February's Fabulous Feast Of Fully Formidable Fiction

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

I abandoned "The Dragon Waiting" by John M Ford because I just couldn't engage with the writing. Started "Chronicles of Shadow Valley" by Lord Dunsany.

Bought the Ballantine edition of the Dunsany as soon as it came out, with that attractive Bob Pepper cover --

But almost the only thing I remember from it is the wicked innkeeper. I had a special fondness for the next (and final) full-length Dunsany book that Ballantine published, The Charwoman's Shadow.

[Fried Egg]

Originally Posted by Extollager

Bought the Ballantine edition of the Dunsany as soon as it came out...

That's the edition I have (although I certainly didn't buy it when it came out!)

[Connavar]

Im reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Im reading so slowly, maybe 50-100 pages per week but still enjoyable book with fine writing. No lame dark continent clichè naturally.

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by Fried Egg

That's the edition I have (although I certainly didn't buy it when it came out!)

Rereading this book, I doubt that I could completely distinguish the satisfaction of reading what Dunsany wrote from the pleasure of reading this particular copy. That goes for some other books that I've held on to for so many years (and through quite a few relocations).

But really, even if I reread some long-familiar story (say one of Lovecraft's) in a new presentation, I'm sure part of the pleasure is the sensation of connecting with an old-time favorite.

I don't think there's anything wrong with this being an element of one's literary enjoyment, provided that one doesn't make excessive claims for a work based really on the personal memories that one brings to it. I suppose that experienced readers are often pretty well able to allow for this.

(Likewise, sometimes one may be unduly harsh in commenting on a reread former favorite. C. S. Lewis says something somewhere about people avenging themselves on their adolescences -- or something like that....)

[D_Davis]

When We Were Executioners, by J.M. McDermott

Sometimes there aren't reasons for things; sometimes things just are. This is true for the characters and story depicted in J.M. McDermott's book, When We Were Executioners, and true for the book itself.

Thus far, The Dogsland Trilogy is the polar opposite of high, epic fantasy. I'm not quite sure what the opposite of epic is, but in this case the narrative is super small and extremely personal, almost to the point of it being a work of pointillism.

The Dogsland Trilogy is low fantasy, very low, and also very urban. I'm not talking about urban in the sense of a Neil Gaiman or Clive Barker urban fantasy. This isn't cute-goth, or weird alt-London, or steampunk. It's urban in the sense of it taking place in the inner-city; it's urban in the same way that The Wire is urban. It's about the lives of a few people trying to get by, it's about whores and drug dealers, cops and criminals, addicts and politicians, all trying to live their lives with the cards they were dealt, while all around them the city, their very environment, chews them up and spits them out.

And the chewing gets nasty. McDermott punctuates this book with a few scenes of extreme, grotesque violence, violence that has a point, and violence that hits hard. It is graphic and hard to read, but never gratuitous. This is not violence in the context of action, or titillation, or excitement. These depictions of violence serve to illustrate the consequences of living in a city like Dogsland.

When you get right down to it, there isn't a lot going on plot-wise. It's basically a direct continuation of the first book, Never Knew Another, almost to the point of it being the same book. Things happen, but there isn't a grand, sweeping narrative with an exciting dramatic drive keeping the pages turning. It is, rather, a very small story about people, their lives, their love, and their survival.

And so what's the point of the book? What's the point of it being a trilogy? I'm sure if you simply examined the plot of the entire thing, you could easily tell the story in a single volume, perhaps in the length of a novella; the plot is not complex, at all. But some things don't need points, or reasons. Some things just are. This book exists simply to read about and spend time with a few fictional characters, not completely unlike people you might know, save for some of them being shape-shifters and of-demons. It exists to be read, and isn't this the ultimate purpose of all fiction?

[gully_foyle]

I finished Robots of Dawn by Asimov. A bit denser and wordy than the original series, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Not sure what to read next. Idly riffling through a treatise on Brisbane by Matthew Condon, but it assumes a degree of familiarity with the city that I don't possess.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by gully_foyle

I finished Robots of Dawn by Asimov. A bit denser and wordy than the original series, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Agreed. Some people dismiss all of Asimov's later writing, and things like Robots and Empire and Foundation and Earth (while I still liked them last I read them) are almost certainly are a step down, but Foundation's Edge and Robots of Dawn, while different, seem to me to be worthy of their great predecessors.

[dask]

I enjoyed his later fiction, more so than the swellheaded nonfiction that appeared in his mag. I might be the only person alive who liked the way he tried to meld his Robot/Foundation material into a single --- can't think of the word, so "thingy" will have to do.

[GOLLUM]

Originally Posted by Connavar

Im reading Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. Im reading so slowly, maybe 50-100 pages per week but still enjoyable book with fine writing. No lame dark continent clichè naturally.

Interesting...

It will be good to read your overall thoughts on this classic of African literature.

You may also want to try and get a copy of Naghuib Mahfouz's quite brilliant EPIC saga The Cairo Trilogy. I have a Library of America copy in HB...currently I'm committed to my reading project on Charles Dickens but may take time out from this to revisit and review this work in the latter part of February.

Another that springs to mind J.M. Coetze's Disgrace..a very powerful work....and as mentioned previously Nardine Gordimer's The Conservative.

[J-Sun]

Originally Posted by dask

I enjoyed his later fiction, more so than the swellheaded nonfiction that appeared in his mag. I might be the only person alive who liked the way he tried to meld his Robot/Foundation material into a single --- can't think of the word, so "thingy" will have to do.

Superseries? I did at the time in terms of what it did in my head conceptually to extend the scope of it all. But the main problem even then was that R&E was basically written just to do that, rather than having something in itself that made it need to be written and accomplishing the welding job along the way. He did a pretty nifty job of doing it but there wasn't room for much else in the book besides that. And, while I love Asimov's dialogue-centric style, I wasn't so much a fan of Lady Gladia's looong monologue (if I recall her name correctly) - the speech before some governing body or whatever it was. It did get us Giskard and the zeroth law, though, which was interesting. And, of course, I was very entertained by F&E and loved one part of it especially (no spoilers but, IIRC, it was on/in the moon) but didn't much care for the ending. And, of course, at the time, I withheld any final verdict because I thought he would go somewhere with it but, of course, he never did. So, IIRC, I liked the later stuff at the time, but less in retrospect. But it's way past time for me to re-read them again and maybe I'll be able to be a little more definite.

And I loved the editorials and the occasional Viewpoint article and so on. And the occasional short story, too. My impression of them was that he sort of got forced into writing the later fiction books which he felt was hard work, whereas the non-fiction was easy (and short fiction at least less demanding than novels) and he had fun and that carried through in my impression of them.

[woodsman]

Finished Perdido Street Station - China Mieville and what a cracker it was. I love his style, such beautiful evocative description that seems to have gone out of fashion more generally. Certainly looking forward to diving into Bas-Laq in the near future.

Up next; Either Danse of Dragons (which scares me a little - worried if its not upto the rest as rumoured) or something from Sanderson, Dick or possibly Rothfuss.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by dask

I might be the only person alive who liked the way he tried to meld his Robot/Foundation material into a single --- can't think of the word, so "thingy" will have to do.

No, you're not the only one; I do, as well, though I will agree that there are some problems with it (even some rather serious ones). J-Sun has pointed some of them out in his post; I would also say that, in order to make it work at its optimal level, Asimov would have had to go through and recast the work to a more consistent level and tone... which would have been an enormous lot of work for rather slender returns.

As for what to call such a thing... while "superseries" is probably the closest popular thing to a name, I must admit I don't care for it much; especially as such series are not unique to Asimov here. Cabell did it with his "Biography of the Life of Manuel", which subsumed the bulkl of his writing to that time (eighteen volumes in the Storisende edition; twenty-five if one goes with the original releases, and that doesn't include a few scattered bits and pieces from other volumes as well*); Balzac did it with his Comedie humaine (which he, too, never lived to finish, yet as it stands it would fill at least a couple of shelves on a bookcase, and covers a wide variety of types of story, not to mention various historical periods); and Moorcock is probably the most notable for such a thing, with tales of the multiverse (this ultimately includes nearly every piece of fiction he has written, which is somewhere around 100 books or better; even his lengthy Eternal Champion cycle could be said -- depending one one's frame of reference -- to be a subset of it, or another title for the entire corpus). Even Robert A. Heinlein was working toward that with his final books (see, for instance, the "People in this Memoir" section of To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which picks up on various threads linking not only the main bulk of his science fiction, but his juveniles as well).

I'm not sure what the best term would be, really, as there are subseries within the overall arc; and each of these can even include a variety of genres as well. What it amounts to is the gradual coalescing of a unified aesthetic vision of a unique and original writer, which gives it both its fascinations and strengths, and its multitude of weaknesses and inconsistencies; but seeing such a grand vision take form and send out different branches and implications is, to me, one of the joys of literature....

*Actually, Cabell's "Biography" may cover even more genres than Balzac's "Comedie", given that it includes not only fiction but essays, plays, and a volume or two of verse as part of its structure....

[Extollager]

Originally Posted by j. d. worthington

As for what to call such a thing... while "superseries" is probably the closest popular thing to a name, I must admit I don't care for it much; especially as such series are not unique to Asimov here. ...he gradual coalescing of a unified aesthetic vision of a unique and original writer, which gives it both its fascinations and strengths, and its multitude of weaknesses and inconsistencies; but seeing such a grand vision take form and send out different branches and implications is, to me, one of the joys of literature....

So what's your well-informed take on Lovecraft's eventual perception of his writings? My impression is that he saw most of them, originally at least, as stand-alone works that used some common references, sometimes as little more than window-dressing. This is not a fault.

Do you think that, if he'd gotten a neat idea for a story using so-called Cthulhu Mythos references, he would have regarded it as an obstacle if he'd "needed" to "contradict" something "established" earlier? I'm trying to think of an example. It seems to me there are really so few hostages to fortune in his stories that the situation wasn't likely to arise. That is, I don't think he tied himself down to very many specifics that might have complicated things later on.

All right -- let's suppose that he got an idea for a weird tale of the length and detail of, say, "The Shadow Out of Time," that would have had an undersea element that would have "contradicted" something suggested by "The Call of Cthlhu" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Do you think this would have been much of an issue for him?

I'm really wondering if he would have -- if he did see his stories as a cycle (let alone a super-cycle including the so-called Dreamlands stories).

But you'd have a better take on the matter than I.

[Vertigo]

Chilled out with a light Vorkosigan romp Cetaganda by Bujold. A little disappointing compared with the previous ones I have read. I know these adventure SF stories need some suspension of disbelief and that's alright and I do enjoy them. However Bujold pushed my credulity a little far a few times in this one. Also I found her writing to be poorer with some really clunky passages in places.

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by Extollager

So what's your well-informed take on Lovecraft's eventual perception of his writings? My impression is that he saw most of them, originally at least, as stand-alone works that used some common references, sometimes as little more than window-dressing. This is not a fault.

Do you think that, if he'd gotten a neat idea for a story using so-called Cthulhu Mythos references, he would have regarded it as an obstacle if he'd "needed" to "contradict" something "established" earlier? I'm trying to think of an example. It seems to me there are really so few hostages to fortune in his stories that the situation wasn't likely to arise. That is, I don't think he tied himself down to very many specifics that might have complicated things later on.

All right -- let's suppose that he got an idea for a weird tale of the length and detail of, say, "The Shadow Out of Time," that would have had an undersea element that would have "contradicted" something suggested by "The Call of Cthlhu" and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Do you think this would have been much of an issue for him?

I'm really wondering if he would have -- if he did see his stories as a cycle (let alone a super-cycle including the so-called Dreamlands stories).

But you'd have a better take on the matter than I.

Without meaning to take the thread off-topic for too long... yes, I think that, as far as such incidentals are concerned, HPL would have ignored them with at most a momentary qualm if he thought a different story could have benefited from such. After all, he made it clear that he liked the fact there were certain disagreements between his various stories, not to mention his own work and that of others who utilized his mythos or whose own growing myth-patterns he used (such as CAS, REH, etc.) He saw this as, in a very genuine way, analogous to the variant versions in genuine mythologies and folktales, evolving over a period of time and in different milieus. In that way, it gives to such work a greater air of verisimilitude than any artificial myth-pattern which is too rigidly maintained. (Which is one of the fundamental reasons why, despite some really quite good prose at times, and some marvelous ideas now and again, Derleth's "Mythos" tales have a dreadful tendency to fall flat on their silly faces, with rare exceptions -- "The Lamp of Alhazred", for instance, which is more a poignant, poetic tribute to HPL than anything else, and as a result manages to actually capture some of that air of mystery and the numinous which Lovecraft's own work could achieve.)

The unity in Lovecraft's work was more thematic, and dealing with certain ideas, motifs, images, and poetic sensations and impressions, rather than the sometimes pedantic minutiae that so many "series" writers become so involved in... and this, I think, remains one of its strengths. I think the best way to put it in short compass is that, originally, he had no such overarching pattern in mind, but he did have a number of such recurring images, ideas, etc., which carried a certain set (albeit a rather complicated one) of associations for him, hence signifying much more than one might at first realize; and over time these began to coalesce with his more rigorous development of his philosophical and aesthetic views, until what had before been largely (I think) unconscious gropings toward a nebulous vision became much more clear and began to crystallize into a genuinely unique aesthetic achievement. His own realization of this was further spurred, I would argue, by his work on Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he began to bring all the disparate elements of his aesthetic of the weird into a unified whole as well; and realized that, in order to make his work true art (in the sense of genuine self-expression), he needed to combine his love of New England (especally Providence) and history with his cosmic vision and philosophy of materialism and cosmic indifferentism; and it came to its full fruition about the time he resubmitted "The Call of Cthulhu" to Weird Tales, as seen by his letter to Farnsworth Wright, in which he says:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos at large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form -- and the local human passions and conditions and standards -- are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown -- the shadow-haunted Outside -- we must remember to leave our humanity -- and terrestrialism -- at the threshold.

-- SLII.150