Cover for one of the paperback editions of The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. (Click to embiggen)I was 16 when I found the Book of Skulls in a used book store. The cover blurb talking about four young men on a quest to find a mysterious cult and obtain immortality. I’d read some of Silverberg’s short fiction in both Galaxy magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and had generally enjoyed it. Plus it had a cool cover.
The novel is told in rotating first-person viewpoint from each of the four characters: Eli, the Jewish bookworm; Ned, the flaming homosexual; Timothy, the rich boy; and Oliver, the farmboy/jock. They are students at the same college who have formed somewhat unlikely friendships. Eli, who has a gift for languages, found and translated a book about the mysterious Brotherhood of the Skull and their secret of immortality. The book says that four people must present themselves together, and work together to endure the trials of the Brotherhood. Even if they succeed, only two will gain mortality. The other two lives are forfeit: one must willingly commit suicide, and the other must be sacrificed by his fellows…Continue reading Mortality, Im- and Otherwise: more of why I love sf/f→
Lost in Space, 20th Century Fox Television & CBS Broadcasting (Click to embiggen)The first episode of Lost In Space aired on CBS in September of 1965, and I was glued to my set. It debuted less than two weeks before my fifth birthday, so I don’t remember a lot about my feelings about the first episode. If you aren’t familiar, the show follows the adventures of the “space family Robinson” (Professor John Robinson, his wife Dr. Maureen Robinson, their grown daughter Judy, and younger children Penny and Will; their pilot, Major Don West, and their robot called B-9 in the early episodes) who were sent off to be the first colonists of the Alpha Centauri system, except their ship is thrown off course due to the bumbling actions of the stowaway/saboteur Dr. Zachary Smith, who ends up trapped on the ship when it takes off.
Lost In Space is not remembered as being serious science fiction, or even as a serious series. Though this is primarily because of the second and third season. The first season was intended as a serious action adventure series giving a science fictional spin to the early 19th Century novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, which had itself been inspired by the 18th Century novel, Robinson Crusoe. Like those novels, the early episodes focused on the crew as castaways trying to survive in a hostile environment. Some of the sci fi notions of some first season episodes were pretty silly by modern standards, but mostly because they were attempts to adapt the sort of complications that might appear in a western series or a contemporary slice-of-life series and put a spacey spin on it…Continue reading Computerized Clods and Squeamish Scoundrels: more of why I love sf/f→
Hardcover copy of the original version of David Gerrold’s When Harlie Was One.I was thirteen or fourteen years old when I found the copy of When Harlie Was One in the public library. The book jacket described an intelligent machine that has to prove he is a person or be shut down. It sounded really cool. This was during a period in my life where I was literally reading at least one entire book every day. I visited the library constantly, turning in a pile of books I’d finished every few days and checking out more. I read during every free moment. I even read while I was walking to school or while walking home. Yep, I was that kid, walking down the sidewalk with my nose stuck in a book. Books weren’t my only friends, but they were my best friends.
Thinking back, I’m sort of surprised that particular public library in that tiny town had this book. It had only been published a year or two previously. Most of the science fiction they had was stuff that had been around for much longer. Of course, When Harlie Was One had been nominated in the best novel category for both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award (it won neither) not long before the library acquired it, so maybe that’s why the librarian who ordered new books picked it. I don’t know…Continue reading Thinking Machines and Thoughtless People: more of why I love sf/f→
A scan of my own copy of The Wicked Day, by Mary Stewart, purchased back in 1983. (Click to embiggen)In the last two weeks I have written about the first three books in Mary Stewart’s Merlin series. The first three books are first-person narratives told from Merlin’s point of view, while the fourth book is told in third-person, mostly from both Mordred and Arthur’s points of view. Part this choice was necessitate by the fact that the crucial parts of Mordred’s story happen after the death of Merlin, so Merlin can’t narrate it. And if you’re familiar with the classic Arthurian legend, you know that both Mordred and Arthur die at the same time, so neither of them could be the narrator.
Even within the third-person narrative, Stewart shifts perspective. The opening of the book is told in an omniscient viewpoint, the narrator revealing the thoughts and feelings of all the characters. While the bulk of the book is subjective, in some chapters the reader is privy to Mordred thoughts but sees all the other characters through his eyes only. In other chapter’s we are in Arthur’s perspective. Then at the end, she moves t a more objective viewpoint, though not fully omniscient. Anyway, I’m spending so much time talking about this viewpoint stuff, which you might be inclined to think of as the mere mechanics of writing, because in a completely different sense, The Wicked Day is all about viewpoints. Several important plot points turn on the fact that one or more characters is operating on incomplete or completely mistaken understanding. And the theme is about perspectives…Continue reading Dark Prophecies and Evil Half-brothers – more of why I love sf/f→
I couldn’t find a nice large image of the same cover art as my copy on line, so spent a while trying to scan the gold paperback. The best image I got was this one, even though you can see my hands and iPhone reflected in the cover. (Click to embiggen)Last week I wrote about the first two books in Mary Stewart’s Merlin trilogy and how they became the standard against which I measure all Arthurian stories. The third and fourth books in the series came along some time later, and consequently influenced me in very different ways.
Before I get into that, I want to remind you that voting for the Hugo Awards ends tomorrow. If you are a Sasquan (WorldCon 2015) member and haven’t completed your ballot online, do it now before the servers get bogged down with the rush. The ballot is here. If you aren’t a member, you can still buy a supporting membership to become a voter, but since processing a membership might take a while as more traffic hits the servers, time is running out!
I’ve mentioned before that it’s my Mom’s fault that I am a fan of both science fiction and mysteries. From the time I was a baby, she would read aloud to me from whatever book she was reading (and when I got to the point I was trying to talk, she would cajole me into repeating back words and phrases and eventually whole sentences, which is how I learned to read at least a year before I was sent off to school). Since her favorite authors were Agathe Christie and Robert Heinlein, they made up a large proportion of what she read. But that’s a slight oversimplification. Because she read other books, too. The Christies and the Heinleins resonated with me in a way that the gothic romances she was also fond of did not. With one exception.
Mary Stewart wrote romances that weren’t always classified as romance. They were mysteries as well, and she integrated the two elements in a way where the solving of the mystery illuminated the character development as the characters fell for each other. So you’ll find some places classify her old books as thrillers, or mysteries, or romances, depending on the whims of the reviewer. Paperbacks my parents each bought tended to get taken back to used book stores to be traded in for store credit unless they were deemed worthy of multiple rereads. So there were only a couple of Stewart’s romances (most originally written in the 50s) that stayed on our bookshelves for years. One particular that I remember reading myself after pulling it off Mom’s shelf several times to look at the cover, was Stewart’s romance/thriller The Moon-Spinners.
The cover of my paperback version is a bit more tattered than this image I found (Click to embiggen).I think I found my copy of Ursula K. LeGuin’s City of Illusions at the used book store that was in a town thirty miles away from the town I lived in for most of middle school. I know that I owned it before my folks split when I was 15. I don’t recall exactly where I acquired it, but I do know why I wanted to book: the character on the front of the cover had cat’s eyes, which I thought was really cool.
I don’t think this was the first sci fi novel I read that featured such a character. There are are so many sci fi books with characters that look mostly human, but have eyes like a cat or a bird of prey. But it was the eyes that really grabbed me.
The story begins with the man on the cover being found in the woods without any memory, not even a language, no clothes, and no clues as to who he is. The people who find him aren’t certain he’s human, because of the eyes, but they take him in, name him Falk, and teach him. We learn that this is Earth of a distant future, once part of an interstellar federation of some sort, conquered by aliens, and now severely de-populated and isolated from the rest of interstellar society. The aliens technically rule the world, but they keep to themselves in a single massive city.
Falk eventually sets out on a quest to try to discover who he is. This allows the author to show the reader other parts of the world before Falk finally is taken captive by the alien overlords who tell him he’s one of only two survivors of a crashed spaceship from another world. They introduce him to the other survivor, and offer to restore his memory—though it will mean erasing his current personality. Falk agrees, and the novel switches to the point of view of the restored personality, who doesn’t know what Falk knows about how the humans on earth are treated. The aliens want Falk to go back to his own people and tell them how they are running earth as a garden, keeping the humans happy.
Eventually the original personality is able to awaken Falk’s memories, which also means that he winds up with two personalities trying to work together.
I’ve left out an important detail: just about everyone seems to be telepathic, Falk, all the humans he meets, and the aliens. Telepathy was how the old Federation came to be, because no one can tell a lie in psychic communication. Except it turns out the alien invaders can. Falk and the restored original personality realize the aliens aren’t going to let him go if he remembers the truth about Earth, so he has to steal a spaceship and escape to his homeworld where he may be able to convince them to attempt to liberate Earth. There’s a cute telepathic trick that Le Guin uses at a crucial point in the climax, and the story ends on wit Falk on his way to his homeworld, but without the certainty that Earth will be liberated.
The novel straddles several categories of science fiction. The world is a post-apocalyptic world, even if the apocalypse happened a thousand years ago and a new, stable set of societies have developed. There’s also the aliens subjugating humans genre. And the isolated protagonist who has to discover who he is.
The novel is one of three loosely connected books (the others being Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile) in which Le Guin was working out a single future history, in which humans have been seeded on many worlds, and they have diverged in various ways, but still consider themselves one race. This is where it encompasses another idea that was more popular in Golden Age science fiction: humans aren’t native to Earth, but were seeded there hundreds of thousands of years before our time.
Some of her much more famous later books, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Word for World is Forest are sequels, in a sense, to these books. They all allude to the common history of these three, in any case, so a lot of people lump them all (along with a few others and some short stories) into a single saga called The Hainish Cycle. Le Guin herself has rejected the label, in part simply because the collective works don’t tell a single story. Another reason is that in the first three books she was trying to figure out how to do a future history, rather than having drafted a coherent future history as a grand backstory to it all. So there are contradictions and variances in the histories of all the books.
The City of Illusions is one of those stories that sticks with me in weird ways. I remember Falk, his struggle to discover himself, and especially the way that Le Guin portrays the two people living inside one head phenomenon at the end. I remember the notions and paradox of telepathic lying. But I forget things like what the aliens are like. I forget what any of the other human societies that Falk visits during his adventures are like. That’s not a bad thing. The story is, on one level, about isolation and discovery. And that part really resonated for me at that age. Some of her other ideas from this book I find myself incorporating into my own stories without consciously realizing where they came from. Which I think means that Le Guin conceived them and executed them well: they’ve become part of the fabric of how I think things would actually work.
Years later, I have read many other Le Guin books, and I own her translation of the Tao Te Ching, a holy book that figures in this novel’s plot. Which I think means that once I finish reading this last Hugo novel, I need to add City of Illusions to this year’s queue for a re-read.
This Frank Frazetta painting, a cover for a John Carter of Mars paperback, hung on my bedroom wall throughout high school and college.(Click to embiggen)
I don’t know when I first saw a painting by Frank Frazetta adorning a book. He had worked for many years in the comics industry, then began doing movie posters in the early 60s, and by the mid 60s he was painting cover art for paperback editions of Conan the Barbarian, John Carter of Mars, and numerous other similar sorts of fantasy book series. He became the go-to guy for that sort of book. And soon rock bands were licensing images for album covers or sometimes commissioning him to do an original work for an album.
His fantasy art style was described as primal and potent. He liked to call his work rough. He also freely admitted he didn’t read the books he created covers for—even when he was also paid to create pen and ink illustrations for the interior. He insisted that most of the people who bought the books didn’t really read them, either. I’m not sure if that was supposed to be an egotistical claim that the book covers were so great that people who didn’t read would buy them, or if he thought that only illiterate people were interested in the types of stories in the books (but if they were literally illiterate, what were they doing even looking at books?), or what.
I know that most of the books I owned that featured his artwork were picked up at used book stores. And they were almost always very worn, having had their pages turned a lot. Lots of people buy books to read only once then pass on. My experience with the other fantasy fans I hung out with during my teen years was that the folks who bought these books read them, re-read them, and re-read them again. We became obsessed, and would go back again and again.
I was reading them for the sense of adventure. For a chance to imagine a different world, where the bad guys were obvious, and the good guys would get back up no matter how often they were knocked down.
But I also spent a lot of time staring at cover art. Thinking about the world and the story, yes, but also wondering why the artist made this choice, or that. What was that thing in the bad guy’s hand supposed to be? That sort of thing.
I also had other, much less noble reasons for staring at the artwork. And for buying posters of some of the artwork to hang on my bedroom wall. Though I didn’t admit it. The artwork, particularly Frazetta’s wasn’t merely primal, potent, barbaric, and rough—it was also erotic.
Frazetta’s cover painting for The Book of Paradox by Louise Cooper, published in 1973. (Click to embiggen)
My first week at university, the parents of my roommate showed up to visit. My roommate’s mother freaked out at this poster on my side of the room. I thought she was upset because of the naked man’s butt, or maybe she guessed that it was a “supernatural” picture (this was a Free Methodist university, and most folks there were quite rightwing conservative). The novel, The Book of Paradox was a sort of tarot-based fantasy, which I’m sure his mother would have labeled Satanic if she realized a battered paperback copy of it was sitting on the shelf above my bed in that same dorm room.
No, what she was angry about were the bare breasts on the winged creatures. I think I actually said out loud, “I forgot those were even there.” Because I literally had. They were obviously not the part of the painting that interested me.
“Atlantis” my very favorite Frazetta painting. I hung onto the poster long after all the others. (Click to embiggen)
My favorite Frazetta was “Atlantis,” which depicts a statue of some long forgotten warrior among flooded ruins. I know that part of my fascination was the presence of a near-nude male figure, as in so many others. But there was also something about the melancholy sense of determination in the face of great loss that spoke to me. The evocation of a great disaster that reduced the heroic exploits of generations of champions to a few vague remembrances alluded to in the stories of more recent adventurers. I wrote more than one story attempting to evoke the feelings that the picture gave me of a once mighty and noble people who had been stuck down by overwhelming, perhaps uncaring forces. I also used variants of this scene in a large number of roleplaying games I ran.
At the time I was doing everything I could to deny my attraction to other guys. Reading some of those hyper-masculine, pulpy adventures of barbarians and warriors seemed like the opposite of anything gay. Because, frankly, the only women who ever appeared in those stories were there as a prize to be won or a damsel to be rescued (or both). But I remember one friend commenting on just how often Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance, mentioned that his various heroes were “half-naked.” At the time, I suggested that a lot of those stories had originally be written to be serialized in magazines. The writer had to re-introduce each character in each installment, for the benefit of readers just joining the tale, or to refresh the memories for those for whom it had been a month since reading the previous chapter.
Many years later, I’m not so sure. There were a lot of guys I knew back then who were all about my age that were really into these kinds of books. We lent each other copies of books we couldn’t afford or hadn’t found our own copy of. We talked about our favorite parts. Some of us bought posters of the book covers. We speculated about which ones would make good movies. We drew pictures of scenes from the stories. We tried to write similar stories of our own. In the years since, more than half of those guys have come out as gay or bisexual.
So maybe I wasn’t the only one who spent a lot of time staring at those cover paintings.
The cover of Half Magic, by by Edward Eager with illustrations by N. M. Bodecker.I think it was in the third grade that I found the copy of Half Magic by Edward Eager in the school library. It was a tale about four siblings who are having a less than wonderful summer—even though during the summer they are allowed to check out more books at a time from the public library, and keep them longer. One of the children finds an unusual coin on the sidewalk, and because she is very bored she makes a wish. The wish is granted… sort of. After some experimentation they determine that the coin grants half a wish. Wish to go home, and you will find yourself magically transported to a spot exactly halfway there, for instance. Wish for a suit of armor, and you can half a suit (the right half, if I recall). So they start making wishes for double of what they want, but that seldom works out (what is half of two talking cats, you might wonder).
They have various misadventures with their wishes. Most of the misadventures are funny, though a few are a bit intense. It was a fun book. I read it several times before I had to take it back to the library. And I was extremely pleased to learn, when I took it back, that the library had a few more books by the author (Edward Eager), some of which starred the same set of siblings. In fairly short order I had devoured Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not?, and Seven-Day Magic. Which was the extent of what that library had. It wouldn’t be until six grade that I found copies of The Time Garden and The Well Wishers. I was getting to be a bit old for them by that point, but I recall enjoying them…Continue reading The Best Kind of Books Are Magic Books – more of why I love sf/f→
Last week I mentioned that Heinlein’s later writing, when compared to his earlier writing, was like a completely different man. That was both true, and misleading. Heinlein’s writing career spanned from the 1940s into the 1990s, and society underwent more than a few changes as to what was allowed in mainstream publications during that time. Through most of the 40s and 50s, for instance, anything remotely sexual was almost completely taboo in fiction, while racial topics could usually only be broached in metaphor. Then there was the legendary John W. Campbell, who edited the magazine Astounding Science Fiction (now known as Analog) from 1937 until his death in 1971. Campbell allowed absolutely no sex in stories he published. Campbell also insisted that humans always be superior to any aliens they met. Campbell seems to have been slightly more racist than the average white american during the 30s—which did not change at all even though he lived through the civil rights movements of the 60s.Continue reading The Moon Harshed My Mellow: more of why I love sf/f→
Font Folly 