Electronic OtherRealms #23 Winter, 1989 Part 8 Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach All Rights Reserved. OtherRealms may not be reproduced without written permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be distributed only if the return address, copyrights and author credits remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used in any way without the permission of the author. All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the original author. Much Rejoicing Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Copyright 1989 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes Episode 8: Special All-Nice Installment If you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all. --the generic mother Reviewing is not an objective business. You read books, react to them, and articulate your reactions so that others can make an informed decision as to whether or not they'd be likely to enjoy those books. But we all have blind spots. There are writers I simply can't stand; but people whose taste I respect praise these writers to the stars. And there are writers that, in my eyes, can damn near do no wrong. One of the latter is Harlan Ellison. You've been warned. Angry Candy Harlan Ellison Houghton Mifflin, 0-395-48307-7, $18.95 Friends and neighbors, Ellison has a new collection of short stories out, Angry Candy, and it's scrum-dilly-icious. Each of these stories is a raw blast of pure emotion, dramatized and set down in black and white to remind you that the world is full of folks like you, who laugh, cry, hurt, bleed, and love. Ellison hammers his theme in again and again, the one he's been hammering for a couple of decades, the cliche that can never be repeated often enough: "You are not alone." He's also derived some corollaries about the responsibilities accruing to a not-alone being. Frankly, I don't think there's anything better a short story can do. Go get this book, even if you have to test-drive a car to do it. Writing Science Fiction Christopher Evans St. Martin's Press, 0-312-01849-5 Fair warning: if you aren't interested in becoming a writer, skip this section. Okay, I presume the rest of you are? Good. Now I'll tell you something you already knew: you can't learn how to write from a book. There are a books on writing out there, most of them published by Writer's Digest but none of them is going to make you a writer. The only way to do that is write. Still, there are some of them that can teach you how to avoid some of the dumber things new writers do. Books like John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, or Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. Which brings me to Christopher Evans's book Writing Science Fiction. This is the first book specifically for the would-be science fiction writer that I can praise wholeheartedly. Like the Strunk and White, it's thin, but densely packed. Like the Gardner, it covers adequately what can be told and tells you that it can't tell you the rest. It isn't perfect. There are topics that Evans might have covered in more detail--such as the business side of writing--but these are covered in other places. Evans doesn't have anything really new to say about writing; but he gives it all the right spin for writing SF. In short, if you are born to be a writer (and not, say, a sewer guard or a professor of biochemistry), then Writing Science Fiction is as likely as any other book I've seen to get you over the hump. If not, nothing will. The Brothel In Rosenstrasse Michael Moorcock Carroll & Graf, 0-88184-406-3, $6.95 Carroll & Graf, whom I've praised before for bringing the finest works of the '70s back into print, are still breaking rules. Hasn't anyone ever told these people that good taste is a sure way to go bankrupt? Now they've gone and brought out Michael Moorcock's The Brothel In Rosenstrasse, a "novel of decadence" set in Waldenstein near the end of the last century. If Waldenstein doesn't sound familiar, don't worry. There's no reason it should. It's just one of many tiny European countries that disappeared during the period from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I, squashed between the Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The hero, von Bek, is a remittance man, a noble son paid by the family to stay away from the ancestral grounds. He has seduced--or been seduced by?--the very young daughter of a fine family of Waldenstein, Alexandra. At first, the novel seems to be about their erotic adventures, both in and out of the titular Brothel. But ever-present entropy sets in; Waldenstein is wracked by rebellion and its lovely capital is laid under siege. Beauty is destroyed. Nobles take up residence in a brothel. Innocence corrupts first itself and then corruption. As the city walls collapse, love is lost...or betrayed. The whole is told in some of Moorcock's finest writing, language for which you could cry or die. Von Bek tells his own story, from his deathbed, years later. The language allows the story to blend, sometimes imperceptibly, with his thoughts on his final circumstances, and his relationship to a strange, sullen, and grouchy manservant. The relationship reflects young von Bek's relationship with Alexandra, and the whole makes a strong comment on faith and betrayal in human relationships. Recommended reading, but not for everybody. To Warm The Earth David Belden Signet SF, 0-451-15485-1, $3.95 About a year back, I praised David Belden's first novel, Children of Arable. His second novel is out, now, and it's a sequel. (I hear the "uh-oh" chorus. Yeah, I worry about sequelitis, too.) To Warm The Earth is not, however, a direct sequel. It takes place in the same universe, but a generation later and with a different cast. Belden starts with some strikes against him: he introduces major characters more than halfway through the book; he slips occasionally between past and present tense for no discernible purpose; and he's writing a goddess-worship religion. There's nothing wrong with this last, but it's extremely au courant, almost as cliche at this point as the Celtic milieu for adventure fantasy. But there's good stuff, too. In Children, Belden created a human-hegemony Universe large enough to warrant further exploration; here, he explores corners of it not touched before. Particularly Earth. Earth is struggling through a new ice age, brought on by what the inhabitants call the "New Clear Winter." They practice magic and religious ritual to hasten the end of the ice age and the return of summer. One old priestess, however, has a plan to hurry the natural processes along. Her fellows think she's crazy; her own chosen successor doesn't believe in her; but she knows the plan can work. There are numerous marvellous scenes, here. The heroine finds herself trying to introduce pagan rituals into a sanity-and-sanitation-oriented space station society, and the conflicts that arise from it swing wildly from funny to touching. To Warm The Earth may never find its proper audience. It's packaged to look like a space-going romance novel, and I've seen it stuffed in with the gothics in the supermarket. But hell, at least it made it to the supermarket... Mona Lisa Overdrive William Gibson Bantam, 0-553-05250-0, $17.95 If you care that William Gibson has a new novel, you've probably either already bought Mona Lisa Overdrive or decided to wait for the paperback. But just in case you're sitting on the fence.... The good news and the bad news are both "it's more of the same." It's set once again in the "Sprawl" future of Neuromancer and Count Zero. While we might have hoped that Gibson would turn to something new, it's hard to complain: he's still growing as a writer, and MLO is better than its predecessors.. It has flaws in common with them, though. In particular, it's hard to identify with Gibson's protagonists; he succeeds in making them so realistically gritty that they don't make easy fantasy-identification figures. But for readers who don't always want easy fantasy-identification figures, it's worth the effort. Gibson has a sense of plot that won't quit; the four plot threads of MLO tie together much more neatly and less artificially than the three of Count Zero. He's achieved a control of language found only in a few writers--Vance, Bester, Delany--and uses it as a precision tool. Also, we find out what happened to Case after the Straylight run, though the answer won't please the hacker-ethic cyberbabies out there. Because there are so many plot threads, it's hard to give a sense of what Mona Lisa Overdrive is about. The four plot threads begin like this: a warped artist is pressured into receiving a very strange guest; the daughter of a Yakuza leader is sent to England for protection; a penny-ante whore is offered the seeming chance of a lifetime; and the biggest media star on Earth returns from drug rehab to commune with the loas. Yes, those all tie together. Don't ask how--it would be telling. Other Americas Norman Spinrad Bantam 0-553-27214-4, $3.95 If you haven't read the Full Spectrum anthology, go get a copy; it contains two masterpieces, Fred Bals' "Once in a Lullabye" and Norman Spinrad's "Journals of the Plague Years," which if it doesn't win every award this field has available for 1988, there just plain ain't no justice left anywhere. Spinrad is another of those writers like Ellison who make my jaw drop and my typing fingers wither with envy. I'd kill three close relatives to be able to write things like Bug Jack Barron, The Men in the Jungle, Riding the Torch, or last year's Little Heroes--all novels that have been unconscionably ignored by the American public. But, ignored though his novels may be, Spinrad's short work is even less well-known. His novels are like riding the world's biggest roller-coaster, in near darkness, without a seatbelt: you go up and down at incredible speeds and sometimes the world turns upside down, and occasionally you lose your lunch. But his short work, especially in the novella length, is like one of those huge waterslides: one long, fast ride, one slope down (though with bumps in it), an immense splash when you get to the bottom. And you're always afraid some joker will pull the plug out of the pool. Spectra Books has collected four of Spinrad's finest novellas into a nifty book called Other Americas. They are: % an all-too-believable future New York, where one mistake or one bad break can put you on the street, fighting for a subway to sleep in and subsisting on "people kibble"; % an uproariously funny "final solution" to the world's terrorism problem, agreed on in principle and action by a dead Soviet Premier and a satyrized American President; % a haunting and touching glimpse of post-Space Age America, the "lost continent" ; and % the final attempt of the Reaganista CIA to co-opt exiled dissident writer Norman Spinrad. Spinrad has a talent for making, if not happy, at least positive, endings come out of impossible situations. All these stories cast light on what the American dream is really about. All will leave you feeling a little bit better about being human. Autumn Angels Arthur Byron Cover Pyramid SF, 0-515-03787-7, $1.25 Closet Classic: Science Fiction, like rock and roll, is a safe harbor for a largish number of looneytunes--people like Robert (Mindswap) Sheckley, Douglas (Hitchhiker's Guide) Adams, and Damien (Striped Holes) Broderick. (That last is a new writer, and if you haven't seen Striped Holes, it's very silly. Trust me.) I don't know if it's because SF readers are an accepting lot, or if maybe we're just a bunch of looneytunes ourselves. But in the '70s, looneytunehood reached what may have been its all-time peak with the advent of one Arthur Byron Cover. He burst on the publishing world, like unto a wet raspberry, with a book called Autumn Angels, and there has never been anything like Autumn Angels before or since. Imagine the far future. No, not that: the far, far future. Mankind's problems are all solved; we have become something better, Godlike Humanity, able to bring anything we wish into existence by wishing for it, and getting rid of anything we don't like by wishing it into the anti-matter universe. Alas, though, godlike humanity has no imagination. Rather than rushing off boldly to go where no godlike man has gone before, they adopt roles and live lives of drab sameness for millennia. This is the situation when the fat man, the demon, and the lawyer decide to get godlike humanity moving again. What does godlike humanity lack that mere humans had? Depression. So Autumn Angels is the story of three crazies out to depress the entire godlike human race. But wait! There's more! Because every character in the book is a Reference. The fat man, for example, is Sidney Greenstreet. The lawyer is Doc Savage's aid, "Ham." If you've read John Myers Myers's Silverlock, you know the pleasant game of guessing at the references in a book of this type. Silverlock, however, was a hifalutin tome about litterchure. Autumn Angels is about nothing but itself; further, you don't have to read a buncha litterchure to get the references. They're all from pop culture--like the Big Red Cheese, or the Insidious Oriental Doctor. Unless Pyramid reissues it, you may have a task finding this one. But make the effort. Read it and weep--tears of laughter. Mentioned in passing and recommended: The Art Of Fiction, John Gardner Full Spectrum, Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, eds. The Elements Of Style, Benjamin Strunk and E.B. White The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas R. Adams Mindswap, Robert Sheckley Striped Holes, Damien Broderick