The only basis for selection is that I liked these books: there are no rules of subject or genre, though my tastes do affect what turns up here. So far, there are pointers to books by Neal Stephenson, Pablo Neruda, Karen Elizabeth Gordon, Patricia McKillip, Nancy Mairs, Mary Gentle, Colin Greenland, Avram Davidson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, Peter Beagle, Lucy Sussex, and Amanda Cross.
For those of you who like classification, the Stephenson, McKillip, Gentle, Greenland, Le Guin, Gaiman, Sussex, and Cross books are fiction; Neruda's is poetry; the Gordon and Davidson books are nonfiction, though of very different sorts; and the Beagle anthology contains both fiction and nonfiction.. There's also a review of a somewhat different travel narrative in one issue of Quipu.
Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson. The main character, Sangamon ("S.T.") Taylor, is obnoxious, knows it, and uses it in a good cause, namely preventing mega-corporations from poisoning the eastern US, and particularly Boston Harbor. He gets a small salary and plenty of notoriety as the only technical person working for an activist environmental group. The action heats up when one of the corporations he's fighting starts fighting back directly instead of with lawyers and press releases. Stephenson is better known as a science fiction writer; this book is more of a thriller, with plenty of action, characters with a bit of depth, and a lot of good lines.
Odes to Common Things, by Pablo Neruda (translated by Ken Krabbenhoft). I found this book courtesy of the New York City Transit Authority, which runs posters with short poems, sometimes only a line or two. The poetry is a nice break from the ads for podiatrists and rice, and the warnings about not riding between cars. They quoted part of "Ode to the Cat," and mentioned this collection. I'd call this everyday poetry: reading it is neither intoxicating n or challenging. This is poetry as basic, and as necessary, as bread. Neruda praises furniture and flowers, tools and food, and always returns to his themes of ordinary human life, water, stone, air, light. "Ode to the Chair" ends
War is as vast as the shadowy jungle. A single chair is the first sign of peace.
Here, also, Neruda praises the dictionary:
Dictionary, you are not a grave, a tomb, or a coffin, neither sepulchre nor mausoleum, you are preservation, hidden fire, field of rubies, vital continuity of essence, language's granary.
A lot of Neruda's work speaks to me; this book frequently speaks for me, and gives me another reason not to let my Spanish get too rusty:
O pan de cada boca, no te imploraremos, los hombres non somos mendigos de vagos dioses o de ángeles oscuros: del mar y de la tierra haremos pan, plantaremos de trigo la tierra y los planetas, el pan de cada boca, de cada hombre, en cada dia....
The Well-Tempered Sentence, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Ticknor and Fields, New Haven and New York, 1983), is subtitled "A punctuation handbook for the innocent, the eager, and the doomed." I'm not recommending it because I think you need help with punctuation--though almost everyone needs help with commas, for which there are no consistent rules--but because it's a fun book.
The fun is in the examples. Many are simply amusing, while some hint at untold (and probably unconceived) stories:
"Dear Rosie and Nimrod,
Thank you for the hospitality, the cold bathwater, the stale beer, and everything."
The book starts with simple sentences, punctuated only with a period, like "Let us settle our indifferences." For the question mark, Gordon gives us "How can I get in your way when you don't even have one?"
"A comma comes between two independent clauses joined by coordinating or correlative conjunctions, such as and, but, nor, neither, yet, for, or so.: "I haven't done it yet, so I don't think I could do it again.'" "No comma is used with a restrictive, or essential, clause: 'All laughter that is out of place will be stuffed into a nearby drawer.'" This isn't all you need to know, but it's helpful, and some of the fine points, like punctuating lists, are subject to long debate. Gordon has written a handbook, which will fit conveniently on a shelf, and which answers questions quickly. A history and encyclopedia of punctuation would be a different work, and would probably not interest enough people to be worth the author's while, except as a labor of love.
In addition to her own examples, Gordon includes excerpts from a variety of other works. This is where I first heard of Stella Gibbons's delightfully weird Cold Comfort Farm, which is used here as an example of punctuation, and paragraph breaks, in printed dialogue.
If you don't believe in being entertained while you learn, you might want another reference book. For the rest of us, the nineteenth-century woodcuts are a nice touch, and Gordon's text provides as clear an exemplar of English punctuation as I have seen.
The Changeling Sea, by Patricia McKillip, looks at first glance like a fairly standard fantasy novel. There's a girl, Peri, who sweeps floors at the inn, wonders why her father drowned, and worries about her mother, who hasn't done much since he drowned except stare at the sea. Peri doesn't go home much: she spends her nights at the abandoned cottage that used to be the home of the local wise woman. There's a king's son, who rides a horse along the sea, and visits the abandoned cottage. And there's a sea monster. The fisherfolk aren't particularly worried about the monster, but they want the gold chain that binds it.
In order to get the gold chain, the fishers hire a wizard: his payment will be part of the gold. Peri doesn't pay much attention to the arrangements: she has her work to do, and is tired from spending so much time talking to the prince.
The prince isn't in love with Peri. All he wants in life is the land under the sea, which may not exist. Peri isn't in love with the prince, either: she knows about romance, and romantic dreams, but they don't have much to do with her. She has found a friend, to fill some of the loneliness after her father died and her mother drifted, but she knows it won't last.
In the best fairy tale tradition, things do work out happily: for the prince, the king, Peri, her mother, the wizard, and even the sea monster. Nothing is quite as we might expect, but it all fits together, and McKillip's prose is wonderful, simple and delightfully crafted. In that respect, it resembles Tolkien's: the words are as they should be, English used by a master of her craft, precise and never pointlessly fancy. No ichor here, no eldritch anything, just periwinkles.
I'd like to recommend all of Nancy Mairs's books of essays. Plaintext happens to be the one that came to hand the other day, when I went to the bookshelf looking for something a bit more nourishing than the newspaper or a mystery novel.
Mairs is also a poet, and has the poet's care for the right word. She isn't showing off her language, she's using it, and using it well, to tell the reader things she finds interesting or important.
Some of these essays discuss small things. "On Having Adventures" starts in a restaurant, with a friend of hers who wants to write but doesn't think he can, because he doesn't have adventures to write about. So she shares her latest adventure, Siamese fighting fish someone gave her. In my life, tropical fish in tanks are a form of interior decoration. But Mairs makes me see them, not only as alive--I knew that--but as changeable and thereby interesting.
Mairs has some important things to say. She thinks and writes from the particulars of her life, which include being a middle-aged heterosexual woman with multiple sclerosis. She doesn't try to hide or gloss over her disease, but it isn't at the center. This book isn't about multiple sclerosis as a disease, though it does have something to say about living with MS, or with any chronic problem. It has more to say about living with what healthy people will think about a person with MS. Mairs brings up some good questions: for example, why do we expect a handicapped person to be calm and accepting of her lot, when healthy people are allowed to rage against fate?
Nancy Mairs is a feminist. She writes about the difficulty of loving men, more precisely, of being expected to love men: not as part of life, in the way that men are expected to love women, but as the center and purpose of female life. She writes about living up to patriarchal expectations, or trying to, and almost dying as a result. Mairs knows that depression has a physical component, but she also knows that it often comes from outside events or pressures: she locates her episodes of depression in terms of a society that told her that she could not be both a woman and a writer, and that refused to discuss her illness honestly because the doctor assumed that women were hysterical and would develop any symptom they were told about. In the end, though, as Mairs remarks, "There is one world--this one--and I have made it. No hope of a cure, ever, for being me."
Plaintext, by Nancy Mairs, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 1986, ISBN 0-8165-1337-6.
Despite the title, Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed is science fiction, not fantasy. I could strip the plot down for you, and it wouldn't look like much, just a variation on the Campbellian hero's journey: a Terran envoy to a newly discovered planet travels, gets involved in local political intrigue, finds that the planet and its people aren't what she thought they were, risks her life a few times, and eventually gets back to where she started at a crucial moment. But plot isn't the point: I could probably pull that trick on most good novels.
You can read science fiction for the plots, but it gets old quickly. There aren't that many plots in the universe. My real interest, and I think that of most readers, is the people who are in the story, and the places it happens, and how the characters make their choices. Science fiction just happens to have a wider range of people and places, and occasional unusual choices: the characters don't have to be human, and there's an infinite number of foreign places to tell travelers' tales of. Mary Gentle is using that classic plot for a classic science fictional reason: it's a good way to show off an interesting world. Books like this are the opposite of space opera: rather than an exotic setting as the excuse for a predictable plot, the plot is largely a way of traveling around an exotic setting. That doesn't mean that nothing happens, or even that the plot is predictable. It means that the exposition is buried in the plot, and the unpredictable events often depend on nonhuman social structures and ways of thinking.
Lynne de Lisle Christie, the envoy, has an interesting attitude toward aliens. She prefers non-humanoid species, because it's easier to remember that they're alien. Those who look human, we expect to act human, and the differences can be shocking. Of course, as time goes on, she does think of the Ortheans as human, even while she becomes familiar with the differences, ranging from attitude to biology, and she occasionally stumbles because she forgets that they aren't human.
One piece of advice, passed along from a friend who read the book before me: don't read the glossary until you've finished the book. It gives away things that you'll be happier waiting to learn.
Colin Greenland's Take Back Plenty is a romp. It's not an old-fashioned book, but it is reminiscent of older science fiction. You don't have to have read those stories to enjoy this book, but it's more fun if you have. Greenland's orbital space habitats are thoroughly modern, but his Mars and Venus owe a debt to what went before.
Tabitha Jute is a hauler. She owns one old cargo spaceship, the Alice Liddell, which she loves jealously, and not much else. The ship keeps asking her to fix the axis lock crystal, and reporting the probability of failure; Tabitha worries about it, but she never has the money when she's someplace where they can do the job.
Since she's broke, Tabitha is willing to take on some odd jobs. Since she's a pulp hero, it helps that the man trying to hire her is good-looking. She picks Marco Metz up at a party (or he picks her up), while trying to figure out where she's going to get the money to pay a fine before the police confiscate her ship. The fine is for throwing a Perk into a canal, after several dozen of them--these particular aliens always travel in large groups--tripped her up. After Tabitha and Marco spend the night together, he hires her for a mysterious mission, promising to get her the money before the deadline.
There are several kinds of aliens in the Solar System. The most important are the mysterious Capellans: they have the star drive. They brought the other species, ranging from the Eladeldi who serve as their bureaucrats and police to Altecean second-hand dealers to the Perks underfoot, who seem to have gotten to our solar system the same way rats got to some of the Pacific islands, by sneaking onto ships when nobody was looking. The Capellans have given humans a hyperspace drive that puts the entire Solar System within easy reach--and erected a barrier just outside the orbit of Pluto, so that humans can go no further. It's not clear how long the Capellans have been in our system: they were waiting for Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
Plenty was built as an orbital habitat by the Frasque, who showed up around the same time as the Capellans, offering riches, asking for help in building their structures, and somehow hypnotizing huge numbers of people into volunteering. Despite the mind control, that seemed all right until the Capellans declared the Frasque to be enemies of everything decent, and chased them out. Plenty is now a run-down shell, rather like the sleaziest area of any large city, a place full of businesses that aren't allowed elsewhere, drunken haulers, a few tourists, and rabid survivalists whose presence is never quite explained: maybe they just like being able to buy guns.
Large parts of the plot seem to just happen, as Tabitha's mission keeps changing: Marco wants her to go to Plenty. When they get there, he changes the mission, and by then she doesn't have much choice: people are shooting at them, she's outnumbered, and she still needs the money. Marco is so good at inventing plausible stories that it never occurs to him to just tell Tabitha the truth, but he's astonished (or pretends to be) when she stops believing him: "I lied to you before, this is what's really going on" works, but not forever. Nobody and nothing in this book, except Tabitha and maybe the Eladeldi police, is quite what it seems at first; Marco's layers of stories and excuses are just part of that.
While Marco is never quite believable, the situation is: people really do behave like this, getting into fights for odd reasons, concealing their motives, and doing things they know are foolish because they're desperate, or horny, or simply bored. I didn't believe in Greenland's Venus for a moment, but I enjoyed it: he's done a delightful job of combining old pulp sf with current science.
Avon paperback, 1992, ISBN 0-380-76395-8
Adventures in Unhistory, by Avram Davidson
"Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like." That isn't literally true--Davidson assuredly knew the wombat as well as the dragon--but it's a good place to start on these adventures. Their less-than-precise subtitle is "conjectures on the factual foundations of several ancient legends." I say "less than precise" because Davidson doesn't limit himself to the phoenix, dragon, mermaid, and werewolf, the voyages of Sindbad and the fabled land of Hyperborea, where it was always summer: he finds room for the dodo, the mammoth, headhunting, and Aleister Crowley.
These adventures were written out of love: Davidson had a vast fund of learning, only some of which found its way into his fiction. Reading this book is like sitting down for an afternoon with an eccentric uncle: he tugs on his beard, he digresses--does he ever digress!--and he tells you more than you dreamed possible about the mandrake.
Davidson repeatedly quotes Charles Fort's statement "In measuring a circle, one begins anywhere," but he lacks Fort's easy acceptance. Oh, he quotes the oddest sources, but he tells us when he thinks they're wrong. He even, in the notes at the ends of chapters, tells us when other people think he's wrong, a degree of intellectual honesty few writers can match. The other theme of these adventures is "Only, maybe not," after an explanation of something has been offered; Davidson then proceeds to offer another answer, or several others, often taken from an old sailor's guide, The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, or from Pliny the Elder, Sir Thomas Browne, or any number of other obscure sources.
The facts here are delightful, delightful at least to those of us who suspected there must be something behind the legend of the phoenix, more than symbolism useful to Christian writers or even a traveler's tale. (A traveler's tale is something fascinating that you know better than to believe. Only sometimes you should. John de Mandeville was a notorious liar, but there really is a mammal in Australia that lays eggs, and there really were Africans who thought salt was worth its weight in gold. They had a point: you can't eat gold.) Davidson had a real talent for spotting, or inventing, connections: starting with the fact that Bonnie Prince Charlie was more Polish than Scottish, he leads us to Genghis Khan, Borneo and the headhunters there, and even the New York City Police Department. And it all fits together, and now I know about all the Indias of the ancient geographers--you've heard of the East and West Indies, but did you know that Ethiopia was once considered part of India? It made sense: ancient Europe knew that if you traveled a long way past the Nile, you would eventually come to a very hot place, where the people had dark skin and there were crocodiles in the rivers. That was Ethiopia, and that was India. Fine, then Ethiopia is part of India. No problem. And Prester John was a Christian king who lived in India; therefore, the Christian emperor of Abyssinia was Prester John. Any Portuguese sailor could figure that out, and did.
I don't want to summarize the whole book for you; I couldn't do justice to Davidson's style anyway. The nice people at Amazon.com say that this book is out of stock at the publisher, but you shouldn't give up that easily; try your local library, or look around at science fiction conventions and used book stores.
Adventures in Unhistory, by Avram Davidson, illustrated by George Barr. Owlswick Press, Philadelphia, 1993. ISBN 0-913896-29-2.
Unlocking the Air and other stories by Ursula K. Le Guin is described on the back cover as a collection of mainstream stories. Defining mainstream is, however, even trickier than defining science fiction: it's either a matter of attitude, a way of writing--at which point you're shoehorning both the most straightforward of current writing and the most experimental into the same box--or it's a definition-by-exclusion, that which does not fit into any other clearly defined genre: if it isn't category science fiction, mystery, horror, fantasy, historical fiction, western, or romance, it must be mainstream. About all the label means here is that Le Guin is widely known as a writer of excellent science fiction, and there are a lot of stories in this book that aren't science fiction.
There are also some that are. "Ether, OR" was first published in Asimov's, a science fiction magazine. It's a delightful tale about, and in the voices of, the people who live in an otherwise ordinary town that doesn't stay put. It's always somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but the inhabitants are never sure which side of the mountains they'll be on from one day to the next. The voices are all interesting--even the man I'm sure I wouldn't like if I met him, not evil in the usual sense but small of imagination precisely as he envisions himself as a man with big, important plans for the town, is well-drawn and plausible, in his motivations and why he stays in such an odd place. Obviously, Ether isn't for everyone: there's a lot to be said for being able to count on the seashore that you walked on yesterday still being there this morning. But maybe it isn't quite as necessary as most of us think. "Olders" is clearly fantasy, with its people who are clearly human, except for one major difference. Not any of the fantasy formulas--there are no quests here, nor any magicians or elves--but fantasy nonetheless. Being the writer she is, Le Guin isn't saying "look at these strange creatures" but "here's how these people live, and what happens between them and 'ordinary' humans."
Some of the stories are definitely "mainstream" fiction, as I understand that term: they are about people living on Earth today, with no fantastic or mysterious elements. "The Professor's Houses" and "Ruby on the 67" are like that: they didn't startle me, and people really are like the characters in these stories, but I feel that I know people a little better for reading them. "Standing Ground" appears to be about abortion, but that's not its main concern, I think. Like a lot of Le Guin's fiction, it's about the stories we tell ourselves and each other, and how they can both create our lives and keep us from seeing them, and each other, clearly. (That sounds like a heavy burden to put on an 11-page story, but the story carries it with grace and without difficulty for the reader; think of it as a day in the lives of a few people, particularly a woman and her mother, if you prefer.)
If Le Guin were Latin American, "The Spoons in the Basement" and "Daddy's Big Girl" might be called magical realism. In each story, odd things have happened, and are described matter-of-factly. "The Poacher" and "A Child Bride" both work with old, familiar stories, so old that we are all expected to learn them and not to believe in them. The narrator of "The Poacher" takes a long time to figure out what story he's in, because his own childhood was almost bereft of stories, but when he does, he adds a twist to it, a twist that might easily be overlooked when this version is written down: the story makes room for him, but he can't really affect how it comes out.
"The Creatures on My Mind" could easily be dismissed as not being a "story" at all, as an unnamed narrator tells us about some creatures met and remembered, three incidents in a life, incidents in which not much happens. But they do matter, to the person telling about them and to the reader.
Unlocking the Air may say "mainstream" and be labeled simply as "fiction" by the publishers, but you'll probably find it in the science fiction section at the bookstore, because Le Guin is known as a science fiction writer and because "mainstream" and "fiction" are such nebulous categories: it's easier to shelve this book with her other books, hoping her usual readers will buy it--as I did--than to leave it swimming by itself under "fiction" or "literature." [Harper, 1996 (paperback 1997), ISBN 0-06-017260-6 or 0-06-092803-4.]
Peter S. Beagle is known mostly for one novel, The Last Unicorn. It's an excellent work of fantasy, well worth looking at, but Beagle had--has--more than one book in him.
The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzche is a collection of short work, none of which I've seen elsewhere. The stories and essays go back as far as 1957; the story the title refers to, "Professor Gottesman and the Indian Rhinoceros," is copyright 1995. The professor meets the rhinoceros when he visits a zoo for the first time in his life, at the request of his visiting niece; it is quite amiable on almost every topic, but insists that it isn't really a rhinoceros. Things happen, but the story is more a character study, a rather engaging one, of three reserved intellectuals, one of them a unicorn.
There's another unicorn tale in here, this one involving a tapestry; a werewolf, rather a period piece than anything else; a variation on the old tale of inviting Death to a party; and a charming fairy tale about a prince who married a naga.
Tucked in as well are three very early realistic stories; they didn't impress me, but the completist and the student will be glad to have them, and the rest of us can skip to the nonfiction at the end.
"My Last Heroes" is an essay in praise of two men Beagle admires: the pitcher Warren Spahn, and the French singer Georges Brassens, filtered through memories of what it was like to be listening to baseball at 10, and wandering through Paris alone in one's twenties without speaking any French. It didn't make me want to find Brassens's music--which might disappoint Beagle--but it made me feel I knew a bit more about Beagle, and what can make a hero last when other heroes are shown to have feet of clay. "D.H. Lawrence" in Taos is less about Lawrence than about the people who knew him, and how they felt about all the pilgrims who came to Taos in search of Lawrence. Finally, "The Poor People's Campaign" is proof that all too little has changed in this country--we have as much poverty as ever, and less hope of it changing. It's well-written and personal, a piece of journalism turned history without anything having changed except the names of the people making the speeches. Werewolves are easier to take than hunger.
This is from a small press: Tachyon Press, 1459 18th Street #139, San Francisco, CA 94107; (415) 285-5615. ISBN 0-9648320-7-0.
The Scarlet Rider is Lucy Sussex's first novel. The Scarlet Rider is also the title of the book-within-a-book, an anonymous Victorian melodrama discovered in the only surviving copy of a weekly newspaper published in an Australian gold-mining town.
Mel is an unemployed recent university graduate when she runs into her almost-stepmother, Nola, whom she had last seen at her father's funeral. Nola offers her a job as a literary detective--find out who wrote The Scarlet Rider, so the press Nola works for, which publishes only female writers, can publish the book.
Mel is sworn to secrecy, and particularly warned about a fellow-researcher who has his own plans for the book. If he's the villain of the piece, it's a very everyday villainy, a reminder of the saying that academic politics are vicious because the stakes are so small.
In the course of researching Victorian literature, police, and gold-mining, Mel finds out quite a bit about her own past. Nothing shocking--this is a novel in the old-fashioned sense, not a work of horror.
I picked this book up at a science fiction convention--and bought it because I'd met the author at another science fiction convention--but the only remotely fantastic element is the significance of the heroine's dreams. It can be read as science fiction, but mostly in the same sense that, say, Jane Austen or George Eliot can be read as science fiction: Sussex trusts her reader to pick up the necessary information about Victorian Australia, just as another writer might drop in only hints about an imagined Mars.
Mel narrates her own tale, in the third person, intercut with excerpts from the invented Victorian novel and brief omniscient-author descriptions of Mel sitting down to write. This could easily have been pretentious or awkward, but Sussex makes it work, almost transparently: not metafiction but something closer to Mel's journal, although clearly written to be read by someone other than the narrator.
This edition is from Tor Books, New York, 1999, ISBN 0-812-54923-6; the first edition appeared in 1996.
I bought Amanda Cross's latest novel, The Puzzled Heart, on the strength of its being her new book--I like her work that much, and I wanted to see what would happen to Kate Fansler, her amateur detective.
What happens is that Kate's husband is kidnapped, and Kate is told that she must publicly renounce her feminist principles if she ever wants to see him again. Kate is understandably flustered, but calls her friends, one of whom is now a professional private detective. In the course of dealing with her troubles, and in order to give her an excuse to visit certain people, Kate is induced to borrow a puppy, who plays a rather large part in the book without, I'm happy to say, ever behaving in the unnaturally clever way of some animals in mystery novels.
I don't want to give away the plot here--suffice it to say that suspicion lights in various places, and the characters are developed further, but that the book stands up on its own. It's also a more traditional mystery than some of Cross's recent work: I enjoyed The Players Come Again and An Imperfect Spy, but many mystery fans might not, particularly if they didn't already know and like the main characters.
Ballantine Books, New York, 1998; ISBN 0-345-41884-0.
Note: the book pick of the fortnight is guaranteed to remain on its own page for at least 14 days before moving over here as an older review; it may stay there considerably longer, since this isn't a standard review column, and I only mention things that I both enjoyed and feel like writing about.
Copyright 1996, 1997, 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig; last revised 28 August 1999.
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