Tag: science fiction

Some Thoughts on Viriconium

M. John Harrison is one of those writers that I knew on paper I should fall in love with but hadn’t properly tried. Up until last year I’d been a big fan of his blog and his tweets but hadn’t read much of his fiction other than The Centauri Device. Then I got gifted a copy of Wish I Was Here and couldn’t help but devour it over the course of a couple of afternoons. (I reviewed it here.)

I was sold on M. John Harrison, so I decided to finally get started with the Fantasy Masterworks omnibus of Viriconium stories that I bought myself last year.

It’s an incredibly varied body of work with a lot to offer, and that asks a lot of questions. At no point did Harrison condescend to my expectations. Not every story hits, but that’s as much down to my reading comprehension as it is anything else, I think. I imagine these stories would be similarly rich on re-reading as Gene Wolfe’s New Sun books are supposed to be.

As has become my habit with these collections and anthologies I end taking notes story by story. I’ll post those raw notes, slightly edited, below the break, and then continue my discussion after.

Viriconium Knights

Why do I get the feeling that the tapestry is obliquely showing me important plot points?

The Pastel City

Like a heroic fantasy adventure inside a T.S. Eliot poem. The vibe here is impeccable. Harrison really goes out of his way to portray a world being scoured by a wind only moving in one direction; capital T Time, before pulling the rug and demonstrating that even at the end of Time, change is possible, is in fact the only constant. I think writing a fantasy novel about a swordsman who refuses to name his sword is hilarious. I just love the way he writes – I love the vocabulary, I love the odd choices of words. Gene Wolfe uses a similar technique in The Book of the New Sun. If you want to make it strange, writing about it strangely will go a long way.

Lord of Misrule

You don’t have to go to the end of time to meet sad people full of memories.

Strange Great Sins

Strange indeed. Is there a greater sin than not becoming yourself?

A Storm of Wings

Even sadder and more elegiac than usual. I miss tegeus-Cromis. So do a lot of people. The world, failing to end, undergoes a mutation. Filled with weird architecture you’ll struggle to imagine.

The Dancer from the Dance

Weird things happening on the heath.

The Luck in the Head

I could bound myself in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

The Lamia & Lord Cromis

Fate exists and you could not possibly guess at it.

In Viriconium

We spend more time in Viriconium than in any other story, and what a run down, claustrophobic place it is.

A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium

You always suspected that Viriconium could be anywhere or anywhen.

I noticed as I was reading these stories that I was tracing the dying earth subgenre of SFF backwards. Or science fantasy, if you wanna call it that. I read The Book of the New Sun a few years ago and had never read anything like it, but knew you could follow it back to Jack Vance and The Dying Earth. The thread runs through Viriconium.

Opening this collection with Viriconium Knights is a smart move, I think. It drops you right it and disorients the hell out of you in terms of the setting, the characters, the way people view the world and how they speak to each other. It’s a concentrated hit. I didn’t understand the significance of the metal bird at the time, but having read Wolfe and been annoyed with myself at totally missing the significance of Dr. Talos’ play in Claw of the Conciliator, I was primed when the old man showed Ignace Retz the tapestry. Re-reading it quickly as I write this, it is a terrible echo, ever so sad; the first time I just nodded my head and knew what to expect.

I don’t know if Harrison arranged the stories or if that choice was made by an editor, but I think it’s significant that the stories from Viriconium Nights were broken up and arranged around the three novels, and not put in as their own block in the same order as published. Viriconium Knights would have one effect reading it after tegeus-Cromis has departed the stage, a nice little callback, do you remember that character? He was swell, wasn’t he? Placing it here, first, an echo of a thing that hasn’t happened yet, deprives you of that feeling of warmth and just highlights the disconnect, the instability of time and identity within these stories.

If The Pastel City was the only Viriconium thing then it would stand very well on its own as a great novel and fine addition to the genre. It’s an epic adventure story that subverts as many ideas and tropes inherent to epic adventure stories as it can, and even has some horror elements. (Thinking about it a lot of these stories have horror elements.) It’s a quest narrative where the quest only obliquely gets fulfilled and the hero is a master swordsman who refuses to name his sword and prefers to think of himself as a poet. The novel is written like the novelist prefers to think of himself as a poet. I mentioned it above, that using weird, archaic language can create that sense of strangeness.

(This extends even to the colours. I learned so many new words for colours reading these stories. Make it new!)

I just came across (here) an old essay of Harrison’s on the idea of worldbuilding. I think this quote is particularly edifying;

Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain

Harrison is writing a kind of post-structuralist fantasy, writing a constantly shifting city into existence by relying on the constant shift of language, asking the reader to do a lot of the work knowing full well every reader “reads” a different text into existence.

In Wish I Was Here, Harrison talks a lot about T.S. Eliot – I thought as I was reading the Viriconium stories that it was like a fantasy novel set inside an Eliot poem, but it goes deeper than that imagery. Harrison is as disobliging as Eliot. Eliot expects you to be familiar with so much stuff outside of his text to be able to fully grok it, Harrison does likewise. Harrison even quotes directly from The Waste Land without citing it, a few times actually, in much the same way Eliot doesn’t let you know when he’s copped something from Fraser, or Shakespeare. It’s poetry, innit.

Which is all to say that I adored The Pastel City, that if you were writing a fantasy novel just for me, just to appeal to my own interests and predilections, you would write The Pastel City.

The short stories that in this collection begin to serve as connective tissue are even more oblique, and I’m going to have to re-read them, I think, to have the same relationship with them that I developed with the novels. Some of the imagery starts repeating, like the Mari Lwyd.

A Storm of Wings is an odd one. In a world that is kind of already post-apocalyptic, but has reached a kind of equilibrium, what does the end of the world look like? It’s something totally alien, totally unimaginable, and it’s far enough in the future that our hero, tegeus-Cromis, has passed, and we must deal with it ourselves. A lot of the characters are heard aloud wishing for the return of their poet-cum-swordmaster in a way that probably echoes what the general reader is thinking. Instead we’re given; a rogue, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and is losing their grip on reality, a person who has been reawakened after millennia and *has* lost their grip on reality, and Tomb the dwarf, so that at least we’re not totally alienated, because despite me using words like “post-structuralist” to describe these stories, they are still stories, and Harrison knows what he is doing.

Harrison isn’t too arch to give us what we want, he just isn’t gonna do it in a straightforward way. The Lamia & Lord Cromis is another quest narrative, because that’s the kind of context that tegeus-Cromis belongs in. Lords of his house are fated to have to find and slay a rare beast, the eponymous Lamia. He does, eventually, do this, but it doesn’t bring him the fulfilment he expects, and I think him losing a ring in the same swamp that he loses one of Queen Jane’s in The Pastel City is interesting. tegeus-Cromis is directly engaging with his fate in this story, but not in the way he thinks.

(I just want to point out that even in giving us what we want, Harrison doesn’t. tegeus-Cromis spends a lot of The Pastel City brooding over his dead sister, in what I imagine might be a reference to Elric, but Harrison doesn’t use the prequel story to show us that loss, or bring tegeus-Cromis’ sister on stage for cheap dramatic irony. Remarkable restraint.)

By this point, and leading into the next novel, I was really noticing what Harrison wasn’t showing us, what he refuses to explain. There is plenty of advanced technology like airships, power armour, and laser swords, that he doesn’t explain, and doesn’t have the characters theorise about in-text either. The stuff just is, like stuff in real life just is. The way he describes the radiation from these technologies is cool (again, he’s not *against* the reader, he’s just not doing it all for them), they give off motes of white and purple light. In Viriconium, the last Viriconium novel, has a plague that is never explained, only its effects shown, that of sapping the will, the creative energy, the life force, of the city.

I actually had a moment reading this one where I thought, “I wonder what it’s like to live through a plage?” It took me a few moments, but I realised I had. And it had had a similar sapping effect on my energies, my life force. I know some people managed to have incredibly creative quarantines; I felt like such a dick because I didn’t. On paper it sounded perfect. My wages were getting (mostly) paid, and I had to stay home. The perfect time to work on that novel. I ground away at it and just felt miserable. None of it came easy. I kept a journal on and off. I’m glad I tried to keep myself busy and have some material to show for it, but it’s hard to look back at it as a particularly fruitful period.

(“Why won’t Harrison explain the plague?” I wondered to myself, as if anyone ever fully explained COVID.)

The protagonist, Ashlyme, a painter, has a friend who is also an artist and who is suffering from the plague. Ashlyme recognises his friend, Audsley King, as a great painter, but struggles to understand her recent work or why she choses to wallow in the plague zone instead of getting out and lapping up the adulation she surely deserves. Audsley has no interest in the praise of people she does not respect. This friction animatesthe whole story and the plague is just a backdrop. The stuff with the secret police, and the twins; I’m sure they represent the city, but otherwise am having trouble reconciling that subplot with the story as whole. Which might be the point. Art has contradictions and unreconcilable parts. Does some of this speak to Harrison’s attitude to the Viriconium stories as a whole? I think so, at least a bit.

The last story, A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, is a gear shift, set as it is in our world, among our people, some of whom have been to Viriconium before, some of whom want to visit for the first time. It’s an interesting contrast – what makes one story set in grimy cafes with a cast of weird people a fantasy and what makes another story set in grimy cafes among weird people not a fantasy story? Is it just the names? Some pretty weird names in this one, but then some of it takes place in York. Is Viriconium a place or a state of mind? I don’t know how I feel about this story, haven’t come to a nice conclusion. I just have questions and ideas I’ll be happy to think about every now and again until I eventually re-read these stories and maybe glean a bit more.

I’ve always enjoyed the modernist bent in SFF, the New Wave stuff, the exploration of inner space. Having read this and The Book of the New Sun, I’m thinking about how some of those other modernist ideas and ways of working leaked into the fantasy side of SFF, as a way of providing a kind of jungle gym for the reader’s mind. I came away from Viriconium with a lot of things to think about and a huge list of vocabulary to look up.

I love a book where I can feel myself becoming a better writer as I read it. The way Harrison constructs his worlds and stories looks so maximalist, and on closer inspection is so deliberate and restrained. Sometimes there is an impulse to explain every cool idea you have, and it is so satisfying to be trusted as a reader to fill in gaps, to be left space enough for a world to grow in me. Viriconium is ever changing in the stories, and is ever changing in my own mind and in the minds of everyone else who reads it.

Viriconium!

First Contact: Some Thoughts on The Caltraps of Time

The Caltraps of Time is a collection of short stories by David I. Masson, all of which (in the 2012 SF Masterworks edition, anyway) appeared in the British New Wave SF magazine New Worlds.

I think the nature of consciously writing in a different, experimental mode, means that you’ll get some duds, because of course not every experiment is going to succeed. Caltraps is a record of Masson’s experiments. Most of them are okay, and one of them is good enough to justify the whole collection.

People have a lot of different reasons for creating art. Expressing yourself is a fine and good aim, but if you’re really honest with yourself, some of the impulse will be rooted in wanting to make a contribution to humanity, in wanting to be remembered. Sure there are people whose entire oeuvre is capital A Art1 , but there are more people who create one really good thing that cements them. All you have to do is write one really good guitar riff, one really great story, one memorable character.

Which makes it sound easy. I know it isn’t. What do you think I’ve been trying to do?

It is time for me to be entirely honest with you. I read the first half of this collection a few years ago, during COVID, and then dropped it. Recently I’m trying to finish off books I’ve already started rather than starting and dropping more new ones, so I picked it back up, and I remembered that I dropped Caltraps (now that’s an image) because there’s a story written entirely in Olde English.

We’ll get to that, but in the spirit of fairness, I’ll post my notes from the first few stories verbatim as well. I have no memory of them otherwise and don’t want to re-read them. This was around the time I started taking more notes on my reading and particularly would write mini reviews of short stories as I worked through a collection (like my notes on Ballard’s complete fiction, volumes 1 and 2).

Lost Ground

A messy story with some great imagery. A bit Ballard-lite. Manages to convey some weighty emotions.

Not So Certain

Whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent.

Mouth of Hell

What a hole.

On to the second half, which I just finished reading and am pretty sure is the stronger half, even if one of the stories wears a bit thin after a few pages and just keeps going.

A Two-Timer

Hilarious title. A fun time travel travel caper, but the middle third drags. SF works by making things strange, of course, but page after page of a guy talking in Olde English about what a fright a horseless chariot is gets a bit old.

The Transfinite Choice

A terrifying answer to the colonialist logic inherent in a lot of stories about alternate dimensions. Reminded me a bit of the Philip K. Dick novel Cantata-140.

Psychosmosis

You need to be able to name the dead to keep living, yourself.

Traveller’s Rest

Heart-wrenching time-travel story. War never changes.

Oh yeah, this is definitely the stronger half, but with qualifications

A Two-Timer is a fun story wrapped around a dull exercise. This is what I mean about experimental fiction not always hitting. It’s a great idea, right? If I’d had it I’d have written it, and I doubt I have the chops to pull it off half as authentically as Masson. The idea: a time travel story where we get the perspective of someone from the 17th Century who has mistakenly travelled to the mid-20th, written entirely in language authentic to that person’s original era. The guy learning to use the time machine is lots of fun. The guy getting into trouble in the 20th Century before returning home; also fun. The middle section where he goes on and on and on at length writing about modern technology in Olde English? You expect a bit of it, sure, but it’s just too long and too dull.

Now The Transfinite Choice, that’s good, tight SF. He has a great idea but leaves enough for you to figure out that it doesn’t outstay its welcome (see previous story). Masson lays out the terrible logic our society functions under. We may well discover time travel, but we would immediately use it to try and solve “problems” that we have decided are ineradicable-because-unprofitable to fix, like overpopulation. I won’t spoil any more if you haven’t read it, but this is a great story.

Psychosmosis I find it difficult to talk about, not because there isn’t anything to say, but just because I’m starting to notice that, having had a fair bit of grief heaped on me in the last few years, I will read a story as being about grief if there’s even the slightest hint of it. This story, about refusing to name those you’ve lost in an attempt to carry on living in a world that is empty without them, is almost too on the nose.

Traveller’s Rest is the really great piece, the one that means that most of the rest of his stuff will stay in print along with it. I don’t want to ruin the story for you, but once you’re halfway in and get the gist you’ll know what’s going to happen anyway. There are some really great works about how war and conflict alienate you from the people you love, the society you’re protecting. Masson uses the relativity of time as a metaphor for that alienation in this deft, perfectly paced story that ends with a really ferocious sense of irony and futility. This mines the same vein as Inception and The Forever War.

Laying it all out like that, it’s really clear how these stories fit in to the New Wave. They’re all about the relativity of time, or the relativity of perceptions of time and space, how our inner worlds affect our outer worlds. If you’re into that kind of thing (I am), then this collection is definitely worth reading, but if you’re not sure, read Traveller’s Rest first to get the vibe (here’s a link to it at Lightspeed Magazine).

1 (although I’m reminded recently of seeing a rash of Bob Dylan records turn up in a charity shop window near me. All the really good ones (there was a copy of Highway 61 Revisited) went quickly. The last one left was a copy of Nashville Skyline. It’s still there.

Some Thoughts on M. John Harrison’s Wish I Was Here

Just before sitting down to write this, I learned that Christopher Priest passed away, on February the 2nd, 2024, at the age of 80. He was a contemporary of M. John Harrison’s, and it made me all the more grateful that so many people from the New Wave are still around and working. Rest in Peace, Christopher.

–

I’ve been broadly familiar with M. John Harrison for a long time (he’s great on Twitter and has a blog you should definitely be reading), but until recently the only novel of his I’d read had been The Centauri Device, which was a delightful, complex, psychedelic space opera that had clearly been an inspiration for Iain M. Banks, an SF writer I adore. I knew Harrison’s reputation for subverting, and sometimes outright demolishing, genre expectations, and The Centauri Device lived up to those… expectations. Which means he… lived up to my expectations by subverting them? Anyway. More recently I read The Pastel City, which I loved and will be reviewing once I’ve read more of the Viriconium stuff,. I also got gifted a copy of his new memoir Wish I Was Here for Christmas, and I’ve just finished it.

Well, I call it a memoir. It’s billed very clearly as an anti-memoir, which in this case means that while it is autobiographical, it isn’t a strict, linear account of Harrison’s life. All the better for it. It is fragmentary, elliptical, told in snatches, it reflects the complexities of inner life and of attempting to reckon with memory in a way that’s far truer than a straight account. I’m reminded of classes I’ve taken on modernism, where we all argued about whether Virginia Woolf hadn’t actually written far more “realistic” fiction than Dickens.

And Wish I Was Here is fiction, really. At the core of the book is that remove between the version of yourself you are in the present and the version of yourself you were. You are no longer that person, to write about them is to write fiction by definition, albeit fiction informed by your memories, and whatever notes you’ve taken, notes that are also impossibly removed from you, something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve kept notebooks or journals. If you haven’t, read this excellent Joan Didion essay. Like I noted in my review of Chris Porsz’ recent exhibition, there’s something to be said for a consistency of accretion, for shoring fragments against your ruins.

I wanted to put off Wish I Was Here until I’d read more Harrison, but I glanced over a few pages and instantly got sucked into the rhythm and flow of it. He writes with a voice that is knowing, funny, wise, that takes you into his confidence. You want to keep listening. When someone is sharing with you the way Harrison is sharing with you, you don’t want to stop them. And it is funny as hell. I don’t want to spoil any of the jokes or stories but the little routine about the sink rotting in a ditch in the midlands is great, trust me.

You get the feeling he’s determined not to write about himself, but that’s fine. There’s some great nature writing in here, some lovely passages about the magic of owning a cat and the awfulness of losing one. There’s some writing advice I wish I’d heard years ago, and plenty of insight into other writers Harrison admires. There’s some frightening passages about the nature of the discontinuity we’re living through; that you’d say the book is partly a reflection of, if you didn’t know any better.

He shows glimpses of letting you in, laying out the details, explicating the five Ws, but they’re a feint. He draws you in with one hand and then keeps you at a distance with the other, the way he is distanced from his past selves. He details conversations and relationships he’s had but he lets you know he’s fictionalised them. He mentions some famous people he’s known but the anecdotes don’t get much juicer than having been a few tables over from Tim Henman at a restaurant, or bumping into William S. Burroughs at a party. Sonic Life, this ain’t, but that’s the point.

Harrison manages to not talk too much about his childhood or his relationships with his parents until the last few pages. It just doesn’t matter. Far more important to get across the sense of disconnection he’s always felt. In a way I think Wish I Was Here is an exercise in examining just how impossible it is to really know anything about your own life, let alone anyone else’s. In that sense I think it’s kin with Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and is similarly a masterpiece.

Yeah, I love New Wave SF, and I would have loved a nice long chapter on what it was like to be a part of New Worlds, but Harrison deftly shows us that that would be too reductive, that the work is what’s important, that it’d be impossible, anyway. You should immediately go and read Wish I Was Here. I’ll echo the recommendation that Weighing a Pig Doesn’t Fatten It gave – it’s among the best books I’ve ever read.

First Contact: Some Thoughts on Larry Niven’s Ringworld

“The Fall of the Cities had left a few survivors. Some were mad. All took the life-extending compound if they could get it. All were looking for enclaves of civilisation. None had thought to build his own.”

page 250

Ringworld by Larry Niven is a really odd book. There are aspects of it that jar like it was written in 1870 – but it was published in 1970. You probably know what I’m talking about. 

It’s incredibly sexist. Tooth-gnashingly sexist. I just finished reading the Conan stories (and you can read my thoughts on those here), and this novel makes Conan look progressive. There are two female characters. The main one, Teela, is ditzy and air-headed and mostly seems to exist to give the main character something to screw. There is a good in-universe reason for her to act like this, and she is pivotal to the story, but she literally has zero agency. 

The subplot about humanity being manipulated by shadowy alien forces into breeding for luck was really interesting (I loved The Sirens of Titan and it reminded me of that), and this feeds really heavily into Teela’s character. Niven explains it away, and it was written in the late ‘60s and seems to take the worst of the New Wave as an influence. I was ready to give him a pass. 

But the second Teela is off the page, the protagonist meets the second female character; Prill, an intergalactic sex worker. Because our protagonist can’t possibly not have someone to sleep with. 

She gets treated really badly and I think Niven goes some of the way to articulating that manipulating people and denying them agency is Not Right, but he doesn’t go all the way there. 

It’s just weird and impossible to avoid. I’m mentioning it first because if you can’t get past this stuff you just shouldn’t bother reading Ringworld. It’s a pretty good SF novel but it’s not that good. 

It otherwise is a perfectly fine adventure story with some fascinating hard SF elements and a surprisingly soft, human element to it. The pacing is great, and the characters face a variety of unique perils they (mostly) use their ingenuity to solve. Niven strikes a great balance between detailing a wider universe and exciting us with action. 

The setting, the world-building, is great. Halo came out when I was eleven years old and I absolutely fell into that game. I’d go round my friend’s every day after school and we’d play the campaign in co-op. It was so mysterious and unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. The game provided some answers, but otherwise set up a vast universe for you to use your imagination in. I see now that that was just Ringworld. 

(I played Halo, then read Consider Phlebas, and then read Ringworld, working my way backwards. There’s something to be said for the scrappiness of mostly reading what you can find in charity shops. I do remember reading some of the Halo tie-in novels back in the day but cannot remember enough details to draw any comparisons.)

Halo got less and less interesting as that space shrunk, as more and more of it got explained and firmly narrativised. I don’t know if I’ll ever bother with any of the sequels to Ringworld but it’s hard not to see the same thing happening. 

There was an edge to this story that I didn’t expect at all – and it was the kind of dying world feeling that stories like Viriconium (I finished The Pastel City recently but will wait until I’ve finished more of the stories before writing about them) and The Shadow of the Torturer evoke. I know they were published after Ringworld, it’s just a vibe. 

(Jack Vance is on my list, don’t worry.)

“He’s old Louis. He got a massive dose of something like boosterspice, long ago. He says he took it from an evil magician. He’s so old that his grandparents remember the Fall of the Cities. Do you know what he’s doing?” Her smile became impish. “He’s on a kind of quest. Long ago, he took an oath that he would walk to the base of the Arch. He’s doing that. He’s been doing it for hundreds of years.”

page 261

A cataclysm or two happened on the ringworld long before the protagonists ever got there, and some of the obstacles they have to navigate are the people of that fallen civilisation, and their unruly technology. Niven even makes a few gestures at what religions might have formed. Like I said, surprisingly “soft” hard SF. And this is part of what makes the storyline with Prill so frustrating, because she otherwise has a fascinating backstory, hailing from this civilisation before it fell, her life extended by a drug. Prill’s character could have literally done anything else in her past life. 

But it’s Niven’s novel and he made his choices. It’s canonical, having won the Hugo and the Nebula. I imagine some people might read it out of obligation, in today’s context. I can’t say I have any particular problem with Niven the way you can point out that say, Ian Fleming or Philip K. Dick are clearly misogynists, because this is the first Niven I’ve read, but the ick in this novel is hard to avoid. I don’t normally write this negatively about living authors who could conceivably see it, but I’m hardly the first to point this out.  

1 All quotes taken from the 2005 Gollancz SF Masterworks edition of Ringworld, ISBN: 0-575-07702-6

Some Thoughts on 2023 – A Year in Review

It’s been a hell of a year and I’m knackered.

It’s been a hell of a year and I’m knackered. I’ve put off writing this post until I either completed my reading challenge or knew I absolutely wouldn’t be able to. The other day I just squeaked over the line having finished my fortieth book. How did I do it? I read a couple of chapbooks last week to make sure I got over the line, because as arbitrary as it is, I’ve completed the challenge for the last ten-odd years and didn’t want this year to be the time I failed it. I need a bit of constancy.

It was a struggle because I started a new and very challenging job this year and because I was also going through the stuff I discussed in this post. Let’s look at the top five most viewed posts I published this year:

Dinosaur Jr. at the Garage – Celebrating 30 Years of Where You Been?

What You End Up Missing

Some Thoughts on William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy

Some Thoughts on Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life

I Think I Thrive Under a Lack of Accountability

I’m glad some of these pieces proved popular. I posted some personal essays on this blog that I originally wrote for my Substack before giving up because the vibes were off. (I should listen to myself more often.) The concert review at the top was borne out of an impulse to make sure I take more notes. I’ve been to some excellent shows I can barely remember and feel sad about now. My review of Sonic Life was quite popular too, but I do know a lot of Sonic Youth fans.

I’ve got no idea how that mid-year accountability post was so popular. I can barely summon the energy to look and see if I kept to my word. Oh, ok then, but later in this post.

And the top 5 overall this year:

Some Thoughts on le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies

So, You Want to be a Dick-head?

Ender’s Game and the Hitler Comparison

So, You Want to Read Ulysses?

Some Thoughts on Len Deighton’s Game, Set, and Match

No surprise here – some of my higher effort and more quality posts – but that top one on Legacy of Spies is odd. I’ve noticed it getting a lot of views on and off and only recently realised it was driving a lot of traffic to my blog. I just checked and it turns out it’s on the front page of Google if you search for that novel’s title. Go me!

The Resolutions.

  • I want to read more classics.

Yeah, this didn’t happen. It’s fine.

  • I want to write with less fear, exactly what I want, for myself.

I’m trying. Still trying.

  • I want to spend more time listening to music.

I have been. Or at least, I feel like I have been. Need to wait for my last.fm to update to know for sure. Plus I went to a gig this year and want to go to more next year.

  • I want to be more present.

I’m working on it.

  • I want to keep going for walks.

I have been – I’ve got a psychogeography project that I’m deciding what to do with, plenty of material ready to go. Remember what I said about less guilt? I’m a white guy with a beard and I like walking. It was only a matter of time before I used the word “psychogeography”. I make no apologies.

  • I want to more actively consider what I can do to make the lives of those around me better. I want to widen my definition of “those around me”.

If only you knew.

  • More writing by hand. More journaling. More sketching situations and dumping my brain.

I have been, and it’s been great. Been journaling regularly, started writing with pencil again as well for a properly analogue experience. I’ll be writing an essay about that soon probably. I fell into the world of pencil blogs this year, particularly Polar Pencil Pusher, and ended up treating myself to some fancy pencils. It’s great. I need more hobbies and it’s cheaper than golf.

  • Fewer new projects, some considered work on old ones.

Whoops.

  • More rest. Less guilt.

I’m trying.

  • I want to read the books I already own. We have books at home. More frugality, consideration of purchases, using what I already have.

I’ve ended up buying more books. I always do. I am aware of this and am trying.

  • Make the most of opportunities I’ve already been given, see them for the value they have.

I’m trying.

  • I want to watch more movies.

I did! I went to the cinema a bunch. I did the Barbenheimer thing and I loved it. Saw the new Mission Impossible as well.

  • I do not want to start a TikTok or pivot to video.

I still haven’t.

  • I want to read more books by women (that I already own).

I read ten books by women and twenty-nine by men. Sorry. I’m aware of it.

  • I want to read more books in translation (that I already own).

Of the forty books I read, five were in translation. It’s fine. At least I know.

  • I want to submit more of my poetry.

I got lazy with this because I was super burned out by the end of the year, but I did get a poem into an anthology from Civic Leicester this year, which I am still super proud of!

  • I want to spend more time with friends.

I’ve tried to say yes more but see previous comment about burnout.

  • I want to read something a friend has recommended (that I already own). 

There’s a few books on the pile that friends have loaned me. I’ll get there.

–

There you have it. It is what it is.

If there’s one thing I’m glad I decided to start doing this year, it was just taking more notes. More journaling, general notes, that kind of thing. Writing things down does help you think and it helps you fix things in your mind.

There are things I wish I remembered or had more extensive notes on – going forward I’m taking as many notes as possible.

I have my reading journal in a notebook which I’m using to track the basics about what I’m reading, but I’ve also started a spreadsheet that I’m using to keep more granular data in a format that I control and that isn’t at the whim of a billionaire who might decide to blow up the platform for the hell of it.

(What’s happened to Twitter should give us all a lot of pause and make us think about where we keep our data, and what technology we chose to use.)

I really like the reading spreadsheet I put together. I’m using it to track:

  • Title
  • Author
  • Author’s Gender
  • Translated By
  • Translator’s Gender
  • Year Translated
  • Year Originally Published
  • Year Published
  • Publisher
  • ISBN
  • Genre
  • Form
  • Format
  • Pages
  • Source (as in, where did I get the book from)
  • Date Finished
  • Difference In Year Between Original Publication and Edition I Read

I know Goodreads do their own end of year thingy (here’s mine), but like I said, my spreadsheet can be more granular, and I control it. It’s how I figured out the gender split in my reading that I talked about above. Some more interesting stats include:

  • The oldest thing I read was published in 1863 (Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life).
  • I’ve read thirteen books published in the last decade or so, which isn’t bad considering I have a friend who constantly disparages how old my reading tastes skew.
  • I’ve read twenty-one non-fiction books this year compared to twelve novels. I’ve definitely been reading more non-fiction deliberately as I’ve made a conscious decision that I’m not that interested in writing fiction at the moment. It took me a long time to realise I could write about real life, and I’ve taken more of an interest in reading about it, too.
  • The longest book I read was A History of the World in 100 Objects at 707 pages (it was excellent and I highly recommend it). The shortest was Antinous by Fernando Pessoa, which was twelve pages in print and I read to bump my stats because I didn’t want to fail my reading challenge.
  • My spreadsheet makes the average length of the books I’ve read this year 247 (and a bit) pages. Goodreads makes it 250.
  • Of the forty books I read, sixteen of them were published by Penguin. No other publisher came close.
  • I read twenty-one paperbacks and eighteen e-books. I tell people I don’t have a preference and will read in any medium, and it’s nice to see it come out in the stats.
  • I read one hardback (the excellent Sonic Life). I prefer paperbacks and the stats show it.
  • Of the physical books I read, the most common source was the library. This’d be higher but I don’t work in a library any more. Of the e-books, six were from Google Play (it’s a good source) and five were from Kindle. Nice and balanced.
  • I only read one graphic novel this year. I tend to binge them when I do read them – I just haven’t been in the mood.
  • My top three genres 1) History 2) Science Fiction 3) Essays (essays got a late bump because I read two Joan Didion collections). I’m still not sure about recording genres. This might get more specific later.
  • I feel like I flit about and don’t read systemically and I can see it clear as day on this sheet. There were only three instances of me reading books by the same author back-to-back, and only a couple of clusters when it came to genre.

All in all, it’s really fun having a year of reading data at my fingertips like this. I’ll probably do a post on starting your own spreadsheet. It’s really easy.

But enough stats, what about feelings?

I deliberately don’t record a score on my own spreadsheet because I don’t care. If a book makes me feel something, it’s not going to boil down to a number. I journal about it, or I try and remember Scott Hanselman’s principle about not wasting your keystrokes and I type it up into a review to clarify and fix my own thoughts before sharing them.

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole watching YouTube videos on software development this year. I’ve bounced off trying to learn to code a few times, but the principles and ideas involved still fascinate me. Scott Hanselman in particular is a really good example of how anything can be interesting and you can make anything engaging. This talk about him migrating his website to a new host is just fantastic storytelling any way you slice it:

But again, to my feelings. The best book I read this year, the one I enjoyed most? Probably Speedboat, which I knew I’d love and put off reading because I knew I’d only be able to read it for the first time once. I realised it affected me deeply because I put it down and immediately wanted to write a novel in slavish imitation.

Sonic Life is a late contender for favourite read and my favourite non-fiction one. I’m a huge Sonic Youth fan. I was always going to love this one.

The biggest surprise was Stanley Tucci’s autobiography Taste. My partner got loaned it by a friend and I picked it up because it was yellow and looked fun – and I came away with a fresh perspective on the lives of working class Italian Americans in the middle 20th Century, as well as a lot of insight into Italian cooking, and food in general.

The biggest disappointment was probably Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño. I’ve wanted to read him for a while and picked this out of the library because it was short. I’ve since learned that his estate are strip mining his extant drafts for anything remotely publishable regardless of its real merit. The Hendrix Estate Manoeuvrer. Antwerp, in it’s sub-Burroughsian meanderings, falls into this category. I’ve got a copy of 2666 and I’ll read it one day, and I know I’ll like The Savage Detectives when I do get around to it.

I’ve read a couple of Joan Didion Collections in the past month, The White Album and Slouching Toward Bethlehem, in that order. I do see what all the fuss is about now. Wasn’t expecting her to be as funny as I found her.

Here’s another end of year reading data tool someone just linked me, and here’s the graphic it put together for me. It’s great, check it out!

I joined a D&D group this year which is still going strong. It’s a hell of a lot of fun and I suggest anyone try a TTRPG if they haven’t. I was a bit worried I’d struggle but 5E is so simple compared to what I remember of AD&D or 3E. I’ve been reasonably diligent about writing up and posting my notes from that campaign. They’re mostly for the benefit of myself and the group, but they’re here if you do want to read them.

I’ve been a bit hot and cold on social media in general (my new phone gives me screen time reports and the only thing worse than knowing I’ve spent six hours on Football Manager is knowing I’ve somehow spent six hours on Facebook), but I have been posting on and off on my Instagram accounts, a bookish one and one where I mostly post photos of empty spaces like someone who has a problem. Follow them if you like.

–

There you have it. I accomplished a lot this year. Learned a bunch, too. About myself, about life. Picked up some new skills, honed some old ones. If I really look at it objectively it’s going ok.

See you next year!

Some Thoughts on Thurston Moore’s Sonic Life

I can trace an awful lot of my musical taste to getting Nirvana’s best-of album for Christmas one year and then getting a copy of Cobain’s journals a few years later.

I had sent Confusion is Sex and Bad Moon Rising to New Alliance, the Minutemen’s personal imprint at SST, and I had received an encouraging, if cryptic, postcard back from Mike Watt. He mentioned to me, on another occasion, that one of the people overseeing operations at SST had been reluctant to sign bands outside of SST’s local and familial zone and had further said, in a subtle dig at me and the band- “Record collectors shouldn’t be in bands.”

Sonic Life, p.g 3131

I can trace an awful lot of my musical taste to getting Nirvana’s best-of album for Christmas one year and then getting a copy of Cobain’s journals a few years later. The best-of opens with You Know You’re Right, which begins with a tinkling little plucked behind the bridge figure, and his journals contain list after list after list of bands and records he liked, letters to musicians he was a fan of, plots to get cult bands on the bill opening for Nirvana.

(I can trace a lot of it to Mark Prindle, too, whose record review blog stands as a testament to DIY ethics. Prindle couldn’t stand Sonic Youth though, natch).

SY was one of those bands I came to because I read Cobain’s journals, and I’m thinking about it now because I’ve just finished Sonic Life, which is a declaration about the power of music and more specifically, music fandom. I think Sonic Life could have been a similar blueprint for me if I wasn’t already au-fait with a lot of this stuff; Moore mentions so many bands that I only heard about because Cobain or Prindle championed them, and plenty of other stuff I hadn’t and now want to because, of course, Moore is the hipster’s hipster.

Another thread that connects Sonic Life with Cobain’s journals, in my mind, is the evangelising about punk rock. When I was a kid, punk rock was The Sex Pistols, spiked hair, leather, and that was it. I’d never really thought about it in terms of it giving you the freedom to be yourself, of being autonomous, of not waiting for permission, DIY, starting where you are – until I read those passages in the journals and was converted instantly. A similar light shines off the page when Moore talks about it.

This dynamic would form a defining essence of punk rock, where the intellectual passions of literature and art collided with the street smarts of the working class. It was Richard Hell meeting Johnny Thunders, Malcolm McLaren meeting Steve Jones.

Sonic Life, p.g. 511

Again, if I wasn’t already fully converted, I would be now.

Moore spends a lot of time talking about his life as a writer and a poet as well, and it reminds me that I’ve always appreciated that SY were a literate band, incredibly so, by rock and roll standards. I was probably going to discover writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson anyway, but SY made them seem achingly cool. It makes sense that this band would spawn a couple of excellent memoirs. Hopefully Lee or Steve write one next.

There is name-dropping, and I can appreciate that someone who already knows that SY toured with Boredoms might be getting tired and eye-rolly, but if I’d never heard of Boredoms then I might be more inclined to go “Hell yeah, let’s check this out!”

[As a side note, I’d envy any kid getting this book for Christmas who is able to listen along, plugging band names into Spotify and YouTube].

I don’t mean to go on about it but I think this aspect is really important. Bands like SY and Nirvana were serious about trying to help their friends break out of the underground as well. Sonic Life is part of the legacy of that. Not to say that Moore talks uncritically about his cool friends – he doesn’t always detail them for reasons you can imagine, but he does highlight moments of tensions, relationships that soured. I’m sure he still gets on really well with Mike Watt, and I’m glad their relationships is in a place where it can stand Moore mentioning the post card I quoted at the top of the page.

I disagree with the sentiment entirely, though I’m sure it was tongue in cheek. Record collectors like Moore and Cobain were fans who lived the dream, and they did their best to make sure the ladder stayed steady under them. Their bands made me want to pick up a guitar, start a band, and be part of the same sonic democracy they were. Of course it never happened for me, but that it happened for them is part of what makes the stories special. And I don’t mean that they achieved great success, because Our Band Could Be Your Life gave me the same feeling.

Don’t come to Sonic Life if you want a serious reckoning, because you won’t get it. Thurston Moore clearly wanted to write a book about a particular and magic moment in time, the music he loves, and the charmed life it enabled him to live. Kim wrote about their marriage’s dissolution a bit in Girl in a Band (which you should read, I reviewed it here) but it isn’t the main focus of the story. Thurston devotes an even smaller amount of Sonic Life to it; his falling in love with Eva, breaking up with Kim, it all takes place over a couple pages.

In fact, the whole thing kinda telescopes. Moore takes a lot of time and includes a lot of detail when it comes to his early life and relationships, his first gigs, how he came to start spending time in New York before moving there to be one of many destitute artists. The pace of this is just right. It is very reminiscent of Just Kids, in the best sense. If I’d lived in that time and place, I’d write a memoir about it too, because apparently every other person living in Manhattan at the time was destined for greatness. The pace of Sonic Life picks up in tandem with the band’s fame until you get to the last third, which is mostly made up of “I went to X and played with Y and it was awesome, then I went to A and played with B and it was radical.” And then the last decade of SY gets waved away, pretty much.

That’s as uncharitable as I’m going to be. I’m going to level with you and say that if I’d met David Bowie, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, and Neil Young, I’d damn well mention every single one of them in my memoirs, and if anyone told me no, I’d remind them whose life I was writing about. Have you ever read A Moveable Feast? Artist memoirs tend to talk a lot about people those artists admired and worked with, and that’s a good thing (see earlier comments about how I got switched on to punk rock).

SY are my second favourite band but there’s still stuff in here new to me. I knew, for example, that Bob Bert was in and out of the band a bit, but I didn’t realise the extent to which he was almost taken advantage of, being kicked out because they were hoping to go in a different direction then being invited back for a tour because they needed the body. They’ve patched it up now (check out Bob Bert’s Instagram, he’s always cheerleading SY releases), but I was reading those pages like yikes.

There’s no index! Which is a big shame in what is an otherwise encyclopaedic work about the American underground in the late 20th century (my bones crumbled to dust typing that). There were a few times I wanted to skip around a bit, seeing what he wrote about Michael Gira a few chapters back, and wasn’t able to easily.

SY are a pretty polarising band so if you’re reading this and have an opinion on them you should know whether you wanna read Sonic Life or not. To me it’s partly a chronicle of a period of time I’m fascinated with, which already has me sold, and then it’s partly a story about punk breaking and the wave of SY reaching it’s peak, which yeah, I’m in. If you’ve read Please Kill Me or Just Kids and enjoyed them, this covers the same stuff but from such a different perspective I can’t help but recommend it.

Thurston Moore was a kid looking at punk rock with wide eyes and then got to go from making scratchy noise with his friends to stardom, never stopping being a fan along the way, and Sonic Life evokes that energy beautifully.

1 Sonic Life, Thurston Moore, 2023, Faber & Faber, ISBN: 978-0-571-37394-9

So, I Joined a Dungeons & Dragons Group

And I’m loving it.

We’ve only had two sessions so far but I’m having a blast. I’ve rolled myself up (ok, stat arrayed myself up) a human barbarian who is totally not Conan. In fact, I’ve accidentally reverse engineered Conan. I designed a guy with a mercenary/military background, who has a really sharp sense of fairness, and who now wanders the land until he witnesses an injustice, where he will, with a cold rage, despatch the people who would exploit and abuse those weaker than them.

A bit like Jack Reacher.

Who is pretty much Conan the Barbarian.

Oh well.

–

I’ve had an interest in D&D ever since I played the original Baldur’s Gate, along with the other Infinity Engine games Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment, and learned about the ruleset behind all the mechanics. What the hell is THAC0? Why is a lower number better for armour? I didn’t really have an appreciation of what tabletop D&D looked like. I didn’t know any elder nerds who could guide me. I hung around at the Games Workshop a bit, and I collected and painted a bit of 40k, but otherwise D&D was mostly a computer game thing for me.

Some friends and I got invited to join a tabletop group when I was in my late teens. They were playing 3.5e. We were joining to replace some players who left, I think? I just remember being given a character that someone had been playing before me. It was a dwarven monk that was basically fitted out to wrestle things to death, and also, he was mute.

I can’t imagine how *annoying* that must have been for the DM. This was my first ever TTRPG experience, and I was having to figure out the 3.5e grapple rules. Yeah.

Had loads of fun though. I remember nothing about that campaign, except, through a combination of careful argument and good rolls, one of the other players launching me in the air to grapple with a dragon.

Oh, I also remember how frustrating it was not to be able to speak. The group had decided on an RP thing before I joined where another player knew sign language and so did I, so I could “talk” directly to him, and then he’d relay it to the group. The DM eventually took pity on me and decided to give me back my power of speech through a demonic bargain with what turned out to be the BBEG. I can’t remember if the debt ever got called.

It annoys me that I can’t remember anything about this campaign, and I daren’t have a look at any of my journals from this time. This was a period in my life where I was otherwise Not Happy. My journals probably don’t have anything about this campaign anyway. Probably just complaining about a girl.

So this new group, this new campaign, I am determined to take lots of notes. I’ve got a nice fresh notebook I am using exclusively to capture our tabletop sessions, and I am recording the dates and session numbers. I am not logging every action, just taking general notes the way I am trying to in other contexts in my life. (See my post on keeping a journal, and keeping a reading journal. I really need to get on my post about keeping a commonplace book).

I am also considering taking part in this group to be storytelling practise; D&D is just storytelling after all. The rules give it structure and the dice give it a frisson of unpredictability, but really, what you’re doing is telling a fantastic story with a group of friends. I’ve enjoyed the fantasy I have read (Book of the New Sun was boss and of course I love Tolkien), and I’ve got more on my shelves too read, but I’ve never really tried writing it.

So I’m writing up my notes from my character’s perspective. A bit of backstory, too, but I intend to flesh that out more as the campaign goes on. I’ve been reading up on West Marches campaigns and I really like the idea that it can be really valuable to your group to keep a record, but it can also be fun to see how you’ve perceived events, what was important to you and what wasn’t.

I also really, really like Scott Hanselman’s ideas about not wasting your keystrokes. I absolutely see the value in writing something up just for myself, but if I intend to share it, I could just share it among the WhatsApp group, or I could put it up on a blog to make it more accessible and allow other people to possibly get some enjoyment out of it too.

So that’s what I’ve done. You can read it here. There should be a new post every couple weeks. I’ve put it on a separate blog because I’m not sure the people who read this one (all three of you) are interested in a D&D 5e campaign journal. But hey, if you are, let me know, I haven’t spent any money and could always change where I’m posting. I’ll probably be writing a bit more about D&D on this blog anyway, as it pertains to SFF, as I want to do something on Appendix N/E.

I’m already having to stop myself buying a new set of dice every week, and am thinking about maybe running my own game for my family. Soon I’ll be looking at new games. There are some Fallout TTRPG systems I’d like to try…

First Contact: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Compass Rose

I was thinking that The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Le Guin’s previous collection (collected in the same 2015 Gollancz SF Masterworks paperback and reviewed by me here), was the stronger one, but reviewing these notes I’m not so sure. There are some masterpiece level stories here too (The New Atlantis, Two Delays on the Northern Line, Sur), but the weakest stories (Small Change, I think), aren’t as weak as the ones in the previous collection, and there aren’t as many of them. Hm. 

Both collections make a good omnibus together. You can clearly see Le Guin’s developing thought as well as her recurring motifs (deliberately choosing marginalised perspectives, the figure of the artist/scientist out on the fringe). I read this collection shortly after experiencing a personal loss so some of the stories here that touch on that subject loom larger to me that they might otherwise have, and brought me a lot of comfort. 

I read Two Delays on the Northern Line shortly before having the experience I wrote about in this piece, and it was that combination that encouraged me to write it down. 

Reading these short stories just confirmed to me that Le Guin is one of my favourite writers and possibly my favourite SFF writer along with PKD and Ballard (don’t make me choose). I really do need to re-read The Dispossessed, Always Coming Home looks really interesting as well, there’s more short fiction I need to get, and also Earthsea: I own them, just need to read them.  

I was reading these Le Guin collections around the time I started keeping a commonplace book. I ended up underlining, highlighting, and commenting a lot in my paperback, and copied a fair bit out, because just like in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, The Compass Rose is full of writing that captures really delicate feelings that I couldn’t describe, so I won’t, but here are some quotes that stuck out to me. 

“When the brandy is gone I expect I will stuff this notebook into the bottle and put the top on tight and leave it on a hillside somewhere between here and Salem. I like to think of it being lifted up little by little by the water, and rocking, and going out to the dark sea.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 331, from the story The New Atlantis

“But it was good to have an artist. It was human. It was like Earth, wasn’t it?”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 447, from the story The Eye Altering

“But then the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that. They know also that the heroism may be no less real for that. But achievement is smaller than men think. What is large is the sky, the earth, the sea, the soul.”    

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 551, from the story Sur

Like I mentioned in my previous review, this was intended to be a #onetweetreviews style thing, and still kind of is, I just haven’t posted it on Twitter. I think this format works, or at least, it works for me, and I’ve seen other SFF blogs take similar approached when reviewing collections and anthologies. If you have any thoughts, please let me know in the comments.

The Author of the Acacia Seeds (1974)

What is this, a short story for ants?

The New Atlantis (1975)

We’ll be here soon, I think; under a fascist yoke while the world melts. Just read it, you can here https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-new-atlantis/

Schrödinger’s Cat (1974)

More like Schrödinger’s dog in a hot car.

Two Delays on the Northern Line (1979)

A story that captures how deeply weird grief is, and also the best attempt I’ve ever seen to capture the idea that “when God closes a door he opens a window” in humanist terms.  

SQ (1978) 

I think every writer has to do a story sceptical of the mental health profession. 

Small Change (1981)

Grief is weird. 

The First Report of the Shipwrecked Foreigner (1978)

In which Le Guin artfully demonstrates what history is while taking multiple swipes at Thomas Mann. 

The Diary of the Rose (1976)

What if Nurse Ratched had a heart?

The White Donkey (1980)

God donkey is such a great turn of phrase. 

The Phoenix (1982)

Egghead likes his booky-wook. 

Intracom (1974)

Science Fiction language is a great way to get across how odd pregnancy is. 

The Eye Altering (1974)

I love that Le Guin uses SF to explore what the role of the artist might be in a radically different context. Perfect example of how to use the medium. 

Mazes (1975)

Conjured a mental image very much like a Tool music video, which is an achievement. 

The Pathways of Desire (1979)

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

Gwilan’s Harp (1977)

There is art and there is life. You can’t always make your life art, but you can have art in your life.

If you’ve ever had a headstock break on your Gibson, read this story. 

Malheur County (1979)

We are born alone and die alone, and in the meantime should learn to live with ourselves. 

The Water is Wide (1976)

I don’t get it, apart from the idea that the afterlife is probably very confusing. 

The Wife’s Story (1982) 

Something of Angela Carter about this, and also another of Le Guin’s commitments: whose perspective would we not normally get?

Some Approaches to the Problem of the Shortage of Time (1979)

A story in the form of a scientific report, all about the relativity of time? Very funny, and the most Ballardian Le Guin story I’ve read. 

Sur (1982)

Le Guin writes the most positive, hopeful, “but what if…?” stories I have ever read, and tinges them with exquisite melancholy.

First Contact: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

First Contact: If I ever see a Gollancz SF Masterworks edition of something I haven’t read, I buy it. It’s a proper mark of quality in a genre I continue to enjoy exploring. I have a bunch I haven’t read yet and I am on the lookout for more. It makes sense to me to group reviews of these editions, and First Contact seems like an appropriate name for that grouping. I continue to experiment. Bear with me.

[If I read something that I know has an SF/Fantasy Masterworks edition but that’s not the edition I have, I’ll count it anyway.]

I read Semley’s Necklace in my undergrad SF module and it might have actually been the first Le Guin I ever read. It intrigued the hell out of me and was one of the first New Wave stories I’d read that wasn’t something by Ballard. Since then I’d meant to get properly into Le Guin’s short fiction and just didn’t get around to it until recently. I love her novels; I’ve read The Dispossessed, The Word for World is Forest, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Left Hand of Darkness. The Earthsea stories in this collection are the only ones I’ve read so far; yes I know I need to read them. 

I read this as part of Gollancz’s collected edition along with The Compass Rose, but I think this earlier one is stronger, even if I think a few of the stories are quite weak (The Good Trip, A Trip to the Head). These weak stories are more than counterbalanced by the masterpiece level ones in this collection, like Semley’s Necklace, Winter’s King, Nine Lives, The Field of Vision. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. 

I felt like I’d read Omelas before reading it, such is its place in the canon of SF and even the wider consciousness at the moment. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it since I read it and will re-read it soon, I think.

I’m attracted to SF as a literature of ideas and of stylistic experimentation; there’s a reason I like New Wave stuff. To me, there’s a direct thread between modernism and SF. Le Guin’s ideas are almost always fascinating, and examine spaces where we can see the “soft” implications of “hard” science, like FTL travel, or cloning. The stories in this collection have introductions from the author, and I particularly like this passage from her introduction to The Masters:

“Some science-fiction writers detest science, its spirit, method, and works; others like it. Some are anti-technology, others are technology-worshippers.I seem to be rather bored by complex technology, but fascinated by biology, psychology, and the speculative ends of astronomy and physics, insofar as I can follow them”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, page 37, from the introduction to the story The Masters

People forget that the social sciences are sciences. 

I’m (slowly, oh so slowly) working my way through Arthur C. Clarke’s collected stories, and as much as his ideas and concepts do fascinate me, the quality of the prose often leaves me cold. There’s a reason people think of the movie when they think of 2001. I mean, the novel’s fine. It’s fine. But there wasn’t much in it that stuck with me the way some of the frames in that movie have. Reading Le Guin, by comparison, is a treat. I find myself underlining and annotating like I’m an undergrad again. A couple selections. 

“He had been trying to measure the distance between the earth and God.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 49, from the story The Masters

“She had already learned that the Earth was, here, called Winter, and that Ollul was, here, called the Earth: one of those facts which turn the universe inside out like a sock.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 102, from the story Winter’s King

“Smiles, bells, parades, horses, bleh. If so, please add an orgy. If an orgy would help, don’t hesitate.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelves Quarters and the Compass Rose, Gollancz 2015, p.g 257, from the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

She writes with such humour, and pain, and depth of feeling. 

[I originally intended for this to be a #onetweetreviews like my reading of the complete Ballard short stories (Volume 1, Volume 2), but I’ve ended up using Twitter less and less because it’s a total shower. I post updates on there when I put something on my blog, but otherwise I feel even more than ever that time spent posting on Twitter would be wasted time, and I don’t have the energy to try and do something similar on Mastodon. I’m free, right? I’ll use the time to do something else. But I still like the idea of writing a short review of each story in a collection. I’ll keep doing that.]

Semley’s Necklace (1964)

Still love it. Has the quality of legend, myth, and is also utterly modern in its focus. I think of the Elgin Marbles, and of “dispassionate” administrators without a clue of the lived experience of the administered. 

April in Paris (1962)

Loneliness is a hell of a drug. A story that perfectly captures the vertigo of looking at a monument, and wondering who else has seen the same thing. 

The Masters (1963)

I love a good SF story that doesn’t present as such. Notes of The Dispossessed. There are many sciences . 

Darkness Box (1963)

More here than I could glean on a first read. Enduring images; a box full of darkness, a room full of candles, lined with gold, studded with gems, a white suit of armour, a black cat. 

The Word of Unbinding (1964)

So this is Earthsea, huh? Words having literal power, I like that. 

The Rule of Names (1964)

There’s a reason they employed a burglar in that other fantasy universe. 

Winter’s King (1969)

I love, love, Le Guin’s commitment to the full implications of relativity. This is hard SF with a soft heart. 

The Good Trip (1970)

Who needs drugs when you have an imagination amirite.

Nine Lives (1969)

I had heard about this story and was excited to read it, because I wanted to see what kind of SF Playboy used to publish. Like The Odd Couple with more examples of the tragic, brutal uncaring of the universe. Masterpiece. 

Things (1970)

You are what you do, and Lif goes on. 

A Trip to the Head (1970)

I don’t get it. 

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow (1971)

Everybody’s gangster until the trees start vibing. 

You should read poetry for many reasons, and one of them is so you can give your stories absolutely boss titles like this one has. 

The Stars Below (1973)

I love the idea that anything can be interesting if you consider it closely enough, like Corbyn and his manhole covers. And I loved this story of endurance in the face of profound, wilful ignorance. 

The Field of Vision (1973)

My God, it’s full of… God. 

I’ve got some very definite ideas, but on reflection, I don’t know how healthy it would be for me to definitively know one way or the other w/r/t the existence of the creator. 

I love a good “astronauts go mad” story.

Direction of the Road (1974)

It’s a truism to say that every perspective is different, and it’s another thing to write a story that really demonstrates that difference of perspective. Such an alien story about such an everyday thing. 

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (1973)

A masterpiece, but you knew that. We live in Omelas, but you knew that too. 

The Day Before the Revolution (1974)

For anyone who has ever wondered how Che Guevara would have felt about being on T-shirts and posters.

I really need to re-read The Dispossessed.

Some Thoughts on John Brunner’s The Jagged Orbit

It is astounding to me the extent that Brunner anticipates the vibe of our present moment. It’s one thing to consider specific details about what the future might look like, to predict certain technologies and social situations, but it is another thing entirely to imagine what things are going to feel like in the future.

In 1909 E.M. Forster published a science fiction story called The Machine Stops, in which humans have become isolated from each other, spending their days indoors and communicating through video screens. 

In 1957, Isaac Asimov published a science fiction story called The Naked Sun, in which humans have become isolated from each other, spending their days indoors and communicating through video screens. 

In 1969, John Brunner published a science fiction story called The Jagged Orbit, in which humans have become isolated from each other, spending their days indoors and communicating through video screens. Also, the United States is engulfed by a violence that feeds itself, with people buying weapons for personal defence because their neighbours have bought weapons for personal defence because their neighbours have bought weapons for personal defence, a state of affairs encouraged by arms companies with no incentive to help end the violence and every incentive to feed it. Corporate power, in this future, is the only power that matters.

And there’s subplots about insidious future advertising, tabloid journalism, the pathologising of difference, generative AI subduing human creativity, and time travel1. 

Never let it be said that John Brunner novels lack ideas. 

If you’ve read Stand on Zanzibar then The Jagged Orbit is going to be immediately familiar to you. The style is the same, being made up of lots of pretty short chapters with a panoply of perspectives and forms, and the content is very similar, being about a crowded future world very much going to pieces. It almost reads like a companion piece, being as it is part of the Club of Rome quartet. 

I remember reading Stand on Zanzibar with my mouth open at how directly he’d anticipated bits of our present. It’s not an SF writer’s job to predict the future, but in these novels Brunner is very much extrapolating forwards, and if that’s what he’s attempting then we’ll give him points. Much like in Stand, Brunner includes plenty of clippings from articles he’d seen in the paper that form the seeds for some of his ideas. 

I finished The Jagged Orbit a couple of weeks ago, and since then the news has been full of stories of people in the United States who are holed up, being fed propaganda through a screen and making sure their guns are loaded, ready for the urban conflict that the news is telling them is already going on right outside their door. They’re ready to fire on anyone who… knocks on the wrong door or picks the wrong driveway. This is the exact thing that goes on in The Jagged Orbit. 

It is astounding to me the extent that Brunner anticipates the vibe of our present moment. It’s one thing to consider specific details about what the future might look like, to predict certain technologies and social situations, but it is another thing entirely to imagine what things are going to feel like in the future. I made a point of mentioning above that Brunner’s idea is not new; plenty of people have imagined that we’ll have video calling. It’s one of those technologies that people saw in SF and said “Whoa, we need to develop that.” But Brunner imagines that it will enable a retreat from the public sphere, encourage isolation and paranoia, and just be part of a technological milieu that is corrosive to the human experience. That is uniquely Brunner. 

In between drafting the first few paragraphs of this and finishing it off, I came across a story about an unhoused person being choked to death in a New York subway car while a bunch of people watched. As far as I can tell, Jordan Neely had done nothing worse than commit the “crime” of being visibly mentally ill. 

How can you see the news coming out of the US and not come to the conclusion that civil society there is breaking down, if not broken? People are terrified, isolated, willing to commit capital violence on the commute to work. They are arming themselves. And it’s that last point that suits a few people who are quite happy for things to carry on like this, if not get worse. 

Every mass shooting is an advert. 

1 I just wanna mention the time travel subplot again. Essentially, the arms cartel called the Gottschalks develop an AI whose prime directive is to maximise arms sales, which it does, off screen, with apocalyptic effect. The AI, realising it cannot sell arms if there aren’t humans to sell them to, then has to use its ~temporal feedback circuits~ to probe into the past2 and try and find a deflection point that will enable it to stop this apocalypse. One character in the novel basically is this AI. I recently read William Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy and it was interesting to consider that in The Jagged Orbit Brunner is writing about a nodal point.

2 Yes, the above is basically the plot of The Terminator. This time travel thing has a big effect on the ending of The Jagged Orbit, but is one of five or six strands and throughout the bulk of the novel is a really minor subplot. I absolutely love that The Terminator can end up being a relatively minor plot point in a John Brunner novel, but I understand if it puts people off. I love a good kaleidoscope novel like Ulysses or Infinite Jest, so to read something like Brunner, where he uses similar techniques, but also is aware of his word count because it has to get published by an SF publisher, is great. It tickles a similar part of my brain but I actually find it more accessible, neologisms be damned. And Brunner does use a hell of a lot of them. What is a kneeblank? You’ll spend a lot of time wondering before it gets explained exactly.

3 Featured image courtesy of the ISFDB

You can find my review of Stand on Zanzibar here. 

You can find my review of The Shockwave Rider here.