The "Best" sf and fantasy? (Repost)
Mark Dillon
[I have reposted this message to encourage argument... and in the hope
that others will talk about these writers.]
Any discussion of the best fantasy or science fiction books will run into
problems (what do we mean, for instance, by fantasy or science fiction?); the
field is so broad that few people will ever agree on titles. Yet I can offer
a partial list of books that have haunted me over the decades. Here are
some of my favourites, in no particular order:
J. G. Ballard: VERMILION SANDS. A series of stories set in a desert resort
in an unspecified era. A fascinatingly alien locale provides a psychological
stimulus to the haunted people who live there; more than just a backdrop,
it is almost a character in itself. Lonely people enact deep-seated
compulsions amidst surreal, dune-invaded houses. Sentient buildings,
bizarre insects and sand rays, living fabrics, sonic statues, organic
machines, compulsive loves, obsession and a lingering sense of loss fill
these stories like the light after an autumn storm. Add to this an
acutely visual sense of the bizarre, and you have a book that seems
like a Max Ernst painting come to life. Ballard is an amazing writer,
and all his books and stories have a lingering fascination
for me.
Olaf Stapledon: SIRIUS. This is one of the most moving books I have
ever read. An experimental attempt to breed intelligent dogs results
in a being that is neither human nor animal; he has no place in this
world, yet he must find a way to live that allows him to grow on his
own terms. His relationship with a human child who grows into a woman
as unique as he is, in her own way, is the central thread of the story.
This is something rare--a genuinely speculative tragedy and a disturbing
attempt to see an alien mind from its own perspective.
Gene Wolfe: THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS. Many people love Wolfe's
BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, but I prefer his books from the 1970s, such as
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR DEATH AND OTHER STORIES AND OTHER STORIES, and
this one. They have an anger and a chilling power that he never quite
recaptured. CERBERUS is composed of three linked novellas, set, for the
most part, in a decaying slave society, vaguely French in feeling and
mood. The first novella deals with a boy who grows up within this culture
oppressed by his deeply ambiguous relationship with an obsessive, self-
absorbed father. I won't discuss the other two--they have their own
surprises. As a whole, the book deals with troubling questions of
identity and memory, and is nowhere near as vaguely abstract as this
paragraph....
Mervyn Peake: TITUS GROAN, GORMENGHAST, TITUS ALONE. A fantasy
trilogy in which nothing fantastic happens. The people are
fully recognizable human beings who just happen to be more vividly
themselves than most people are. The setting, a vast, decaying
castle, has nothing of the supernatural about it. Yet these
books capture a sense of fantasy in a way that few fantasies
can. That sounds vague; I apologize. I find it very difficult
to describe books so monstrously labyrinthine and alive. The
author has been compared to Dickens, and he does have the
hallucinatory intensity of Dickens at his best, but his books
are uniquely his own. All I can say is that they are as strange
and wonderful as their titles.
H.G. Wells: THE WAR OF THE WORLDS. Do not disregard this book
because of its age; in some ways, it might have been written
yesterday. The story is surrealistically vivid--it almost feels
like Ballard before Ballard--and full of logically-established
surprises (some people say that the ending is a deus ex machina--
they are wrong: Wells has set up the basis for his ending long
before the fact). Ecological themes, imperialism, the brutal
debits and credits of evolution, alien biology and human
incomprehension: the subtexts are strikingly modern, and the
dreamlike grip of the narrative is undeniable.
M. John Harrison: THE PASTEL CITY. Harrison has written better
books--THE COURSE OF THE HEART is an amazing work that deserves
its own summary--but I have a special love for this one. Harrison's
decaying world is (for me at least) far more vivid and
stark than Vance's Dying Earth or Wolfe's Urth; it is far more
precise in its physical details, and its protagonist has a bleak
and fatalistic outlook on life that fits right in with the rugged
landscapes that oppress and reflect him. This is a "science-fantasy"
story full of pulp imagination and adventure, but written with far
greater skill and conviction than most. Harrison is an oddly
underappreciated writer who deserves the widest possible audience;
all of his books take the everyday world of rocks and rain and
streetcorners and show it to be an overwhelmingly alien place
that we never fully comprehend.
E.T.A. Hoffmann: THE GOLDEN POT and MASTER FLEA ("Der goldne Topf"
and "Meister Floh"). Anyone who picks up these stories from the
early 19th century is in for a surprise. Stories in which almost
every character has a secondary, mythic identity in a parallel
fantasy world. Stories in which this fantasy world seeps into our
own until it becomes hard to tell hallucinations from memories, or
dreams from the awkward, embarrassing things that took place just
that morning. Your enemies are actually your allies, your friends
are fleas and the eccentric next door may be your key to the lost
world of Atlantis, sort of. Possibly. Outrageous invention and
the sort of humour that would be called "surreal" a century later.
I could go on (and I have, haven't I?). Clark Ashton Smith's wonderfully
morbid and decadent stories set in lost worlds like Hyperborea and
Poseidonis, and in the far future continent of Zothique--an
acknowledged influence on Jack Vance, but I prefer Smith on the
whole. Check the Necronomicon Press site for some wonderful
collections of his work (http://www.necropress.com/).
Bruno Schulz's bizarre and dreamlike SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN
OF THE HOURGLASS and THE STREET OF CROCODILES. Doorways heal
and walls spread over empty rooms. The year sprouts an extra
month. The wrinkles on an old man's face become a swirling
vortex. Tailors' dummies receive their own account of Genesis....
Paul Park's SOLDIERS OF PARADISE, SUGAR RAIN and THE CULT OF LOVING
KINDNESS, set in another "Dying Earth" type of world like a
combination of Babylon and Calcutta: wonderfully dark and
compelling "science-fantasy" for literate adults.
R. A. Lafferty's wild FOURTH MANSIONS, John Sladek's hysterical
THE MULLER-FOKKER EFFECT. Unfailingly funny and jaggedly sharp
in completely different ways. Lafferty and Sladek are nowhere
near as popular as they should be--why? Why? I've been asking
that question for twenty years now.
Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, by far the best
science-fiction teleplay I have ever seen and, along with THE WAR
OF THE WORLDS, perhaps the most inventive and disturbing tale of
alien invasion.
David Lindsay's A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS. People have dismissed this book
as an extended allegory, but I consider it one of the most vivid
evocations of an alien world. Fascinating, too, is its message,
a rejection of romanticism in favour of a starkly bleak, "realistic"
view of life... fascinating because this rejection is set within a
story brimming with gorgeously romantic imagery. A very fruitful
paradox.
Avram Davidson's THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR (apparently part of
an incomplete trilogy, but it stands perfectly well on its own). If
you liked the atmosphere of Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN, do not
miss the Davidson.
C. L. Moore's stories of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry,
from WEIRD TALES in the thirties--I consider her, along with
Clark Ashton Smith, one of the best writers to contribute to
that magazine.
Gore Vidal's MESSIAH, one of the best sf novels from the fifties
and just as chilling and sad today.
And if you can read French, don't miss the stories of Marcel
Schwob (Borges before Borges), or Marcel Brion's utterly
surreal novella LES ESCALES DE LA HAUT NUIT, full of vivid
oneiric imagery. And Paul Feval's LA VILLE VAMPIRE, a truly
funny spoof of the gothic novel that seems more Hoffmannesque
than Gothic. Yet for all the jokes and satire, there is a scene
set in a vampire city as eerie and fantastic as anything dreamed
up by C. L. Moore.
I could go on.....
Mark Dillon
Mark A Mandel
: J. G. Ballard: VERMILION SANDS.
Just a nitpick, but it may help. IIRC, the stories are set in
"Vermi<ll>ion Sands", with a double "L", which puns on the color name
(with one "L") and wealth. And if you're looking for the stories or
references to them, especially by Web search, spelling is critical.
-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
Philological Busybody
a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
--
If you're reading this in a newsgroup: to reply by mail,
remove the obvious spam-blocker from my edress.
jg
of them.<g>
So have you developed a working definition of SF or fantasy, or is it more
that it doesn't much matter?
To my taste much, but not all, of what list would roughly be considered
fantasy, or more properly *fantastic* literature. Any thoughts on more
trad, more recent SF books? I'm looking for some "new" classics to catch up
to the current state of the art...
Mark Dillon <dq...@FreeNet.Carleton.CA> wrote in article
<7ad268$h...@freenet-news.carleton.ca>...
>
> [I have reposted this message to encourage argument... and in the hope
> that others will talk about these writers.]
>
> Any discussion of the best fantasy or science fiction books will run into
> problems (what do we mean, for instance, by fantasy or science fiction?);
the
> field is so broad that few people will ever agree on titles. Yet I can
offer
> a partial list of books that have haunted me over the decades. Here are
> some of my favourites, in no particular order:
!!major snippage!!