You don’t have a soul.  You are a soul.  You have a body.”   

This book is composed of three linked stories.  First, a hapless monk (living in a nuclear post-apocalyptic aftermath that very likely influenced Road Warrior and other such movies and books) discovers ancient documents from their founder.  In the second, several centuries have passed, and the same Order has gone on to save enough of the old world to recreate the technologies that have been lost.  Lastly, a millennium later, annihilation by war befalls the world again.  The book falters only in this third section, and only for a few chapters, because there is no way to tell the difference between this future society and our own... but that may have been the point!  

The characters is this book bore into my heart, and their causes became my causes.  That is powerful writing, and I am not quite sure how it was done.  It’s an enviable skill.  Would I normally care about a rather simple man who spends seven years failing to become a priest?  No. Would I normally care for an abbot who freaks out at mercy killings?  No.  But in this book, I loved these characters.  And although the characters were outstanding, so was everything else: infodump and description so deftly woven in that the story wraps around you.

I would have liked to read more books by Miller, but I will have to content myself by re-reading this one, and getting his short stories, and perhaps the sequel that was completed by Terry Bisson after the author died.  This is tragic.  In his old age, after decades of depression and pain, Miller committed suicide in 1996.  Given how this book rails so eloquently and vehemently against taking ones’ own life, I was quite shocked to learn his end.  It gives another mood to this book that I may need to investigate in future reading. 
 
In writing, make your reader identify, appreciate, and like your character before you must take them on a journey with them, make them feel every step with their soles.  And souls. 

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. 

“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. 

I can say that before I read this book (1)  I had not realized that John Christopher was a writer for adults and (2) that  John Christopher played such a part in the formation of my writing  style.  I read this book in less than a day, because it really sucked me in: a virus destroys grass, food becomes an  unreliable variable, and civilization is almost instantly thrown out the  window. His characters are  rational, realistic, and sympathetic: I was all the way through the book before I could even begin to question his vision of the world-gone-barbarous in three days. (I am also surprised how often London is destroyed in science fiction; it
seems to be a favorite target, like New York is for movies.)

Honestly, it had never dawned on me that  he was an adult author.  In junior high, I had read the White Mountains series over and over, and of course,  adored them.  This book was published in 1956; and the copy I purchased to read was published in 1971, just a little before I started reading that spooky series that touched on some of the same themes, such as the nature of civilization, and the loss of innocence. But what a true surprise: I had absolutely no idea that he had been such a big influence on my writing, if not for technique, then for mood and tone. This book had a bittersweet wistfulness, a seasonality, and almost mystical wind in this story that I can see faintly repeated in my own stories.  

I am glad I read this book now, with a  background in biology and agriculture... and having visited London twice this last year... and I look forward to reading his other books.                            

The  lessons this book offers, I may have actually already internalized, so it is difficult to explain them.  I’ll
give it a try.  Writing should truly go beyond describing something creative and giving the reader a visual idea of what is going on: it should evoke something in the reader that they can’t quite name, but identify with instantly.  How in the hell can I quantify that?  All I know is that it has to do with a sleekness in writing that is almost poetry, finding the exact right word that hits the right tone. It comes back to deconstruction,
maybe? I don’t know: that may be one of the goals I will explore during the rest of my reading list.


 

 

My introduction to J.G. Ballard came in 1987 with the Spielberg movie, Empire of the Sun.  It was a movie with so many evocative, mysterious images, I knew they had to mean something and I didn’t know what.  So, against my dread of hacky movie-to-book editions, I read the book.

Joy.  The book was written before the movie.  It was marvelous.  I didn’t know he had written science fiction until I started this preparing for this project.

Like A Case of Conscience and Childhood’s End, this story deals with “recapitulation,” a science-fictionilization of the biological process of uterine development.  These aren’t story lines that I buy into by any means, but The Drowned World is another story whose writing transcends a weak story for the following reasons:


One: This is the science fiction version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  Ballard is a gorgeous, poetic writer.  Is it hard to read?  Yes.  Is it even hard to process?  Yes.  But it is so beautiful, evocative, and mysterious, you don’t care.  Comparing a beautiful woman’s muscled back to a python, the image of a rusted crown with wild orchids growing into it.  The writing is lush, like the jungle he describes.  It makes me wonder if in his other “elemental” novels, does the burning world have hot, crackly writing and the crystal world have luminous, cool writing?  Anyway, he draws you into his hot triassic world with every paragraph, stacked like poems, growing like the tendrils of vines.  And by the way, jeez louise, how did he manage to create this without a word processor?  This was written in the sixties!

Two: And this world is definitely the star of this book.  The lagoon becomes a character in its own right, and a character that affects you profoundly.  I found myself wondering what other books would have been like, had they been written by this author.  Non-Stop, for instance, which I liked immensely... but I felt Ballard could have drawn that world even better.  Which then put me onto the side thought: what if authors rewrote versions of other’s stories.  What would happen?  Like these remakes of all these movies.  But back to our story...

Three: Ballard ups the ante on science fiction, because his created world doesn’t just drive and inform his world, it defines his themes.  The world is deconstructing back to the beginning of time, peeling back to Adam and Eve, and then... Adam.

The lessons are marvelous and true, but a revelation for me.  The very language you choose can evoke your world, and your world can be used to delineate your themes.  This concept had been brought to me in an earlier class, but it had not dawned on me until this book just how important and powerful that is, especially in science-fiction, where a world or technology or other science creates the stage for the story.  Thank you, Mr. Ballard.