i started reading John Middleton Murry, Jr.'s (aka Richard Cowper’s) “The Road To Corlay,” the first book in his “White Bird” series. i ran across the short story that started it all in an anthology awhile back, and really liked it. i was pleasantly surprised to find that he ended up writing a whole series from it.
what’s REALLY interesting to me is that, even though it was written in the 1970s to the early 1980s, there’s already talk of global warming and “The Drowning,” when the sea levels rose and basically changed everything, resetting some parts of the world back to pre-industrial tech. the other thing that is super interesting is the literal use of some terms that we all are familiar with nowadays from a later writer’s VERY popular series – that is, this book has “Seven Kingdoms,” and also a power-controlling church with a “Faith Militant” organization. hmmmmm
This past week I picked up the final two issues of Love & Rockets New Stories and the last few issues of the current “direct market five dollar pamphlets” format. (Vol. 4 Issues 1-3)
Maybe this hyper-aware era of what women got to put up every day with every day has put me off of the comic. Or maybe Gilbert has let his fetishes and artistic tics taken over from what was some pretty sharp writing back in the 80s and 90s. His overly long and meandering story about the character Fritz and how all of her children and rivals went into porn, acting as her clones (Fritz jr. for example) was kind of weird and a bit gross.
Jaime on the other hand, finished up a very long story about a reunion for his 80s characters at a punk rock show in their home town of Hoppers. While it was nice for me to see since I effectively grew old with Maggie and Hopey I realized that anyone who wan’t in the same boat I was in would find it impenetrable and meaningless. This was paired with his usual Adventure Ladies type of story that felt a bit phoned in.
Los Bros have been making this comic for literally decades now. Time changes everyone, reader and artist alike. While I do have a fondness for these characters we’ve grown apart.
I finally started reading The Worst Journey in the World, the memoir of Antarctic exploration by Apsley Cherry-Gerrard.
As a feat of writing alone it’s amazing – the grim humour leavening an even grimmer tale.
He’s also inadvertently showing how small a social group is involved. He thanks Mr. & Mrs. Bernard Shaw for helping him with his writing in the foreword, and it’s already clear just how much these polar explorers were in touch with each other. Which I suppose only makes sense, but to read about Scott writing letters in 1905 to the biologist of the 1839 expedition is something else.
I found the Long Earth series to be a bit like a book of alternate reality travel writing. Each book is very interesting in terms of going through the different worlds, but at the end of each it’s as though an editor said “shit! We’d better have some sort of plot!” and as a result, a story that is barely touched upon (like an inter-world war) is summed up unsatisfactorily in a chapter.
Overall, enjoyable enough but I won’t reread them the way I do with Pterry’s other books.
Just a couple comments in and they mention Walter Mosley. He’s known as more of a detective novel writer than a sci-fi writer, but I like his sci-fi even better.
I read that book when I was maybe 19 or 20, and it was exactly the right book at just the right time. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started it, but I had so much fun reading it and then reading about it. I picked up a used copy a year or so ago, intending to re-read it at some point, but now I’m not sure I want to risk the disappointment.
I’ve only just discovered Octavia Butler (literally yesterday) as I’m currently going through the female F&SF humble bundle. 1 short story so far and I already think she’s fantastic.
Don’t get me wrong, I do like it, but it’s got a bit too much of sexy women being sexy only for men kind of thing going on. RAW was indeed a happy mutant, and I really appreciate the exploration of conspiracy theories, and the like, but that sort of hippie misogyny just sort of rubs me the wrong way. It’s worth reading, for sure, though.
I surely would not have noticed that sort of thing, as such, when I originally read it. I just didn’t have the life experience back then to recognize it. Now, I probably (hopefully) would, and that would likewise tarnish the book a bit for me. I just have such fond memories of it that I’m not sure I want to risk changing my opinion of it. Sometimes I like to just like things, if you know what I mean.
It probably doesn’t help that I just had that same sort of reading experience with the last book I read. It wasn’t a book I’d read before, so that much is different, but it was the kind of book that I used to read a lot of, so it felt familiar and a bit nostalgic when I started reading it.
However, it wasn’t a very good book. It was a fun read, and the plot eventually sucked me in, but it was bad in ways that were downright silly, sometimes, and I kept wondering if it was just this particular book that wasn’t very good, or if all the books like this I used to read were equally as bad. Right now, I don’t know the answer to that question, but if I start re-reading books I used to like, I might find out.
And since this is the Watcha Reading? thread, I’ll go ahead and mention that the book is In the Country of the Blind, by Michael Flynn. The protagonist, who is unironically portrayed as a hero, is a real estate developer whose atypical intelligence and keen business eye allow her to spot which neighborhoods are about to become hot markets so she can buy up property for cheap and then renovate it for big profits. I’m reading that and thinking, OK, she’s smart, she’s successful, she’s – wait a minute! …she’s one of those gentrifying assholes who don’t care if poor people are forced out their homes and neighborhoods as long as she makes a killing on her condos.
The “hero” is an Ayn Rand outlaw billionaire, and his scheme to manifest Eris in the physical world is to create a cult, pick a follower, and subject her to Crowley/Manson magical brainwashing until she blacks out and forgets who she is. Then she can be our savior goddess who can fight the undead Nazi army. The misogyny is integral to the story. It’s the whole point.
And then there’s the drug stuff. If we all just smoked pot we could see through the veil of lies.
I’m not saying people who like the book are “wrong.” I’m just not going to read it again.
The Adventures of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser are available for super cheap right now ($2.99 for electronic editions!), so i’m gonna dive into them. I’ve always meant to give them a read:
I picked up a copy of the first one in a thrift shop about 2 years ago now and read through it and enjoyed it for the fluff that it was. If I didn’t have the current SCI-FI/Fantasy humble book bundle to go through right now I would be tempted.
On the note of my current read, I am reading through Hap & Leonard Blood and Lemonade… grim in pointing out how fucked up and racist society was in the late 60s, but a lot of fun. I will have to get book one now.
