Review - Dogbert's Clues for the Clueless by Scott Adams

Short review: Dogbert hits clueless people with a clue-by-four.

Haiku
If you are clueless
And Dogbert pays a visit
Prepare to be clued

Full review: This is a collection of strips featuring Dogbert giving advice to "the clueless". Dogbert is Dilbert's dog (from the Dilbert comic strip) who believes everyone but him is a minion just waiting to be conquered.  In keeping with Dogbert's character, the advice is direct, brutal, and extremely funny. The comic panels are oversized, which doesn't seem to do much for the book other than reduce the amount of material that can be put into it. Even so, watching Dogbert give abusive and mean-spirited advice in an effort to "help" is exceptionally amusing.

I have often said that even though it is labeled as such, I don't believe that Dilbert is a satire, because the situations presented hit too close to home. Almost everyone has encountered someone who is as clueless as the people who populate this book, and almost everyone wishes they could respond in the same manner as Dogbert does throughout the comic strips in this volume. I suspect that there have been a number of office murders that have only been averted because someone was able to experience the cathartic joy of reading Dilbert and realizing that they are not the only person who is plagued by idiots. The only thing about this book I didn't like was that it wasn't longer.

Previous book in the series: Build a Better Life by Stealing Office Supplies
Subsequent book in the series: Shave the Whales

Scott Adams     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Rock You Like a Hurricane by The Scorpions

In honor of Hurricane Sandy, which has apparently shut down everything on the East coast except fast food restaurants, I give you the Scorpions performing Rock You Like a Hurricane.

Anyone who thinks the Federal government is useless, or too big, or too involved should consider what happens after events like Hurricane Sandy, when the Federal government is the only entity capable of stepping in to provide assistance when the State governments have been functionally destroyed or practically overwhelmed by the enormity of a natural disaster. I know a lot of people want to treat our nation like a confederation of states that has an extremely limited Federal government, but the fact is we tried that model before, and it worked so poorly that the current Constitution, which creates a much stronger and more active Federal government, was put in its place. State governments have a place in our system, but they are subordinate to the Federal government for a reason.

Previous Musical Monday: Who Wants to Live Forever? by Queen

Subsequent Musical Monday: The Way Too Early Christmas Song by Paul & Storm

The Scorpions     Musical Monday     Home

Book Blogger Hop October 26th - November 1st: In a Randomly Chosen Group of 23 People There is a 50% Chance That Two Will Share the Same Birthday

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The hop is currently traveling about the blogosphere and is being hosted by Knitting and Sundries. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: What are three of your favorite book blogs and/or communities? Why do you like them?

My first choice is LibraryThing. That is where I keep track of all my books, all my statistics, and essentially handle the enormous volume of printed material that I have. I know others like Goodreads or Shelfari more, but LibraryThing allows me more substantial control over the details of my virtual library, which is why I prefer it.

My second choice is Parajunkee's View. Parajunkee is always helpful for new book bloggers, and her Book Bloggin' 101 series is an excellent resource.

My third choice is John Scalzi's Whatever, which is cheating somewhat, but it is a book related blog in that its writer is an author and he occasionally features material about books he and his friends are publishing. If you want to know what is going on in the science fiction world right now, a good place to start is Scalzi's blog.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: "Twenty-Two" Was a Second Season Episode of the Twilight Zone

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: A Tesseract Is Made Up of Twenty-Four Squares

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Alchemists Didn't Know That the Atomic Number of Lead Is 82

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Carmen Jenner and The Y.A. Bookworm Blogger.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What writing device or trick most irritates you when reading a book? For example, if an author employs an omnipotent narrator that is sometimes considered bad form.

I don't think it is a writing "trick" but nothing irritates me more than a weakly or poorly defined viewpoint. If you are going to use omniscient third person to tell your story, that's fine, but stick with that. If you are going to use limited first person, that's fine too, but don't shift to omniscient third person in the middle of a book for no reason. If you are going to use a shifting viewpoint character like Robert A. Heinlein does in The Number of the Beast, that's fine too, but don't shift viewpoints in the middle of a paragraph. If you are going to tell your story in the first person, that's fine as well, but don't hop out to third person for a chapter, and then hop back in because you don't want the reader knowing what the viewpoint character knows. If your story depends upon the reader not knowing what the viewpoint character knows, or knowing things the viewpoint character doesn't, then first person is the wrong viewpoint for your story.

That doesn't mean you can't have multiple viewpoint characters in a story. A.S. King rotates between a teenage girl, her father, a dead boy, and a pagoda as chosen narrative viewpoints in Please Ignore Vera Dietz (read review), and she turned out a brilliant book by doing so. But she used the shifting viewpoint intentionally, and skillfully, not haphazardly and without thought. And that is one of the critical elements of a good book, and why executing this element badly annoys me so much.

Go to previous Follow Friday: If You Are Caught Between the Angels of Light and Death, You Might Be in Artemis 81

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: On Old Televisions 83 Was the Highest UHF Channel

Follow Friday     Home

Review - Time Untamed by Ivan Howard (editor)

Stories included:
Sally by Isaac Asimov
You'll Never Go Home Again by Clifford D. Simak
The Eye of Tandyla by L. Sprague de Camp
Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Ray Bradbury
The Hungry Eye by Robert Bloch
The Dark Room by Theodore Sturgeon
The Eternal Eve by John Wyndham
I'm Looking for "Jeff" by Fritz Leiber

Full review; Time Untamed is a moderately obscure science fiction anthology featuring a grab bag of stories from a collection of fairly prominent science fiction authors of its day. The genesis of the collection appears to have been to reprint some popular stories that had appeared previously in Fantastic that had previously been culled from previous publications and reprinted in the magazine. Ivan Howard was apparently on the staff of the magazine at the time and was assigned the job of editing this anthology of third run stories, although he is uncredited in the book. Given that every story in this book was considered worth publishing at least three times, it is no surprise that they are all pretty good, although none of them stand out as more than that.

Sally by Isaac Asimov is another in a long line of Asimov stories featuring "positronic brains" and the position of robots in human society. The twist in Sally is that the robot brains are installed in cars, and only robotic cars are allowed on the roads, reducing automobile accidents and the resulting injuries and fatalities to almost zero. The protagonist Jake runs a retirement farm for old cars, including the title character, an old convertible named "Sally". Retired cares are rare because cars in the future are rare and have longer service lives. Jake regards his charges fondly, almost like cherished pets. He is visited by an unscrupulous entrepreneur who wants to take the retired cars, rip out their brains, and put them into new cars. This appalls Jake, and when the ensuing back and forth moves into criminal action, the cars take sides against the interloper. While this provides a victory for the "good guys" it makes Jake wonder what would happen if the cars ever stopped behaving like spoiled pets and took sides against humanity. Sally is a fairly simple robot story with a slightly unsettling implication, although Asimov's three laws of robotics are noticeably absent.

Several of the stories in the volume are frightening, but from my perspective none can match Clifford D. Simak's tale of deep space exploration You'll Never Go Home Again. A human survey ship sets down on an alien planet and begins to set about studying it in preparation of future colonization. Using robots to set everything up, and the latest technological devices to ensure their security, the survey team is not intimidated by the Stone Age technology of the natives. In the one encounter between the explorers and the natives, the intrepid humans are told they will never leave, a threat they scoff at. But it turns out not to be a threat, but a prediction, as things don't turn out exactly as either the characters or the reader would expect. The humans end up marooned and unequipped with anything more advanced than stone tools on an alien planet, which is what makes this story quite frightening.

L. Sprague de Camp gives a humorous take on pulp sword and sorcery with The Eye of Tandyla, in which a king compels Derezong Taash, his reluctant court magician, to steal a valuable and magical gem from a neighboring kingdom to mollify the king's new wife. Derezong and his trusty assistant manage to pull of the heist, but when everything seems to go a little too well they get suspicious and change their plans. This turns out to be a good idea, and they manage to unwittingly prevent an assassination of their king. The story is humorous, somewhat silly, and fairly entertaining.

The one time travel story in the volume is Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Ray Bradbury, a tale involving a down on his luck writer in Los Angeles and a mysterious typing machine that shows up in his apartment. He is contacted by a woman who claims to be from a dystopian future ruled by a brutal dictator. She encourages him to prevent her reality by killing the ancestor of the ruthless leader who has imprisoned her father. The hero resists, but finally gives in and kills a minor politician, which of course sparks a police hunt for him. The story ends ambiguously, with one wondering if the main character did the right thing – after all, he only has this stranger's say-so that killing this otherwise unremarkable man, and in the process ruining his own life, is necessary. Of all the stories in the volume, this one is probably the best of the bunch.

Two of the stories are more or less horror stories, and seem somewhat similar, although they take fairly different ways to get to their conclusion. The Hungry Eye by Robert Bloch centers on a mysterious stone which seems to drive those near it to murderous acts. The protagonist's brother is accused of killing another security guard at his place of work and stealing the stone. He then takes up with a woman he picks up in a bar, and is killed by her. The stone is then taken by the protagonist and as the tale ends, he is casually contemplating murdering his beloved wife. The story is framed as an alien invasion story, but the invader is a life form that no one suspects is a life form, and is unsettling as only a Robert Bloch story can be. The other horror story in the collection is The Dark Room by Theodore Sturgeon, which is almost a dark fairy tale. People who attend parties at a particular house do things that are unusual for them. In fact, people do things that are impossibly out of character for them. But then they are never invited to return. The protagonist's wife cheats on him at one of these parties, and is then driven by his brother-in-law to investigate. The trail leads inevitably back to the house where the parties happen, and the enchanted source of the mysterious behavior. The story is dark, twisted, and magical

The last two stories both focus on women, and only very slightly from different angles. In The Eternal Eve by John Wyndham a colony on Venus learns that the rest of humanity has destroyed itself in an orgy of violence, leaving only the handful of colonists as the last vestige of our race. Even more ominously, the colony was mostly male, leaving fewer women alive than one could count on one hand, including the protagonist who is apparently the last fertile female still breathing. She takes a stand, refusing to pick a man and start breeding a new generation of humans, which leads to her holing up in a cave with the primitive native Venusians she had been studying as a graduate student when the catastrophe took place. The story is somewhat conventional in that she eventually gives in to biology and takes a partner, become the "Eve" of the title. The story is predictable and has a moderately anti-feminist message, essentially asserting that a woman must be willing to breed for the good of the race, even if it does allow that she shouldn't be forced into it and should be permitted to breed with the man of her choice. I'm Looking for "Jeff" by Fritz Leiber, on the other hand, is a classic ghost story featuring a damsel in distress, a stalwart hero, and a crude villain. Only the damsel in distress is picking up men in a bar, the hero is a drunkard, and the crude villain, well the crude villain is in fact a crude villain. The story is well-written, and the characters are fun to follow, but the plot is very predictable, and the reader is likely to figure out the "twist" ending well before they reach the end.

Taken as a group, the stories in Time Untamed are an enjoyable but not particularly substantial lot. The best that can be said for most of them is that they are well-written stories that contain stock characters acting out stock plots in stock settings. The best story is Bradbury's time travel tale Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and even that is a fairly standard example of the genre, drawing upon some fairly well-worn time travel story tropes. All of the authors represented here are good writers, and as a result even their clichéd material makes for an enjoyable read.

Ivan Howard     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

Musical Monday - Who Wants to Live Forever? by Queen

Sometimes a movie that is a seemingly trivial piece of flashing swords escapism will make you think a little bit. For me, the original Highlander movie is one of those movies. While the movie is overtly about a collection of magical immortals who can only die by having their heads cut off, leading to the gimmick of having them all engage in a collection of sword fights, there is something of a deeper story to it. Namely, the loneliness of immortality. Maybe I came to these thoughts because I had read Joe Haldeman's Forever War at about the same time, but the element of Highlander that always stuck with me is the dislocation felt by Connor MacLeod. Although it is only used as a background for a scene in which he demonstrates his immortal nature by stabbing himself in the gut, the trophy room he MacLeod has, filled with banners and mementos of his long dead past always struck me as horribly sad. I imagined him spending his days in there, sitting and wistfully trying to remember all the friends he had buried. Highlander made me decide that if those I was close to could not be immortal, I don't think I'd want to be either. To answer Freddy Mercury's plaintive cry "Who wants to live forever?", I'll answer, "Probably not me".

Previous Musical Monday: Modern Poetry (Nerdy Love Song) by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Rock You Like a Hurricane by The Scorpions

Queen     Musical Monday     Home

Review - Analog Science Fiction and Fact: Volume CXXIX, No. 10 (October 2009) by Stanley Schmidt (editor)

Stories included:
Where the Winds Are All Asleep by Michael F. Flynn
Shallow Copy by Jesse L. Watson
An Idea Whose Time Had Come by Robert Grossbach
Cold Words by Juliette Wade
The Hanged Man by William Gleason
Teddy Bear Toys by Carl Frederick
In the Autumn of the Empire by Jerry Oltion

Poems included:
Insignificance by Edward M. Lerner

Science fact articles included:
The Psychology of Space Travel by Nick Kanas, M.D.

Full review: Some issues of Analog seem to have unannounced themes, and this appears to be one of them. Stanley Schmidt's editorial discusses the dangers of relying too heavily upon technology to solve one's problems, highlighting an accident caused by an individual who blindly followed his GPS while driving despite the obvious stupidity of doing so. The dangers of such reliance, or merely the dangers of virtual reality and artificial intelligence, seems to be the unstated theme of this issue.

The issue starts off with some interesting, but not thematically related stories: Michael Flynn's Where the Winds Are Asleep details an expedition deep into the Earth following the journal of a long dead geologist in an effort to find an entirely new strain of life, with somewhat less than happy results. The Hanged Man by William Gleason is a story that also has an unhappy end, although it clearly falls into the subgenre of space horror, focusing on the psychological cost of betrayal made manifest.

Then begins a series of stories that seem to all deal with the issues discussed in Schmidt's editorial. Teddy Bear Toys by Carl Frederick seems like a frivolous story, following the attempts of a computer game fanatic to get a copy of the newest release by sneaking into and camping out in a store the night before the game becomes available. The story quickly becomes much more than that, as the protagonist deals with the nature of reality, and how it interacts with increasingly real virtual reality. If Teddy Bear Toys is about virtual reality moving towards reality, Jerry Oltion's In the Autumn of the Empire is about reality being altered to match delusion, as an infallible Emperor changes the world to match his notions of how the world should work, with disastrous results.

Jesse Watson's Shallow Copy is also about the dangers of virtual reality becoming too real, as a child genius' project to create actual artificial intelligence succeeds, but none of those involved are prepared for the implications. The story seems a little derivative of some of the elements from Egan's Permutation City, but the story is still decent. An Idea Whose Time Had Come by Robert Grossbach also deals with artificial intelligence, but deals with the dangers of trusting such an AI to solve our problems, even if the AI is benevolent.

The final story in the issue is Juliette Wade's Cold Words covers the classic territory of attempting to communicate with an alien species. It turns out that knowing the language the aliens speak is only a tiny part of what is required. The alien culture described walks the fine line between being alien enough that the human emissaries believably have a difficult time understanding how to negotiate for what they want, but not so alien that the reader is too confused to follow the story. Overall, this is probably the best story in the issue.

Nick Kanas provides a science fact article about the psychological effects of long term space travel both positive and (mostly) negative. It is well researched, and Kanas clearly knows what he is talking about, but it is a little dry. John Cramer also chips in with an article titled Connecting Gravity with Electricity about the LIGO gravity wave detector and the search for gravity waves.

Given the interest I have taken in the whole science/creationism debate, Edward Lerner's poem Insignificance about man's true place in the universe struck a chord with me. It is beautiful and puts humanity in proper perspective.

Overall, this is another decent issue of Analog, with no real great stories, but no awful ones either. A couple of the stories are above average, but none of them seem like ones that people will look back on as classics. The issue is worth reading, but nothing really stands out.

Previous issue reviewed: September 2009
Subsequent issue reviewed: November 2009

Analog     Stanley Schmidt     Magazine Reviews     Home

30 Days of Genre - Who Is Your Favorite Protagonist in a Genre Novel?

Jack of Shadows created by Roger Zelazny

I love Roger Zelazny's work, especially the way he so often weaves mythology together with science fiction in books like . . . And Call Me Conrad, Lords of Light, and Creatures of Light and Darkness. Even the Nine Princes in Amber series, which is more fantasy oriented than many of Zelazny's books, merges science fiction into its fantasy sensibilities.

But my favorite character of Zelazny's, and my favorite protagonist in a genre novel, is the morally ambiguous Jack of Shadows, also known as Shadowjack, from the novel of the same name. Jack lives on an Earth that does not rotate, with one side bathed in continuous daylight, and the other shrouded in perpetual night. On the light side, technology reigns supreme, while in the darkness, magic prevails. Most of the great powers on the dark side are tied to a location, deriving their strength from the place they inhabit. Jack does not. Jack derives his power from shadow. Not darkness, shadow. As a result, though most of the potent wielders of arcane might are sedentary, Jack is a wanderer. But Jack is also despised, and his only friend is Morningstar, a great being cursed to be fused into a mountain on the edge of dawn, only to be released if the sun that will never rise rises over the horizon.

In Jack's world death is not always permanent, and most people will come back a couple of times after they die, always regenerating on the East Pole, and this is where the story begins, with Jack returning to life. He evades the ruler of the East Pole, who extracts service out of those unfortunate enough to be caught in his realm outside of their own places of power, and avoids the machinations of his enemies. But Jack is a hunted man, and he decides to seek out the mystical Kolwynia, the "Key That Was Lost", which has been the subject of many quests after its location. And Jack's solution is why I love him as a protagonist because he looks where no one else has thought to: the light side of the planet. Jack finds the key, and uses its power to overthrow the established order on the dark side, placing himself as ruler of the eternal night. But he discovers that he alone cannot do what is necessary to keep the cold of darkness from destroying the shadowy nations he rules, and he has offended everyone so much that no one will help him.

Taking Morningstar's advice, Jack goes deep under the surface to restart the machine that turns the world, setting the planet rotating. One interesting side note here is that it is revealed that the beliefs of the side that one is on determine reality. On the light side, where science rules the world, the core of the Earth is a molten ball of superheated iron. On the dark side, where magic dominates, the core of the world is occupied by a giant clockwork machine that needs to be restarted. After restarting the machine, the world begins to turn, and Jack struggles to escape from the underworld, but falls. Morningstar, having been freed, flies to save him, and the book ends with Morningstar's outstretched hand approaching as Jack wonders whether it will reach him in time.

Jack is a protagonist, although one might hesitate to call him a hero. He does overthrow the unjust regime of the dark side, but he replaces it with a dictatorship. He restarts the world, but in doing so he dooms the existence of magic. But he is the fly in the ointment that prevents stagnation. Through the novel he acts, and acts in ways that others not only do not expect, but would not have even considered. He is the voice of rebellion, the force of change, and the agent of chaos that alters a situation that had become ossified and moribund. And that, along with the exotic world he inhabits, is why he is my favorite protagonist.

Go to Day 17: Who Is Your Favorite Antagonist in a Genre Novel?

Go to Day 19: What Genre Novel World or Setting Do You Wish You Lived In?

30 Days of Genre     Home

Book Blogger Hop October 19th - October 25th: "Twenty-Two" Was a Second Season Episode of the Twilight Zone

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The hop is currently traveling about the blogosphere and is being hosted by Knitting and Sundries. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: How did you find out about book blogging and what made you decide to start one yourself?

Although I can't say that I was completely unaware of the existence of book blogging when I started writing my blog, I certainly hadn't focused on it as a "thing". I guess one could say I sort of fell into book blogging. I have always read a lot, but I was lousy at keeping a record of what books I owned and what books I had read. After the third time I accidentally reread Citizen of the Galaxy, I started an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my books. And then I found LibraryThing and began cataloging my books there. And then I began writing reviews of books on LibraryThing. And from there it was natural to start reviewing books on this blog. The odd thing is that although I seem to be in the mold of a book blogger, the reason I started blogging my reviews rather than just writing reviews for LibraryThing is that I wanted to, and do, review material that is not books, but rather magazines, movies, television shows, and pretty much any other media that is related to science fiction and fantasy. I'm a science fiction and fantasy blogger. It just happens that lots of science fiction and fantasy can be found in books.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: The Numbers on a Six-Sided Die Add Up to Twenty-One

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: In a Randomly Chosen Group of 23 People There is a 50% Chance That Two Will Share the Same Birthday

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - If You Are Caught Between the Angels of Light and Death, You Might Be in Artemis 81

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Kinx's Book Nook and Shelf Addiction.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: When you step out of your USUAL genre what do you like to read? Best books in that genre?

When I step out of my usual genres of science fiction and fantasy, I usually turn to nonfiction, specifically science or history. I read history because, well, I like history, which would be the reason why one of my undergraduate majors is a B.A. in History. One notable advantage that reading a lot of history gives me is that I am usually able to spot when an author steals from actual history to fuel the plot of their story. I should note that I generally include reading about mythology in the ambit of "history", because having an understanding most mythology is intimately tied to being able to acquire an understanding of how people in historical eras thought, which is critical for understanding why they took certain actions and forewent others.

I read science books both because I like reading them, and because a working knowledge of science is incredibly helpful when reading science fiction, and often makes the stories much better. A lot of science fiction obviously involves bending the rules of science to make the story work, but having a basic grasp of the scientific concepts involved usually helps make a story more enjoyable. For example, knowing just a little bit about imaginary numbers, Klein bottles, and antimatter makes the explanations Catherine Asaro gives in her books about the Skolian Empire that much more interesting than they would be without that knowledge.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Phileas Fogg Went Around the World in Eighty Days

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: Alchemists Didn't Know That the Atomic Number of Lead Is 82

Follow Friday     Home

Review - The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1 edited by Isaac Asimov

Stories included:
Ship of Shadows by Fritz Lieber
Ill Met in Lankhmar by Fritz Lieber
Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon
The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson
Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven

Full review: After the success of the first two volumes that collected the Hugo winning stories, it was somewhat inevitable that a third would be in the offing. Isaac Asimov returned to take on the editing duties and write funny little anecdotes about the prize winning authors. This installment, the first half of the third volume in the series, only contains five stories, but they are five excellent stories by four outstanding authors.

Asimov notes that the book opens with two consecutive novellas by Fritz Lieber, meaning that what is supposed to be a multi-author collection of short fiction opens with approximately forty-thousand words worth of fiction from a single author. Fortunately, they are forty thousand pretty good words, so it isn't really much of a problem. The first Lieber story is Ship of Shadows, a story that begins with an almost dream-like feel that sharpens into a high focus by the end of the tale. The ostensible reason for this increase in clarity are the optical enhancements the main character acquires through the course of the story, but Lieber uses this as a metaphor for learning. What at the outset were poorly seen shadows that coalesced in the mind of the viewpoint character as vampires, witches, and werewolves, are transformed into their real shapes as the narrator gets better vision, and a better understanding of the world he lives in. The story starts off as a fantasy, but by the end it is clear that it is pure science fiction, and that Lieber is playing with the reader's perception by means of the narrator's faulty reporting, although at all times the narrator's reporting is painfully and almost childishly honest. In the end, the mystery is solved, the threats faced by the protagonist are mostly averted, and all is more or less well, but that is almost all beside the point of this simultaneously surreal and real tale.

The other Lieber story in the collection is Ill Met in Lankhmar, in which the author details the first meeting of his two famous sword wielding swashbucklers Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Though this is ostensibly the tale describing the first encounter between the pair, it is one of the last-written stories about them, and it seems to assume that the reader has more than a passing familiarity with these two characters and the world they live in. And for a long awaited story about how a team of well-liked pulp heroes got together, this story is something of a disappointment. The pair accidentally bump into each other while ambushing the same set of members from the Lankhmar Thieves' Guild. After the fight, they take on look at one another and become immediate friends. They then go get some wine, get their girlfriends, and stage an impromptu party. And seeing one another in an alleyway after killing a couple thieves is the sum total of the introduction that made Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser the best of friends. The story goes on from there in fairly standard fashion. The pair are goaded into infiltrating the Thieves' Guild, do so drunkenly and clumsily, get both their girlfriends killed by sorcery, and then go back to bash their way into the Guild house and kill the sorcerer responsible. The story is pretty standard swords and sorcery adventure, so I have to wonder if the voters were honoring this story, or were rather honoring the body of Lankhmar stories that preceded it.

After the surreal first story and pulp adventure of the second, Theodore Sturgeon's sober dissection of human nature in Slow Sculpture is something of a jolt, but it is a refreshing and compelling jolt. An unnamed woman suffering from cancer finds her way to a cynical engineer brilliant enough to have invented numerous inventions that would revolutionize everything about our world. The central message of the story is that humanity will resist such revolutionary changes, and that if the engineer released his inventions upon the world that they would be suppressed, destroyed, or ignored. This is in direct contrast to many science fiction stories in which a brilliant scientist comes up with a clever invention that sweeps across the world and causes massive change. In the story humanity is likened to a bonsai tree, capable of being changed, but slowly, and with great persistent effort. It may not be the best story in the collection, but it is the most thoughtful.

In The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson crafts another story involving humans dealing with an alien world and its seemingly inscrutable inhabitants. The son of a scientist studying the native life in the wilderness of a frontier planet is mysteriously abducted. After being stonewalled by the local police, she enlists a private investigator and sets out to find her son. The story alternates between the pair of searchers and the humans living amidst the alien intelligence that seems to love and care for them. But as in his previous Hugo winning story The Sharing of Flesh, the humans don't really understand the aliens they are dealing with, and their assumptions have led them to some missteps. In the end, the private investigator unravels the aliens' secret and the story ends with everything turning out more or less well. But the plot is not the fascinating part of the story, rather, the alien "Queen" is coupled with the exploration of how an alien intelligence could hide more or less in plain sight.

The final story in the volume is Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven, which was later made into an Outer Limits episode of the same name starring Michael Gross and Joanna Gleason. In the story, an improbably bright moon leads Los Angeles resident Stan to conclude that the sun has exploded on the other side of the Earth. He calls up an old girlfriend and proceeds to have what he expects will be one last night in which they can live it up before dying when the cataclysmic wave of superheated atmosphere rolls around to where they are. Through the story several clues lead Stan and the reader to conclude that the future is not quite as bleak as he first thought, although the picture is definitely not rosy. The story is a classic astronomical disaster story, a chilling reminder of just how precarious our continued existence on the Earth is, and how randomly death and extinction might come to our doorstep.

The Hugo Winners, Volume 3, Book 1 is an excellent collection of award-winning stories. Of the five stories in the book, four are excellent, and the remaining one - Ill-Met in Lankhmar - is pretty good. The stories are thought-provoking, and enjoyable, and as usual, Asimov's commentary about the authors and the circumstances of their Hugo victories is amusing and gives a fascinating look into the history of science fiction. These are stories that are "must reads" for any serious science fiction fan who has not already come across them, and an anthology that should definitely be on every science fiction fan's shelf.

Subsequent book in the series: The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2 edited by Isaac Asimov

What are the Hugo Awards?

This volume contains the Best Novella winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1970, 1971, and 1972, and the Best Short Story winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1971 and 1972.

1969 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: Nightwings by Robert Silverberg (reviewed in More Stories from the Hugo Winners, Volume II)

1973 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula K. Le Guin (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2)

1970 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany (reviewed in More Stories from the Hugo Winners, Volume II)

1973 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: (tie) Eurema's Dam by R.A. Lafferty (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2)

1973 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: (tie) The Meeting by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2)

1971 Locus Award Winner for Best Short Story: The Region Between by Harlan Ellison

1973 Locus Award Winner for Best Short Story: Basilisk by Harlan Ellison

1970 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novelette: Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany (reviewed in More Stories from the Hugo Winners, Volume II)

1973 Nebula Award Winner for Best Novelette: Goat Song by Poul Anderson (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2)

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

List of Locus Award Winners for Best Short Story

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Novella
List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette

1970 Hugo Award Nominees
1971 Hugo Award Nominees
1972 Hugo Award Nominees

1971 Locus Award Nominees
1972 Locus Award Nominees

1970 Nebula Award Nominees
1971 Nebula Award Nominees
1972 Nebula Award Nominees

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Musical Monday - Modern Poetry (Nerdy Love Song) by The Doubleclicks

Things mentioned in this song that I have not done: Gone to a modern poetry reading, consumed instant apple cider mix, played Magic: The Gathering, attended a Renaissance Faire, played the bass in a heavy metal band. Things mentioned in this song that I have done: Gone to an open mike night. Even as a geek I seem to have a lot of things left to do. Although I don't know about the poetry reading. Or the instant apple cider mix. And you don't want me trying my hand at music. And I have played other CCGs, mainly the Babylon 5 CCG and the Illuminati: The New World Order CCG. Just not Magic: The Gathering, which is probably as good thing because I'm reasonably certain that I'd become addicted to it almost immediately and never do anything but build decks again.

So that leaves a Renaissance Faire. I hear Maryland has a nice one. I may have to check it out the next time it happens.

Previous Musical Monday: This Fantasy World (Dungeons & Dragons) by The Doubleclicks

Subsequent Musical Monday: Who Wants to Live Forever? by Queen

The Doubleclicks     Musical Monday     Home

30 Days of Genre - Who Is Your Favorite Antagonist in a Genre Novel?

The Berserkers created by Fred Saberhagen

My favorite antagonists in science fiction are the inhuman relics of a long forgotten war between two now dead races: the robotic "Berserkers" created by Fred Saberhagen. Originally created to provide the opposition for the human protagonist in the short story Without a Thought, these agents of destruction ended up featuring in several novels and a couple dozen pieces of short fiction - sufficient to fill seventeen books worth of pages.

The Berserkers were created during the same time period as Earth's Paleolithic era by a race now only known as the Builders. They were intended to help the Builders prosecute a galaxy spanning conflict against their rivals, known as the Red Race. To this end, they made the Berserkers engines of pure destruction, making them self-aware and programming them with instructions to "destroy life". Unfortunately, the Berserkers worked too well. They won the war for the Builders, wiping out the Red Race in the process, but then they turned on their own creators and destroyed them as well. Millennia later, the Berserkers still travel through space obeying their long gone master's one command, and humanity and its allies must desperately fight for survival.

The Berserkers are a fantastic antagonist because they are both infinitely malleable, and firmly fixed in their implacable desire to eradicate life. Some humans bargain with the Berserkers, becoming "goodlife", and work for the Berserkers hoping to stave off their own deaths for a while. But they know that their reprieve is only temporary, because the Berserkers know no mercy, no pity, and no kindness, but are driven by their unchangeable homicidal programming. But they are infinitely malleable as antagonists because they can take almost any form - from gigantic starfaring ships the size of large asteroids, to human sized (and shaped) entities, and almost anything else one could conceive of. They are, in many ways, the perfect adversary, unreasonably hostile and unswervable in their dedication to their mission, and provide the perfect antagonist for fallible, ingenious, resourceful humans.

Go to Day 16: What Genre Novel Has the Most Intriguing Plot?

Go to Day 18: Who Is Your Favorite Protagonist in a Genre Novel?

30 Days of Genre     Home

2012 WSFA Small Press Award Nominees

Location: CapClave in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Comments: In 2012, Tansy Rayner Roberts won the WSFA Small Press Award for the second time, becoming the first person to accomplish this feat. Robert's story appeared in the anthology Love and Romanpunk, published by Twelfth Planet Press, making that publisher the first to have two stories from one of its publications win the award. The fact that Twelfth Planet Press is both very young and based in Australia makes this accomplishment even more notable, and is a testament to the overall high quality of books and stories supported by the publisher.

This is not to say that the other publishers who had works nominated were not also great organizations. In fact, between the magazines GigaNotoSaurus, Clarkesworld, and Fantasy as well as the anthologies Hope, Shadow Conspiracy, Volume II, and Transtories, the wealth of great stories that the voters had to choose from is extremely impressive, and speaks to the need for an award such as the WSFA Small Press Award to continue to honor such endeavors.

WSFA Small Press Award

Winner:

The Patrician by Tansy Rayner Roberts

Other Nominees:
A Militant Peace by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell
Flowers in the Shadow of the Garden by Joanne Anderton
Lessons from a Clockwork Queen by Megan Arkenberg
Sauerkraut Station by Ferrett Steinmetz
The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees by E. Lily Yu
What Ho, Automaton! by Chris Dolley
Yesterday's Taste by Lawrence M. Schoen

Go to previous year's nominees: 2011
Go to subsequent year's nominees: 2013

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Book Blogger Hop October 12th - October 18th: The Numbers on a Six-Sided Die Add Up to Twenty-One

Jen at Crazy for Books has restarted her weekly Book Blogger Hop to help book bloggers connect with one another. The hop is currently traveling about the blogosphere and is being hosted by Soon Remembered Tales. The only requirements to participate in the Hop are to write and link a post answering the weekly question and then visit other blogs that are also participating to see if you like their blog and would like to follow them. A complete explanation of the history and the rules of the Hop can be found here.

This week Jen asks: With Autumn upon us and Halloween drawing near, what books remind you of fall? What ones do you enjoy reading that are about autumn?

There are some books that bring up obvious memories about autumn, usually involving Halloween, and sometimes Thanksgiving; Marion T. Place's The Witch Who Saved Halloween and Ray Bradbury's Halloween Tree are clear examples of this sort of book. But then there are some books that feel like they take place in the autumn, no matter what time of year they are actually set. For me, Danny, the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl has always felt like a book about autumn. I just always envisioned Danny and his father walking around Hazell's Wood looking for pheasants in the crisp fall evenings and then heading home to eat their ill-gotten gains on a cold, clear autumn night with the wind rustling through the trees outside.

Go to previous Book Blogger Hop: Exponential Thermostellar Bomb Number 20 Threatened to Detonate in the Dark Star's Bomb Bay

Go to subsequent Book Blogger Hop: "Twenty-Two" Was a Second Season Episode of the Twilight Zone

Book Blogger Hop     Home

Follow Friday - Phileas Fogg Went Around the World in Eighty Days

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Reese's Reviews and Bookfever.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: What book do you think would make a great Halloween movie? Please explain in graphic detail of goriness.

It isn't an entire book, and it would probably be almost impossible to translate to film, but the story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream would be a truly terrifying vision to put on the screen. It probably couldn't be told in exactly the same way, but the crushing inevitability could work. Perhaps have the story start something like Colossus: The Forbin Project, and then proceed from there to the part where the now sentient hate-filled computer eliminates almost all of humankind but saves a handful of individuals to torture endlessly out of spite. The final segment would have to be a voice over on account of the fact that the narrator has no mouth. Eliminating the last part would rob the story of much of its terror potential, so it would have to be retained, although the director would have to work hard to get the viewer to identify with the inhuman remains of the narrator, which is necessary for the horror to work.

It would be difficult to pull off, but if it could be done, it would be amazing and terrifying.

Go to previous Follow Friday: Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture Were Both Released in 1979

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: If You Are Caught Between the Angels of Light and Death, You Might Be in Artemis 81

Follow Friday     Home

Review - More Stories from the Hugo Winners, Volume II edited by Isaac Asimov

Stories included:
Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey
Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer
Gonna Roll the Bones by Fritz Lieber
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison
Nightwings by Robert Silverberg
The Sharing of Flesh by Poul Anderson
The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World by Harlan Ellison
Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany

Full review: Following up on The Hugo Winners, Asimov agreed to edit and write interstitial pieces for More Stories from the Hugo Winners, an anthology featuring those pieces of short fiction that had won the Hugo Award since the first volume's publication. As with the first volume, this collection of stories is quite strong, which one would expect from a group of stories that had all been handed one of the two highest honors in science fiction literature.

The first story in the volume is the history-making Weyr Search by Anne McCaffrey, a story that marked the first time a woman had won a Hugo Award. The story introduces Pern, the fictional world that would dominate much of McCaffrey's career, and tells a tale of revenge and discovery with a little twist of the unexpected thrown in. The story features a vile usurper, a displaced princess, and dragon-riding hero, and a destiny that one of the characters didn't know they had. The story is a good story, but I'm not sure if it is a truly great story. As an installment in the Pern series, it is quite satisfying, but given that this was the first Pern story published, there is something of an unfinished feel to it. The later Pern stories put this one into context, but standing on its own the story seems unfinished with too many elements unresolved. McCaffrey's story shared its Hugo win with Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer, an at times surreal tale of a future in which everyone lives off of government hand-outs, but in exchange gives up most control over their own lives, including where they live. The main character is Rex Luscus, an artist who is sheltering his grandfather, the last known tax evader, who is also the voice of rebellion and dissent in the world. The story meanders, with federal agents pursuing their quarry while hampered by a populace that mostly wants to be left alone to watch the future equivalent of television, but is also very touchy about those who trample on their myriad of rights. The story winds its way to an art show in which a disagreement between art critics leads to a riot, and then back to the apprehension and death of Luscus' grandfather, and then to a final joke played upon authority. The story is odd, with the characters displaying an equal mixture of feeding off the government and rebellion against the government.

Probably the most straightforward story in the volume is Gonna Roll the Bones by Fritz Lieber, a tale in which Joe Slattermill, a man with an amazing ability to roll dice, decides to head to a new casino to shoot craps. In a turn that will surprise no one, he ends up shooting against Death, which leads to a critical showdown. Slattermill realizes that no mere man can hope to succeed against the darkness of death, which results in an interesting denouement. The story is interesting, but as it is yet one more of the long line of stories in which a human matches up against Death and has to find their way out of their predicament using their wits, and as a result isn't particularly unique. Were it not for the final few lines of the story in which Slattermill makes a choice about what to do with his second chance at life, it is quite possible that the story would have faded into obscurity.

In contrast with Lieber's somewhat conventional story about an encounter with evil, we have Harlan Ellison's two Hugo winning stories I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream and The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, both nightmarish visions of terror that avoid being cliched. Ellison has a somewhat well-deserved reputation as the enfant terrible of genre fiction, and I am convinced that this is at least partially because the inside of his mind if a terrifying and scary place. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream follows the last four humans on Earth as they deal with the nightmarish reality that the "AM" computer forces them to endure. Having systemically killed off everyone else on the planet, the world-spanning AM tortures these four out of hate and spite, keeping them alive just to torment them. The story details the many horrors the AM inflicts upon the characters: starving them for months and then providing them food that is disgusting, or inaccessible, causing creatures to shred them to pieces, or freezing them, or boiling them, or any number of other atrocities, but each time the AM saves and heals them so that it may inflict further punishment upon them. Eventually, the lead character figures out how to kill the others, but before he can kill himself the AM stops him and transforms him into a gelatinous creature with no mouth, capable of feeling pain, but incapable of harming himself. This story is possibly the most terrifying vision that has been realized in print.

Also mediating on the subject of evil is Ellison's follow-up story The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, although in this story Ellison treats evil as insanity, and posits that insanity is a palpable force that can be isolated and excised. But after the insanity of cruelty and hatred has been removed from a being, it has to go somewhere, and the frightening thing about this story is the decision that is made concerning that question. And even though there are characters in this story that poison hundreds of people and blow up airplanes and engage in cannibalism, the real evil doers are shown to be those who, having purged themselves and their society of insanity, consign others to endure its ravages in order to be able to ship the poison elsewhere. In Ellison's vision, the true evil is appears to be in actions that are banal and dispassionate, and not those taken out of insanity and rage.

The strange, almost fairy-tale quality of Nightwings by Robert Silverberg seems to have influenced his own Majipoor Chronicles, as well as Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, imagining a future Earth in which humanity living on a wrecked planet has slipped back into a feudal way of life and the working lives of all adults are dominated by the guilds they belong to. The viewpoint character is a "watcher", a guild dedicated to watching the stars for evidence of the expected invasion of Earth by alien forces. He travels with a "flyer" and a mutant who is a member of no guild as they all head for the ancient city of Roum. Once there, they find the corruption that has crept its way into every facet of society, and even when the human cause is betrayed, it doesn't seem like anything of importance has been lost in the destruction of the world that humans had built. The story deals with the nature of history, the nature of expectation, and the nature of power, and all of these themes weave together to yield a slightly unsettling tale.

Another unsettling tale is Poul Anderson's story about how cultural assumptions can blind one to the reality that they are studying. In The Sharing of Flesh a team of anthropologists studying the primitive inhabitants of Lokon are stunned when one of their number is murdered out of the blue by a native the researcher trusted. While investigating the murder, the deceased's widow uncovers the truth behind her spouse's murder, and the biological imperatives that drive the seemingly barbaric practices of the world. The story is a classic tale of miscommunication between disparate cultures and how even the most careful observers can be blinded by their own prejudices and assumptions. Even though the story itself is fairly simple, the excellent characterization and the stark unflinching manner in which the tale is told raise it up to superior status.

The final story in the volume is Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones by Samuel R. Delany, and as usual, Delany's story is strange and beautiful. The story itself, covering the rise of an upwardly mobile criminal with an ever changing name, is fairly straightforward. The protagonist recounts how he escaped from a life of dairy farming, tries to unload some stolen property, runs afoul of the law, flees to Neptune, and opens an ice cream shop. But the brilliance of the story is in the elements that surround the plot - the "singers" who tell the stories of the world around them, the use of gemstones as code words by a diffuse criminal network, the "holographic analysis" that allows the police to determine when a criminal is about to move up in the world, and the idea that the only thing the police are concerned about is the upwardly mobile criminal. The protagonist is shaking up the underworld by climbing the criminal social ladder, and comes into conflict with other, but realizes that after he has made the climb, the dust will settle and those he is fighting will be his allies again. The story is a brilliant essay on social stability and the conflict caused by those who would seek to change their own place in the world.

It is very difficult to go wrong with an anthology when you start with Hugo winners as your material, and More Stories from the Hugo Winners ably demonstrates why this is so. Every story in the collection is at least good, and many of them are great, especially Ellison's two contributions as well as Delany and Anderson's stories. As usual, Asimov's short essays about each author are fun and enjoyable, adding a nice personal touch that helps draw you into each story. Overall, this is an excellent collection of stories, and a must read for any science fiction fan.

What are the Hugo Awards?

This volume contains the the Best Novella and Best Novelette winners for the Hugo Award for 1968 and 1969, and the Best Short Story winners for the Hugo Award for the years 1968, 1969, and 1970.

1954 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: A Case of Conscience by James Blish (awarded in 2004)

1970 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novella: Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1)

1967 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: The Last Castle by Jack Vance

1973 Hugo Award Winner for Best Novelette: Goat Song by Poul Anderson (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 2)

1967 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Neutron Star by Larry Niven

1971 Hugo Award Winner for Best Short Story: Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon (reviewed in The Hugo Winners: Volume 3, Book 1)

1967 Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette: Call Him Lord by Gordon R. Dickson

1969 Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette: Mother to the World by Richard Wilson

1969 Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette: Mother to the World by Richard Wilson

1971 Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette: Slow Sculpture by Theodore Sturgeon (reviewed in The Hugo Winners, Volume 3, Book 1)

List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Novelette
List of Hugo Award Winners for Best Short Story

List of Nebula Award Winners for Best Novelette

1968 Hugo Award Nominees
1969 Hugo Award Nominees
1970 Hugo Award Nominees

1968 Nebula Award Nominees
1969 Nebula Award Nominees
1970 Nebula Award Nominees

Isaac Asimov     Book Award Reviews     Book Reviews A-Z     Home

30 Days of Genre - What Genre Novel Has the Most Intriguing Plot?

Stars in My Pocket, Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany  

When I am thinking of intriguing plots, my thoughts always turn to Samuel R. Delany. From competing interstellar industrialists trying to find a star about to go nova so they can mine its exploding guts in Nova (read review), to a nameless kid trying to navigate his way through the dying city of Bellona in Dhalgren (read review), to art and relationships in the middle of an interplanetary war in Triton, Delany always delivers wondrous, bizarre, and amazing stories full of strangeness and beauty.

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is no exception, and like most great science fiction, it is fundamentally about people and how we fit together. In the novel, Delany deals with issues of cultural decay, human freedom, and sexuality, fitting everything together in a story that seems almost mundane in many places, and exotically alien in others. In Stars, humanity has expanded across the galaxy, and now inhabited thousands of worlds, all of which evolve culturally on their own. Humanity shares the galaxy with many alien races, but only one, the Xlv, that is also capable of interstellar flight. The danger that all human planets face is "cultural fugue" a poorly understood phenomenon in which technological complexity and cultural advancement interact in such a way as to create a planet destroying conflagration which, at the opening of the novel, has always destroyed every living being on a planet that experiences cultural fugue.To fend off cultural fugue, most planets are aligned with either "the Family" or "the Sygn", which attempt to provide the necessary tools to avoid this destructive event by repression and permissiveness, respectively.

Korga, a somewhat dim and psychologically unstable giant agrees to undergo "Radical Anxiety Termination" therapy, a process that will eliminate his destructive and criminal tendencies, but will make him unable to learn, unable to desire, and unable to love. After his treatment, he is a "rat" and like all other rats works as slave laborer, in Korga's case in a mining operation. But Korga's menial occupation saves him when his home planet undergoes cultural fugue and he is protected by being deep within the mines at the time. Korga becomes the only human to survive a cultural fugue, although the event is somewhat shrouded in mystery, especially since Xlv starships were seen in the area when Korga's planet annihilated itself. The action moves to industrial diplomat Marq Dyeth on the distant world of Velm. It turns out that Korga is a statistical love match for Marq, and in an experiment, Korga is equipped with a device that reverses most of the RAT process and sent to Velm to meet Dyeth.

The two fall in love and have a short idyllic period together in which they, among other things, go on a dragon hunt. The book ends at a strange dinner party hosted by Marq's "stream" at which some off-world guests, who had formerly been their friends, show up after having chosen to align themselves with the Family, and behave fairly rudely. In the end, it is determined that Marq and Korga's relationship is possibly a triggering event for a cultural fugue on Velm, and they are separated. AT this point, the story ends, with almost every plot point still up in the air. Delany originally intended to make this the first half of a diptych, with the second book to be titled The Splendor and Misery of Bodies, of Cities, but the second half has not been written, and given that twenty-eight years have passed since Stars in My Pocket was published, it seems unlikely that it will be.

That doesn't change the fact that the plot of this book is intriguing. There are so many ideas packed into the book - the cultural fugue, the RAT therapy, the nature of relationships between people in distant parts of the galaxy, the idea that relationships could be expressed via a mathematical model, and so on - and then these ideas are interwoven together in such a way as to create mysteries. And the mysteries are big and thought provoking, such as why did the Xlv show up at a planet just as it went into a cultural fugue? And how could a relationship between two men threaten an entire planet? And why would otherwise nice people align themselves with a totalitarian faction and shut out their close friends? Like most truly good science fiction, Stars in My Pocket is all about questions, and whether those questions ever get answered is not nearly as important as asking them.

Go to Day 15: What Is the Cover of Your Current or Most Recent Genre Read?

Go to Day 17: Who Is Your Favorite Antagonist in a Genre Novel?

30 Days of Genre     Home