Books!

[petronia]

Samuel R. Delany, Babel-17: I like it better than Nova because it has space pirates and programming languages (best eerily coincidental throwaway line of all time: "Ruby and Python are on display this evening"). The edition I read includes a novella called Empire Star at the back which is a book-that-exists-in-the-Babel-17-universe, which briefly discusses its author and inspirations. I thought that was a super-neat setup, though Babel-17 gives the impression it's supposed to be pulp SF, and when you actually read it it's, like, Jorge Luis Borges's idea of what a pulp SF novella is.... One has a funny sense of Delany's precocity, like he's excited by ideas to be utilized post-haste but his ability to recycle/reuse just falls short of his ability to spew the results out convincingly, whereas it should be the other way around - does that even make sense? XD; What I'm trying to say is Nova had MARX FAIL iirc and this one has TURING FAIL, though it's not like I'm sure of my expertise. I should track down Trouble on Triton next as dubdobdee has made it sound interesting.

MOST HILARIOUS PART OF BOOK: the fanboying of Theodore Sturgeon. Cos it's all "do you ever get the feeling with some writers that they have walked in your shoes and written down your thoughts before you ever thought them" and one is like "you mean how dude looked at Spock and pre-empted the mechanisms of Fandom before they existed? Yeah that was pretty mystic."

RACEFAIL/GENDERFAIL RATING: it's Delany, so the protagonist is a female spaceship captain (and poet!) of ethnic Chinese descent who was involved in a poly relationship. I should've had this as the last review maybe, except that I read it first. XD;


John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time: not gonna lie, the main reason I took this out of the library was because it had an elf with a machine gun on the cover. It kind of reads like what you're thinking, too - one of those SSBB stories that are a serious genre exercise that contain elves for insider lulz, and by the end you don't even laugh cos the worldbuilding is too convincing. I could compare Ford to Tarentino in that he also has that thing where he loves movies too much to let you forget you're watching a movie, although with Ford it's not (just) movies and the meta is a thing of beauty; or compare Ford to Diana Wynne Jones in that they're good writers who're pants at certain types of exposition, though not (I think) the same ones.

MOST HILARIOUS PART OF BOOK: the premise. I should declare a film noir issue of SSBB and hope people write in with elves.

RACEFAIL/GENDERFAIL RATING: realized that I have actually read several fantasy novels containing unconscious racefail where THE RACE IN QUESTION WAS ELVES. Human psychology, fascinating as always! Just to be clear, elven racefail is banninated from SSBB submissions.


Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination: finally read part 2! I feel like I deserve a commendation for managing to not spoiler myself for 15 years. XD; The plot twists are worth it although one suspects the real reason I never got past part 1 (and I have vague memories of trying at least once, in the interim) is because the main character is such a horrible person - he's meant to be. Neil Gaiman makes the case in one of his better forewords that this is why the book doesn't feel dated, even though it's massively 1956 in some ways. Weirdly enough one way this book completely makes sense in 2009 (and not yet in 1996 when Gaiman wrote his piece) is its description of the ruling class of a society that's achieved near-instantaneous transportation and communication, that expresses its leisurely decadence by fetishizing analog tech and period evening wear. i.e. as a noted cyberpunk precursor it spends quite a bit of time outlining why living in a cyberpunk society would make people take up steampunk.

MOST HILARIOUS PART OF BOOK: the aristocratic mega-corporation clan names - a snapshot of big American business before OPEC and Japan Inc. happened. Nowadays one would open Built to Last and take a randomized finger stab.

RACEFAIL/GENDERFAIL RATING: not to be spoilerish but the 'gender relations' are sorta like Neal Stephenson's Vickies by way of Ayn Rand's idea of romansu. (Portrayal of PoC I cannot even begin to telescope into a snappy sentence. XD; It's not all bad news, mind.) Stephenson may well have been inspired by this, tbh.


Fritz Leiber, Swords and Deviltry: in the same overall effort to tie up the loose ends of my tween-age reading, I'm also going through the Lankhmar series - other than "cyberpunk precursors", am also trying to get what Terry Pratchett has been parodying all these years. I'll probably write more about it after I read more, this feels like a beginning and it's actually rather hard to disentangle the prose from future echoes of Pratchett (let alone past echoes of Lovecraft, Sabatini, etc.), even though Leiber has a psychological bent that's distinct from all of these. Basically, I've got the Tolkien Cliche Problem.

MOST HILARIOUS PART OF BOOK: the way these novellas have been compiled makes the storyline structurally identical to the first volume of Nana. I'm just sayin'.

RACEFAIL/GENDERFAIL RATING: omg ahahahahaha.

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

triton totally has SEMIOTIXPOSTSTRUCTURALISMFAIL!

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hey at least dude keeps moving I guess! LIKE A SHARK. XD

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

IIRC the Ford book is written as part of the Bordertown series and turns it on its head; as ever when Ford writes in someone else's universe. incandescens tells me that after Ford wrote a Star Trek tie-in, TPTB tightened up the guidelines of what was permissable to give the clear message that You Can't Do That. I give TLHT's narrator a pass on SpeciesFail just because he's young and wide-eyed and OMG elves!! Other Bordertown writers /have/ done elves who are (again IIRC- this was '96 too) Just Like Us At Heart.

Like the Emperor's new clothes, I'd always assumed Ford and DWJ told their stories that way on purpose. I much prefer the idea of 'can't exposit their way out of a paper bag.'

Leiber-- it is of its time and its time is past. You'd think.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It wasn't even the narrator, it was more like... you know how The Black Guy And The Slutty Girl Die First in horror movies, and so on? Structural stuff. Ford's "contribution" to this is minor, to be fair to him, I just suddenly saw a pattern and had to laugh.

In Ford's case it probably is on purpose - I think he's one of those writers who can't write straightforwardly as that doesn't keep them entertained enough to get through the process - has to fuck around somehow, whether it be wilful obscurantism or overturning The Rules Of The Game - which I sympathize with a lot as I am like that, but purposefulness doesn't make it easier on the reader. XD; That it's part of an ongoing universe makes it make more sense, though. DWJ otoh is just, yanno, pants at "directing action".

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I love Delany, and I should read far more of him than I have.

I don't know how he finessed it in Babel-17, but in Dhalgren, his main character was not just a poet, he was supposed to be the most fantastic poet anyone had ever read -- and you never get to read more than a line or two of his poetry. As a poet myself, I approve of this approach, because if we'd seen the poetry and it'd been bad, a large part of the book's premise would have been blown for me.

Also, I have a special place in my heart for Dhalgren because I remember fondly being at a little spa in Japan, turning to page 400 or so, and suddenly finding the main character involved in a smokin' hot and fairly detailed bisexual threesome. More like this, please!

[meril.livejournal.com]

I didn't really get that impression about the poetry in Dhalgren; what I got is that the smart set in Bellona were inclined to blow a whole lot of smoke. (no pun intended.)

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

I liked that that was also possibly true! I mean, they were a bunch of douchebags, but that doesn't mean he wasn't also talented.

[meril.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of ambiguity in that book. That's one of the reasons I liked it. It's a shame that there are a lot of sf readers out there who can't handle ambiguity.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Poets and bisexual threesomes seem to crop up a lot in dude's oeuvre. XD; There's quite a bit of (someone else's, published) poetry used as chapter headers in Babel-17, but I'm not sure it's meant to be Rydra's. I thought it was pretty good. In any case what Delany seems to be interested in is 1) what goes on in a poet's head that allows them to make poetry and 2) how other people relate to the presence of a poet in their midst, and really all that requires is the assumption that the poetry exists. Like a McGuffin. XD

[nojojojo.livejournal.com]

What is SSBB?

And could you clarify what you mean in those Racefail/Genderfail bits? I'm not sure if you're recommending Delaney's book, or saying the female Chinese captain is badly-depicted.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

SSBB is Shousetsu Bang*Bang is bb_shousetsu - the m/m fiction zine I edit. ^^ (And the reason this is relevant is that there's a joke rule that says "a warning asterisk will be placed before all stories involving elves," which in the general way of humanity has led people to write some pretty interesting things.)

Oh, the Delany book is a definite recommend! Rydra is very cool. In fact the most refreshing thing is that she very much has a sexuality but is never a sex object. (Insofar as I can figure it about 75% of the characters are PoC as they are on the side of the interplanetary war where the colonies are of African/Middle Eastern/European/Asian descent, and the colonies of N.American/S.American descent are on the other side.) Sorry for being abstruse, it's kind of a problem. XD; I don't really like saying "this book has too much genderfail" etc because that's for the reader to judge, so these are just sort of... thoughts (for the record I enjoyed all of the ones listed here).

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

One has a funny sense of Delany's precocity, like he's excited by ideas to be utilized post-haste but his ability to recycle/reuse just falls short of his ability to spew the results out convincingly, whereas it should be the other way around - does that even make sense? XD;

If this is a way of saying that he can write a really long and convincingly detailed description of (for instance) a total communications breakdown and the damage that would result, without understanding that a WORKING society would never have a communication system that was structured that that way in the first place - which is what I saw in The Fall of the Towers - then I agree.

Maybe I should read some Delany not written when the dude was 17... and The Stars My Destination, that sounds intriguing.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing I mean. XD

Do read any/all of these, would love to know what you think.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

But that was exactly the kind of thing that drove me crazy about The Fall of the Towers! Are you saying that it doesn't get better in Babel-17 and Dhalgren? But Dhalgren is supposed to be his best novel.

It's one thing to read a Paulo Coelho novel and think, this system is described convincingly but would never work, and another thing to read a sci fi novel where the author is continually trying to describe complex social dynamics and continually failing...

(I did like the one Delany short story I read. It was kind of like The Old Man and the Sea, only set in space and the retired space captain was black. And there were mermaids. I think.)

[meril.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't even try to read Dhalgren with sf reading protocols in mind. It won't work--there is no "how" or "why" but there is an incredible sense of the moment, if that makes any sense.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I haven't read Dhalgren yet! But it's not quite like that - it's more, he gets into a whole new set of EXCITING IDEAS every six months and writes a book around them, and his thinking is getting better but the ideas are getting subtler (as dubdobdee mentions you can see him go from Marx to Foucault), so he fails but in MORE ADVANCED WAYS. It's never the same river twice. Or something. XD

IMO Babel-17 > Nova > The Fall of the Towers

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i haven't reread any of delany's early stuff for YEARS: i reread all his later dirty stuff earlier this year!

at the level of sentences and scenes, i think he's an amazing writer: i think something about book-length throws him off a little; he can't really do endings to books -- dhalgren has a classic modernist getout here, no spoilers! -- which is a kind of giveaway... i think actually his problem is that he's too high-concept, and there's element of his books, not a single moment, that isn't bound into the concept, which means they don't quite ever breathe; you're never just kicking around reading about sex or rockets or just stuff that makes you chuckle or weep in its own terms, there's always a sense of NO BUT DO YOU SEE! Not in a dull or bullying way, or even a show-offy way: just a kind of piercing never-off hyperconsciousness that's fine in a short story, in fact probably ideal, but a bit wearing at length

here is a podcast (http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2008/09/a-bite-of-stars-a-slug-of-time-and-thou-episode-11/) of a radioshow my pal elisha and i do discussing sf short stories, which -- this particular ep -- focused on delany: this is a terrific story, where everything he's good at, inc.the social feel of very weird sex, is spot-on

[petronia.livejournal.com]

not a single moment, that isn't bound into the concept, which means they don't quite ever breathe

That's exactly right and I've noticed it, though not to verbalize to myself. Though tbh I have a tendency to prefer novels by writers who're more constitutionally suited for short stories (because I include myself in that category, probably XD;). Bill Gibson's also like that, and he's pants at endings. But with Gibson it's all observation, not concept, so it comes out in the prose style and the actual narrative can meander over hill and dale for ages.

Darn, you have a whole SF podcast series! Freakytrigger is the site that just keeps on giving. :D