Best writers I haven't yet read
ewo...@aol.com
SF/F writers I have never read, and this is this list I came up with,
after about 15 minutes of thought and perusing of Aldiss's "Trillion
Year Spree":
Olaf Stapledon
John Crowley
Tim Powers
Robert Sheckley
Edgar Rice Burroughs
J. G. Ballard
Thomas Disch
C. J. Cherryh
Mervyn Peake
I'm going to try to make amends this summer, after I read Pete Hamill's
_Forever_ (my current book) and Haddon's _The Strange Incident of the
Dog in the Nighttime_ (on deck)
Anyone else have a list?
Mark
There are so many I've read "at"--started, never finished, picked up in
a boostore/library, did two pages, put back. So with a caveat that I
may have looked at something (but never read anything in its entirety)
I have some embarrassing lapses:
A. Bertram Chandler
Norman Spinrad
Ron Goulart
Robert Sheckley
Leigh Brackett
Barry Malzberg
Fritz Leiber
A.A.Attanasio
Frank Belknap Long
A few of whom I've read one or two things, but not most or even the
most significant of their oeuvre--for instance, I have yet to read
LeGuin's LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS, even though I still have the original
Ace Special edition.
So many books, so little time!
Mark
author of:
THE SECANTIS SEQUENCE
REMAINS
www.marktiedemann.com
David Tate
> Having read the "I never read Wells" post, I thought about the best
> SF/F writers I have never read, and this is this list I came up with,
> Anyone else have a list?
In the glory days of Alexandria Digital Literature, the online user
community used to publish "shame lists" occasionally -- lists of the
highest-recommended works (on our personal recommendation lists) that
we had never read. It's an interesting exercise.
There are far too many highly-regarded SF authors by whom I have never
read a thing. The ones I feel most guilty about are:
Lloyd Alexander
Kage Baker
L. Frank Baum
Stephen Baxter
Peter S. Beagle
Greg Bear
James Blaylock
James Branch Cabell
John Brunner
Jonathan Carroll
E.R. Eddison
Charles Finney
Mary Gentle
William Gibson
M. John Harrison
Robert E. Howard
Guy Gavriel Kay (unless you count _The Silmarillion_)
Nancy Kress
Tanith Lee
China Miéville
Hope Mirrlees (but I have it out of the library as we speak)
Michael Moorcock
Mervyn Peake
Mike Resnick
Will Shetterly
Dan Simmons (but I just bought a copy of _Hyperion_)
E.E. Smith
Bruce Sterling
John Varley
James White (expletive deleted library system doesn't have them)
John Wyndham
One begins to wonder what I *have* read...
--
David Tate
Randy Money
> Having read the "I never read Wells" post, I thought about the best
> SF/F writers I have never read, and this is this list I came up with,
> after about 15 minutes of thought and perusing of Aldiss's "Trillion
> Year Spree":
>
> Olaf Stapledon
> John Crowley
> Tim Powers
> Robert Sheckley
> Edgar Rice Burroughs
I know I'll be hooted down, but I'm not sure you're missing all that
much by not reading Burroughs.
> J. G. Ballard
> Thomas Disch
> C. J. Cherryh
> Mervyn Peake
>
> I'm going to try to make amends this summer, after I read Pete Hamill's
> _Forever_ (my current book) and Haddon's _The Strange Incident of the
> Dog in the Nighttime_ (on deck)
>
> Anyone else have a list?
>
There are a lot of writers (sf/f/h) I think I'd like if I tackled them,
but so far haven't done so. Among them:
Lloyd Alexander
Greg Bear
Leigh Brackett
Bradley Denton
E.R. Eddison
Jeffery Ford
John M. Ford (just me, or does there seem to be a proliferation of
Fords/Fordes/Ffordes these days?)
Alan Garner
Mary Gentle
M. John Harrison
Guy Gavriel Kay
Maureen McHugh (sp?)
China Miéville (hope to correct this sometime this year)
Hope Mirrlees
Holly Phillips
William Tenn
Jeff Thomas
Jeff Vandermeer
Robert Charles Wilson (hope to correct this sometime this year)
T. M. Wright
I'm currently taking one author off this list, Sean Stewart; just
started _Ressurection Man_.
Then there's the list of writers of whose work I've read very little,
and think I'd like to get back to them:
A. A. Attanasio
Kage Baker
Peter S. Beagle
Michael Bishop
James Blaylock
Octavia Butler
William Spenser Browning (Browning Spenser?)
John Brunner
James Branch Cabell
Suzy McKee Charnas
Samual Delany
Karen Joy Fowler
Glen Hirshberg
Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Kathe Koja
Tim Lebon
Tanith Lee
Barry Malzberg
Patricia McKillop
Mervyn Peake
Tim Powers
Joanna Russ
Robert Sheckley
Clark Ashton Smith
Bruce Sterling
Thomas Tessier
Jack Williamson
I have no doubt that if I thought about it overnight, I'd come up with
many others.
Randy M.
Joe Bernstein
Huh. David Tate and Randy Money are people I'm used to thinking of
as *much* better-read than I am, given our largely overlapping tastes
and interests (one I think likes science fiction more'n I do and one
I'm sure likes horror more, but still). They've both just posted
lists that *astonished* me. I'm feeling like "Gosh, maybe it's
just that they've read stuff I don't read, but not the stuff I do!"
And I don't much want to spoil that feeling by tallying up major
authors *I* haven't read, which is pretty much guaranteed to leave
me feeling inferior again.
But I *do* "have a list". When I worked at The Stars Our Destination,
we had a Recommended Reading shelf right at the front of the store,
a place where
a) it was easy to point people looking for advice;
b) it was easy to keep track of "books we want to have more than
one or two copies in stock at a time".
Now, at this point I'd been going to the store for about two
years fairly often, and had read a *lot* of books on the owner's
advice. It dawned on me that I should try *not* to continue this
practice while working there, so that the Recommended Reading
shelf could benefit from my offering *different* choices from those
she'd picked. It was already too late to prevent a lot of overlap,
but going forward, I did pick out three authors she raved about,
whom I'd therefore avoid totally:
Lois McMaster Bujold
Octavia Butler
Barry Hughart.
(When the owner reprinted Barry Hughart's three books, this put
me in the amusing position of trying to proofread scanned pages
*without* actually reading them.)
In the eight years since I left Chicago and mostly left her employ,
I stuck to this for the first several, basically out of inertia
more than anything else. In late 2003 and going on to 2004, I
finally read most of Bujold's books. I haven't, in that time
or for a while before, felt strong enough emotionally to tackle
Butler, and for some reason haven't really thought about Hughart.
Hmmmm.
So that's not much of a list - rest assured there are dozens of
other major authors I haven't read - but it is mine.
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
Gene Ward Smith
David Tate wrote:
> There are far too many highly-regarded SF authors by whom I have never
> read a thing. The ones I feel most guilty about are:
Finally a list with some people I haven't read on it!
> Kage Baker
Haven't read. But I feel no shame, I probably will one of these days.
> China Miéville
Quit on--even worse shame, I guess.
David Tate
> In article <1147656002.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> <ewo...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Anyone else have a list?
>
> Huh. David Tate and Randy Money are people I'm used to thinking of
> as *much* better-read than I am, given our largely overlapping tastes
> and interests (one I think likes science fiction more'n I do and one
> I'm sure likes horror more, but still). They've both just posted
> lists that *astonished* me. I'm feeling like "Gosh, maybe it's
> just that they've read stuff I don't read, but not the stuff I do!"
Given that I think of you as someone who is much more widely read in
fantasy than I am, I suspect that's probably true.
In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
> And I don't much want to spoil that feeling by tallying up major
> authors *I* haven't read, which is pretty much guaranteed to leave
> me feeling inferior again.
Your reputation is in no danger with me.
[Octavia Butler and Barry Hughart, with interesting anecdote]
> So that's not much of a list - rest assured there are dozens of
> other major authors I haven't read - but it is mine.
I have (to the best of my recollection) read exactly one thing by
Octavia Butler: the excellent short story "Speech Sounds". I would
probably never have discovered Hughart if not for the insistent
recommendations of Hypatia at Alexandria Digital Literature, and
concurring discussion by people like Rich Horton and Glen Engel-Cox on
the AlexLit forum. (That forum is also what pointed me at r.a.sf.w, so
the popularity of Hughart around here wouldn't have been an independent
factor...)
But you know what's even more embarrassing than not having read Eddison
or Cabell or Varley or Brunner? It's having read at least 8 different
novels by Piers Anthony. What was I thinking!?
David Tate
Sea Wasp
Hmm. I have no idea how good they actually are, but here's some names
that I've seen often batted around which I have read nary a word of:
Lois McMaster Bujold
Charlie Stross
Ian Banks
Tim Powers
Mercedes Lackey
Ian McDonald
China Mieville
Glen Cook
Robert Sawyer
Lois and Charlie may soon be off that list as they're on my very
short list of "must try as soon as have reading time".
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
Live Journal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/seawasp/
Mike Schilling
"Sea Wasp" <seawasp...@obvioussgeinc.com> wrote in message
news:446B1E99...@obvioussgeinc.com...
>
> Hmm. I have no idea how good they actually are, but here's some names that
> I've seen often batted around which I have read nary a word of:
>
> Lois McMaster Bujold
Huh. Back when, say, A Civil Campagn came out, and we had endless on-topic
threads discussing it [1], I never noticed that you were absent from them.
1. AKA The Good Old Days.
rick++
I dont if its to due to familiarityy or whther those authors had
the best styles.
The early stuff has a couple of problems. Sometimes reality has
overcome speculation and these earlier scenarios are too
unbeleiveable. The other is the style novel writing- too often it
is first-person diary style which can become tedious.
Randy Money
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
>>In article <1147656002.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
>> <ewo...@aol.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Anyone else have a list?
>>
>>Huh. David Tate and Randy Money are people I'm used to thinking of
>>as *much* better-read than I am, given our largely overlapping tastes
>>and interests (one I think likes science fiction more'n I do and one
>>I'm sure likes horror more, but still). They've both just posted
> Given that I think of you as someone who is much more widely read in
> fantasy than I am, [...]
Seeing Joe's message, I was going to say something along these lines,
but you beat me to it, David. And, of course, I think of both of you as
more deeply read in fantasy and/or s.f. than I am.
>>I'm feeling like "Gosh, maybe it's
>>just that they've read stuff I don't read, but not the stuff I do!"
>
> [...] I suspect that's probably true.
Agreed, or at least the overlap is relatively small.
Just yesterday I was looking around at Shocklines and astonished by how
much I would find of interest. Besides the three items I decided to buy,
I'd have liked to purchase books by Poppy Brite and Caitlin Kiernan,
William Hope Hodgson, Manly Wade Wellman, and Norman Partridge, Jeff
Thomas, Lisa Tuttle, Lucius Shepard, and David Niall Wilson, among
others, and these just what I found on their SALE page.
It is impossible to read all of the work within any one genre that I
think I'd enjoy, to say nothing of the work outside. We live in a time
of plenty, and occasionally too damn much, and we can't possibly read
all that would interest us.
> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
slowly returning to genre. My main problem is I'm not that fast a
reader. I rarely read more than 15 complete books a year, and maybe as
many pages in separate short stories.
[...]
>>So that's not much of a list - rest assured there are dozens of
>>other major authors I haven't read - but it is mine.
I've already thought of a few others I should add to my previous list.
For instance, I've read more Le Guin, Sturgeon and PK Dick than I have
any of the writers I listed, but not all of their major works. I still
have catching up to do.
> I have (to the best of my recollection) read exactly one thing by
> Octavia Butler: the excellent short story "Speech Sounds". I would
> probably never have discovered Hughart if not for the insistent
> recommendations of Hypatia at Alexandria Digital Literature, and
> concurring discussion by people like Rich Horton and Glen Engel-Cox on
> the AlexLit forum. (That forum is also what pointed me at r.a.sf.w, so
> the popularity of Hughart around here wouldn't have been an independent
> factor...)
>
> But you know what's even more embarrassing than not having read Eddison
> or Cabell or Varley or Brunner? It's having read at least 8 different
> novels by Piers Anthony. What was I thinking!?
Erase Piers Anthony, insert Agatha Christie, repeat rhetorical question.
Randy M.
jpe...@qwest.net
reading; (all before the Xanthian Brain-eater got him).
This is a very interesting thread and while I'm able to come up with
several authors that I feel I haven't read ENOUGH of, I'm really at a
loss to come up with someone with a major body of work that I haven't
read at least something of.
Oh, wait... Got it! I have never read Julian May, even though I have
several of the books... Yep, been sitting on the shelf for twenty years
and I've never read 'em...
Cheers,
John
Mike Schilling
"Randy Money" <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote in message
news:446B5DBC...@spamblock.syr.edu...
> David Tate wrote:
>> But you know what's even more embarrassing than not having read Eddison
>> or Cabell or Varley or Brunner? It's having read at least 8 different
>> novels by Piers Anthony. What was I thinking!?
>
> Erase Piers Anthony, insert Agatha Christie, repeat rhetorical question.
Erase Christie, insert P. G. Wodehouse, change 8 to about 60, and rhetorical
question to "And what's wring with that?"
Westprog
"Mike Schilling" <mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:S9Mag.77570$H71....@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...
Nothing wring with that. Everyone has some writers who they regret not
reading, and some that they consider not worthy, but fun. The problem is
with the writers one doesn't really like, but read anyway.
Books I'm glad I've decided not to read - all those Dune sequels/prequels,
for one.
J/
Mark
time he produced some pretty enjoyable fiction. Somewhere around the
time the Xanth series began he seems to have lost it. But up till
then, I remember thoroughly enjoying a lot of his stuff.
Sea Wasp
I may very well have ended up in such threads, but only as a tangent
discussion (for example, whenever one of them mutated into one of the
eternal Heinlein Nazi Gun Tax threads.)
Mike Schilling
"Mark" <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1147903648.8...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>I wouldn't beat myself up about a Piers Anthony Period. There was a
> time he produced some pretty enjoyable fiction. Somewhere around the
> time the Xanth series began he seems to have lost it.
He didn't lose it. He deliberately and cynically threw it away, which is
why so many people dislike him.
Andrew Wheeler
Oh, let's embarrass myself. I don't think there are all that many
authors I've never touched at all, but let's see:
John Wyndham
Charles L. Harness
Edgar Pangborn
Angela Carter
Bob Shaw
Ian Watson
M. John Harrison
Joanna Russ
Richard Matheson
T.H. White
Avram Davidson
If we were doing the "I've never read <x>" game (which I've seen talked
about on a couple of blogs in the past week or two -- it's apparently
the lit-professors' version of "chicken"), I'd have more shockers, I'm sure.
--
Andrew Wheeler: Professional Editor, Amateur Wise-Acre
--
If you enjoyed this post, try my blog at
http://antickmusings.blogspot.com
If you hated this post, you probably have bad taste anyway.
Mike Schilling
> Mike Schilling wrote:
>> "Sea Wasp" <seawasp...@obvioussgeinc.com> wrote in message
>> news:446B1E99...@obvioussgeinc.com...
>>
>>>Hmm. I have no idea how good they actually are, but here's some names
>>>that I've seen often batted around which I have read nary a word of:
>>>
>>>Lois McMaster Bujold
>>
>>
>> Huh. Back when, say, A Civil Campagn came out, and we had endless
>> on-topic threads discussing it [1], I never noticed that you were absent
>> from them.
>
> I may very well have ended up in such threads, but only as a tangent
> discussion (for example, whenever one of them mutated into one of the
> eternal Heinlein Nazi Gun Tax threads.)
I'm sure there were HNGT tangents -- it was still Usenet. But part of what
made that the Good Old Days was books of such general interest that all the
regulars would discuss them as books. Perhaps the next Bujold, if it's as
widely appreciated as ACC or TCoC.
Mike Schilling
"Andrew Wheeler" <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote in message
news:446BAFA1...@optonline.com...
> ewo...@aol.com wrote:
>
> Oh, let's embarrass myself. I don't think there are all that many
> authors I've never touched at all, but let's see:
>
> John Wyndham
> Charles L. Harness
> Edgar Pangborn
> Angela Carter
> Bob Shaw
> Ian Watson
> M. John Harrison
> Joanna Russ
> Richard Matheson
> T.H. White
> Avram Davidson
The last two are the surprising ones. _The Once and Future King_ is not to
be missed. And unless I'm very much mistaken, I bought _The Avram Davidson
Treasury_ from you. Surely there's a copy lying around the warehouse that
you can "borrow". Or if not, here's one of his best stories:
http://www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/davidson3/davidson31.html
David Tate
>
> Oh, let's embarrass myself. I don't think there are all that many
> authors I've never touched at all, but let's see:
>
> John Wyndham
> Charles L. Harness
> Edgar Pangborn
> Angela Carter
> Bob Shaw
> Ian Watson
> M. John Harrison
> Joanna Russ
> Richard Matheson
> T.H. White
> Avram Davidson
I feel *MUCH* better now :-). I have read at least one thing each by
Harness, Pangborn, Shaw, Watson, Matheson, and White, and about 80% of
Davidson's output.
David Tate
Howard Brazee
<mscotts...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>>I wouldn't beat myself up about a Piers Anthony Period. There was a
>> time he produced some pretty enjoyable fiction. Somewhere around the
>> time the Xanth series began he seems to have lost it.
>
>He didn't lose it. He deliberately and cynically threw it away, which is
>why so many people dislike him.
Partly because his "serious" works weren't at all popular. But they
weren't that good either. He blamed the audience.
Anthony Nance
Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>David Tate wrote:
>
>> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
>> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
>> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
>> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
>> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
>> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
>
>My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
>slowly returning to genre. My main problem is I'm not that fast a
>reader. I rarely read more than 15 complete books a year, and maybe as
>many pages in separate short stories.
>
>[...]
Like you and David, I have a gap in SF reading, roughly from
1986 - 1995, and again like you, I typically get through 1-2
novels a month. For the last year or so, I've been reading
short stories over lunch 2-3 times a week. This has allowed
me to read more single author anthologies, including Brackett,
Bradbury, del Rey, Dickson, Egan, Lafferty, Sheckley, and Zelazny
amongst others.
Since reading time an unfortunately scarce commodity, I use
rasfw as a great filter, and as a result end up reading mostly
older works. Except for the three latest Harry Potter books[1],
I can't remember the last novel I read the same year it was
published. I just picked up Vinge's latest, though, and I will
read that as soon as I finish the book I'm currently in.
Getting back to the thread, my own list is too long, but there
are many on that list I have no intention of reading. However,
I actively plan to rectify not reading anything by the following
(* = I own something, but haven't got to it yet):
Lloyd Alexander
*Kage Baker
Susan Cooper
Charles Harness
Michael Moorcock (huuuge body of work - where to start?)
Tamora Pierce
*Mervyn Peake
*Tim Powers
*Philip Pullman
Melissa Scott
*Clark Ashton Smith
*Charlie Stross
*A&B Strugatski
*Robert Charles Wilson
*Gene Wolfe (<---this is the one that actively bugs me, but for
some reason, when I go down to the basement to
grab a new novel, none of his jump into my hand;
I feel I must have read a short by him, but darn
if I can recall doing so)
Alexander, Cooper, Pierce, and Pullman are purposely being saved
for when the kids are a bit older. If I haven't accumulated too
many parent cooties by then, hopefully we can read them for the
first time together.
Tony
[1] I do enjoy them, but the unusual "rush" to read them quickly
is to give a niece and I something engaging to talk about.
John Pelan
<seawasp...@obvioussgeinc.com> wrote:
>
> Hmm. I have no idea how good they actually are, but here's some names
>that I've seen often batted around which I have read nary a word of:
> Tim Powers
SW: Having read your work (and enjoyed it); I'm very surprised by the
Powers omission. Pick up a copy of The Anubis Gates or On Stranger
Tides ASAP. You'll be hooked.
Cheers,
John
David Tate
I agree that both seem like the kind of books that Wasp would like.
When I first saw advertising for "Pirates of the Caribbean", my
immediate thought was "Oh look, someone's made a movie of ON STRANGER
TIDES". My second thought was "No, apparently not -- but I wish they
had."
David Tate
Randy Money
[...]
> Books I'm glad I've decided not to read - all those Dune sequels/prequels,
> for one.
>
> J/
I reacted similarly. I read Herbert's _Dune_, enjoyed it quite a bit,
but never felt the need to read more. It was complete in and of itself
and needed no more.
Randy M.
Randy Money
> Andrew Wheeler wrote:
>
>>Oh, let's embarrass myself. I don't think there are all that many
>>authors I've never touched at all, but let's see:
>>
>>John Wyndham
>>Charles L. Harness
>>Edgar Pangborn
>>Angela Carter
>>Bob Shaw
>>Ian Watson
>>M. John Harrison
>>Joanna Russ
>>Richard Matheson
>>T.H. White
>>Avram Davidson
>
>
> I feel *MUCH* better now :-).
Me, too. :)
> I have read at least one thing each by
> Harness, Pangborn, Shaw, Watson, Matheson, and White, and about 80% of
> Davidson's output.
>
> David Tate
>
Except for Watson and Harness, I've read at least a novel, or short
story or two by everyone else, and around 70% of Pangborn's s.f.
I'd strongly suggest tackling _Davy_ or at least a few stories in _Good
Neighbors and Other Strangers_.
Randy M.
James Nicoll
Andrew Wheeler <acwh...@optonline.com> wrote:
>
>Oh, let's embarrass myself. I don't think there are all that many
>authors I've never touched at all, but let's see:
>
Old Earth Books would be happy to help you with this particular
oversight.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
David Tate
> David Tate wrote:
>
> > I have read at least one thing each by
> > Harness, Pangborn, Shaw, Watson, Matheson, and White, and about 80% of
> > Davidson's output.
> Except for Watson and Harness, I've read at least a novel, or short
> story or two by everyone else, and around 70% of Pangborn's s.f.
> I'd strongly suggest tackling _Davy_ or at least a few stories in _Good
> Neighbors and Other Strangers_.
I did say "at least one". I've read _Davy_, and _A Mirror for
Observers_, and the short stories "Longtooth" and (possibly) "Angel's
Egg".
For the others, I don't think I've read multiples by any except T.H.
White. _Wolfhead_ for Harness, "The Light of Other Days" for Shaw,
"Born of Man and Woman" for Matheson.
David Tate
horseshoe7
ewo...@aol.com wrote:
> Having read the "I never read Wells" post, I thought about the best
> SF/F writers I have never read, and this is this list I came up with,
> after about 15 minutes of thought and perusing of Aldiss's "Trillion
> Year Spree":
>
> Olaf Stapledon
> John Crowley
> Tim Powers
> Robert Sheckley
> Edgar Rice Burroughs
Booooring... even at 14, these books were too "fantastic" for me.
> J. G. Ballard
> Thomas Disch
> C. J. Cherryh
You LUCKY Devil... never to have experienced the HORROR of Cherryh.
> Mervyn Peake
- Stewart
Gene Ward Smith
Randy Money wrote:
> I'd strongly suggest tackling _Davy_ or at least a few stories in _Good
> Neighbors and Other Strangers_.
My favorite is A Mirror for Observers, which is probably wicked of me.
Middlebrow
news:e4e9bo$7gs$1...@reader1.panix.com...> But I *do* "have a list". When I worked at The Stars Our Destination,
> we had a Recommended Reading shelf right at the front of the store,
> a place where
Hey, if you worked there after 1987, I'll bet I've bought a few books from
ya!
That was a truly great store.
Victoria L.
ewo...@aol.com wrote:
> Having read the "I never read Wells" post, I thought about the best
> SF/F writers I have never read, and this is this list I came up with,
> after about 15 minutes of thought and perusing of Aldiss's "Trillion
> Year Spree":
>
> Olaf Stapledon
> John Crowley
> Tim Powers
> Robert Sheckley
> Edgar Rice Burroughs
> Thomas Disch
> C. J. Cherryh
I've been lurking/occasionally participating on this newsgroup for
probably a couple of years now, and have found this thread makes me
feel much better! It always feels to me like everyone on this group
has read every single well known book, and almost every single
not-well-known book as well. Sometimes it takes my breath away. And
now I figure I'm not as poorly read as I thought.
However, here's my list... (and it's very, very partial)
Mervyn Peake
Lord Dunsany
China Mieville
Tim Powers
Philip K. Dick (well, maybe one short story or so?)
Alfred Bestor
Pangborne (spelling?)
Terry Pratchet
David Weber
Vernor Vinge
William Gibson
And that's probably enough shame for now...
Victoria
Joe Bernstein
jpe...@qwest.net <jpe...@qwest.net> wrote:
> This is a very interesting thread and while I'm able to come up with
> several authors that I feel I haven't read ENOUGH of, I'm really at a
> loss to come up with someone with a major body of work that I haven't
> read at least something of.
Well, thanks. I could've said something similar, though I probably
wouldn't have *meant* it in quite the same way. Anyway, this provides
as good a hook as any for the post I composed offline, after spending
a week dealing with the problem you (didn't mean to) mention.
I said I didn't have a list, and didn't want to.
David Tate and Randy Money's replies convinced me to make a list. But
one reason I didn't want to make a list, is that I can't summon up names
of authors I've never read so easily as they apparently did. So, how?
I considered my references on science fiction and fantasy, and found
that at once the most comprehensive, and the newest, I own, are the
encyclopaediae of which John Clute is co-editor, <The Encyclopedia of
Science Fiction> and <The Encylopedia of Fantasy>. So one possibility
was to use them to build a list. The only alternative strategy I
considered was to look for authors represented by multiple books in my
personal collection's catalogue, none of which books I'd read - but
frankly, when I tried that, it rapidly got boring. And anyway, I'd find
it useful to *have* an index to the authors with entries in those books,
analogous to those I built long ago from the Penguin Companions; why not
kill two birds with one stone?
So I've spent much of this past week compiling a list of author entries
in those books, along with birth and death dates and line counts for the
entries. (To my semi-trained eye and spot test on Tolkien's full name,
the lines in the two books are the same length.) I may post a lot more
on the basis of this spreadsheet later, or dump it onto the Web, once
I've done some error-checking. (It would probably hurry that day if
people post or e-mail telling me they're interested. Or delay it if
not...) [1] But for now, all I've done is list the longest 50 author
entries in the EoSF (both counting, and then not counting, the errata in
my copy), the longest 50 in the EoF, and the top 100 authors judged by
the *sum* of how many lines they got in the two books.
There are plenty of things wrong with this strategy.
1. The editors do warn us clearly that length of entry should not be
taken as showing an aesthetic judgement. (I could make a lot of
possibly interesting comments about this.)
2. Defining the boundaries of the concept "author entry" resulted in
excluding some who probably should've been included (e.g. Edward Gorey,
because I didn't want to tackle reading comics artists' entries
carefully to see if they ever wrote comics, so I defined "author
entries" as entries about people who've been credited as having written
*anything* PLAIN TEXT and spec-ficnal), and certainly resulted in
including some who probably should've been excluded (the above
definition results in including Steven Spielberg!).
3. The EoF is about 20% shorter than the EoSF (counting by lines); when
you also note that the EoF is 37% author entries, the EoSF 47%, the
difference gets bigger. Of the top 50 science fiction authors, only
three failed to make it into the top 100 by the combined count; but of
the top 50 fantasy ones, nine did. So the list, used as simply as I'm
using it, is systemically biased against fantasy writers; I could
actually make some possibly interesting comments about that too.
4. Finally, these books are, um, not *that* new. J. K. Rowling lacks
an entry; I couldn't think of a science fiction writer who *completely*
matches, but maybe nobody will object if I name our own Charlie Stross?
On the other hand, Really Important Writers whom one should feel ashamed
to have ignored *should* be way back when, seems to me, so I'm not sure
this objection matters.
So OK. 100 top by the combined count; nine more fantasy writers; four
more science fiction writers. [2] And of these 113, how many have I
not read? Even if you count all the writers I name below, and you
really shouldn't, my list is *still* not much longer than the ones
Messrs Tate and Money posted. But hey! I've surely ignored much
higher quality literature, right?
I don't remember everything I read. So I'm spot-checking the entries to
see if they remind me of anything. But I'm not, for example, checking
the tables of contents of anthologies I've read in full, just in case.
So the question is not "Have I ever encountered this person's prose?"
But rather, "Did *anything* about the encounter stick in my head?"
So here goes.
Jules Verne. This is arguable. As a child I read at least two
translations of his novels, but as I understand it, most translations of
him are so bad that they don't in any meaningful way represent his
actual writing, and anyway these were kiddie versions. I may or may not
remember correctly that at some point I tackled a not entirely bogus
version of <20,000 Leagues>, but whatever. Easily the top scorer in
this bunch at 443 lines, equivalent to more than three full pages of the
EoSF.
(Pause. Surely you didn't really care that there are 120 lines in the
typical page of the EoSF, 1st printing in the US of a trade paperback
edition, and 128 in the US 1st hardcover of the EoF? Nah, didn't think
so. But now you know anyway, and it may put the following into
perspective.)
Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but I'm
not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read anything else.
Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The Telltale Heart" was a
school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
Robert E. Howard. Actually, I may have got through an entire book of
the De Camp/Carter 12-volume set at one point, but see above re Verne...
And my book catalogue doesn't know I read it, if I did. 379 lines.
H. Rider Haggard. Our first absolutely unequivocal never-touched-it
winner. 339 lines.
William Morris, sorta. I *have* read his first book (poems) and his
early stories, which probably do count, as part of a reading project
that then foundered on the rocks of his <Jason>; and I have, several
times, attempted one or another of his late novels, which may count.
330 lines.
H. P. Lovecraft. Beyond a token sentence or three, I definitely haven't
read him. 327 lines.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, to get back to the origin of this thread. I think
I actually started <A Princess of Mars> at some point - Burroughs is
probably a heavy leader in the "Which author do I own the most unread
books by?" sweepstakes, and I sometimes feel guilty about this - but if
so, I don't remember getting far. 309 lines.
J. G. Ballard. I'm sure he has a story in one of the <Dangerous
Visions> anthologies, which I *have* read, so he probably doesn't count,
but I don't remember the story, so he's close. 297 lines.
Jack Williamson. OK, OK, I *do* remember the <Undersea> books he and
Frederik Pohl wrote, so he definitely doesn't count. But I *wish* I
didn't remember them, so can he be an honorary member? 284 lines.
Lin Carter. Well, I've read a lot of his *non*-fiction... 271 lines,
probably mostly devoted to his editorial activity rather than his
fiction anyway.
Donald A. Wollheim. Pretty much ditto, except 263 lines and I don't
remember any non-fiction to speak of either.
Brian M. Stableford. Though I occasionally mean to, given that his more
recent books actually look kinda interesting, if I can ever find a whole
series at once... 259 lines.
M. P. Shiel. The top writer on the list of 100 who isn't on either list
of 50 is Piers Anthony - but he'd be on the EoSF 50 if you counted the
errata. (Snarky remarks about oversensitivity welcome.) Shiel is the
top one who definitely isn't in either 50, but makes it solely on the
basis of long entries in *both* books. Anyway, never touched him. 250
lines.
Algernon Blackwood. My mental label for him is "That guy who's not
Ambrose Bierce, whom I also haven't read". (Though *that* is no longer
strictly true - I read "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" sometime this past
year.) 244 lines.
Olaf Stapledon. Well, I did long ago sort of skim <Last and First Men>,
so I guess he doesn't really count. 221 lines.
Russell Hoban. Another author of multiple books I own but have not
read. 208 lines.
William Hope Hodgson. Um, maybe. I remember something that seems
vaguely Hodgson-like, but also remember clearly that I've never read
either of his famous books; either memory could be bogus. 208 lines.
William Mayne. A remarkably prolific British writer of kids' books whom
I either missed or forgot entire. 204 lines.
G. K. Chesterton. If any people are left yet who haven't slapped their
heads over my woeful ignorance and prepared to rant at me, then this is
their cue... 203 lines.
Robert Nathan. I know I've *seen* a book or two by him... 200 lines.
Andrew Lang. Not sure. Definitely never any of the fairy books,
though. 199 lines.
Robert Bloch. Again, not sure, but certainly not a whole novel. 199
lines.
Charles Grant. We seem to be developing a theme here, vis-a-vis horror.
193 lines.
Steven Spielberg. He's credited (with doubts on the entry authors'
parts) as author of one or two novelisations of his movies; believe me,
the 192 lines are not mostly about deathless prose you somehow missed.
Anyway, *I* missed the novelisations.
L. Ron Hubbard. I think. 192 lines.
Walter De La Mare. I see that "The Canterville Ghost" is actually by
Oscar Wilde, so quite possibly I haven't read a thing by him. He and
Peter S. Beagle are the only two authors on the top 100 who made it
there without having entries in the EoSF. 185 lines.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Pipe down, you. 184 lines.
Clark Ashton Smith. And no, his books' rarity is not an excuse; he's
another of the 'owned but not read' leaders. 181 lines.
E. T. A. Hoffmann. Yet another 19th century giant I've never touched.
180 lines.
Edmond Hamilton. I've kept meaning to, but copies of his earlier works
are actually hard to find and I wanted to read them first so as to get a
sense of the wonderful maturation his late works are said to show (and
so as not to find them inadequate by comparison, if I read the late ones
first and they really are so great). 179 lines.
Kenneth Bulmer and R. L. Fanthorpe, tied at 177 lines. Finally, a
couple I *really* don't have to feel ashamed to admit to... See, one
way to get a really long entry is just to have a whole *lot* of titles
for them to list!
Karel Capek. Well, that shame-free thing sure didn't last. 174 lines.
Algis Budrys. Surely he's somewhere in an anthology I've read? 172
lines. (The only one listed here who's one of the four science fiction
authors on one of the top 50 lists who isn't on the top 100 combined
list. Our next three are top-50-fantasy authors without science fiction
entries.)
The <Mabinogion>. In the EoF, there are a total of two entries for
works that can reasonably be considered as equivalent to author entries
but are about works whose authors are unknown - this and <Beowulf>.
(Other anonymice are typically covered by country entries or the like.)
There are two others for works with known authors that I decided to
include anyway (<Kalevala> and <Kathasaritsagara> ["Ocean of Story"]),
though I consistently refused to include entries about recent
multi-author stories such as the Doc Savage series or the Superman
concept. Anyway, I've read 1/4 of Evangeline Walton's version of the
Four Branches proper, but nothing from any closer translation, though
(you guessed it) I own two. 153 lines.
Johann W. Goethe. Yes, I can ignore *eighteenth* century titans too!
I'm an equal opportunity ignoramus! 138 lines.
Ramsey Campbell. Yeah, more horror. Yeah, I know. 131 lines.
And, whew, that's over with. Does anyone still wonder why I've only
completed two chapters of my history of fantasy?
But I do admit to having read at least *something* by each of the other
76 authors of those 113. [3] So I don't feel totally ashamed; 2/3 may
not be a passing mark, but isn't *all* bad.
Joe Bernstein
[1] OK, two tidbits gratis. One, if fandom really is graying, could it
have an eensy bit to do with lack of recognition for younger readers'
role models? The youngest [4] author in the science fiction book,
Jonathan Littell, turned 24 in the year it came out (1993); in the
fantasy one (1997), the lower limit went all the way down to 22
(Felicity Savage). Total of authors born after 1960: EoSF - 1961 (age
32), 3; 1962 (age 31), 2; and 1 each for 1963 (age 30), 1966 (age 27),
1967 (age 26), and 1969 (age 24). EoF - 1961 (age 36), 4; 1962 (age
35), 4; 1963 (age 34), 6; 1964 (age 33), 3; 1965 (age 32), 2; 1967 (age
30), 4; 1975 (age 22), 1. In other words, the EoSF actually had three
authors in their twenties, the EoF one. (As for ages 30-34, EoSF 21,
EoF 15.) Granted *most* authors don't get books into print until later,
but still, for a field that's had so many youthful prodigies ballyhooed,
this seems awfully strange, and speaking as someone *myself* born well
after 1960, I feel a bit nonplussed; Littell and Savage are the *only*
writers represented who are clearly younger than I!
Two, the single most surprising "outside the genre" entry I found has
*got* to be that for ... drum roll please ...
John Philip Sousa. I kid you not. He's in EoF.
Unless he's the joke entry to match the one for "Smith, E.E." in
the EoSF.
[2] Sigh. OK, the deal is that if you count the errata, Algis Budrys
and Piers Anthony edge out Mack Reynolds and R. A. Lafferty for spots 49
and 50 on the science fiction list; but Budrys and Reynolds each fail to
make the top 100 on the combined list, errata included or not. So
whether or not you count the errata there are only three authors on the
science fiction 50 not on the combined 100, but I chose to look at all
four of the possibles.
[3] If anyone wants the full lists, or whatever, well, e-mail or post,
y'know?
[4] Sigh, full precision. The youngest among those whose birthdates
were given. One hypothesis: prodigies are careless with their mail and
didn't bother to answer the questionnaires sent them in building the
books?
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://www.panix.com/~josephb/> "She suited my mood, Sarah Mondleigh
did - it was like having a kitten in the room, like a vote for unreason."
<Glass Mountain>, Cynthia Voigt
Joe Bernstein
Anthony Nance <na...@math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
> In article <446B5DBC...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> >David Tate wrote:
> >> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
> >> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
> >> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
> >> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
> >> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
> >> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
[rearranging]
> >My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
> >slowly returning to genre.
> Like you and David, I have a gap in SF reading, roughly from
> 1986 - 1995,
Holy cow, is this a universal? I thought most sf fans other than me
had been reading lifelong... Come to think of it, the steady stream
of people here saying "Haven't read anything since my teens, where
should I start?" should've convinced me otherwise, but it didn't.
I stopped reading in my first year of college, probably early 1984,
when I went to the local bookstore and the most interesting new books
were *all* sequels to stuff I didn't think needed sequels. (Memory
claims they were the fourth Dune book, the sixth Amber book, and
the sequel to <The Book of the Dun Cow>, but I won't be even slightly
shocked if this is impossible.) I'm sure the real reason was more
'who has time for pleasure reading?' but it was more reassuring to me
to have this high-minded reason instead.
I puttered around reading various stuff - including sf I'd already
picked out in some way; this is when I first read <Engine Summer>,
for example - for some years. Then in I think 1990 I found that a
local branch library had trashed a year's worth each of <Analog> and
<Asimov's>, and nabbed 'em. (The <Asimov's> were 1988, roughly, not
sure about the <Analog>s.) Read them over the next year or so and
suddenly had a whole *raft* of new Authors Who Interested Me to
replace those who'd betrayed me with sequel frenzy.
So suddenly I find myself with a *short* gap, where usually I figure
I missed something vital...
> >My main problem is I'm not that fast a
> >reader. I rarely read more than 15 complete books a year, and maybe as
> >many pages in separate short stories.
> and again like you, I typically get through 1-2
> novels a month. For the last year or so, I've been reading
> short stories over lunch 2-3 times a week. This has allowed
> me to read more single author anthologies, including Brackett,
> Bradbury, del Rey, Dickson, Egan, Lafferty, Sheckley, and Zelazny
> amongst others.
A good friend is a slow reader. I sometimes try to imagine what that
would be like and Just Can't.
I also have the admittedly questionable advantages of most of my life
having been underemployed, and all of it having been unattached.
So the ignorance I just posted about upthread a ways is somewhat
... more culpable, in a sense.
> Michael Moorcock (huuuge body of work - where to start?)
It may amuse you to know that while Asimov had a longer entry in the
EoSF, and Tolkien in the EoF, Moorcock, by being #5 EoSF and #2 EoF,
was the undisputed champ in total space devoted to him in the two
books. He's the poster child for "Being prolific makes for longer
entries".
Joe Bernstein
Randy Money
Well, you pointed up a few more authors whose work(s) I haven't read or
haven't read much of.
Joe Bernstein wrote:
> In article <1147887480....@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> jpe...@qwest.net <jpe...@qwest.net> wrote:
>
[...]
> Jules Verne.
Right there with you on this one, Joe. Nothing in the descriptions
really grab me, and I've seen the movies so the plots, or some
approximation of them, are familiar enough that I don't have a strong
urge to educate myself.
> Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but
> I'm not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read
> anything else. Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The
> Telltale Heart" was a school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
>
Huh. No "Fall of the House of Usher" for school? That really amazes me
because its so ubiquitous in high school and even college curriculums.
> Robert E. Howard.
I've read some. Wasn't that impressed. I do kick myself for letting
loose of a hardcover edition of _Skullface and Other Stories_ (approx.
title)
> H. Rider Haggard. [...] William Morris, sorta. [...]
Apparently we'll meet in the circle of hell devoted to fantasy readers
who skip the past masters.
> H. P. Lovecraft. Beyond a token sentence or three, I definitely
> haven't read him. 327 lines.
Ah, ha! A hit! One I have read, and pretty much all of his fiction.
> Edgar Rice Burroughs, to get back to the origin of this thread.
> [...] J. G. Ballard. [...]
A couple of books by the former and I felt replete with Burroughs. A
couple of stories by the latter failed to hook me. I may take a shot at
Ballard someday but I think I missed my window of opportunity to be
dazzled by ERB.
> Jack Williamson.
No "The Humanoids"? I'm surprised. I hope this year to finally get to
_Darker Than You Think_, but I'm not holding my breath.
> Lin Carter.
Think I read something long ago. You're not missing anything. He was a
better editor.
> Donald A. Wollheim. Pretty much ditto, except 263 lines and I don't
> remember any non-fiction to speak of either.
"Mimic." If I get hold of it, I'll read it, but otherwise I'm okay not
reading DAW.
> Brian M. Stableford. Though I occasionally mean to, given that his
> more recent books actually look kinda interesting, if I can ever find
> a whole series at once... 259 lines.
What you said. I've had _Man in a Cage_ and one or two of his vampire
books on my shelves for years and never get to him.
> M. P. Shiel. The top writer on the list of 100 who isn't on either
> list of 50 is Piers Anthony - but he'd be on the EoSF 50 if you
> counted the errata. (Snarky remarks about oversensitivity welcome.)
> Shiel is the top one who definitely isn't in either 50, but makes it
> solely on the basis of long entries in *both* books. Anyway, never
> touched him. 250 lines.
If anyone thinks Lovecraft wrote purple prose, send them to Shiel. I've
read a couple of mysteries and "The House of Sound" -- eh.
> Algernon Blackwood. My mental label for him is "That guy who's not
> Ambrose Bierce, whom I also haven't read". (Though *that* is no
> longer strictly true - I read "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" sometime
> this past year.) 244 lines.
I've read at least one collection worth of Blackwood short stories;
ditto Bierce, for that matter. Wonderful writers.
> Olaf Stapledon. Well, I did long ago sort of skim <Last and First
> Men>, so I guess he doesn't really count. 221 lines.
>
> Russell Hoban. Another author of multiple books I own but have not
> read. 208 lines.
Someday one or both of these.
> William Hope Hodgson. Um, maybe. I remember something that seems
> vaguely Hodgson-like, but also remember clearly that I've never read
> either of his famous books; either memory could be bogus. 208 lines.
>
One novel, a handful or two of short stories. Not bad, though the novel
was a bit overlong.
> William Mayne. A remarkably prolific British writer of kids' books
> whom I either missed or forgot entire. 204 lines.
Another I'll never get to.
> G. K. Chesterton. If any people are left yet who haven't slapped
> their heads over my woeful ignorance and prepared to rant at me, then
> this is their cue... 203 lines.
*sniff* You're bring back fond memories of Father Brown. I wonder what
I'd think of those stories now.
> Robert Nathan. I know I've *seen* a book or two by him... 200
> lines.
>
> Andrew Lang. Not sure. Definitely never any of the fairy books,
> though. 199 lines.
And there are two more likely candidates for the "I'll never get to this
author" sweepstakes.
> Robert Bloch. Again, not sure, but certainly not a whole novel. 199
> lines.
I've read a ton. One of my early favorites.
> Charles Grant. We seem to be developing a theme here, vis-a-vis
> horror. 193 lines.
Fun if you like quiet, sneak up on you and go boo! horror.
> Steven Spielberg. He's credited (with doubts on the entry authors'
> parts) as author of one or two novelisations of his movies; believe
> me, the 192 lines are not mostly about deathless prose you somehow
> missed. Anyway, *I* missed the novelisations.
[this space left blank because nothing comes to mind to say]
> L. Ron Hubbard. I think. 192 lines.
May read a couple of this things someday; "Fear," most likely
> Walter De La Mare. [...]
>
> E. T. A. Hoffmann. [...]
Rearranged these. I need to read more by them. Some of the de la Mare I
read was so long ago my memory of it is no longer clear. Hoffman I've
only dipped into.
> Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Pipe down, you. 184 lines.
But, Joe, it's only *one* book! I mean, really, if you don't read
anything else by her, just the *one* book!
> Clark Ashton Smith. And no, his books' rarity is not an excuse; he's
> another of the 'owned but not read' leaders. 181 lines.
_Zothique_ was wonderful. I finally read it about this time last year. I
need to read more.
> Edmond Hamilton. [...]
I'm more bothered by not having read but one story by his wife, Leigh
Brackett.
> Kenneth Bulmer and R. L. Fanthorpe, tied at 177 lines. [...]
Still more I'll never get to.
> Karel Capek. Well, that shame-free thing sure didn't last. 174
> lines.
Ditto.
> Algis Budrys. [...]
I have three (four?) novels and a collection of his and I still haven't
read but one story by him. But I will, dang it! I will!
> The <Mabinogion>. In the EoF, there are a total of two entries for
> works that can reasonably be considered as equivalent to author
> entries but are about works whose authors are unknown - this and
> <Beowulf>. (Other anonymice are typically covered by country entries
> or the like.) There are two others for works with known authors that
> I decided to include anyway (<Kalevala> and <Kathasaritsagara>
> ["Ocean of Story"]), though I consistently refused to include entries
> about recent multi-author stories such as the Doc Savage series or
> the Superman concept. Anyway, I've read 1/4 of Evangeline Walton's
> version of the Four Branches proper, but nothing from any closer
> translation, though (you guessed it) I own two. 153 lines.
This and Mallory feel like albatrosses around my readerly neck. Maybe.
Some day.
> Johann W. Goethe. Yes, I can ignore *eighteenth* century titans too!
> I'm an equal opportunity ignoramus! 138 lines.
Let's joing I.A. -- Ignoramuses Anonymous. If we're ignoramuses enough,
we'll not notice that we just announced we belong to it.
> Ramsey Campbell. Yeah, more horror. Yeah, I know. 131 lines.
I've read two novels and a few short stories, and I definitely will
expand those numbers as long as the bus and truck drivers keep braking
when they see me in the street. He's an excellent prose stylist and has
written some genuinely creepy works. I do think you need a healthy
tolerance for horror to deal with most of it, though, Joe.
And because of a conversation I had yesterday, mention of Campbell
reminds me I've only read one novel by Robert Holdstock. Nuts.
Randy M.
Anthony Nance
Joe Bernstein <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <e4i23v$e45$1...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
>Anthony Nance <na...@math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
>
>> In article <446B5DBC...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
>> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
>> >David Tate wrote:
>
>> >> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
>> >> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
>> >> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
>> >> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
>> >> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
>> >> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
>
>[rearranging]
>> >My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
>> >slowly returning to genre.
>
>> Like you and David, I have a gap in SF reading, roughly from
>> 1986 - 1995,
>
>Holy cow, is this a universal? I thought most sf fans other than me
>had been reading lifelong... Come to think of it, the steady stream
>of people here saying "Haven't read anything since my teens, where
>should I start?" should've convinced me otherwise, but it didn't.
Well, in my case, that gap largely occurred due to a severe
lack of time available for pleasure reading. Most of the
curtailed leisure time I had wasn't given to reading. Also,
the little time I devoted to pleasure reading was not often
spent on SF. And there's the anatomy of a gap.
> <some snipping>
>
>
>> >My main problem is I'm not that fast a
>> >reader. I rarely read more than 15 complete books a year, and maybe as
>> >many pages in separate short stories.
>
>> and again like you, I typically get through 1-2
>> novels a month. For the last year or so, I've been reading
>> short stories over lunch 2-3 times a week. This has allowed
>> me to read more single author anthologies, including Brackett,
>> Bradbury, del Rey, Dickson, Egan, Lafferty, Sheckley, and Zelazny
>> amongst others.
>
>A good friend is a slow reader. I sometimes try to imagine what that
>would be like and Just Can't.
When I do read, my pace is okay - it's that whole "making/having time
to read" part that's harder to arrange. This is probably better
illustrated by the most recent example: WJW's _Conventions of War_
took four evenings to finish, but those evenings were scattered through
the first three weeks of May.
> <snip a little>
>
>> Michael Moorcock (huuuge body of work - where to start?)
>
>It may amuse you to know that while Asimov had a longer entry in the
>EoSF, and Tolkien in the EoF, Moorcock, by being #5 EoSF and #2 EoF,
>was the undisputed champ in total space devoted to him in the two
>books. He's the poster child for "Being prolific makes for longer
>entries".
Amusing/interesting indeed - thanks.
Tony
Mike Schilling
> > G. K. Chesterton. If any people are left yet who haven't slapped
> > their heads over my woeful ignorance and prepared to rant at me, then
> > this is their cue... 203 lines.
>
> *sniff* You're bring back fond memories of Father Brown. I wonder what
> I'd think of those stories now.
Don't forget _The Man Who Was Thursday_.
Randy Money
One of these days. Probably about the same time I get myself to read
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_, _Lady Into Fox_, and _Zuleika Dobson_.
Randy m.
Joe Bernstein
<rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> Mike Schilling wrote:
> > "Randy Money" <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote in message
> > news:447757CD...@spamblock.syr.edu... [quoting me]
> >>>G. K. Chesterton. If any people are left yet who haven't slapped
> >>>their heads over my woeful ignorance and prepared to rant at me, then
> >>>this is their cue... 203 lines.
> >>*sniff* You're bring back fond memories of Father Brown. I wonder what
> >>I'd think of those stories now.
Oh, gee, I'd forgotten those. But I think I'm covered by their not
being spec-fic; I mean, I wouldn't say "Oh, sure, I'm familiar with
John Clute's fiction", for example, on the basis of having now
skimmed so very much of the encyclopaediae.
(Stops, wonders who got the family Father Brown books, last year.
Huh.)
So I'm pretty sure most of those 203 lines are devoted to
> > Don't forget _The Man Who Was Thursday_.
and suchlike. (I doubt it actually got 203 lines all by its lonesome -
most likely he also wrote ghost stories or some such, but the books
are in an obstructed shelf for the first time in a week and it seems
rude to get them out just for this.)
> One of these days. Probably about the same time I get myself to read
> _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, _Lady Into Fox_, and _Zuleika Dobson_.
I suppose I'll have to re-read <The Picture> should my history ever
reach the 1890s, but I'm not looking forward to it; even "The
Canterville Ghost" paled on a recent re-read. (As did <Salome> on
a recent re-listen, but, well, that's Strauss, not Wilde, at work.
Actually this prompts me to wonder if my decreasing interest in
20th century Western art music is to any significant extent because
I haven't listened to enough 19th century Western art music lately
to be able to keep it in context. Hmmmm.)
Joe Bernstein
Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> You take this sorta thing kinda seriously, don't ya, Joe?
Ya think?
The work-for-my-book that's been mouldering on my shelves recently is
archaeological reading so I can figure out whether the guys who insist
the Hebrew scriptures are a hoax are kooks or not. I suppose doing
this was simultaneously a way to keep putting that off, and to
remind myself why I care about the whole project.
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but
> > I'm not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read
> > anything else. Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The
> > Telltale Heart" was a school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
> Huh. No "Fall of the House of Usher" for school? That really amazes me
> because its so ubiquitous in high school and even college curriculums.
From fifth grade on, I went to funny schools.
But yeah, he's a Literary Titan, not just a Horror Guy. So the real
start of the more interesting-to-me bit of this commentary is a
bit further on...
> > H. P. Lovecraft. Beyond a token sentence or three, I definitely
> > haven't read him. 327 lines.
>
> Ah, ha! A hit! One I have read, and pretty much all of his fiction.
Yep, right here.
> > Jack Williamson.
>
> No "The Humanoids"? I'm surprised. I hope this year to finally get to
> _Darker Than You Think_, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, I know I at least *tried*, while at Stars, to complete sets of
the two Legion series and the the Humanoids one, but I'm pretty sure
I didn't succeed on all three, and don't remember which not, so at
some point it clearly faded in my mind.
<Darker Than You Think> is of course mandatory if I ever get as far
as the ?1940s, but meantime just makes me think of Fritz Leiber
books I didn't enjoy much. (And so, unexpectedly, brings us back
to that theme...)
> > Algernon Blackwood. My mental label for him is "That guy who's not
> > Ambrose Bierce, whom I also haven't read". (Though *that* is no
> > longer strictly true - I read "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" sometime
> > this past year.) 244 lines.
> I've read at least one collection worth of Blackwood short stories;
> ditto Bierce, for that matter. Wonderful writers.
See, you've even *read* them and you can't tell the difference! <--troll
I try to tell myself "Bierce is the really weird one who did the
<Devil's Dictionary> and disappeared", which worked better before I
did this and found that Blackwood was British. I mean, it's pretty
much a law of nature that the British can out-weird us any old time,
right? so what's the deal here?
> > Robert Bloch. Again, not sure, but certainly not a whole novel. 199
> > lines.
>
> I've read a ton. One of my early favorites.
>
> > Charles Grant. We seem to be developing a theme here, vis-a-vis
> > horror. 193 lines.
>
> Fun if you like quiet, sneak up on you and go boo! horror.
> > L. Ron Hubbard. I think. 192 lines.
>
> May read a couple of this things someday; "Fear," most likely
> > Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Pipe down, you. 184 lines.
>
> But, Joe, it's only *one* book! I mean, really, if you don't read
> anything else by her, just the *one* book!
>
> > Clark Ashton Smith. And no, his books' rarity is not an excuse; he's
> > another of the 'owned but not read' leaders. 181 lines.
>
> _Zothique_ was wonderful. I finally read it about this time last year. I
> need to read more.
> > Ramsey Campbell. Yeah, more horror. Yeah, I know. 131 lines.
>
> I've read two novels and a few short stories, and I definitely will
> expand those numbers as long as the bus and truck drivers keep braking
> when they see me in the street. He's an excellent prose stylist and has
> written some genuinely creepy works. I do think you need a healthy
> tolerance for horror to deal with most of it, though, Joe.
Well, see.
I have two interlocking issues at work here. One is that at core,
at heart, my view of Fantasy is "Oh, it's what Tolkien did, and
what's close enough to that to share the name". This isn't how I
*think* about it, but it's how I feel about it. Oddly enough, what
this means is that I share the view advocated in the EoF by Clute,
that what he calls "full fantasy" with wrongness, thinning, and
healing in order is How Things Should Be, though I've railed at
the way this turned into an excuse to downgrade a whole *lot* of
writers of pastorals in that book. But this is partly because I
*like* pastorals - at some level feel them anyway *closer* to
Tolkien than supernatural fictions (wrongness) or horror (thinning).
Which brins us to the other issue: I'm a readerly wimp. A good
enough writer can get me past the many things I resist reading
about (he says, having raced through Susan Palwick's <Flying in
Place> today). But if I want to read junk, I'll pick unicorns
over vampires every time. And lots of the time, I really do just
want to read junk. Or re-read. Or whatever.
> And because of a conversation I had yesterday, mention of Campbell
> reminds me I've only read one novel by Robert Holdstock. Nuts.
Tee hee. So here I finally beat you.
One thing I can be grateful to Michael Swanwick's "In the Tradition..."
for, besides being directly causative of my vapourware book, is the
introduction to Gentle, Ryman, and Holdstock it pushed me into.
All of whom had struck me as Scary, see, as so much does.
So I read as much, in particular, of the prolific Holdstock as I
could glom onto (his <Necromancer> I think it's called may for all
I know be the *only* horror novel I've read and you haven't), and
my reward was the amazing sight of his first doing <Mythago Wood>
and then actually surpassing it with <Lavondyss>. But the book or
three I tackled after that just kept seeming like diminishing
returns - he wasn't just refusing to advance the plot, in the way
that worked in <Lavondyss> but couldn't (IMO) work forever, but
seemed to just be repeating himself too. This isn't astonishing
given that so much of what was so magnificent in the first two
Ryhope Wood books was prefigured in earlier, worse, ones - the man
clearly just does not let ideas go - but he'd have had to keep
handling them better to keep my attention, and he didn't. I gather
he's moved past that by moving out of Ryhope Wood, but haven't wanted
to see for myself yet.
Joe Bernstein
John F. Eldredge
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <e4i23v$e45$1...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
>Anthony Nance <na...@math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
>
>> In article <446B5DBC...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
>> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
>> >David Tate wrote:
>
>> >> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
>> >> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
>> >> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
>> >> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
>> >> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
>> >> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
>
>[rearranging]
>> >My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
>> >slowly returning to genre.
>
>> Like you and David, I have a gap in SF reading, roughly from
>> 1986 - 1995,
>
>Holy cow, is this a universal? I thought most sf fans other than me
>had been reading lifelong... Come to think of it, the steady stream
>of people here saying "Haven't read anything since my teens, where
>should I start?" should've convinced me otherwise, but it didn't.
Well, I am 48, and have been reading for entertainment since age 8
(that was the point at which I started enjoying reading). I have been
reading science fiction since age 10 or so, with no long gaps.
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria
r.r...@thevine.net
<rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>You take this sorta thing kinda seriously, don't ya, Joe?
>
>Well, you pointed up a few more authors whose work(s) I haven't read or
>haven't read much of.
>
>Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > In article <1147887480....@y43g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
> > jpe...@qwest.net <jpe...@qwest.net> wrote:
> >
>
>[...]
>
> > Jules Verne.
>
>Right there with you on this one, Joe. Nothing in the descriptions
>really grab me, and I've seen the movies so the plots, or some
>approximation of them, are familiar enough that I don't have a strong
>urge to educate myself.
>
> > Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but
> > I'm not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read
> > anything else. Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The
> > Telltale Heart" was a school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
> >
>Huh. No "Fall of the House of Usher" for school? That really amazes me
>because its so ubiquitous in high school and even college curriculums.
>
Or "Masque of the Red Death"? Or is it Mask? I forget. That's also
a common school assignment.
> > Walter De La Mare. [...]
> >
> > E. T. A. Hoffmann. [...]
>
>Rearranged these. I need to read more by them. Some of the de la Mare I
>read was so long ago my memory of it is no longer clear. Hoffman I've
>only dipped into.
Did de la Mare write things beyond poetry? I remember using a lot of
his poems in my required poetry assignment in school. (The task:
pick a theme and find poems that illustrate it. My theme: Man's use
of the supernatural to explain his world.) He does a really good
translation of Goethe's Erl-Koenig.
>
> > Johann W. Goethe. Yes, I can ignore *eighteenth* century titans too!
> > I'm an equal opportunity ignoramus! 138 lines.
>
>Let's joing I.A. -- Ignoramuses Anonymous. If we're ignoramuses enough,
>we'll not notice that we just announced we belong to it.
>
I have actually read some of Goethe in the German. The
above-mentioned Erl-Koenig (and I was surprised to realize that the
original version I had found was not in fact the original), and the
Lorelei.
Rebecca
Joe Bernstein
David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> In the glory days of Alexandria Digital Literature,
Huh? What happened? (I occasionally looked at it Back When, out of
curiosity, but never wanted to put the time into it that would've
been needed to make it useful enough for me to want to put the
time in... But I've sorta always wanted to get back to it, someday...)
> There are far too many highly-regarded SF authors by whom I have never
> read a thing. The ones I feel most guilty about are:
I hadn't planned to reply with neener-neeners to you and Randy Money,
but having seen the two of you tag-team Andrew Wheeler, I suppose it's
only fair that someone return the favour, and he seems to be too
high-minded to do so. So here goes.
> Lloyd Alexander
Prydain was my introduction to fantasy, at least in my opinion.
My younger sister was sick sometime in the first half of the 1970s
and my elder sat reading <The Book of Three> to her. I was
entranced, pestered Sarah enough to get the title and trotted off
to the library. Then read the books and chattered about them enough
that the next year my eldest brother gave 'em to me.
> Kage Baker
On publication of <Black Projects, White Knights>, or is it the other
way around? - anyway, to be more accurate, on seeing that at Madison's
central library, I proceeded to read the entire Company thing in
publication order, just the way I like series.
Have wanted to redo that embracing the more recent novels for some
time, but Milwaukee's libraries don't have <Black Projects> and
neither do I.
> L. Frank Baum
No comment needed, sur[e]ly.
> Stephen Baxter
Keep meaning to try - many of his books are at least interesting to
me in *topic* - but it's that old thing about wanting to make a
chronological reading project out of it, and I can't locate enough
of the books.
> Peter S. Beagle
Good Lord!
> Greg Bear
Huh. And here I think of you as the guy who's read all the science
fiction I haven't.
> James Blaylock
Only one, so far, and now I can't remember which. (He's yet another
of those owned-but-not-read guys I posted about at such length
yesterday.) The one with a clock tower and a blue bird of happiness.
> James Branch Cabell
I once tried the Biography in order. Hoo boy. But did finish two
or three books before getting fed up.
I think it was series order, not publication.
> John Brunner
<The Traveler in Black>.
> Jonathan Carroll
<Outside the Dog Museum>.
> E.R. Eddison
<The Worm Ouroboros>. Yes, really. I haven't been totally remiss in
acquainting myself with past masters, I just made myself look that way.
> Charles Finney
You're missing out. <The Circus of Dr. Lao>, anyway.
> Mary Gentle
If I had a clearer sense of why you like the things you like, I could
probably find the exact right book of hers for you, but maybe not.
Your interest in philosophy suggests the White Crow stuff, though
<Ash> may have superseded that. Your higher-than-mine opinion
of Romanticism - greater confidence in <The Curse of Chalion>,
greater tolerance for Liaden - suggests you should probably avoid
<Ancient Light>, which makes suggesting <Golden Witchbreed>
problematic. But I don't think this adds up to enough of a picture
of your reading tastes.
> William Gibson
Eh, not my favourite, but still I'm amazed.
> M. John Harrison
I tend to get far-future cities of decadence confused, except for
Tanith Lee's Fours, but I do remember having read Bryant's <Cinnabar>,
not having read Moorcock's End of Time in any version, and probably
having encountered Vermilion Sands in an anthology sometime (that's
the unreliable memory here). And I'm quite sure I've read at least
a book's worth of Viriconium. Not that this means I could tell it
apart from Cinnabar, or for that matter Vermilion Sands.
> Robert E. Howard
Finally we overlap.
> Guy Gavriel Kay (unless you count _The Silmarillion_)
Let me get this straight, you love Liaden and you *haven't read Kay*?
For Heaven's sake, whyever *not*?
I would be utterly astonished if you did not greatly enjoy *any*
of <A Song for Arbonne>, <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, or the Sarantine
Mosaic. You are almost certain to like <Tigana>, as best I remember
it, and I'd expect you to have a rather higher opinion of the
Fionavar books than I do, too.
Unless you're simply saving those books for when you're a crotchety
old man and can't find anything you like - well, fair enough, I was
pretty disturbed not long ago to discover that I'd never again read
a new Jane Austen novel - you should simply take care of this bizarre
oversight. I may not know enough about your reading tastes to pick
a Mary Gentle book to suit, but I do know *this* much.
> Nancy Kress
At the other end of the Romantic spectrum, stories like "The Price
of Oranges", "Beggars in Spain", or <The Prince of Morning Bells>
really should be your cup of tea - the stories that used to make
me say there were two Nancy Kresses, the one who used to be an
advertising copywriter (this one), and the one who listened to
Stockhausen, Varese, or early Penderecki for fun (author of <The
White Pipes>, <An Alien Light>, <Brain Rose>, and at least the
second of the Beggars *books*).
Nancy Kress is clearly the sort of writer that guy coined the phrase
"tough-minded" for, but there are those among her stories aimed at
readers who aren't that sort of reader.
> Tanith Lee
Lee normally gives me the impression of being too softly decadent
for my tastes (years ago I claimed that the ex-couple Richard Grant
and Elizabeth Hand had sold me on *their* decadence, but in fact
I've yet to read another novel by either, and anyway neither of
*them* is soft about it!). But there are isolated exceptions.
I remembered <The Silver Metal Lover> from my teens with fondness,
and recently re-read it along with the belated sequel, which was,
well, different. Then there's the pair I raved about elsethread
recently, <Don't Bite the Sun> and <Drinking Sapphire Wine>. And
<Kill the Dead>, though it's been a while for that one.
And, see, the common thread these all have, as I see it, is again
Romanticism Par Excellence. The Individual and True Love versus
Society and Conformity. The Difference One Individual Can Make.
Our Emotions Are What Make Us Real.
So OK. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the commonalty that makes you
praise <The Curse of Chalion> so highly and like the Liaden books,
maybe it's something quite other from Romanticism. But if not,
why have you skipped so *many* of the field's other working Romantics?
(Arguably Baker and Nice Kress; certainly Beagle, Kay, and now Lee; OK,
I don't see any more coming up, though what little I know of Simmons
suggests this may simply be lack of information on my part.)
> China Miéville
OK, another overlap.
> Hope Mirrlees (but I have it out of the library as we speak)
So OK, I won't shame you on this, but I trust you enjoyed it.
> Michael Moorcock
Some may wonder why I'm not embracing him under this Romantic label.
All I can say is that from what I've read - which was once copious -
his Romanticism never seemed to me to carry conviction. So, well,
whatever.
> Mervyn Peake
I've only tried. (And, OK, watched the TV version.)
> Mike Resnick
> Will Shetterly
In both cases I'm certain I've read *something*, but don't remember it
and don't care enough to go look.
> Dan Simmons (but I just bought a copy of _Hyperion_)
You should like it.
> E.E. Smith
Huh.
> Bruce Sterling
High on my owned-but-not-read list because I once liked <Islands
in the Net> a lot.
> John Varley
The early stories should really be your cup of tea - if "The Phantom
of Kansas" isn't somewhere in Liaden's direct ancestry I sure don't
know why not. I'm not sure about any of the novels.
> James White (expletive deleted library system doesn't have them)
Which is why I've gotten no further than the first three of the
medical-series books.
> John Wyndham
His <Re-Birth> was one of the core Things I Liked in that Boucher
anthology I read when young, but that didn't last into adulthood.
> One begins to wonder what I *have* read...
Well, I've been waiting for you to reply to my hundreds-of-lines
post of yesterday. You strike me as the person most likely to
want the spreadsheet I mentioned there, or at least the rest of
the list I worked from (the 76 authors I didn't comment on there,
most of whom aren't above). I suspect you'd find that as
reassuring as, ultimately, I did; so let me know.
Joe Bernstein
Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> There are a lot of writers (sf/f/h) I think I'd like if I tackled them,
> but so far haven't done so. Among them:
OK, so this is part two of replying in kind to yours and David Tate's
comments on Andrew Wheeler's list.
By way of preface, I have even less of a picture of your reading
tastes than I do of David Tate's, except that I know you like things
dark, and know you think about them much more deeply than I usually do.
Which means I'll probably be more selective about recommending stuff
than I was to him.
It occurs to me, though, that one reason your list and his surprised me
so is that you both listed authors who actually *came to mind*. I
tend not to *have* "authors I haven't read yet" who come to mind; I
mean, his list mentioned Stephen Baxter, and sure enough, some
months ago I was trying and failing to assemble a reading project
around him; but I wouldn't have remembered that on my own. The
other day I found <The Necessary Beggar> by Susan Palwick at the
library, realised it was the "characters from Elsewhere land in a
refugee camp" novel I've mentioned a couple of times lately [1],
and promptly in the past two days read both <Flying in Place> and
this newer book. Basically, unless I'm actively trying to assemble
someone's books so I can read them - as, say, with Elizabeth Boyer
and Marion Zimmer Bradley right now - they're likely just to
collapse back into the infinite swamp of That Great Majority of
All Authors Whom I've Never Read.
So, in other words, I more or less *had* to build my list from a
quasi-objective, or at least outside, source. Your lists not being
so built presumably focus more closely on authors you at least
suspect you'd like. So my surprise at both lists may be misplaced.
> Lloyd Alexander
Covered in reply to David Tate, but I'm not sure I can or should convince
you to try him.
> Greg Bear
I'd be rather surprised if you didn't like the fantasy pair <The
Infinity Concerto> and <The Serpent Mage>, nowadays sold in omnibus
as <Songs of Earth and Power>.
And yes, of course you should have read <Blood Music>.
> Leigh Brackett
> Bradley Denton
I know I've read at least *something* by Brackett, but otherwise no
comment.
> E.R. Eddison
I have no brief for urging him on you.
> Jeffery Ford
On one of my longer to-get-to lists.
> John M. Ford (just me, or does there seem to be a proliferation of
> Fords/Fordes/Ffordes these days?)
"Smart perceptive reader who likes things dark" strikes me as pretty
much the ideal John M. Ford reader, so I'm a bit confused.
> Alan Garner
You'd like him a lot better than I do, I'm fairly sure. I can't
imagine your not getting a lot out of <The Owl Service>, and I
strongly suspect you'd see merits in <Elidor> and <Red Shift>
that I don't.
> Mary Gentle
Again, I'm surprised. It's out of series order, but that probably
doesn't matter for the series in question; given what you've said about
being a slow reader, and given what little grasp I do have of your tastes,
I'd suggest you start with <The Architecture of Desire>.
> M. John Harrison
From what I remember of Viriconium, it seems like your kind of place,
but I could be wrong.
> Guy Gavriel Kay
Huh. Maybe the time you guys have to make me feel ill-read and poke
fun at Andrew Wheeler is the time you don't spend reading, and re-reading,
and *re*-re-reading, Kay. Hmmm.
> Maureen McHugh (sp?)
> China Miéville (hope to correct this sometime this year)
No comment. (I think I've read stories by McHugh, and yes, that's
the spelling.)
> Hope Mirrlees
Ignoramuses Anonymous here we come... Seems a moderately close fit
to my take on you.
> Holly Phillips
> William Tenn
> Jeff Thomas
> Jeff Vandermeer
No comment. (Have read at least one Tenn story, probably more;
have heard of Vandermeer; no idea about the other two.)
> Robert Charles Wilson (hope to correct this sometime this year)
My *guess* is that you'd like him a lot. Aren't you the one who
told me the ending of <The Light Ages> was just perfect? Seems
to me Wilson's approach to plotting should suit you to a T; but
I'm not sure because except for <Spin>, everything I've read.
by him was long long ago, and <Spin> strikes me as having an
uncharacteristically happy and straightforward ending though
a characteristically unhappy and twisty path to it.
> T. M. Wright
Well, I actually bought a book of his tonight...
> I'm currently taking one author off this list, Sean Stewart; just
> started _Ressurection Man_.
<Nobody's Son> is Stewart's outlying Conventional Fantasy book.
(He thinks <Clouds End> is too, but, well, I differ. That remains
the one book of his I haven't finished.) It is, of course, my
favourite of his. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if <Resurrection
Man>, with or without the others set in its world (but largely
unlinked), <The Night Watch> and <Galveston> at least, would be
your favourite. I suppose <Passion Play> might have an outside
chance, but I suspect those three should really be your focus.
> Then there's the list of writers of whose work I've read very little,
> and think I'd like to get back to them:
> A. A. Attanasio
Isn't he the <Riverrun> guy? If so, then better you than me.
> William Spenser Browning (Browning Spenser?)
Browning Spencer.
> Glen Hirshberg
[*]
> Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Really? My take on a book or two of hers was that there was too much
saccharine there for my tastes. I'm surprised.
> Kathe Koja
'cause, see, this seems much more your style.
> Tim Lebon
[*]
And OK, enough of that.
Joe Bernstein
[1] And in case I don't get around to it. One of the contexts in
which I mentioned that book was that I wanted to see a fantasy world
person come *here* and like it so much they wanted to stay, a
reversal of the common trope, elsewhere than in the recent books
by Charlie Stross. So I wondered if <The Necessary Beggar>, the
one where fantasy world people come here and land in a refugee
camp, would turn out that way. Well, nope. I'm not sure how my
opinions will settle down over the longer term, so don't want to
review the book in full right now, but will say that I'm fairly
sure a certain implausibility/idealisation of the homeworld as
remembered by the POV characters is a genuine flaw in it. Not an
extreme flaw - they're exiles, not emigres of the more usual kind,
and can be expected to make unfavourable comparisons between the
land of exile and the land of golden memory. But they're not
idiots, and at some point they *should* notice *something* good
about this world. Seems to me, anyway. And further seems to me
one reason they don't is that their world is consistently depicted
as, well, a lot more *consistent*, a lot more a place where Bad
Things Don't Happen (close reading finds counter-examples, but
that isn't a focus, and does not factor in a spoiler at the book's
climax that justifies much of what I'm saying...), than I can believe
a human world as being.
Mind, I still Think A Lot of the book, am seriously considering
buying it new in hardcover if I can; am just moderately disappointed
that it didn't work out the way I'd speculated it might, and that
this is partly because the deck is stacked against that.
r.r...@thevine.net
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <1147702277.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
>David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>
>> In the glory days of Alexandria Digital Literature,
>
>Huh? What happened? (I occasionally looked at it Back When, out of
>curiosity, but never wanted to put the time into it that would've
>been needed to make it useful enough for me to want to put the
>time in... But I've sorta always wanted to get back to it, someday...)
>
>> There are far too many highly-regarded SF authors by whom I have never
>> read a thing. The ones I feel most guilty about are:
>
>I hadn't planned to reply with neener-neeners to you and Randy Money,
>but having seen the two of you tag-team Andrew Wheeler, I suppose it's
>only fair that someone return the favour, and he seems to be too
>high-minded to do so. So here goes.
>
>
>> Guy Gavriel Kay (unless you count _The Silmarillion_)
>
>Let me get this straight, you love Liaden and you *haven't read Kay*?
>For Heaven's sake, whyever *not*?
>
>I would be utterly astonished if you did not greatly enjoy *any*
>of <A Song for Arbonne>, <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, or the Sarantine
>Mosaic. You are almost certain to like <Tigana>, as best I remember
>it, and I'd expect you to have a rather higher opinion of the
>Fionavar books than I do, too.
>
YMMV. I love the Liaden books, and hated Tigana so much that I have
put Kay on my "never buy another book from this author again" list.
It's the entire moral viewpoint expressed in Tigana that gets me, more
than any individual items. And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
Rebecca
Mike Schilling
>> A. A. Attanasio
>
> Isn't he the <Riverrun> guy?
That was James Joyce.
Seriously, has Attanasio written something related to Finnegans Wake?
Peter Huebner
>
> > John Brunner
>
> <The Traveler in Black>.
Is this different from "The Compleat Traveler in Black"? I have only read that
latter one and found it to be overrated. Not Good Brunner, i.m.o.
> > Mary Gentle
>
> If I had a clearer sense of why you like the things you like, I could
> probably find the exact right book of hers for you, but maybe not.
> Your interest in philosophy suggests the White Crow stuff, though
> <Ash> may have superseded that. Your higher-than-mine opinion
> of Romanticism - greater confidence in <The Curse of Chalion>,
> greater tolerance for Liaden - suggests you should probably avoid
> <Ancient Light>, which makes suggesting <Golden Witchbreed>
> problematic. But I don't think this adds up to enough of a picture
> of your reading tastes.
I loved Golden Witchbreed, yet could never get into Ancient Light. Had it on
the shelf for 15 years or more ... stalled 1/4 into the book every time.
Golden Witchbreed can stand on its own feet, easily :-)
I also love "Scholars and Soldiers" and "Rats and Gargoyles" by Gentle, above
several others. Interesting pastel shades of philosophy there.
-P.
--
=========================================
firstname dot lastname at gmail fullstop com
David Goldfarb
Peter Huebner <no....@this.address> wrote:
>In article <e5bd1k$o4s$1...@reader1.panix.com>, j...@sfbooks.com says...
>>
>> > John Brunner
>>
>> <The Traveler in Black>.
>
>Is this different from "The Compleat Traveler in Black"? I have only read that
>latter one and found it to be overrated. Not Good Brunner, i.m.o.
Compared to _The Traveler in Black_, _The Compleat etc._ has one more
later-written story ("The Things That Are Gods"), and the text is
changed quite a bit at the sentence and paragraph level. The plots
of the stories are the same, but a lot of the writing is somewhat
different. I would be surprised to find, however, that anyone had
a significantly different opinion of one than the other.
--
David Goldfarb |"Everyone generalizes from insufficient data.
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | I know I do."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | -- Steven Brust
David Goldfarb
S.P. Somtow wrote a trilogy whose first volume was called _Riverrun_.
Had more to do with _King Lear_ than with James Joyce, though.
--
David Goldfarb |"My agent's negotiating for a half-hour cooking
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu |program, you know..."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | "Just cooking?"
|"Cooking and anti-personnel weaponry. Tossing
|salads, tossing bodies -- it's all the same to me."
David Tate
> In article <1147702277.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>
> > In the glory days of Alexandria Digital Literature,
>
> Huh? What happened? (I occasionally looked at it Back When, out of
> curiosity, but never wanted to put the time into it that would've
> been needed to make it useful enough for me to want to put the
> time in... But I've sorta always wanted to get back to it, someday...)
It's still there, and the management mostly seem to try to act as if
nothing has changed, but it often doesn't work, emails go unanswered
for months on end, etc. I suspect it is an orphan unfunded property of
whoever acquired whatever after the bankruptcy.
> > There are far too many highly-regarded SF authors by whom I have never
> > read a thing. The ones I feel most guilty about are:
>
> I hadn't planned to reply with neener-neeners to you and Randy Money,
> but having seen the two of you tag-team Andrew Wheeler, I suppose it's
> only fair that someone return the favour, and he seems to be too
> high-minded to do so. So here goes.
Aww, we weren't that hard on him. And besides, if this is your idea of
"piling on", you're more than welcome -- tons of great info here. I've
saved it away to help direct future reading.
> > Peter S. Beagle
>
> Good Lord!
_The Last Unicorn_ is sitting on a shelf about 4 feet above my head. I
have no plausible excuse, and I will get to it Real Soon Now.
> > E.R. Eddison
>
> <The Worm Ouroboros>. Yes, really. I haven't been totally remiss in
> acquainting myself with past masters, I just made myself look that way.
>
> > Charles Finney
>
> You're missing out. <The Circus of Dr. Lao>, anyway.
It's on the same shelf as _The Last Unicorn_.
> > Mary Gentle
>
> If I had a clearer sense of why you like the things you like, I could
> probably find the exact right book of hers for you, but maybe not.
> Your interest in philosophy suggests the White Crow stuff, though
> <Ash> may have superseded that. Your higher-than-mine opinion
> of Romanticism - greater confidence in <The Curse of Chalion>,
> greater tolerance for Liaden - suggests you should probably avoid
> <Ancient Light>, which makes suggesting <Golden Witchbreed>
> problematic. But I don't think this adds up to enough of a picture
> of your reading tastes.
Interesting -- have you decided that my confidence in _The Curse of
Chalion_ means that I won't like works that work to deliberately
subvert its kind of Romance? I have a tolerance for a certain amount
of cynical fiction, but not all sorts, so you may be right.
> > Robert E. Howard
>
> Finally we overlap.
>
> > Guy Gavriel Kay (unless you count _The Silmarillion_)
>
> Let me get this straight, you love Liaden and you *haven't read Kay*?
> For Heaven's sake, whyever *not*?
Sloth. Mixed reviews from the people whose opinions I normally trust.
More sloth.
Half of my usual reliable sources think I MUST READ TIGANE!!!!, and the
other half say no no no no you won't like it but read _The Lions of
Al-Rassan_. That has so far managed to get me to miss them all, which
I recognize is probably A Bad Thing. Thus they make my guilt list.
Thanks for the book-by-book analysis, by the way -- that might well
help me pick one to start with.
> > Nancy Kress
>
> At the other end of the Romantic spectrum, stories like "The Price
> of Oranges", "Beggars in Spain", or <The Prince of Morning Bells>
> really should be your cup of tea - the stories that used to make
> me say there were two Nancy Kresses, the one who used to be an
> advertising copywriter (this one), and the one who listened to
> Stockhausen, Varese, or early Penderecki for fun (author of <The
> White Pipes>, <An Alien Light>, <Brain Rose>, and at least the
> second of the Beggars *books*).
Again, thanks for the nuanced pointers.
> > Tanith Lee
[...]
> And, see, the common thread these all have, as I see it, is again
> Romanticism Par Excellence. The Individual and True Love versus
> Society and Conformity. The Difference One Individual Can Make.
> Our Emotions Are What Make Us Real.
Hmm. No, I don't think that's the flavor of Romanticism I'm buying
these days. I'm not sure I can characterize what it is that I *am*
buying, though, that makes me so fond of certain works. I've been
trying, but it's slippery. It's partly tied up in this "personal
honor" thing, and partly requires a certain pragmatic version of starry
eyes.
> So OK. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the commonalty that makes you
> praise <The Curse of Chalion> so highly and like the Liaden books,
> maybe it's something quite other from Romanticism. But if not,
> why have you skipped so *many* of the field's other working Romantics?
"Skipped" is the wrong verb here. "Missed", "failed to find",
"overlooked", "gone in woeful ignorance of", "formed an irrational
prejudice against", ... those are all more likely, case by case.
> > One begins to wonder what I *have* read...
>
> Well, I've been waiting for you to reply to my hundreds-of-lines
> post of yesterday. You strike me as the person most likely to
> want the spreadsheet I mentioned there, or at least the rest of
> the list I worked from (the 76 authors I didn't comment on there,
> most of whom aren't above). I suspect you'd find that as
> reassuring as, ultimately, I did; so let me know.
Will do -- I just got back into The Real World from 5 (wonderful) days
officiating at Odyssey of the Mind World Finals. (ObPlug:
http://www.odysseyofthemind.com). Lots of catching up to do...
David Tate
David Tate
Actually, my favorite Chesterton novel(et) is still _Manalive_, which
is only honorary SF, if at all. For Joe, I would recommend it as a
great short novel to try, to see if he likes Chesterton when
Chesterton's doing what he does best, turned up to 11. _The Man Who
Was Thursday_ is second-best (though still marvelous), IMHO -- and very
different in tone. (I have not read _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
yet, and so can't comment on it.)
Of course, they're both short enough that you could knock off the pair
of them in an evening.
Of the Father Brown stories, the best few early stories are priceless,
but most of the rest are completely forgettable. I would always
recommend "The Blue Cross" (of course), "The Queer Feet" (my favorite),
"The Flying Stars", and "The Invisible Man". After that... not so
much, unless you love the character so much that you want to read
everything he's in, a la Sherlock Holmes.
Of the other short works, some of the "Club of Queer Trades" stories
are good fun, as are some of the "Pardoxes of Mr. Pond" and the "Four
Faultless Felons". All of these works are available as HTML or .txt at
http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/.
David Tate
David Tate
dog ^H^H^H software, and lost to the ether. If this seems abrupt or
terse, that's probably why.
Joe Bernstein wrote:
> David Tate and Randy Money's replies convinced me to make a list.
My work is done here, then. :-)
> But one reason I didn't want to make a list, is that I can't summon up names
> of authors I've never read so easily as they apparently did. So, how?
Well, in my case, I cheated -- top 100 lists, Eric Walker's website
(plug plug), etc to jog my memory. You hit on the same solution, with
different sources, in much more depth. (Though if you haven't seen
Eric's list, and discussions of 4- and 5-star authors at his website
http://greatsfandf.com/, I highly recommend them as an iconoclastic but
extremely coherent literary take on masters of SF.)
> I may post a lot more
> on the basis of this spreadsheet later, or dump it onto the Web, once
> I've done some error-checking. (It would probably hurry that day if
> people post or e-mail telling me they're interested. Or delay it if
> not...)
I'm interested. Definitely.
> Jules Verne. This is arguable. As a child I read at least two
> translations of his novels, but as I understand it, most translations of
> him are so bad that they don't in any meaningful way represent his
> actual writing, and anyway these were kiddie versions.
I've at least read an adult version of _Journey to the Center of the
Earth_, but also in translation. I may attempt a French version of
20,000 Leagues, because reading stories I already know in French is one
way I try to keep my minimal French skills functional.
> Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but I'm
> not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read anything else.
> Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The Telltale Heart" was a
> school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
I wrote a lot about this in version one, but I'll settle for saying
here that I like a little bit of Poe a lot, and a lot of Poe a little.
Very little counts as SF to me, though -- "The Man Who Was Used Up" is
the only clear-cut example I can think of, and it's not top shelf work.
(John Steinbeck's pastiche of Poe, "The Affair at 7 Rue de M--", is
both SF and hilarious.)
> Jack Williamson. OK, OK, I *do* remember the <Undersea> books he and
> Frederik Pohl wrote, so he definitely doesn't count. But I *wish* I
> didn't remember them, so can he be an honorary member? 284 lines.
The short version of "With Folded Hands" in the SF Hall of Fame
collection is a classic, with good reason. I find the antique stuff
hard to take.
> Brian M. Stableford. Though I occasionally mean to, given that his more
> recent books actually look kinda interesting, if I can ever find a whole
> series at once... 259 lines.
I didn't even know enough about him to put him on my list, since I
didn't know whether or not to feel guilty. I'll take this as a 'yes'
vote.
> G. K. Chesterton. If any people are left yet who haven't slapped their
> heads over my woeful ignorance and prepared to rant at me, then this is
> their cue... 203 lines.
I went on an on (thought not ranting, I hope), in version one. Here's
the summary:
My favorite long(er) work by Chesterton is _Manalive_, and I would
highly recommend it as a place to start. It is not SF, but it has the
feel of all his best works, and is very well realized. It is not as
dark as _The Man Who Was Thursday_, nor so light as most other
Chesterton.
Chesterton's most notable trait as an author is that he is the foremost
master of paradox (the rhetorical device) in the history of English.
His favorite tactic is to claim that up is down, then show you exactly
why up really is down, and that furthermore it is a base slander
against down to have ever thought otherwise. _The Man Who Was
Thursday_ has a lot of that, but _Manalive_ has even more.
I recommended a (small) subset of the Father Brown stories in v1, but I
see that you have read them after all. You might check out some of the
stories in the "club of queer trades" or "paradoxes of Mr. Pond" or
"four faultless felons" collections, too.
Public domain e-copies: http://www.dur.ac.uk/martin.ward/gkc/books/
If you are interested in Chesterton's religious thought, his nonfiction
work "Orthodoxy" is an astonishingly entertaining bit of writing that I
think reveals a great deal about how his mind worked.
> Robert Bloch. Again, not sure, but certainly not a whole novel. 199 lines.
"That Hellbound Train" seems the most likely candidate. That's the one
I've read.
> Clark Ashton Smith. And no, his books' rarity is not an excuse; he's
> another of the 'owned but not read' leaders. 181 lines.
An oversight on my list. When I find a copy of Zothique, I will
certainly read it.
> Algis Budrys. Surely he's somewhere in an anthology I've read?
If you haven't read _Rogue Moon_ or "Rogue Moon", the most likely hit
is "Nobody Bothers Gus", a widely-anthologized story published under
the name "Paul Janvier".
> [3] If anyone wants the full lists, or whatever, well, e-mail or post, y'know?
Yes, please. Pretty please, even.
David Tate
Rich Horton
>_The Last Unicorn_ is sitting on a shelf about 4 feet above my head. I
>have no plausible excuse, and I will get to it Real Soon Now.
Do so!
I had it one my list of Guilty Non-Reads for decades, and I finally
read it a few months ago. It is totally wonderful!
Rich Horton
>Actually, my favorite Chesterton novel(et) is still _Manalive_, which
>is only honorary SF, if at all. For Joe, I would recommend it as a
>great short novel to try, to see if he likes Chesterton when
>Chesterton's doing what he does best, turned up to 11. _The Man Who
>Was Thursday_ is second-best (though still marvelous), IMHO -- and very
>different in tone. (I have not read _The Napoleon of Notting Hill_
>yet, and so can't comment on it.)
I haven't read Manalive.
_The Man Who Was Thursday_ is remarkable, one of the strangest books I
have ever read.
_The Napoleon of Notting Hill_ is also strange, and unambiguously SF.
It's -- interesting, very much so -- but I have issues with it.
Certainly worth reading, but not to my mind as good as _The Man Who
Was Thursday_.
David Tate
> On 29 May 2006 14:14:53 -0700, "David Tate" <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>
> >_The Last Unicorn_ is sitting on a shelf about 4 feet above my head. I
> >have no plausible excuse, and I will get to it Real Soon Now.
>
> Do so!
So, Rich, read _Watership Down_ yet?
:-)
> I had it one my list of Guilty Non-Reads for decades, and I finally
> read it a few months ago. It is totally wonderful!
Like you with WD, I find that I am waiting until "the right mood" hits,
so that I can give a fair chance to a book that seems inevitably
over-hyped to me. But I certainly do plan to read it, soon.
David Tate
Howard Brazee
>Like you with WD, I find that I am waiting until "the right mood" hits,
>so that I can give a fair chance to a book that seems inevitably
>over-hyped to me. But I certainly do plan to read it, soon.
At least you have some idea about what kind of mood you want to be in.
That's useful.
Rich Horton
>Rich Horton wrote:
>> On 29 May 2006 14:14:53 -0700, "David Tate" <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>>
>> >_The Last Unicorn_ is sitting on a shelf about 4 feet above my head. I
>> >have no plausible excuse, and I will get to it Real Soon Now.
>>
>> Do so!
>
>So, Rich, read _Watership Down_ yet?
>
>:-)
>
Got me there!
A teacher recommended WD to my daughter. She hasn't read it yet
either!
Westprog
"Rich Horton" <rrho...@prodigy.net> wrote in message
news:o06n72pkucebnoioo...@4ax.com...
Chesterton's collections of essays and journalism are very readable still,
if that's the kind of thing you like. His essay on British Tennis is as
relevant today as it was seventy years ago.
J/
Randy Money
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 15:32:29 -0400, Randy Money
> <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
[...]
>
>>>Walter De La Mare. [...]
>>>
>>>E. T. A. Hoffmann. [...]
>>
>>Rearranged these. I need to read more by them. Some of the de la Mare I
>>read was so long ago my memory of it is no longer clear. Hoffman I've
>>only dipped into.
>
>
> Did de la Mare write things beyond poetry? I remember using a lot of
> his poems in my required poetry assignment in school. (The task:
> pick a theme and find poems that illustrate it. My theme: Man's use
> of the supernatural to explain his world.) He does a really good
> translation of Goethe's Erl-Koenig.
de la Mare wrote several collections of short stories, which have been
pulled together in a couple of volumes by his son. I have the first one
-- a right sizable volume it is, too -- but haven't gotten around to
purchasing the second.
Besides his stories I can no longer recall in detail are two that I do
recall with some detail, and find exceptional: "Seaton's Aunt" and "Mr.
Kempe." The latter is something of a low-key adventure story, the ending
of which offers what I think of as a Hemingway-esque nuance, delivered
with (Henry) Jamesian oblique delicacy, yet more effective for me than
when James delivers such (with the possible exception of "Turn of the
Screw"). I found it startling and it resonated for me in interesting ways.
The former is simply one of the most disturbing stories I've ever read.
This is possibly because I first read it in my teens, when I was more
easily disturbed, but I think it's mostly because it's one of the most
disturbing stories I've ever read. Yet nothing really happens, nothing
definitely awful or bad or gory or terrifying, yet Seaton's Aunt remains
one of those characters I associate with BAD things because de la Mare's
restraint makes the possiblities more appalling than anything stated.
Anyone who has read Robert Aickman's ghost stories (or, as he called
them, "strange stories") would most probably be intrigued by de la Mare.
I believe Aickman was an admirer.
>>>Johann W. Goethe. Yes, I can ignore *eighteenth* century titans too!
>>> I'm an equal opportunity ignoramus! 138 lines.
>>
>>Let's joing I.A. -- Ignoramuses Anonymous. If we're ignoramuses enough,
>>we'll not notice that we just announced we belong to it.
>>
>
> I have actually read some of Goethe in the German. The
> above-mentioned Erl-Koenig (and I was surprised to realize that the
> original version I had found was not in fact the original), and the
> Lorelei.
>
> Rebecca
One of these days. I've had a collection of his work for years but
haven't gotten to it, just as I have collections of Hoffman's work and
have barely dented them.
Randy M.
Randy Money
I think this applies to me with Beagle in general. I think I want to
read a batch of his stuff at one time, and I just haven't put aside the
time to do so.
I did read _A Fine and Private Place_ years ago and I would probably
start with either a reread of that or the collection of his short
stories I keep telling myself I'll read real soon now.
Randy M.
Randy Money
> In article <4468EB85...@spamblock.syr.edu>, Randy Money
> <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
>
>> There are a lot of writers (sf/f/h) I think I'd like if I tackled
>> them, but so far haven't done so. Among them:
>
> OK, so this is part two of replying in kind to yours and David Tate's
> comments on Andrew Wheeler's list.
>
> By way of preface, I have even less of a picture of your reading
> tastes than I do of David Tate's, except that I know you like things
> dark, and know you think about them much more deeply than I usually
> do. Which means I'll probably be more selective about recommending
> stuff than I was to him.
Fair 'nuff.
> It occurs to me, though, that one reason your list and his surprised
> me so is that you both listed authors who actually *came to mind*.
I have piles of books which, when stressed or when just puttering about
the house, I tend to rearrange in piles of, "what I WILL get to next,
damn it!" This rarely works out since my attention span is
hummingbird-like and there are sooooo many nice blossoms -- er -- books.
One of my frequent re-pilings consists of books I want to get to by
writers I haven't gotten to yet. This, plus cribbing from some other
responders, and presto! instant list of writers I haven't attempted
to read.
[...]
>> Lloyd Alexander
>
> Covered in reply to David Tate, but I'm not sure I can or should
> convince you to try him.
He's probably the writer on the list I'm least in a hurry to read. Just
the cover blurbs I've seen make him sound interesting.
>> Greg Bear
>
> I'd be rather surprised if you didn't like the fantasy pair <The
> Infinity Concerto> and <The Serpent Mage>, nowadays sold in omnibus
> as <Songs of Earth and Power>.
Okay. Note to self, quit passing by this one.
> And yes, of course you should have read <Blood Music>.
That last has been sitting on my shelf for a decade, at least, along
with _The Wind from a Burning Woman_ and _Tangents_.
>> Leigh Brackett
>
> I know I've read at least *something* by Brackett, but otherwise no
> comment.
It occurs to me I did read a collaboration between her and Ray Bradbury,
a title something like "Lorelei of the Red Mist," and liked it. Can't
remember a bit about it, though.
>
>> E.R. Eddison
>
> I have no brief for urging him on you.
It's a scholarly inclination, not likely to be followed up on real soon.
>
>> Jeffery Ford
>
> On one of my longer to-get-to lists.
>
>
>> John M. Ford (just me, or does there seem to be a proliferation of
>> Fords/Fordes/Ffordes these days?)
>
> "Smart perceptive reader who likes things dark" strikes me as pretty
> much the ideal John M. Ford reader, so I'm a bit confused.
>
These two are high on the "I shoulda read 'em last year" pile. And thank
you for the compliment. I've had a copy of _The Dragon Waiting_ since it
first appeared in pb, but the smallish, cramped type, the gaudy cover
and the length of it have put me off. I'm more likely to start with his
story collection or _The Last Hot Time_ (approx. title).
[...]
>> Mary Gentle
>
> Again, I'm surprised. It's out of series order, but that probably
> doesn't matter for the series in question; given what you've said
> about being a slow reader, and given what little grasp I do have of
> your tastes, I'd suggest you start with <The Architecture of Desire>.
>
>> M. John Harrison
>
> From what I remember of Viriconium, it seems like your kind of place,
> but I could be wrong.
I understand your compulsion to read in chronological and/or series
order, and occasionally fall prey to it myself. Add another compulsion
to it: the more directly a current work seems to derive from earlier
literary works, the more strongly I want to read the literary
precursor(s) first. In this case there seems to be a stream of Brit
fantasy that derives largely from Mervyn Peake. I only got to _Titus
Groan_ about three years ago, and I think I'd like to read _Gormanghast_
before tackling Moorcock, Gentle, Harrison, Mieville and a few others. I
haven't done so because Peake, wonderful, complex and breath-taking as
TG was, is also the readerly equivalent of heavy lifting.
On the other hand, part of me is trying to talk the rest of me out of
this and might well win out.
>> Guy Gavriel Kay
>
> Huh. Maybe the time you guys have to make me feel ill-read and poke
> fun at Andrew Wheeler is the time you don't spend reading, and
> re-reading, and *re*-re-reading, Kay. Hmmm.
That's it!
I have _Tigana_ and a couple of others around, but the size of these
have put me off a bit.
[...]
>> Hope Mirrlees
>
> Ignoramuses Anonymous here we come... Seems a moderately close fit
> to my take on you.
_Lud-in-the-Mist_ sounds wonderful. And, really, I don't always go for dark.
>> Robert Charles Wilson (hope to correct this sometime this year)
>
> My *guess* is that you'd like him a lot. Aren't you the one who told
> me the ending of <The Light Ages> was just perfect?
Nope. He's another of the writers I really should get to, even if his
name is currently escaping me, and that book is in one of the piles ...
> Seems to me
> Wilson's approach to plotting should suit you to a T; but I'm not
> sure because except for <Spin>, everything I've read. by him was long
> long ago, and <Spin> strikes me as having an uncharacteristically
> happy and straightforward ending though a characteristically unhappy
> and twisty path to it.
I may start with _Spin_ just 'cause, though _Darwinia_ sounds like even
more my cuppa.
>> T. M. Wright
>
> Well, I actually bought a book of his tonight...
He has a reputation of writing stories that sneak up on you, "quiet"
horror, not gory, bloody, slasher-movie wannabes. That's one of the
kinds of thing I like.
>> I'm currently taking one author off this list, Sean Stewart; just
>> started _Ressurection Man_.
>
> <Nobody's Son> is Stewart's outlying Conventional Fantasy book. (He
> thinks <Clouds End> is too, but, well, I differ. That remains the
> one book of his I haven't finished.) It is, of course, my favourite
> of his. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if <Resurrection Man>, with or
> without the others set in its world (but largely unlinked), <The
> Night Watch> and <Galveston> at least, would be your favourite. I
> suppose <Passion Play> might have an outside chance, but I suspect
> those three should really be your focus.
I thnk you're right on this, though I do hope to track down _Nobody's
Son_ and _Cloud's End_, eventually. I'll take the liberty of posting
some thoughts on _RM_ here. I have posted it elsewhere than rasfw:
Finished Sean Stewart's _Resurrection Man_. This is fantasy, albeit a
dark fantasy, that takes place in a 1990s where magic began to leak back
into the world shortly after WWII. Dante is an angel -- angels in this
book aren't exactly what we think of as angels, though some of the
symbolism carries over -- and he has to learn to cope with the powers
that go with it.
This is a strong work, well-written, dark, intense and emotional, a
story of a family contending with its past and the impact of the return
of magic on their personal lives. I found the gradual unveiling of the
magic and some of how it works involving, and the story of Dante’s
family compelling because their caring as well as their dysfunction
comes across as real, in particular Dante's relationships with his
brother and sister. His self-involvment and his relationship with a
young woman who lives in the same apartment house he does are also well
rendered.
One caveat: Either the work, or maybe the author, comes down a bit too
hard on atheists. While the set up is solid, I don’t think Stewart makes
the existence of a god so persuasive that I was willing to grant him the
ending of the novel without reservations. Even so, this is a solid work
of fantasy, and a pretty solid coming-of-age novel for both Dante and
his brother Jet.
I expect the majority of horror readers would find this of interest, as
would most any reader who enjoys the well-turned phrase and evocative,
descriptive prose.
>> Then there's the list of writers of whose work I've read very
>> little, and think I'd like to get back to them:
>
>A. A. Attanasio
>
> Isn't he the <Riverrun> guy? If so, then better you than me.
Nope. At least, I don't think so. His short stories interest me -- some
Lovecraftian influence there, from what I've heard -- though _Radix_ and
one or two others have been on my shelf for years.
>> Nina Kiriki Hoffman
>
> Really? My take on a book or two of hers was that there was too much
> saccharine there for my tastes. I'm surprised.
One or two were so well-reviewed by de Lint among others that I'm
curious. Then there was "Savage Breasts," a story she wrote for
Pulphouse, I believe, that I found very, very funny, so I've wondered
about her for some time.
>> Kathe Koja
>
> 'cause, see, this seems much more your style.
Her short stories in _Extremities_ were astoundingly powerful. I want to
tackle a couple of her novels.
> [1] And in case I don't get around to it. One of the contexts in
> which I mentioned that book was that I wanted to see a fantasy world
> person come *here* and like it so much they wanted to stay, a
> reversal of the common trope, elsewhere than in the recent books by
> Charlie Stross. So I wondered if <The Necessary Beggar>, the one
> where fantasy world people come here and land in a refugee camp,
> would turn out that way. Well, nope. [...]
Well, great, so now add Palwick to my list.
Randy M.
netcat
>
> I tend to get far-future cities of decadence confused, except for
> Tanith Lee's Fours, but I do remember having read Bryant's <Cinnabar>,
> not having read Moorcock's End of Time in any version, and probably
> having encountered Vermilion Sands in an anthology sometime (that's
> the unreliable memory here). And I'm quite sure I've read at least
> a book's worth of Viriconium. Not that this means I could tell it
> apart from Cinnabar, or for that matter Vermilion Sands.
Vermilion Sands isn't far future.
rgds,
netcat
Joe Bernstein
<r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
Could you expand on that, please? I don't remember <Tigana> all
that well - I think I've read it twice, *maybe* three times - and
I have essentially no desire to tackle it again. So while I'm
very familiar with much else Kay has written, I don't really see
what you're getting at.
> And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
> the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
Same question. (I'm reluctant to try Liaden again too, though for
very different reasons.)
Joe Bernstein
David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > In article <1147702277.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> > David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > > Mary Gentle
> > If I had a clearer sense of why you like the things you like, I could
> > probably find the exact right book of hers for you, but maybe not.
> > Your interest in philosophy suggests the White Crow stuff, though
> > <Ash> may have superseded that. Your higher-than-mine opinion
> > of Romanticism - greater confidence in <The Curse of Chalion>,
> > greater tolerance for Liaden - suggests you should probably avoid
> > <Ancient Light>, which makes suggesting <Golden Witchbreed>
> > problematic. But I don't think this adds up to enough of a picture
> > of your reading tastes.
> Interesting -- have you decided that my confidence in _The Curse of
> Chalion_ means that I won't like works that work to deliberately
> subvert its kind of Romance? I have a tolerance for a certain amount
> of cynical fiction, but not all sorts, so you may be right.
Well, <Ancient Light> is "cynical" in the sense that <Banewreaker> or
<Tehanu> is cynical, not superficially but deeply. She basically
converts the comfortable planetary romance modeled on travel
literature into something modeled on serious reportage from the
Third World, and goes on from there. Lots of people who Really
Loved <Golden Witchbreed> actively *hate* Gentle for <Ancient Light>,
partly but not entirely because of an ending I'm not going to say
anything else about. So basically, the deal is that I don't think
you're a readerly wimp - not as much as I am, let alone as much as
those Gentle-haters are - and I don't think you'd be comfortable
reading a book whose sequel you were unwilling to read.
<The Architecture of Desire> is criticised as doing something vaguely
similar to the characters of the White Crow series (before "Left
to His Own Devices" & such subvert that series on a much more
basic level).
> > > Tanith Lee
> [...]
> > And, see, the common thread these all have, as I see it, is again
> > Romanticism Par Excellence. The Individual and True Love versus
> > Society and Conformity. The Difference One Individual Can Make.
> > Our Emotions Are What Make Us Real.
>
> Hmm. No, I don't think that's the flavor of Romanticism I'm buying
> these days. I'm not sure I can characterize what it is that I *am*
> buying, though, that makes me so fond of certain works. I've been
> trying, but it's slippery. It's partly tied up in this "personal
> honor" thing, and partly requires a certain pragmatic version of starry
> eyes.
Ah. Which combination makes Bujold, in *spades*, the ideal writer
for you. So.
Kay is much about honour but less about starry eyes. (It's possible
to read all his historical fantasies as riffs on the theme of what
it takes to make a golden age, and whether it's worth it, though
<Tigana> is particularly hard to squeeze into this mould. But he
rarely shows individual characters trying anything that big; they
tend to be more tangled in history than that.) [1]
I'm not getting anywhere trying to relate the concept of honour to
Beagle, except maybe via Prince Lir in <The Last Unicorn>. Kress
is fairly heavy on it, is good at pragmatism, and can sometimes do
starry eyes. I'm guessing I should retract the suggestion of Lee.
<Hyperion> definitely deals in honour and Big Things, but I dunno
about "starry eyes".
Baker is somewhere similar. Honour is less palpable than in Bujold,
Liaden, or what little I could stomach of Weber, but is certainly
part of the main protagonist's burden. I can come up with several
possible meanings for "starry eyes" in conjunction with "pragmatic"
that work to describe that protagonist too. So I guess this remains
a recommendation of sorts.
Joe Bernstein
[1] I tried not long ago to read <A Talent for War>, <Polaris>,
and <Seeker> in order, and bogged down partway through <Seeker>,
in the process belatedly realising a bunch of things about
Jack McDevitt.
a), and what occasioned this footnote: He rather consistently
has his protagonists not *doing* Great Things, but unearthing
Great Things of the Past. <Omega> is here something of an
exception; <Moonfall>, which I haven't read, is presumably another;
I also haven't read <The Hercules Text> fwiw. Anyway, though,
I've tended to like him as a writer who's clueful about history
and archaeology and who often features same in his work, indeed
in starring roles - "Look what the past can do for us!" - but
hadn't realised to what extent his protagonists *do* history
or archaeology, and *don't* themselves do new things, so his
books despite being science fiction are sort of on the edges of
s.f.'s traditional fascination with discovery.
b) Oddly, given a, he really doesn't approve of professional
historians and archaeologists. I had read <A Talent for War>
and <Polaris> as showing a protagonist whose cavalier disregard
for archaeology except as a means to profit is a moral flaw,
but who is nevertheless interesting. But in <Seeker> we're
given a very different take on this (spoiler). Again, in
<Ancient Shores> a bunch of people do archaeology and make a
very obtrusive point of barring professional archaeologists
from any involvement; in <Infinity Beach>, the professional
historian does something really dumb and pays for it. Only, I
think, in <The Engines of God> does McDevitt allow the pros who
usually figure in his books to look good.
What's his beef? I wonder. I note that he is not himself a pro,
and perhaps has tired of hostility from pros (something I've tasted
myself); but I also note the energetic defense of the antiquities
market built into <Seeker> and wonder if he's himself in that
market, and some of the hostility comes from that.
c) He's repeating himself. Not only are his recent books all
more or less belated sequels, but individual bits and pieces are
showing up, albeit usually transmuted - for example, "female
protagonist goes on date under fake name to get information"
appears in both <Infinity Beach> and I think <Polaris> (maybe
<Seeker>?), but in one optimistically, the other pessimistically.
Still, it's getting to where one would be ill-advised to sit down
and read his books in a row.
Sigh. He's been one of my favourite writers for years now, but
this is a rather dispiriting set of things to realise about him
and (given point a) about me.
Joe Bernstein
Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > In article <4468EB85...@spamblock.syr.edu>, Randy Money
> > <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> >> John M. Ford (just me, or does there seem to be a proliferation of
> >> Fords/Fordes/Ffordes these days?)
> > "Smart perceptive reader who likes things dark" strikes me as pretty
> > much the ideal John M. Ford reader, so I'm a bit confused.
> These two are high on the "I shoulda read 'em last year" pile. And thank
> you for the compliment. I've had a copy of _The Dragon Waiting_ since it
> first appeared in pb, but the smallish, cramped type, the gaudy cover
> and the length of it have put me off. I'm more likely to start with his
> story collection or _The Last Hot Time_ (approx. title).
Well, I know I've read <The Dragon Waiting> twice, and the second
time not that long ago, but I can already feel the memory fading
*again*.
I remember <Web of Angels> and <The Scholars of Night> somewhat
better, and I was constructing my picture of the ideal John M. Ford
reader partly out of those three recollections, such as they are,
and partly out of who I've seen rave about him here (Jo Walton is
the most obvious person).
[Mary Gentle, M. John Harrison, and evidently others]
> I understand your compulsion to read in chronological and/or series
> order, and occasionally fall prey to it myself. Add another compulsion
> to it: the more directly a current work seems to derive from earlier
> literary works, the more strongly I want to read the literary
> precursor(s) first. In this case there seems to be a stream of Brit
> fantasy that derives largely from Mervyn Peake. I only got to _Titus
> Groan_ about three years ago, and I think I'd like to read _Gormanghast_
> before tackling Moorcock, Gentle, Harrison, Mieville and a few others. I
> haven't done so because Peake, wonderful, complex and breath-taking as
> TG was, is also the readerly equivalent of heavy lifting.
>
> On the other hand, part of me is trying to talk the rest of me out of
> this and might well win out.
Wow. This is definitely not how I do things; my approach to all
that supernatural mystery stuff, where I'm perfectly happy to try
*anything* if it'll keep me from having to come to grips with Laurell
K. Hamilton, is quite typical. Indeed, there are authors whose major
works I never read precisely because of my *chronological* compulsion.
So I wind up encountering their big ideas as someone else rendered
them.
Concretely, I felt no obligation to read Bierce then Lovecraft then
Cthulhu Mythos and only then Bradley.
Or to read Howard before Leiber, Moorcock, Delany, and Russ (all of
whom I'd tackled before leaving high school). Let alone Haggard
before Howard.
> >> Robert Charles Wilson (hope to correct this sometime this year)
> > My *guess* is that you'd like him a lot. Aren't you the one who told
> > me the ending of <The Light Ages> was just perfect?
> Nope. He's another of the writers I really should get to, even if his
> name is currently escaping me, and that book is in one of the piles ...
Sorry. I've finally remembered this was a, um, disagreement between
me and Rich Horton.
(The "um" is because I'm not at all sure I *can* sustain my side of
an "argument", say. But I didn't finish <The Great Wheel> and
haven't felt much inclined even to start the new book, so evidently
Ian McLeod is not a taste of mine.)
> >> Nina Kiriki Hoffman
> > Really? My take on a book or two of hers was that there was too much
> > saccharine there for my tastes. I'm surprised.
> One or two were so well-reviewed by de Lint among others that I'm
> curious.
Huh. I've found de Lint almost totally unreliable as a guide to
what I'll like or find interesting - there doesn't seem to be any
rhyme or reason to our disagreements. (For example, I'm tempted
between what you say about Hoffman and my own take on Ann Downer
[sp?] to say "He likes saccharine". But he's also much fonder
of horror than I am, and anyway Downer isn't saccharine, she just
also isn't the Great Fantasy Writer de Lint hailed her as.)
> Then there was "Savage Breasts," a story she wrote for
> Pulphouse, I believe, that I found very, very funny, so I've wondered
> about her for some time.
Well, the mere fact that she's *appeared* in <Pulphouse> conveys
the possibility that what I've read by her was atypical.
> >> Kathe Koja
> > 'cause, see, this seems much more your style.
> Her short stories in _Extremities_ were astoundingly powerful. I want to
> tackle a couple of her novels.
She had some stories in <Asimov's> that are some of the strongest
evidence I've seen that Horror Can Be Literature. But, well, while
that makes me think "Yeah, someday I should" it doesn't make me think
"Tomorrow I must".
> > [1] And in case I don't get around to it. One of the contexts in
> > which I mentioned that book was that I wanted to see a fantasy world
> > person come *here* and like it so much they wanted to stay, a
> > reversal of the common trope, elsewhere than in the recent books by
> > Charlie Stross. So I wondered if <The Necessary Beggar>, the one
> > where fantasy world people come here and land in a refugee camp,
> > would turn out that way. Well, nope. [...]
> Well, great, so now add Palwick to my list.
FWIW, <Flying in Place> is rather better than <The Necessary Beggar>,
though both push that button of mine labeled "earned tears".
(<Flying in Place> is essentially the story of one family, with
another in a supporting role and occasional others. <The Necessary
Beggar> opens out from one to three POVs and offers significantly
bigger parts to non-family members; it also spreads out more, with
settings like the refugee camp and POV characters' jobs, where
<Flying in Place> has rather few settings. And the later book is
of course much longer.
But much of the increase goes underused. Several characters
with prominent roles in <The Necessary Beggar> feel insufficiently
characterised to me; I already talked about how the other-world
setting feels stagey, and indeed so to a lesser extent does Palwick's
near-future America; while the length isn't wasted, this book hasn't
the sheer poetic intensity of <Flying in Place>, either.
<The Necessary Beggar>'s big win is that it lacks a villain,
but I'm not sure that's a major factor for you.)
Joe Bernstein
Joe Bernstein
<r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 26 May 2006 15:32:29 -0400, Randy Money
> <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
> >Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > > Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but
> > > I'm not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read
> > > anything else. Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The
> > > Telltale Heart" was a school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
> >Huh. No "Fall of the House of Usher" for school? That really amazes me
> >because its so ubiquitous in high school and even college curriculums.
> Or "Masque of the Red Death"? Or is it Mask? I forget. That's also
> a common school assignment.
So, um, evidently this is stupid of me, but why exactly is "The
Telltale Heart" such an implausible alternative?
Anyway, I never took American literature in high school. Maybe that's
where I was supposed to run into him. Believe it or not I took *no*
"English" courses in college, at all. So, well, there you go.
> > > Walter De La Mare. [...]
> Did de la Mare write things beyond poetry?
Yep. Just bought a book of his stories for kids at a bookstore's
going-out-of-business sale, in fact.
> > > Johann W. Goethe. Yes, I can ignore *eighteenth* century titans too!
> > > I'm an equal opportunity ignoramus! 138 lines.
> I have actually read some of Goethe in the German. The
> above-mentioned Erl-Koenig (and I was surprised to realize that the
> original version I had found was not in fact the original), and the
> Lorelei.
Well, <Faust> in the German is a longstanding ambition of mine, but
as yet not attempted for more than a page or so, and that *long* ago.
netcat
> Well, <Ancient Light> is "cynical" in the sense that <Banewreaker> or
> <Tehanu> is cynical, not superficially but deeply. She basically
> converts the comfortable planetary romance modeled on travel
> literature into something modeled on serious reportage from the
> Third World, and goes on from there. Lots of people who Really
> Loved <Golden Witchbreed> actively *hate* Gentle for <Ancient Light>,
> partly but not entirely because of an ending I'm not going to say
> anything else about.
I much prefer _Ancient Light_ to _Golden Witchbreed_. The latter had
potential to be an interesting read, but raised too many issues (for me)
that made me grumble, most importantly, the behaviour of the human
explorers was so silly, inefficient and unscientific it almost became an
"idiot plot" case, and some other things (naming etc) that combined to
break my WSOD several times over.
_Ancient Light_, as a story, can be depressing, sure. It's a tragedy
after all. But a strangely beautiful, cathartic tragedy.
rgds,
netcat
David Tate
> In article <1148937293.6...@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
>
> > Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
> > > In article <1147702277.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> > > David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > Interesting -- have you decided that my confidence in _The Curse of
> > Chalion_ means that I won't like works that work to deliberately
> > subvert its kind of Romance? I have a tolerance for a certain amount
> > of cynical fiction, but not all sorts, so you may be right.
>
> Well, <Ancient Light> is "cynical" in the sense that <Banewreaker> or
> <Tehanu> is cynical, not superficially but deeply.
That's a good distinction. I utterly loathed _Tehanu_, but that may be
more a function of having taken a large bite expecting cheesecake, and
gotten garlic chevre instead. I will try it again someday, forewarned.
[...]
> > Hmm. No, I don't think that's the flavor of Romanticism I'm buying
> > these days. I'm not sure I can characterize what it is that I *am*
> > buying, though, that makes me so fond of certain works. I've been
> > trying, but it's slippery. It's partly tied up in this "personal
> > honor" thing, and partly requires a certain pragmatic version of starry
> > eyes.
>
> Ah. Which combination makes Bujold, in *spades*, the ideal writer
> for you. So.
Indeed -- spot on. Bujold at her best is about as good as (Romantic)
reading gets, for me.
> Kay is much about honour but less about starry eyes.
That's not necessarily bad; it's certainly not disqualifying.
> <Hyperion> definitely deals in honour and Big Things, but I dunno
> about "starry eyes".
On the shelf, waiting -- I'll probably get to it during my summer
vacation this year.
> Baker is somewhere similar. Honour is less palpable than in Bujold,
> Liaden, or what little I could stomach of Weber, but is certainly
> part of the main protagonist's burden. I can come up with several
> possible meanings for "starry eyes" in conjunction with "pragmatic"
> that work to describe that protagonist too. So I guess this remains
> a recommendation of sorts.
Thanks. I have _In the Garden of Iden_ from the library -- is that a
good place to start?
David Tate
Joe Bernstein
David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > In article <1148937293.6...@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> > David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
> > > Joe Bernstein wrote:
> > > > In article <1147702277.5...@j55g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
> > > > David Tate <dt...@ida.org> wrote:
[Oops, snipped <Tehanu>, sorry. Part of the deal here is probably that
I first read <Tehanu> as part of, or soon after, reading all of Le Guin's
books and collected short stories to that date, in publication order;
this was one of my earlier experiments in what is now a standard
reading approach for me. So instead of approaching it as "New Earthsea,
how *sweet*!" or something like that, I was more or less prepared to
approach it as "Gosh, what would middle-aged Le Guin *want* to say
about what young Le Guin wrote?" So although I was surprised, I
wasn't *shocked* the way many others were.]
> > > Hmm. No, I don't think that's the flavor of Romanticism I'm buying
> > > these days. I'm not sure I can characterize what it is that I *am*
> > > buying, though, that makes me so fond of certain works. I've been
> > > trying, but it's slippery. It's partly tied up in this "personal
> > > honor" thing, and partly requires a certain pragmatic version of starry
> > > eyes.
> > <Hyperion> definitely deals in honour and Big Things, but I dunno
> > about "starry eyes".
> > Baker is somewhere similar. Honour is less palpable than in Bujold,
> > Liaden, or what little I could stomach of Weber, but is certainly
> > part of the main protagonist's burden. I can come up with several
> > possible meanings for "starry eyes" in conjunction with "pragmatic"
> > that work to describe that protagonist too. So I guess this remains
> > a recommendation of sorts.
> Thanks. I have _In the Garden of Iden_ from the library -- is that a
> good place to start?
Well, for the first several books, the plot is pretty seriously
sequential despite *massive* chronological gaps, so yes, at least
if my memory isn't lying about that being her first book. Warning:
the sequentialness has changed to some extent recently. I'm I think
two books behind now; the last book I read specifically did not star
the protagonist of the first ?four books. And I have the impression
that neither does one or both of the books I haven't read. So
don't let the readerly expectations the beginning of the series
will arouse come back to bite you.
I don't remember enough about the stories in <Black Projects, White
Knights> to talk about how necessary they are; this suggests but
does not require that they, well, aren't.
Joe Bernstein
r.r...@thevine.net
On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 08:53:32 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <n0gi72dua47l4d27f...@4ax.com>,
> <r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 28 May 2006 05:39:01 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
>> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
>> >Let me get this straight, you love Liaden and you *haven't read Kay*?
>> >For Heaven's sake, whyever *not*?
>> >
>> >I would be utterly astonished if you did not greatly enjoy *any*
>> >of <A Song for Arbonne>, <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, or the Sarantine
>> >Mosaic. You are almost certain to like <Tigana>, as best I remember
>> >it, and I'd expect you to have a rather higher opinion of the
>> >Fionavar books than I do, too.
>
>> YMMV. I love the Liaden books, and hated Tigana so much that I have
>> put Kay on my "never buy another book from this author again" list.
>> It's the entire moral viewpoint expressed in Tigana that gets me, more
>> than any individual items.
>
>Could you expand on that, please? I don't remember <Tigana> all
>that well - I think I've read it twice, *maybe* three times - and
>I have essentially no desire to tackle it again. So while I'm
>very familiar with much else Kay has written, I don't really see
>what you're getting at.
>
In a very condensed version: The Evil Overlord in Tigana (whose name
I have forgotten... Brendan?) decides to do a very evil act of
genocide because the Tiganans have killed his son. Let me state right
here that I think that this was a very bad thing for him to do.
However, part of my problem with the story is that I just don't see
the evil deed (erasing the word Tigana from the knowledge of everyone
else in the world _except_ the Tiganans) would actually work, so that
makes my acceptance of this evil fact more of an "I'll accept it for
the sake of the story" thing, and not a heartfelt belief. Especially
since we are shown, in the same book, a cult that has had to deal with
this issue (non-magically enforced, granted) for quite some time
without dying out. Although part of the issue with that is that I see
no reason for why children of Tiganese parents aren't still Tiganan,
and thus able to say Tigana.
And then there is the hero, Alessandro. Who has decided that the Evil
Overlord must be destroyed so that his people can once again rise to
be the country that they were meant to be. Who, given many other
options, decides as a first choice that the best thing that he can do
for his people is to enslave a wizard. Which is, in my belief system,
innately bad. And, as if that's not bad enough, Kay has said wizard,
after several attempts to get away that nearly kill him, come to the
sudden realization that he was wrong to ever not want to help out
Alessandro in the first place, and now would even if he weren't being
forced to by Alessandro's gift. Which is, of course, irrevocable, so
it's really a moot point.
So, essentially, we have a bad guy who is shown doing one act that
wouldn't have (imo) the affect that it does in the book, because of an
admittedly bad emotional decision. On the other hand, we have a hero
who has shown that he firmly believes the ends justifies the means.
Of the two, I know which one I believe is worse. And yet the book is
asking me to cheer for him.
>> And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
>> the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
>
>Same question. (I'm reluctant to try Liaden again too, though for
>very different reasons.)
>
The Liaden books seem to put a high value on personal responsibility.
Liadens are in charge of maintaining their melan'ti, and need to take
reasonable steps to do so. With a culturally-approved method of
making sure that those steps do not get too out of hand. And the
books generally value life and diversity. Pat Rin, for example, sets
out to subjugate a world in order to serve Balance, but he also tries
to promote the good of the people he deals with at the same time. And
he keeps a scrupulous record of his actions so that those who come
after him can judge his actions and make restitution if he is wrong.
Crystal Dragon has characters who act in ways similar to Kay's
characters, but they are undeniably the bad guys, except for the
unnamed sister, who at least comes to regret her action. And, it is
also shown that Rool had some choice in the matter, since he meant to
use the enslavement as a way of getting free.
Rebecca
Joe Bernstein
<r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
> Warning: There will be spoilers for [Guy Gavriel Kay's] Tigana below.
Well, I've removed them, I think. But I've probably inserted some
for his <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, sigh.
> So, essentially, we have a bad guy who is shown doing one act that
> wouldn't have (imo) the affect that it does in the book, because of an
> admittedly bad emotional decision. On the other hand, we have a hero
> who has shown that he firmly believes the ends justifies the means.
> Of the two, I know which one I believe is worse. And yet the book is
> asking me to cheer for him.
This is a difficulty that reached me on second reading. (I don't
clearly remember what I disliked about the book on first reading
except boredom; I could well have disliked this too, but any memory
I might have of doing so is probably confabulation.)
I don't think this is typical of Kay, but at the same time I don't
want to say outright that it isn't. In the Fionavar books there
are characters who do terrible things, but they're fighting Ultimate
Evil, so *that's* OK! and more seriously, those terrible things are
in fact shown as having terrible consequences, just not *as* terrible
as letting the Dark Lord win.
<A Song for Arbonne> is easily the least morally ambiguous of Kay's
books, and I'm having trouble thinking of examples of Good Guys
Doing Bad Things in it - it's massively preoccupied with chivalric
honour and such - but I'd be reluctant to say this means there aren't
any without checking. Oh, OK, actually, I've thought of one. Some
merchants at a trade fair protected by market truce are being addressed
by the ruler of the country, after the merchants' ruler violated said
truce by invading. They are told their goods will be confiscated; one
answers by angrily haranguing the ruler in question, which leads her
to order his execution. Here, the end is that she (pronoun emphasised)
not be seen as weak; the means is behaving like a typical, rather than
a perfect, ruler addressed disrespectfully. I'm not sure there's
worse in the book.
<The Lions of Al-Rassan> is to a considerable extent *about* whether
ends justify means, and when, and looks at the question from a whole
bunch of angles. One POV character is a man renowned for an
assassination he did in his teens, and he is shown becoming other
than a warrior; another is a starry-eyed new recruit to an army,
shown doing the same. But along the way the first acts without
much compunction as a mercenary, and the second (with rather more
compunction) kills civilians to protect a (not-)Jewish quarter
under attack. I have no idea how you would take this book.
The Sarantine books clearly expect us to cheer for the not-Justinian,
but just as clearly expect us *not* to cheer for a lot of what he does
or tries to do. I believe the main protagonist actually makes it
through a rather violent pair of books without killing anyone, and
I know he maintains a sort of moral high ground. Towards the end
a bit character is killed to safeguard a secret, but this is not
presented as a Good Thing.
Standing at the end of those two books (still not having re-read
<The Last Light of the Sun>, see), my take on the whole thing is
that Kay really does believe you can't make every omelette without
breaking some eggs, but also believes that this makes many omelettes
not worth making, and many others costly to make. Or to put it more
concretely, he clearly is aware that what states do is maintain
themselves by violence, and he clearly finds alternatives worse.
Because, like you, I just can't take the Problem in <Tigana> *seriously*
(though haven't you understated it?), I have trouble reconciling
<Tigana> with these general statements.
> >> And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
> >> the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
> >Same question. (I'm reluctant to try Liaden again too, though for
> >very different reasons.)
> The Liaden books seem to put a high value on personal responsibility.
> Liadens are in charge of maintaining their melan'ti, and need to take
> reasonable steps to do so. With a culturally-approved method of
> making sure that those steps do not get too out of hand. And the
> books generally value life and diversity. Pat Rin, for example, sets
> out to subjugate a world in order to serve Balance, but he also tries
> to promote the good of the people he deals with at the same time. And
> he keeps a scrupulous record of his actions so that those who come
> after him can judge his actions and make restitution if he is wrong.
OK. I'd forgotten the "personal responsibility" angle in Liaden,
my memories being dominated by the more wish-fulfillment aspects
(forgiveness and healing readily available, for relevant examples).
But I'll snip <Crystal Dragon>, since I haven't read it.
David Johnston
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <n0gi72dua47l4d27f...@4ax.com>,
> <r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 28 May 2006 05:39:01 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
>> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>
>> >Let me get this straight, you love Liaden and you *haven't read Kay*?
>> >For Heaven's sake, whyever *not*?
>> >
>> >I would be utterly astonished if you did not greatly enjoy *any*
>> >of <A Song for Arbonne>, <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, or the Sarantine
>> >Mosaic. You are almost certain to like <Tigana>, as best I remember
>> >it, and I'd expect you to have a rather higher opinion of the
>> >Fionavar books than I do, too.
>
>> YMMV. I love the Liaden books, and hated Tigana so much that I have
>> put Kay on my "never buy another book from this author again" list.
>> It's the entire moral viewpoint expressed in Tigana that gets me, more
>> than any individual items.
>
>Could you expand on that, please? I don't remember <Tigana> all
>that well -
Me too. I think I have some kind of mental block against remembering
Tigana.
Elaine Thompson
>Warning: There will be spoilers for Tigana below.
>
>
>
>
snip back & forth between Joe Bernstein and Rebecca
>>
>In a very condensed version: The Evil Overlord in Tigana (whose name
>I have forgotten... Brendan?) decides to do a very evil act of
>genocide because the Tiganans have killed his son. Let me state right
>here that I think that this was a very bad thing for him to do.
>However, part of my problem with the story is that I just don't see
>the evil deed (erasing the word Tigana from the knowledge of everyone
>else in the world _except_ the Tiganans) would actually work, so that
>makes my acceptance of this evil fact more of an "I'll accept it for
>the sake of the story" thing, and not a heartfelt belief.
I could accept that the magic worked as advertised even to the point
of affecting the next generation, as you apparently did not.. Where I
had problems was with Brandin's apparent shock that his li'l boy got
killed while leading Dad's invading army. You invade, people fight
back, and people get killed. This is a surprise and deserving of such
a response? I think, now, that was part of Kay's point - it wasn't
reasonable and wasn't supposed to be. But I had real problems with it
at first. (had a similar problem with the plot engine in Arbonne -
that female was an idiot....and again, it was deliberate.)
>
>Especially
>since we are shown, in the same book, a cult that has had to deal with
>this issue (non-magically enforced, granted) for quite some time
>without dying out. Although part of the issue with that is that I see
>no reason for why children of Tiganese parents aren't still Tiganan,
>and thus able to say Tigana.
>
I assumed that was part of the magic.
Haven't reread it for years, but I did get that impression.
>And then there is the hero, Alessandro. Who has decided that the Evil
>Overlord must be destroyed so that his people can once again rise to
>be the country that they were meant to be. Who, given many other
>options, decides as a first choice that the best thing that he can do
>for his people is to enslave a wizard. Which is, in my belief system,
>innately bad. And, as if that's not bad enough, Kay has said wizard,
>after several attempts to get away that nearly kill him, come to the
>sudden realization that he was wrong to ever not want to help out
>Alessandro in the first place, and now would even if he weren't being
>forced to by Alessandro's gift.
Ok, I haven't read it in years, as I said, and I don't expect to
convince you that he was right - but I do seem to recall he didn't do
it blithely or without concern. He didn't like it, but didn't see a
way around doing it. Which helps make it more palatable for me as
reader. A considered sort of 'least evil' of possible evils now and
in the future.. And if Brandin and the other invader weren't thrown
out *all* the wizards were going to be dead, anyway, because the
invaders killed all wizards they found. Which is one reason the
enslaved wizard converted. Or so I remember it. It wasn't quite as
bad as your summary. in my memory at least.
>
>>> And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
>>> the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
>>
>>Same question. (I'm reluctant to try Liaden again too, though for
>>very different reasons.)
May I ask what? I just blasted through about seven of them - The Val
& Miri set, and the Crystal duo - and enjoyed them quite a lot.
>>
>The Liaden books seem to put a high value on personal responsibility.
>Liadens are in charge of maintaining their melan'ti, and need to take
>reasonable steps to do so. With a culturally-approved method of
>making sure that those steps do not get too out of hand.
That is indeed part of what I like about them.
--
Elaine Thompson <Ela...@KEThompson.org>
Randy Money
> In article <no1h729ctqe5i5nru...@4ax.com>,
> <r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
>
>>On Fri, 26 May 2006 15:32:29 -0400, Randy Money
>><rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
>>>Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
>>>>Edgar Allan Poe. OK, OK, I've read that "quoth the raven" poem, but
>>>>I'm not sure that's enough, and I'm not at all sure I've read
>>>>anything else. Well, my unreliable memory is now claiming "The
>>>>Telltale Heart" was a school assignment once. Who knows? 399 lines.
>>>
>
>>>Huh. No "Fall of the House of Usher" for school? That really amazes me
>>>because its so ubiquitous in high school and even college curriculums.
>>
>
>>Or "Masque of the Red Death"? Or is it Mask? I forget. That's also
>>a common school assignment.
>
>
> So, um, evidently this is stupid of me, but why exactly is "The
> Telltale Heart" such an implausible alternative?
Nah, just surprising to folks who climbed the public school ladder.
And "The Telltale Heart" is a prime flavor of Poe, showing him in his
"Jimmy Cagney" form -- which is to say, like Cagney he barely kept a
toehold on the correct side of overdoing, and seemingly enjoyed the
tightrope walk. It's also is a good example of his macabre sense of
humor. I'm told Vincent Price does a good recital, but when I read it I
seem to hear Peter Lorre. (Well, Peter Lorre and the chorus of an old
country/western song, "I'm Walking the Floor Over You," but I believe
the latter is more idiosyncratic.)
If you do get your scholarly interest going, I would at least read Usher
-- besides nearly incalculable influence on the modern horror story,
it's a cornerstone of the American short story, and probably of American
lit. as a whole.
Randy M.
Randy Money
> In article <447C7CF8...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
>>Joe Bernstein wrote:
>
[...]
>>I understand your compulsion to read in chronological and/or series
>>order, and occasionally fall prey to it myself. Add another compulsion
>>to it: the more directly a current work seems to derive from earlier
>>literary works, the more strongly I want to read the literary
>>precursor(s) first. In this case there seems to be a stream of Brit
>>fantasy that derives largely from Mervyn Peake. I only got to _Titus
>>Groan_ about three years ago, and I think I'd like to read _Gormanghast_
>>before tackling Moorcock, Gentle, Harrison, Mieville and a few others. I
>>haven't done so because Peake, wonderful, complex and breath-taking as
>>TG was, is also the readerly equivalent of heavy lifting.
>>
>>On the other hand, part of me is trying to talk the rest of me out of
>>this and might well win out.
>
>
> Wow. This is definitely not how I do things; my approach to all
> that supernatural mystery stuff, where I'm perfectly happy to try
> *anything* if it'll keep me from having to come to grips with Laurell
> K. Hamilton, is quite typical. Indeed, there are authors whose major
> works I never read precisely because of my *chronological* compulsion.
> So I wind up encountering their big ideas as someone else rendered
> them.
I think that's what started my compulsion. I kept coming to those who
wrote about what I was reading and finding them saying, "But so-and-so
did it so much better." That led me to start reading the so-and-sos first.
> Concretely, I felt no obligation to read Bierce then Lovecraft then
> Cthulhu Mythos and only then Bradley.
I read HPL, Bierce, Blackwood, Machen, Bloch, a smattering of Robert E.
Howard and several others before that compulsion got too strong a hold
on me.
> Or to read Howard before Leiber, Moorcock, Delany, and Russ (all of
> whom I'd tackled before leaving high school). Let alone Haggard
> before Howard.
I still haven't gotten to Haggard, but intend to. Leiber's Fahfred and
Gray Mouser, I will probably read first, since I just like Leiber's work
in general.
[...]
>> >> Nina Kiriki Hoffman
>
>> > Really? My take on a book or two of hers was that there was too much
>> > saccharine there for my tastes. I'm surprised.
>
>>One or two were so well-reviewed by de Lint among others that I'm
>>curious.
>
> Huh. I've found de Lint almost totally unreliable as a guide to
> what I'll like or find interesting - there doesn't seem to be any
> rhyme or reason to our disagreements. (For example, I'm tempted
> between what you say about Hoffman and my own take on Ann Downer
> [sp?] to say "He likes saccharine". But he's also much fonder
> of horror than I am, and anyway Downer isn't saccharine, she just
> also isn't the Great Fantasy Writer de Lint hailed her as.)
One or two books he reviewed many years ago I rather liked and one
became a favorite, _Practial Magic_ by Alice Hoffman. Maybe he just has
a thing for Hoffmans.
>>Then there was "Savage Breasts," a story she wrote for
>>Pulphouse, I believe, that I found very, very funny, so I've wondered
>>about her for some time.
>
> Well, the mere fact that she's *appeared* in <Pulphouse> conveys
> the possibility that what I've read by her was atypical.
A friend of mine has mentioned one of her books as particularly good. I
don't recall the title, but I think it had to do with child abuse. My
friend thought it was a particularly "felt" book, and everything else
she's read by NKH has been more commercial, even determinedly cheery.
>> >> Kathe Koja
>
>> > 'cause, see, this seems much more your style.
>
>>Her short stories in _Extremities_ were astoundingly powerful. I want to
>>tackle a couple of her novels.
>
> She had some stories in <Asimov's> that are some of the strongest
> evidence I've seen that Horror Can Be Literature. But, well, while
> that makes me think "Yeah, someday I should" it doesn't make me think
> "Tomorrow I must".
As for "Horror Can Be Literature," I agree. She works at a level only a
few contemporary horror writers I know of come close to. (That said, I'm
not as familiar with contemporary horror writers as you might think.)
Thanks, Joe. _Flying in Place_ is lurking in my piles. I'll have to dig
it out.
Randy M.
Mike Schilling
> And "The Telltale Heart" is a prime flavor of Poe, showing him in his
> "Jimmy Cagney" form -- which is to say, like Cagney he barely kept a
> toehold on the correct side of overdoing, and seemingly enjoyed the
> tightrope walk. It's also is a good example of his macabre sense of humor.
> I'm told Vincent Price does a good recital, but when I read it I seem to
> hear Peter Lorre. (Well, Peter Lorre and the chorus of an old
> country/western song, "I'm Walking the Floor Over You," but I believe the
> latter is more idiosyncratic.)
The same Peter Lorre voice as in Spike Jone's version of "My Old Flame".
My old flame
I can't even think of her name
(I'll have to look through my collection of human heads)
David T. Bilek
>Warning: There will be spoilers for Tigana below.
>
>
>
(much snippage)
>
>So, essentially, we have a bad guy who is shown doing one act that
>wouldn't have (imo) the affect that it does in the book, because of an
>admittedly bad emotional decision. On the other hand, we have a hero
>who has shown that he firmly believes the ends justifies the means.
>Of the two, I know which one I believe is worse. And yet the book is
>asking me to cheer for him.
>
Here is, I think, your primary mistake. I don't believe it is clear
at all that _Tigana_ is asking you to cheer for Alessandro. Kay isn't
so unskilled a writer that he believes one must under all
circumstances "root for" the major characters of his novels. And, in
fact, I read _Tigana_ as a tragedy with Brendan as the hero destroyed
by his mistakes.
Why do you feel you must cheer for Alessandro? Understand his
motivations, perhaps, but cheer for?
-David
Gene Ward Smith
Joe Bernstein wrote:
> Honour is less palpable than in Bujold,
Honor is indeed very palpable in Weber, but feeling her up without
permission is not recommeded.
Randy Money
Yeah. Yeah, I expect you're right.
Randy M.
Gene Ward Smith
Randy Money wrote:
> >> E.R. Eddison
> >
> > I have no brief for urging him on you.
>
> It's a scholarly inclination, not likely to be followed up on real soon.
There's a difference I think is important between people who can write
at the sentence level--who can deal with prose the way a great
violinist deals with music--and people who can't. If you ever need to
wash the vile flavor of Banewreaker from your mouth, then would be a
good time to read Eddison.
Oh, and Worm is a cracking good yarn also.
Mike Schilling
"Gene Ward Smith" <genewa...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1149542193....@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
When I was much younger (it had to be '73 or '74), and making my way through
my parents' collected Mark Twain, I took a break from fiction to read a book
about Watergate written by some newspaper reporter, and literally found it
unreadable, due to the ugliness of the prose. I doubt the fellow was an
exceptionally bad writer [1], but he couldn't survive the comparison with
Twain.
1. Surely not as bad as Dan Brown.
r.r...@thevine.net
<j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>In article <92f8829p2n41ps65t...@4ax.com>,
> <r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
>
>> Warning: There will be spoilers for [Guy Gavriel Kay's] Tigana below.
>
>Well, I've removed them, I think. But I've probably inserted some
>for his <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, sigh.
>
>
>Standing at the end of those two books (still not having re-read
><The Last Light of the Sun>, see), my take on the whole thing is
>that Kay really does believe you can't make every omelette without
>breaking some eggs, but also believes that this makes many omelettes
>not worth making, and many others costly to make. Or to put it more
>concretely, he clearly is aware that what states do is maintain
>themselves by violence, and he clearly finds alternatives worse.
>Because, like you, I just can't take the Problem in <Tigana> *seriously*
>(though haven't you understated it?), I have trouble reconciling
><Tigana> with these general statements.
>
That is the crux of the matter for me, too. If I believed more in the
Problem, I might have a different opinion of the book.
As to understating the Problem, as I understood it:
1. The Evil Overlord worked some major magic to remove the name
Tigana from everyone in the world that wasn't Tiganese.
1a. Although not stated, I assume this includes all the written
materials.
1b. I am also assuming that the spell would differentiate between the
word "Tigana" as it applied to the country, and the word as used for a
name of something not the country.
2. What it means to be "Tiganese" was never defined. Children living
in Tiganese families outside of Tigana could still hear and say the
name. Why children living in families in the newly-renamed country of
Tigana after the spell couldn't hear and say the name is not clear to
me, since I would consider them Tiganan as long as their families
followed the Tiganan culture.
>> >> And it's a viewpoint opposed to that in
>> >> the Liaden books, except maybe for Crystal Dragon.
>
>> >Same question. (I'm reluctant to try Liaden again too, though for
>> >very different reasons.)
>
>> The Liaden books seem to put a high value on personal responsibility.
>> Liadens are in charge of maintaining their melan'ti, and need to take
>> reasonable steps to do so. With a culturally-approved method of
>> making sure that those steps do not get too out of hand. And the
>> books generally value life and diversity. Pat Rin, for example, sets
>> out to subjugate a world in order to serve Balance, but he also tries
>> to promote the good of the people he deals with at the same time. And
>> he keeps a scrupulous record of his actions so that those who come
>> after him can judge his actions and make restitution if he is wrong.
>
>OK. I'd forgotten the "personal responsibility" angle in Liaden,
>my memories being dominated by the more wish-fulfillment aspects
>(forgiveness and healing readily available, for relevant examples).
>
>But I'll snip <Crystal Dragon>, since I haven't read it.
I can say, having read it, I find the idea of lifemates now a bit
creepy.
Rebecca
r.r...@thevine.net
Mainly because, up until that point, Alessandro's position is "evil
invader has done a terribly immoral, wrong act, and thus must be
ousted to restore our people to the place that was taken from them."
Having the good guys then do something that I find just as morally
reprehensible means that all of the work of the book up to then goes
out the window. If Alessandro had been presented as someone willing
to bend the rules and do bad things in the course of his task, I would
have not bounced so hard at that point. Heck, I could have handled it
if both sides were shown as greedy, stubborn men who didn't care at
all about anyone else. But as it was, Alessandro presented his side
as a Noble Cause, fighting for Good.
I would have also found it a stronger book if how the spell worked was
not such a fuzzy area. As far as I can tell, a baby born to Tiganan
parents after day X was affected, but it's not clear to me why.
Rebecca
r.r...@thevine.net
<Ela...@KEThompson.org> wrote:
>On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 07:36:48 -0700, r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>
>>Warning: There will be spoilers for Tigana below.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>snip back & forth between Joe Bernstein and Rebecca
>
>
>
>
>
>>And then there is the hero, Alessandro. Who has decided that the Evil
>>Overlord must be destroyed so that his people can once again rise to
>>be the country that they were meant to be. Who, given many other
>>options, decides as a first choice that the best thing that he can do
>>for his people is to enslave a wizard. Which is, in my belief system,
>>innately bad. And, as if that's not bad enough, Kay has said wizard,
>>after several attempts to get away that nearly kill him, come to the
>>sudden realization that he was wrong to ever not want to help out
>>Alessandro in the first place, and now would even if he weren't being
>>forced to by Alessandro's gift.
>
>
>Ok, I haven't read it in years, as I said, and I don't expect to
>convince you that he was right - but I do seem to recall he didn't do
>it blithely or without concern. He didn't like it, but didn't see a
>way around doing it. Which helps make it more palatable for me as
>reader.
Well, it bothered me that he never even considered the possibility of
_asking_ the wizard if he wanted to come work for the side of Good.
Of course, given the interaction between the two, the wizard would
have said no. But he didn't even make an attempt to convince him to
reconsider before enslaving him.
>A considered sort of 'least evil' of possible evils now and
>in the future.. And if Brandin and the other invader weren't thrown
>out *all* the wizards were going to be dead, anyway, because the
>invaders killed all wizards they found. Which is one reason the
>enslaved wizard converted. Or so I remember it. It wasn't quite as
>bad as your summary. in my memory at least.
>
Stuff snipped, and pasted into my reply to David.
>
Rebecca
r.r...@thevine.net
<rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
And, as my English teacher liked to point out, because of the
underlying meaning of Poe's works, it's really a happy ending!
Rebecca
Alexey Romanov
I am pretty sure this is wrong, and he is mentioned as destroying books
soon after the conquest, along with the statues and the buildings. Of
course, it is unclear what happened with the books in the eastern Palm.
Presumably, Brandin intended to conquer the east and destroy the relevant
books before dying.
> 1b. I am also assuming that the spell would differentiate between the
> word "Tigana" as it applied to the country, and the word as used for a
> name of something not the country.
Why?
> 2. What it means to be "Tiganese" was never defined. Children living
> in Tiganese families outside of Tigana could still hear and say the
> name. Why children living in families in the newly-renamed country of
> Tigana after the spell couldn't hear and say the name is not clear to
> me, since I would consider them Tiganan as long as their families
> followed the Tiganan culture.
Here is the quote: "He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every
man and woman who had not been born in that province." Anybody born after
the conquest was born in Lower Corte, not Tigana. Both Devin and Catriana
were born before, and so weren't subject to the spell. Seems pretty
well-defined to me.
Alexey Romanov
> Warning: There will be spoilers for Tigana below.
>
>
> And then there is the hero, Alessandro. Who has decided that the Evil
> Overlord must be destroyed so that his people can once again rise to
> be the country that they were meant to be. Who, given many other
> options, decides as a first choice that the best thing that he can do
> for his people is to enslave a wizard. Which is, in my belief system,
> innately bad. And, as if that's not bad enough, Kay has said wizard,
> after several attempts to get away that nearly kill him, come to the
> sudden realization that he was wrong to ever not want to help out
> Alessandro in the first place, and now would even if he weren't being
> forced to by Alessandro's gift. Which is, of course, irrevocable, so
> it's really a moot point.
It is very much revokable:
Alessan shook his head. "That may be true, but it is not all, Erlein di
Senzio. I bound you to this cause against your will, but I think you have
just joined it freely."
Erlein swore feelingly. "Don't be a fool, Alessan! I just told you, I..."
"I know what you just told me. I make my own judgments though, I always
have. And the truth is, I have been made to realize tonight, by you and
Catriana, both, that there are limits to what I wish to do or see done for
any cause. Even my own."
As Alessan finished speaking, he stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on
Erlein's brow. The wizard flinched, but Alessan steadied him. "I am
Alessan, Prince of Tigana," he said clearly, "direct in descent from
Micaela. In the name of Adaon and his gift to her children, I release you
to your freedom, wizard!"
Both men suddenly staggered apart, as if a taut cord had been cut. Erlein's
face was bone-white. "I tell you again," he rasped, "you are a fool!"
Alessan shook his head. "You have called me worse than that, with some
cause. But now I will name you something you will probably hate: I will
unmask you as a decent man, with the same longing to be free as any of us
here. Erlein, you cannot hide anymore behind your moods and rancor. You
cannot channel into me your own hatred of the Tyrants. If you choose to
leave us, you can. I do not expect you will. Be welcome, freely, to our
company."
Erlein looked cornered, assailed. His expression was so confused Devin
laughed aloud; the whole situation was clear to him now, and comical, in a
bizarre, twisted way. He stepped forward and gripped the wizard.
"I'm glad," he said. "I'm glad you're with us."
Randy Money
A similar experience, for me, was reading Lisa Goldstein's _A Mask for
the General_ immediately after Margaret Atwood's _Handmaid's Tale_.
Whatever the complaints one might have about Atwood's novel, the
richness of the language and the density of her prose made anything
afterward pale. I think Goldstein's book was okay, but I would have to
read it again to be sure my appreciation wasn't so biased that it seemed
less than it was.
Randy M.
Pumpkin Escobar
books in a used book store over the Memorial Day weekend and have been
reading his newest, _Gibralter Earth_. He self publishes now and his
books and back catalog are available from his website and Amazon.
Pretty straight forward SF and space opera.
PE
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
Or the rest of the world. Can you imagine a bunch of school kids
somewhere reading that the Country of Such-and-Such went to war with
Tigana in 1172, and not being able to pronounce "Tigana"? It would
soon get another name, if only "The country that cannot be named",
which would keep the idea of Tigana alive.
>> 1b. I am also assuming that the spell would differentiate between the
>> word "Tigana" as it applied to the country, and the word as used for a
>> name of something not the country.
>
>Why?
>
Brandin's goal was to destroy any memory of the country of Tigana. If
a little girl had heard a song once about Tigana, and then later on
wanted a name for new kitty, and the name Tigana just popped into her
head as a pretty sound, would she not be able to call her kitty in to
dinner? Trust me, this happens. I spent days agonizing over a
characters name for a role-playing game, and finally came up with
something that I really liked, something both unique and easily
pronounced. It wasn't until I went home many months later that I
realized it was the name of a restaurant that I had never been to, but
had driven past many times while a teenager. So, I didn't name the
character after the restaurant, but it had the same name as it.
>> 2. What it means to be "Tiganese" was never defined. Children living
>> in Tiganese families outside of Tigana could still hear and say the
>> name. Why children living in families in the newly-renamed country of
>> Tigana after the spell couldn't hear and say the name is not clear to
>> me, since I would consider them Tiganan as long as their families
>> followed the Tiganan culture.
>
>Here is the quote: "He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every
>man and woman who had not been born in that province." Anybody born after
>the conquest was born in Lower Corte, not Tigana. Both Devin and Catriana
>were born before, and so weren't subject to the spell. Seems pretty
>well-defined to me.
So, non-Tiganans born in Tigana should still be able to hear and say
it, and it's not a good indicator of nationality. Which is definitely
not the impression that I got. Further, Tigana was merely renamed, it
was not annexed. So, the province still exists, and is still called
Tigana by those who are fiercely Tiganan. Ergo, it seems to me that
someone born into Lower Corte to parents who call it Tigana is still
being born in Tigana, and thus should not be affected by the spell.
Which, once again, gets back to the fact that the spell seemed to have
a degree of nationality-identification built in to it, and yet they
never defined exactly what that identification was based off of.
So, essentially the spell is described very simply, but the affects
that it has in the book do not match the description given. In fact,
the affects of the spell as described in the book requiring a high
degree of specificity.
And, it's always seemed to me that the spell would have had a much
easier time if it had simply been flipped. Most of us don't care
particularly about that country over there, so if he had made it so
that the people in the country couldn't say Tigana, and announced to
the rest of the world that it was now Lower Corte, everyone else would
have gone along with it.
Rebecca
Alexey Romanov
They _have_ a new name: Lower Corte.
>>> 1b. I am also assuming that the spell would differentiate between the
>>> word "Tigana" as it applied to the country, and the word as used for a
>>> name of something not the country.
>>
>>Why?
>>
> Brandin's goal was to destroy any memory of the country of Tigana. If
> a little girl had heard a song once about Tigana, and then later on
> wanted a name for new kitty, and the name Tigana just popped into her
> head as a pretty sound, would she not be able to call her kitty in to
> dinner? Trust me, this happens. I spent days agonizing over a
> characters name for a role-playing game, and finally came up with
> something that I really liked, something both unique and easily
> pronounced. It wasn't until I went home many months later that I
> realized it was the name of a restaurant that I had never been to, but
> had driven past many times while a teenager. So, I didn't name the
> character after the restaurant, but it had the same name as it.
Unless the restaurant's name has been torn out by magic, I don't think yhat
applies. The girl would have to _hear_ a song about Tigana first, and hear
the name. Due to the spell, she can't.
>>> 2. What it means to be "Tiganese" was never defined. Children living
>>> in Tiganese families outside of Tigana could still hear and say the
>>> name. Why children living in families in the newly-renamed country of
>>> Tigana after the spell couldn't hear and say the name is not clear to
>>> me, since I would consider them Tiganan as long as their families
>>> followed the Tiganan culture.
>>
>>Here is the quote: "He stripped that name utterly from the minds of every
>>man and woman who had not been born in that province." Anybody born after
>>the conquest was born in Lower Corte, not Tigana. Both Devin and Catriana
>>were born before, and so weren't subject to the spell. Seems pretty
>>well-defined to me.
>
> So, non-Tiganans born in Tigana should still be able to hear and say
> it, and it's not a good indicator of nationality. Which is definitely
Now, that's an interesting point. But how many people in the Palm are born
outside of their province?
> not the impression that I got. Further, Tigana was merely renamed, it
> was not annexed. So, the province still exists, and is still called
> Tigana by those who are fiercely Tiganan. Ergo, it seems to me that
> someone born into Lower Corte to parents who call it Tigana is still
> being born in Tigana, and thus should not be affected by the spell.
It seems the spell doesn't agree with you.
> Which, once again, gets back to the fact that the spell seemed to have
> a degree of nationality-identification built in to it, and yet they
> never defined exactly what that identification was based off of.
>
> So, essentially the spell is described very simply, but the affects
> that it has in the book do not match the description given. In fact,
> the affects of the spell as described in the book requiring a high
> degree of specificity.
It seems to me to match what we see pretty precisely. Everyone able ot
speak the name is either a Tyrant, a wizard, or born in Tigana before the
conquest.
> And, it's always seemed to me that the spell would have had a much
> easier time if it had simply been flipped. Most of us don't care
> particularly about that country over there, so if he had made it so
> that the people in the country couldn't say Tigana, and announced to
> the rest of the world that it was now Lower Corte, everyone else would
> have gone along with it.
>
> Rebecca
Or he could simply make it so noone at all could say the name.
Gary Thompson
Joe Bernstein wrote:
> In article <447C7CF8...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
> > I understand your compulsion to read in chronological and/or series
> > order, and occasionally fall prey to it myself. Add another compulsion
> > to it: the more directly a current work seems to derive from earlier
> > literary works, the more strongly I want to read the literary
> > precursor(s) first. In this case there seems to be a stream of Brit
> > fantasy that derives largely from Mervyn Peake. I only got to _Titus
> > Groan_ about three years ago, and I think I'd like to read _Gormanghast_
> > before tackling Moorcock, Gentle, Harrison, Mieville and a few others. I
> > haven't done so because Peake, wonderful, complex and breath-taking as
> > TG was, is also the readerly equivalent of heavy lifting.
> >
> > On the other hand, part of me is trying to talk the rest of me out of
> > this and might well win out.
>
> Wow. This is definitely not how I do things; my approach to all
> that supernatural mystery stuff, where I'm perfectly happy to try
> *anything* if it'll keep me from having to come to grips with Laurell
> K. Hamilton, is quite typical. Indeed, there are authors whose major
> works I never read precisely because of my *chronological* compulsion.
> So I wind up encountering their big ideas as someone else rendered
> them.
>
Where'd that thread go on why people reread books? Having completely
missed out on important allusions to prior works the first time 'round
is one of my most common reasons.
>
> > One or two were so well-reviewed by de Lint among others that I'm
> > curious.
>
> Huh. I've found de Lint almost totally unreliable as a guide to
> what I'll like or find interesting - there doesn't seem to be any
> rhyme or reason to our disagreements. (For example, I'm tempted
> between what you say about Hoffman and my own take on Ann Downer
> [sp?] to say "He likes saccharine". But he's also much fonder
> of horror than I am, and anyway Downer isn't saccharine, she just
> also isn't the Great Fantasy Writer de Lint hailed her as.)
But you have to admit, he's certainly a /compelling/ reviewer.
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
>On Tue, 06 Jun 2006 08:18:25 -0700, r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 11:00:29 +0400, Alexey Romanov <alex...@mail.ru>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>On Mon, 05 Jun 2006 20:32:30 -0700, r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Mon, 5 Jun 2006 15:36:29 +0000 (UTC), Joe Bernstein
>>>> <j...@sfbooks.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>In article <92f8829p2n41ps65t...@4ax.com>,
>>>>> <r.r...@thevine.net> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Warning: There will be spoilers for [Guy Gavriel Kay's] Tigana below.
>>>>>
>>>>>Well, I've removed them, I think. But I've probably inserted some
>>>>>for his <The Lions of Al-Rassan>, sigh.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>> Which, once again, gets back to the fact that the spell seemed to have
>> a degree of nationality-identification built in to it, and yet they
>> never defined exactly what that identification was based off of.
>>
>> So, essentially the spell is described very simply, but the affects
>> that it has in the book do not match the description given. In fact,
>> the affects of the spell as described in the book requiring a high
>> degree of specificity.
>
>It seems to me to match what we see pretty precisely. Everyone able ot
>speak the name is either a Tyrant, a wizard, or born in Tigana before the
>conquest.
>
>> And, it's always seemed to me that the spell would have had a much
>> easier time if it had simply been flipped. Most of us don't care
>> particularly about that country over there, so if he had made it so
>> that the people in the country couldn't say Tigana, and announced to
>> the rest of the world that it was now Lower Corte, everyone else would
>> have gone along with it.
>>
>> Rebecca
>
>Or he could simply make it so noone at all could say the name.
Here's the essence of my issue with the spell as described. "Tigana"
is a random assortment of sounds, that has been given a meaning of
"that country over there". It is not the country, it is not the
culture, it's not the people who live there. It's just a random
assortment of sounds that have been given meaning. What this spell
has to do is differentiate between "Tigana", and any other close
approximation. For example, can people in the Palm still say "Ti"?
Can they say "Gan"? Can they say "Uh"? They will need to use those
sounds in other words, so I would say yes. So, I would assume that
someone could say Ti (pause) gan (pause) uh. Three separate
syllables. Now, the magic has to figure out when those pauses are
small enough that the person is actually saying the word Tigana.
And then, that same random assortment of sounds could mean other
things. It could be the name of a little girl's cat. She could have
made it up out of whole cloth. Does the magic distinguish between the
two uses? I'd argue that it would have to, since it's intent is to
eliminate the memory of the country.
So, while I admire what Kay was trying to do in this story, I think
that he didn't think through the issues as well as he could have. And
the biggest issue is that it is very hard to eliminate the presence of
a civilization, especially if it is still existent. Humiliate the
people living there, easy. Make them wretched, sure. Outlaw their
culture, language, religion, so that they are forced to assimilate
into a larger group, and destroy all the records of their history?
That might work. To say: "I am going to destroy you by renaming you
Lower Corte" just doesn't do it, in my book.
And finally, to a degree, most people just don't care what the people
of a country call it. Did WWI and WWII not happen, just because we
call it Germany instead of Deutschland? Are the Anasazi less of a
culture because we have no clue what they were called? And yet, that
is the basis of the whole Tigana story.
Rebecca
Peter Huebner
says...
>
> A similar experience, for me, was reading Lisa Goldstein's _A Mask for
> the General_ immediately after Margaret Atwood's _Handmaid's Tale_.
> Whatever the complaints one might have about Atwood's novel, the
> richness of the language and the density of her prose made anything
> afterward pale. I think Goldstein's book was okay, but I would have to
> read it again to be sure my appreciation wasn't so biased that it seemed
> less than it was.
>
> Randy M.
>
LOL. I've always found Goldstein so pale I had difficulty focussing on the
letters on the page. She may be a good writer, I dunno, but when I try to read
her books I get twitchy and I want to be gone and doing something that can
capture my interest a bit better. Like playing solitaire on the computer ...
-P.
--
=========================================
firstname dot lastname at gmail fullstop com
Gary Thompson
r.r...@thevine.net wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jun 2006 00:16:40 +0400, Alexey Romanov <alex...@mail.ru>
> wrote:
>
>
> Here's the essence of my issue with the spell as described. "Tigana"
> is a random assortment of sounds, that has been given a meaning of
> "that country over there". It is not the country, it is not the
> culture, it's not the people who live there. It's just a random
> assortment of sounds that have been given meaning. What this spell
> has to do is differentiate between "Tigana", and any other close
> approximation. For example, can people in the Palm still say "Ti"?
> Can they say "Gan"? Can they say "Uh"? They will need to use those
> sounds in other words, so I would say yes. So, I would assume that
> someone could say Ti (pause) gan (pause) uh. Three separate
> syllables. Now, the magic has to figure out when those pauses are
> small enough that the person is actually saying the word Tigana.
>
Ask an ultra-orthodox Jew if they'd be willing to say Y (pause) H
(pause) W (pause) H.
Gary Thompson
Joe Bernstein wrote:
> In article <e4i23v$e45$1...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
> Anthony Nance <na...@math.ohio-state.edu> wrote:
>
> > In article <446B5DBC...@spamblock.syr.edu>,
> > Randy Money <rbm...@spamblock.syr.edu> wrote:
>
> > >David Tate wrote:
>
> > >> In large part, I'm still recovering from the decade plus between my
> > >> personal "golden age" and when I returned to reading SF. From about
> > >> 1980 to about 1992 I really didn't read much SF at all, and most of
> > >> what I did read was by authors I already knew. So I missed an entire
> > >> generation of writers the first time 'round, as well as falling behind
> > >> on the classics, and am only slowly catching up, if at all.
>
> [rearranging]
> > >My gap ran from about 1984 to about 1990, though by '88 or so I was
> > >slowly returning to genre.
>
> > Like you and David, I have a gap in SF reading, roughly from
> > 1986 - 1995,
>
> Holy cow, is this a universal? I thought most sf fans other than me
> had been reading lifelong... Come to think of it, the steady stream
> of people here saying "Haven't read anything since my teens, where
> should I start?" should've convinced me otherwise, but it didn't.
>
Mine was shorter, but still, definitely, present: '96-01.
David Johnston
>>
>> Here's the essence of my issue with the spell as described. "Tigana"
>> is a random assortment of sounds, that has been given a meaning of
>> "that country over there". It is not the country, it is not the
>> culture, it's not the people who live there. It's just a random
>> assortment of sounds that have been given meaning. What this spell
>> has to do is differentiate between "Tigana", and any other close
>> approximation. For example, can people in the Palm still say "Ti"?
>> Can they say "Gan"? Can they say "Uh"?
Not in that order with nothing intervening. OK, I'm guessing here. As
I mentioned although I've read Tigana I remember nothing about it. But
given a magic spell I've got no problem with the idea that you can say
Ti and you can say Gan, but for some reason you can't think of
whatever comes after Ti and Gan.
Damien Neil
> 2. What it means to be "Tiganese" was never defined. Children living
> in Tiganese families outside of Tigana could still hear and say the
> name. Why children living in families in the newly-renamed country of
> Tigana after the spell couldn't hear and say the name is not clear to
> me, since I would consider them Tiganan as long as their families
> followed the Tiganan culture.
Because, firstly, it's magic, and magic gets to follow whatever rules
the author wants.
And secondly, the spell wouldn't be anywhere as effective if it didn't
cover the children of Tiganans. Brandin wants eradicate the name
"Tigana" from history; he also wants the people of Tigana to know what
he's doing. He wants them to see even their own children growing up to
call Tigana "Lower Corte". If this wasn't the case, he'd have been as
well off casting a spell that eradicated the name from *everyone*'s
mind, Tiganans included.
Besides, the spell dies when he does, which is a plot point: He needs to
outlive every person who still knows the name. If children knew it,
he'd be stuck.
- Damien
--
Lovely spam
From a pig
In my .sig
NewsGuy
Alexey Romanov
It may well depend on intent.
> And then, that same random assortment of sounds could mean other
> things. It could be the name of a little girl's cat. She could have
> made it up out of whole cloth. Does the magic distinguish between the
> two uses? I'd argue that it would have to, since it's intent is to
> eliminate the memory of the country.
But Brandin wouldn't care if there were such minor side effects.
> So, while I admire what Kay was trying to do in this story, I think
> that he didn't think through the issues as well as he could have. And
> the biggest issue is that it is very hard to eliminate the presence of
> a civilization, especially if it is still existent. Humiliate the
> people living there, easy. Make them wretched, sure. Outlaw their
> culture, language, religion, so that they are forced to assimilate
> into a larger group, and destroy all the records of their history?
> That might work. To say: "I am going to destroy you by renaming you
> Lower Corte" just doesn't do it, in my book.
He didn't stop at renaming Tigana: he destroyed every artifact of their
culture he could lay his hands on. Language and religion are the same in
Tigana as elsewhere in the Palm.