The Books We're Reading, Canto II

[Jobuu]

I recently picked up again the second book of the Barsoom series, The Gods of Mars. I had read A Princess of Mars a few years ago, and enjoyed it (even given its age and some instances of awkward writing style). One thing I'm noticing this time around, however, is how much of an influence the series must have had on Frank Herbert when he wrote Dune. Tars Tarkas reminds me so much of Stilgar that it can't just be coincidence.

[Yora]

I have never read Dune, but when I had been reading Princess of Mars, I spotted precursors for Star Wars with every new chapter.

It reads a bit lightweight, but the impact on fantastic fiction is massive. Strange that it is barely known. It ranks of similar importance with Conan and Lord of the Rings.

[BannedInSchool]

Barrayar really was the high-point of that series.

I guess that's a problem with taking the Hugo nominees as a reading list. The only direction to go from there is down.

I have never read Dune, [...]

And speaking of a series of novels, you may want to stop with just the first two of Dune if you ever read them. After that Herbert was more free of editor influence and IMO suffers for it.

[IthilanorStPete]

And speaking of a series of novels, you may want to stop with just the first two of Dune if you ever read them. After that Herbert was more free of editor influence and IMO suffers for it.

I would either just stick to Dune or read the first three, then stop. Children of Dune is about as good as Dune Messiah, IMO, and it wraps up the loose ends and thematic arc of the trilogy.

[Aolbain]

I guess that's a problem with taking the Hugo nominees as a reading list. The only direction to go from there is down.

Don't get me wrong, with the exception of Komarr and Cetaganda (which was just decent-to-good) they're all excellent, but nothing quite surpassed Barrayar in my mind.

[LibraryOgre]

I have never read Dune, but when I had been reading Princess of Mars, I spotted precursors for Star Wars with every new chapter.

It reads a bit lightweight, but the impact on fantastic fiction is massive. Strange that it is barely known. It ranks of similar importance with Conan and Lord of the Rings.

Barsoom is also very close to what you'd see in Dark Sun.

Another important series that gets ignored? Lensman. Foundations for so many science fiction technologies are there, from shields to hyperspace. End of the Lensman series DOES get a bit squicky, what with the heavily implied incest and all, but it's still very much where you find the Jedi, the Green Lantern Corps, and all your other space rangers.

[Killer Angel]

And speaking of a series of novels, you may want to stop with just the first two of Dune if you ever read them.

I would either just stick to Dune or read the first three, then stop.

I Agree. Dune is a masterpiece and a Must Read. The other books? it's a continuous drop in quality, so it's a matter of how low you set the bar.
All I can say is: when you find them boring, stop the reading, because there will be no improvement.

[Yora]

Barsoom is also very close to what you'd see in Dark Sun.

And by close we mean thri-kreen are green martians.

[LibraryOgre]

And by close we mean thri-kreen are green martians.

And every body's psychic.

[warty goblin]

Picked up my Brackett collections from the post office yesterday. Altogether just gorgeous things, into which I dived with abandon.

The first story isn't particularly good, but is nevertheless an interesting little snapshot of one particular character. A lot of Brackett's stories don't seem to be so much a complete accounting of a character, as a sort of vignette of a short period of their life. Things happened to this person before the story, which we may or may not see, and the story will end with only hints of what is to follow.
The second story is a fun little romp around Mars. Good times, but nothing special.

The third is straight up horror, a sort of suburban hell of interior decorating with the miserable persons of Dick and Jane (no really, the central characters are named Dick and Jane, into which actual Hell starts to intrude. Actually kinda freaky, and different in just about every way from all the Brackett I've read previously. As before, it's a vignette of a particular sequence of moments, but here the untold future of the characters is used for maximal horror.

Fourth story seems to be adventures in colonialism on Venus with an army of convicts. It does contain the first reference to the Low Canals of Mars, which is excellent. Brackett's Mars is a place fascinating and seductive in its barbaric dangers. The ulterior motive behind reading the early woman pioneers of sci-fi is I confess really to ride the road to Sinharat.

And I've got fifteen hundred pages of this wonderful stuff yet to go. I'm thrilled without bounds.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Mark Hall
Another important series that gets ignored? Lensman. Foundations for so many science fiction technologies are there, from shields to hyperspace.

I think I came across references to this when I was a kid, but never actually looked at the books.

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Fourth story seems to be adventures in colonialism on Venus with an army of convicts.

…and this sounds vaguely Heinlein-ish, although it's been quite a while.



Just finished The War That Made America, which followed the French and Indian War and the apparently disparate events which came after, presenting them as aspects of a single integrated narrative leading directly--but by no means inevitably--to the Declaration of Independence. It's a compact history of the period, perhaps a little too much in some respects, but an excellent overview of the conflict and how its aftereffects created the political and emotional climate which led to the more familiar story of the 1770s.

My only complaint, and a minor one, is that while the book pays detailed attention to native peoples and their many roles in the conflict, it almost entirely neglects the European theater, which involved a great upending of long-standing alliances. The back-and-forth of European fighting might not have been directly relevant to the story of French expulsion and native dispossession, but it would have made for a better-rounded understanding of the conflict as a whole. At some point I may look for a companion volume which concentrates on the European side.

Next up on the audiobook front will be Ron Chernow's mondo-sized biography of George Washington. I'm more interested in his early life, so we'll see how far I get. Hoping for a mention of pawpaws.

[LibraryOgre]

…and this sounds vaguely Heinlein-ish, although it's been quite a while.

Green Hills of Earth collection, "The Logic of Empire." The actual Green Hills of Earth is one of my favorite pieces.

We've tried each spinning space mote
And reckoned its true worth:
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.

The arching sky is calling
Spacemen back to their trade.
All hands! Stand by! Free falling!
And the lights below us fade.

Out ride the sons of Terra,
Far drives the thundering jet,
Up leaps the race of Earthmen
Out, far, and onward yet —

[TheThan]

I just borrowed Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, from the local library. Gosh that thing is thick, I had no clue it was a beast of a book.

[Eldan]

And like half of it is all one character's monologue.

[Feytalist]

I just borrowed Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, from the local library. Gosh that thing is thick, I had no clue it was a beast of a book.

It has to be, to contain the main characters' egos.


Still, I enjoyed the book, mostly. There's some wonderful descriptive passages in there, and Rand has a rather pleasing, precise and clear prose, if nothing else.

[Peebles]

I just finished reading Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch. I only discovered the Rivers of London series towards the end of last year, and I've been hoovering them up in big chunks ever since, though I still rate the first book in the series the best of what I've read so far.

That ending of Broken Homes though. I did not, in any shape or form, expect that.

[warty goblin]

…and this sounds vaguely Heinlein-ish, although it's been quite a while.

Heinlein isn't a bad point of comparison, particularly for early Brackett. Her later stuff undergoes something of an ideological inversion though; Eric John Stark notably wages guerrilla war against colonial or corporate forces that week to exploit indigenous 'barbarians'.

Last night's story was about an interplanetary war reporter, and featured stealth craft, guided weapons, and nuclear missiles. Not bad for a story published in 1941. Tonight it's time for The Dragon-Queen of Venus.

[Yora]

Last night's story was about an interplanetary war reporter, and featured stealth craft, guided weapons, and nuclear missiles. Not bad for a story published in 1941. Tonight it's time for The Dragon-Queen of Venus.

All of which had already been in development at the time and the ideas probably had been around for quite some time before.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
Last night's story was about an interplanetary war reporter, and featured stealth craft, guided weapons, and nuclear missiles.

Originally Posted by Yora
All of which had already been in development at the time and the ideas probably had been around for quite some time before.

The stealth properties of Jack Northrop's flying wings had been discovered by accident, when the YB-49 vanished from radar on a test flight. This wasn't taken full advantage of until the B-2 Spirit was developed decades later, along with the work on the F-117 by Ben Rich and the crew at the Lockheed Skunk Works. The idea of a stealth aircraft had been around for a while, but in 1941 it would still be very futuristic, and generations from its realization in the Spirit and Nighthawk.

As for nuclear weapons, I read a story some years ago which featured an "atomic bomb," as conceived of in the early 30s, which was about the size of a lunchbox and created a zone of continuous explosion in a small area, through which the hero could heroically charge while carrying the feisty yet temporarily vulnerable heroine. A little singed, maybe, but otherwise fine after running through the "atomic" explosion, which I don't recall did much structural damage to the building they were in.



On the audiobook front, I've just started Chernow's biography of Washington and it's an immediate disappointment. I dislike the narrator, and Chernow's writing is bombastic and unsubtle; it's hard to tell whom he wants the reader to admire more, Washington or himself. My interest at the moment is mainly in Washington's early life, so I'll see how far I can manage.

[warty goblin]

The Dragon-Queen of Venus was not quite as great as the title intimated, being nowhere near focused enough on dragon riding Venusian royalty. On the other hand it did give us grenades filled with crimson beetles capable of skeletonizing a man inside of a minute, so it was not devoid of pulp goodness. In compensation however Water Pirate was vastly better than its entirely prosaic title suggests, and had the collection's first barbarian Martian badass.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by warty goblin
On the other hand it did give us grenades filled with crimson beetles capable of skeletonizing a man inside of a minute, so it was not devoid of pulp goodness.

Alan Dean Foster had something very similar in Midworld; now I'm wondering about the influence. I first read his books when I was a kid, and knew nothing about pulp as a genre, but there may be some connections there.



As of this morning I'm bagging Chernow's book. It may well be a profoundly researched, magisterial one-volume biography of Washington, but it's also pompous and riddled with sloppy writing, including a whole array of tired and overworn phrases. The narrative is moderately interesting, but overbearing and freighted with too many portents of Washington's later greatness.

Beyond this, the author indulges in the same sort of amateur psychoanalysis that so many biographers can't seem to resist, inferring too much about Washington's mother from fragmentary hints and then, yes, ascribing all his traits to her influence--or, conveniently, to a conscious desire to contravene her influence when some of his traits don't match up. A few observations do ring true, but I'm not convinced by most of it. This is not written by someone who works directly with primary sources, but someone who browses the results of historical research. After just reading two excellent books by historians, the difference here is jarring.

Fortunately, The Barbarous Years continues to be excellent. Although it more than lives up to its title, it's a fascinating account of how early colonial settlements developed and organized--or didn't organize, as the case often was--and it places these settlements in the context of native societies with their own complex histories and political interactions. So far one of the main impressions is just how much influence the political situation of native peoples really had on the contact and growth of different colonies.

Written, of course, by a professional historian with long experience analyzing primary documents. Makes all the difference.

[Yora]

I started reading Blood of Elves by Sapkowski. Like it very much so far. The whole, quite long, first chapter was nothing but exposition, but spread out over five very differently structured scenes and in a way that always is exciting instead of boring.

The second scene is a bunch of travelers on a roadside resting place getting into a shouting match about how much truth was in the song a bard had just played, which quickly turns into all these different people from diverse background exchanging notes on what they know about the events of the very chaotic last two years. Since they are bickering and arguing the whole time, it's much less drab than some kind of Elronds Council scene.
The next two scenes are first one character getting interrogated by some evil guys who ask him about certain things (which are also new to the reader at that point), and second him getting rescued and his acquaintace asking him what this was all about (providing even more information). All the time there are very plausible reasons why the characters are telling each others these things, even though they already know most of them. Very nicely done.

[turkishproverb]

Reading "The Silver Sun" by Nancy Springer. Didn't realize it was by the Enola Holmes author until I was almost done.

[Feytalist]

I started reading Blood of Elves by Sapkowski. Like it very much so far. The whole, quite long, first chapter was nothing but exposition, but spread out over five very differently structured scenes and in a way that always is exciting instead of boring.

Yeah, I'm also pretty impressed with that series.

Well, I'm reading the translations of course, but still. He has the ability to take all the generic fantasy elements and present them in a novel way. Never bored when I'm reading his books. The Last Wish is particularly excellent for subtly twisting all the traditional folk stories.

[Piggy Knowles]

Finished In the Woods, which I really enjoyed overall. I really want to go and get all the rest of Tana French's Dublin novels now, but I've been meaning to read Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, so I'm starting that now. Pretty interesting so far - it's a period piece in a pseudo-NYC, and the basic premise is that the Guild of Elevator Inspectors is split into two factions, the Empiricists (who inspect by rigorous and more or less traditional methods) and the Intuitionists (who are able to intuit the state of the elevator simply by riding it). The Intuitionist method has never failed until one of the main character's elevators collapses. Sounds weird, but it's pretty good thus far.

[Lord Ruby34]

I just started reading The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie, and wow it just reaches out and grabs you right from the very first few pages. It apparently is the first book in the author's "The First Law" series, and it scored great reviews on Amazon so I thought I would try it out via their used books. So far I am definitely glad i made the purchase!

I'm rereading this. I read it for the first time about two years ago, and I remember loving it right up until the end. Which I hated at the time. Now I still can't get it entirely out of my head, one of the most memorable endings to a fantasy trilogy I've ever read. I'm looking forward to reading it again.

For class I'm also reading Moll Flanders, which has been surprisingly interesting so far. I don't usually get immersed in older novels, but Dafoe actually made me care about what happens to Moll. For all her calculating marriages and thievery she's still somewhat sympathetic, possibly because knowing what the punishment was at the time makes me root for her not to get found out. It wasn't until she truly started her life of crime that I became sympathetic to her though. I'm not sure why that is.

I've also just finished Wolfe's To the Lighthouse. This didn't grab my immediately, it wasn't until halfway through the book that I actually started to enjoy what I was reading. The minuscule plotline made it hard for me to engage the text right away. Once I was able to put everything to a simple plot in my head I was able to simply start enjoying the characters and Wolfe's prose. I had to read it for class, but I imagine I'll read it again in my free time over the summer.

[warty goblin]

For class I'm also reading Moll Flanders, which has been surprisingly interesting so far. I don't usually get immersed in older novels, but Dafoe actually made me care about what happens to Moll. For all her calculating marriages and thievery she's still somewhat sympathetic, possibly because knowing what the punishment was at the time makes me root for her not to get found out. It wasn't until she truly started her life of crime that I became sympathetic to her though. I'm not sure why that is.

Moll Flanders is great. I've got a copy with a lot of the original pen and ink illustrations, which improve everything.


I'm hitting some of the longer stories in the current Brackett collection, many of which are excellent. No Man's Land in Space is a really fantastic bit of pulp sci-fi (space pirates! lunar primates! zombies!), and Retreat to the Stars is an astonishingly successful cross between Star Wars and 1984.

One thing I'm really coming to appreciate about Brackett's prose is how sparse it is. There's a sort of bold confidence in the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps if fueled by a few suggestive sentences that I find exhilarating, and entirely orthogonal to the modern habit of having a scene to show everything. It's like she's writing to provide a guided tour of your own imagination, instead of giving a blow-by-blow description of a movie. Backstory is delivered via the occasional sentence, even the most fantastic of sights - electric beasts feeding on a lightning storm in Mercury's Twilight Belt - are given just enough detail to let your mind color the blanks in a way consistent with the next scene. It's a style that could be obnoxiously vague, but her writing is so relentlessly hard boiled that it ends up as definite as a skeleton.

Mind, I think the next collection is going to have to wait. I just was struck with a sudden urge to reread Moby Dick.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Yora
…it's much less drab than some kind of Elronds Council scene.

Heresy!! I loved Elrond's Council.

Originally Posted by Piggy Knowles
Finished In the Woods, which I really enjoyed overall. I really want to go and get all the rest of Tana French's Dublin novels now, but I've been meaning to read Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist, so I'm starting that now.

I might give In the Woods a look at some point, since the first few pages look interesting and the voice is compelling.

And I think you've mentioned The Intuitionist before, since the part about the elevator inspectors sounds familiar.

Originally Posted by warty goblin
One thing I'm really coming to appreciate about Brackett's prose is how sparse it is. There's a sort of bold confidence in the reader's imagination to fill in the gaps if fueled by a few suggestive sentences that I find exhilarating….

Oddly enough, this reminds me of some scenes from Tolkien, in that there are vistas and moods only lightly penciled in--sometimes just a careful stroke or two--which the reader is expected to develop in the mind.

I can't help wondering if authors from older generations, writing for audiences not yet zombified by television, had a greater trust in their readers' ability to imagine scenes for themselves. It almost feels like a lost art these days.



Meanwhile I've started a new audiobook, Mayflower, by Nathaniel Philbrick, whose In the Heart of the Sea I read during some long days in the hospital a year or so ago. Philbrick isn't a professional historian, but he's a good writer and does his own research, and so far Mayflower is fascinating. Owing to the nature of her passengers, not much can be discussed here, but there's a lot I hadn't realized about their earlier history, and the book promises to give full attention to the complexities of the relationships between natives and settlers, especially the sometimes painful and confusing cross-loyalties that would develop in the decades leading up to King Philip's War.

It's very different from the situation in Virginia, and makes a good counterpart to The Barbarous Years, which so far has focused on Virginia and Maryland.
.

[Piggy Knowles]

Finished The Intuitionist - it was very good, kind of a cross between Invisible Man and Yiddish Policeman's Union. Now I've decided to pick up another Tana French audiobook, The Likeness.

Thus far it is starting out alright - the basic premise of the novel seems a bit contrived, but I'll stick around to see how it plays out. The basic question the book asks is this: what happens to the life an undercover agent leads when she stops being undercover? When the case is done and the agent goes back to being whoever she was before, what happens to the false identity, who had a family and friends and a personality? It doesn't seem as strong as In the Woods so far, but it's still pretty interesting.

Also, the audiobook has an Irish narrator, which is a plus. I thought the narrator from In the Woods did a fantastic job, but it was a little weird to have a story based in Dublin narrated by someone with an English accent.

[BWR]

If we permit the comic medium in this thread: just finished off Fist of the North Star.
The ridiculous hypermasculine manliness of this series is overwhelming.