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OtherRealms Issue 23 Part 08
Electronic OtherRealms #23
Winter, 1989
Part 8
Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written
permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic
edition may be distributed only if the return address,
copyrights and author credits remain intact.
No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way
without the permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms
hereby revert to the original author.
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1989 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Episode 8: Special All-Nice Installment
If you can't say something nice about somebody,
don't say anything at all. --the generic mother
Reviewing is not an objective business.
You read books, react to them, and articulate your reactions so that
others can make an informed decision as to whether or not they'd be
likely to enjoy those books.
But we all have blind spots. There are writers I simply can't stand;
but people whose taste I respect praise these writers to the stars. And
there are writers that, in my eyes, can damn near do no wrong.
One of the latter is Harlan Ellison. You've been warned.
Angry Candy
Harlan Ellison
Houghton Mifflin, 0-395-48307-7, $18.95
Friends and neighbors, Ellison has a new collection of short stories
out, Angry Candy, and it's scrum-dilly-icious. Each of these stories is
a raw blast of pure emotion, dramatized and set down in black and white
to remind you that the world is full of folks like you, who laugh, cry,
hurt, bleed, and love.
Ellison hammers his theme in again and again, the one he's been
hammering for a couple of decades, the cliche that can never be
repeated often enough: "You are not alone." He's also derived some
corollaries about the responsibilities accruing to a not-alone being.
Frankly, I don't think there's anything better a short story can do.
Go get this book, even if you have to test-drive a car to do it.
Writing Science Fiction
Christopher Evans
St. Martin's Press, 0-312-01849-5
Fair warning: if you aren't interested in becoming a writer, skip this
section.
Okay, I presume the rest of you are?
Good. Now I'll tell you something you already knew: you can't learn how
to write from a book.
There are a books on writing out there, most of them published by
Writer's Digest but none of them is going to make you a writer. The
only way to do that is write.
Still, there are some of them that can teach you how to avoid some of
the dumber things new writers do. Books like John Gardner's The Art of
Fiction, or Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.
Which brings me to Christopher Evans's book Writing Science Fiction.
This is the first book specifically for the would-be science fiction
writer that I can praise wholeheartedly. Like the Strunk and White,
it's thin, but densely packed. Like the Gardner, it covers adequately
what can be told and tells you that it can't tell you the rest.
It isn't perfect. There are topics that Evans might have covered in
more detail--such as the business side of writing--but these are
covered in other places. Evans doesn't have anything really new to say
about writing; but he gives it all the right spin for writing SF.
In short, if you are born to be a writer (and not, say, a sewer guard
or a professor of biochemistry), then Writing Science Fiction is as
likely as any other book I've seen to get you over the hump. If not,
nothing will.
The Brothel In Rosenstrasse
Michael Moorcock
Carroll & Graf, 0-88184-406-3, $6.95
Carroll & Graf, whom I've praised before for bringing the finest works
of the '70s back into print, are still breaking rules. Hasn't anyone
ever told these people that good taste is a sure way to go bankrupt?
Now they've gone and brought out Michael Moorcock's The Brothel In
Rosenstrasse, a "novel of decadence" set in Waldenstein near the end of
the last century.
If Waldenstein doesn't sound familiar, don't worry. There's no reason
it should. It's just one of many tiny European countries that
disappeared during the period from the Franco-Prussian War to World War
I, squashed between the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires.
The hero, von Bek, is a remittance man, a noble son paid by the family
to stay away from the ancestral grounds. He has seduced--or been
seduced by?--the very young daughter of a fine family of Waldenstein,
Alexandra. At first, the novel seems to be about their erotic
adventures, both in and out of the titular Brothel.
But ever-present entropy sets in; Waldenstein is wracked by rebellion
and its lovely capital is laid under siege. Beauty is destroyed. Nobles
take up residence in a brothel. Innocence corrupts first itself and
then corruption. As the city walls collapse, love is lost...or betrayed.
The whole is told in some of Moorcock's finest writing, language for
which you could cry or die. Von Bek tells his own story, from his
deathbed, years later. The language allows the story to blend,
sometimes imperceptibly, with his thoughts on his final circumstances,
and his relationship to a strange, sullen, and grouchy manservant. The
relationship reflects young von Bek's relationship with Alexandra, and
the whole makes a strong comment on faith and betrayal in human relationships.
Recommended reading, but not for everybody.
To Warm The Earth
David Belden
Signet SF, 0-451-15485-1, $3.95
About a year back, I praised David Belden's first novel, Children of
Arable. His second novel is out, now, and it's a sequel. (I hear the
"uh-oh" chorus. Yeah, I worry about sequelitis, too.)
To Warm The Earth is not, however, a direct sequel. It takes place in
the same universe, but a generation later and with a different cast.
Belden starts with some strikes against him: he introduces major
characters more than halfway through the book; he slips occasionally
between past and present tense for no discernible purpose; and he's
writing a goddess-worship religion. There's nothing wrong with this
last, but it's extremely au courant, almost as cliche at this point as
the Celtic milieu for adventure fantasy.
But there's good stuff, too. In Children, Belden created a human-hegemony
Universe large enough to warrant further exploration; here, he explores
corners of it not touched before. Particularly Earth.
Earth is struggling through a new ice age, brought on by what the inhabitants
call the "New Clear Winter." They practice magic and religious ritual
to hasten the end of the ice age and the return of summer.
One old priestess, however, has a plan to hurry the natural processes
along. Her fellows think she's crazy; her own chosen successor doesn't
believe in her; but she knows the plan can work.
There are numerous marvellous scenes, here. The heroine finds herself
trying to introduce pagan rituals into a sanity-and-sanitation-oriented
space station society, and the conflicts that arise from it swing
wildly from funny to touching.
To Warm The Earth may never find its proper audience. It's packaged to look
like a space-going romance novel, and I've seen it stuffed in with the gothics
in the supermarket. But hell, at least it made it to the supermarket...
Mona Lisa Overdrive
William Gibson
Bantam, 0-553-05250-0, $17.95
If you care that William Gibson has a new novel, you've probably either
already bought Mona Lisa Overdrive or decided to wait for the
paperback. But just in case you're sitting on the fence....
The good news and the bad news are both "it's more of the same." It's
set once again in the "Sprawl" future of Neuromancer and Count Zero.
While we might have hoped that Gibson would turn to something new, it's
hard to complain: he's still growing as a writer, and MLO is better
than its predecessors..
It has flaws in common with them, though. In particular, it's hard to identify
with Gibson's protagonists; he succeeds in making them so realistically
gritty that they don't make easy fantasy-identification figures.
But for readers who don't always want easy fantasy-identification
figures, it's worth the effort. Gibson has a sense of plot that won't
quit; the four plot threads of MLO tie together much more neatly and
less artificially than the three of Count Zero. He's achieved a control
of language found only in a few writers--Vance, Bester, Delany--and
uses it as a precision tool. Also, we find out what happened to Case
after the Straylight run, though the answer won't please the
hacker-ethic cyberbabies out there.
Because there are so many plot threads, it's hard to give a sense of
what Mona Lisa Overdrive is about. The four plot threads begin like this:
a warped artist is pressured into receiving a very strange guest; the
daughter of a Yakuza leader is sent to England for protection; a penny-ante
whore is offered the seeming chance of a lifetime; and the biggest
media star on Earth returns from drug rehab to commune with the loas.
Yes, those all tie together. Don't ask how--it would be telling.
Other Americas
Norman Spinrad
Bantam 0-553-27214-4, $3.95
If you haven't read the Full Spectrum anthology, go get a copy; it
contains two masterpieces, Fred Bals' "Once in a Lullabye" and Norman
Spinrad's "Journals of the Plague Years," which if it doesn't win every
award this field has available for 1988, there just plain ain't no
justice left anywhere.
Spinrad is another of those writers like Ellison who make my jaw drop
and my typing fingers wither with envy. I'd kill three close relatives
to be able to write things like Bug Jack Barron, The Men in the Jungle,
Riding the Torch, or last year's Little Heroes--all novels that have
been unconscionably ignored by the American public.
But, ignored though his novels may be, Spinrad's short work is even
less well-known. His novels are like riding the world's biggest
roller-coaster, in near darkness, without a seatbelt: you go up and
down at incredible speeds and sometimes the world turns upside down,
and occasionally you lose your lunch. But his short work, especially
in the novella length, is like one of those huge waterslides: one long,
fast ride, one slope down (though with bumps in it), an immense splash
when you get to the bottom. And you're always afraid some joker will
pull the plug out of the pool.
Spectra Books has collected four of Spinrad's finest novellas into a
nifty book called Other Americas. They are:
% an all-too-believable future New York, where one mistake or
one bad break can put you on the street, fighting for a
subway to sleep in and subsisting on "people kibble";
% an uproariously funny "final solution" to the world's
terrorism problem, agreed on in principle and action by a
dead Soviet Premier and a satyrized American President;
% a haunting and touching glimpse of post-Space Age America,
the "lost continent" ; and
% the final attempt of the Reaganista CIA to co-opt exiled
dissident writer Norman Spinrad.
Spinrad has a talent for making, if not happy, at least positive,
endings come out of impossible situations. All these stories cast light
on what the American dream is really about. All will leave you feeling
a little bit better about being human.
Autumn Angels
Arthur Byron Cover
Pyramid SF, 0-515-03787-7, $1.25
Closet Classic: Science Fiction, like rock and roll, is a safe harbor
for a largish number of looneytunes--people like Robert (Mindswap)
Sheckley, Douglas (Hitchhiker's Guide) Adams, and Damien (Striped
Holes) Broderick. (That last is a new writer, and if you haven't seen
Striped Holes, it's very silly. Trust me.) I don't know if it's because
SF readers are an accepting lot, or if maybe we're just a bunch of
looneytunes ourselves.
But in the '70s, looneytunehood reached what may have been its all-time
peak with the advent of one Arthur Byron Cover. He burst on the publishing
world, like unto a wet raspberry, with a book called Autumn Angels, and
there has never been anything like Autumn Angels before or since.
Imagine the far future. No, not that: the far, far future. Mankind's
problems are all solved; we have become something better, Godlike
Humanity, able to bring anything we wish into existence by wishing for
it, and getting rid of anything we don't like by wishing it into the
anti-matter universe.
Alas, though, godlike humanity has no imagination. Rather than rushing
off boldly to go where no godlike man has gone before, they adopt roles
and live lives of drab sameness for millennia.
This is the situation when the fat man, the demon, and the lawyer
decide to get godlike humanity moving again. What does godlike humanity
lack that mere humans had?
Depression.
So Autumn Angels is the story of three crazies out to depress the
entire godlike human race.
But wait! There's more!
Because every character in the book is a Reference. The fat man, for
example, is Sidney Greenstreet. The lawyer is Doc Savage's aid, "Ham."
If you've read John Myers Myers's Silverlock, you know the pleasant
game of guessing at the references in a book of this type. Silverlock,
however, was a hifalutin tome about litterchure. Autumn Angels is about
nothing but itself; further, you don't have to read a buncha
litterchure to get the references. They're all from pop culture--like
the Big Red Cheese, or the Insidious Oriental Doctor.
Unless Pyramid reissues it, you may have a task finding this one. But
make the effort. Read it and weep--tears of laughter.
Mentioned in passing and recommended:
The Art Of Fiction, John Gardner
Full Spectrum, Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, eds.
The Elements Of Style, Benjamin Strunk and E.B. White
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas R. Adams
Mindswap, Robert Sheckley
Striped Holes, Damien Broderick
