Jack Finney
About Time
About Time is a collection of short stories, many of which, unsurprisingly, focus on time. It is a quiet, relaxing collection of tales, some tragic, some arguing that this really is a just universe, and others with a more cheerful resolution, but all entertaining.
"The Third Level"
This may be his most well-known short story or at least it's the one I most often remember reading in various anthologies.
The presidents of the New York Central and the New York, New Haven and Hartford railroads will swear on a stack of timetables that there are only two. But I say there are three, because I've been on the third level at Grand Central Station."
I think you can extrapolate from these opening lines the nature of the tale. It's something many, including me, have indulged in, what the psychiatrist later in the tale tells him is a "waking-dream wish fulfillment." It's a very enjoyable tale, which I never skip whenever I encounter it, unlike so many other tales, even though I know the twist at the end.
=====
"I Love Galesburg in the Springtime"
Something strange is happening in Galesburg, Illinois. A business man from Chicago came to town to build a factory, which would have meant tearing down some very old buildings and increasing traffic along some quiet residential streets. He had the town council's promise to make the necessary zoning changes and was ready to build. Then, one night, he goes for a walk down a quiet street and almost gets run down by a streetcar, or so he says. The problem is that there are no longer any streetcar tracks because the streetcars disappeared years ago. Was he drunk? Hallucinating? In any case, the deal is off. No factory will be built, by him anyway.
And, what about the old, old mansion that didn't burn down because the fire was put out by someone, only no one will claim credit for it. However, a neighbor who was obviously dreaming at the time tells a story that the fire was put out by the fire department which used horse-drawn fire engines. Of course, those engines had been retired years ago. It's unfortunate that the place didn't burn down, says local developer, because if it had, he would buy the property and get it rezoned for an apartment building. But, now, it would cost too much to tear it down, almost as much as to restore it, in fact.
And, those fine old elms on Cedar Street won't be cut down after all, or at least not for some time, because the man who had the power saw and had planned to cut them down is in the hospital with a broken leg. He was run down by a car that hadn't been made for many decades. It's appearance is so striking, the police are sure they will find the car involved in the hit-and-run accident very soon.
Perhaps. . .
=====
"Such Interesting Neighbors"
This is one of the classic themes in time travel stories. Anyone who has read a number of time travel stories will figure this one out within the first couple of paragraphs. New neighbors appear: they seem to lack knowledge of the simplest things, they have a strange accent, and they are vague about where they came from. They also have some interesting ideas about what the future will be like.
Enuf said?
=====
"The Coin Collector"
Ever wonder what would have happened if you had made a different decision, such as not going to college or going to college, or married someone else. "The Coin Collector" suggests one way of handling the problem--find an alternative universe. Finney later expanded this into a novel titled The Woodrow Wilson Dime.
Al's marriage is suffering a bit--loss of interest on his part--and his wife is getting upset at the way he seemingly pays her little or no attention. An ad about the fun and profit that can result from coin collecting intrigues him for a time. After making a routine purchase of a paper at the newsstand, he finds himself in a slightly different universe. It was the coin that triggered the transfer--well, the coin and his recognition of it as being different somehow.
Fortunately, habit guides him to his home which is in a different location. There he discovers that something else is different--his wife. She is someone he never met in the other world, and she is gorgeous. His interest in her reawakens her interest in him--same problem as in his other world. His gradual lack of interest (the honeymoon is over, he told his first wife) caused her to react the same way his first wife did.
However, after a brief period, his interest begins to wane and . . . and then . . .
=====
"Of Missing Persons"
What happened to Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce? Charlie Ewell thinks he found out. What seems fascinating and possible after a couple of beers and late in the evening seems quite different in the bright light of the next day. But, Charlie is curious, so he decides to visit the Acme Travel Bureau anyway. If they decide he's the "right type," they will bring out a folder from beneath the counter, a folder they just made up as a joke. It's about a trip, one-way, to a planet called Verna. Why go to Verna?
Life is simple there, and it's serene. In someways, the good ways, it's like the early pioneering communities here in your country, but without the drudgery that kill people young. There is electricity. There are washing machines, vacuum cleaners, plumbing, modern bathrooms, and modern medicine, very modern. but there are no radios, television, telephones or automobiles. Distances are small. and people live and work in small communities. They raise or make most of the things they use. Every man builds his own house, with all the help he needs from his neighbors. Their recreation is their own, and there is a great deal of it, but there is no recreation for sale, nothing you buy a ticket to. They have dances, card parties, wedding, christenings, birthday celebrations harvest parties. There are swimming and sports of all kinds. There is conversation, a lot of it, plenty of joking and laughter. There is a great deal of visiting and sharing of meals and each day is well filled and well spent. There are no pressures, economic or social, and life holds few threats. Every man, woman,and child is a happy person.
It almost sounds too good to be true, and that's what bothers Charlie.
=====
"Lunch-Hour Magic"
Ted likes to go prowling around the various little shops in the vicinity during his lunch hour. Then, one day, he discovers a little store he hadn't seen before--The Magic Shop. Inside, he finds the usual merchandise expected in a "magic shop,". . . except for a pair of magic glasses. These glasses allow one to see through one layer of cloth. With them he can see people outside walking around in their underwear. Naturally he asks if there are stronger glasses, one that could see through two or three layers of clothing. The store owner says that he gets a lot of requests for those glasses, and he will ask the salesman the next time he comes in.
On subsequent trips Ted discovers other "helpful" items, and he tries them out on his fellow employees, who are helpless against the power of those talismans. All goes well, until Ted discovers that Frieda, a fellow employee, is also a lunchtime prowler and has discovered The Magic Shop.
=====
"Where the Cluetts Are"
Harry is an architect, who has some strange ideas about houses--they have souls--and he doesn't work with clients who really aren't interested in working with him in designing their home. The Cluetts are rich and have decided there are no limits on the cost of building their new home.
The problem is that the Cluetts are not interested that much in building a home, but in building a showpiece for their yacht-building business. They will live mostly in New York City and only spend time in the house, throwing grand parties for the rich and influential. In this way, they hope to make an impression on the rich and influential so that when they are interested in getting a yacht, they will remember the Cluetts.
Harry has just about decided that he's not going to take them on as clients when Ellie Cluett discovers a set of blueprints for a Victorian era house designed by Harry's grandfather. Sam and Ellie fall in love with the house instantly and tell Harry to build it, regardless of the cost.
All goes well and the house is built, but then. . .
I think the title is wrong.
=====
"The Face in the Photo"
Inspector Ihren is a very determined and persistent police officer. So, when a number of petty crooks, suspects in various crimes, can't be found, he gets upset. What upsets him most is that they seem to have completely disappeared and for a long period of time. Inspector Ihren knows that they have hiding places and can stay hidden for a while, but for many months? Not a clue, whisper, rumor, gossip? Something is wrong.
Then, one day, he discovers an old photograph with a familiar face and acting on a hunch, he begins viewing old films about sporting events and discovers another face. But this suggests something that is inconceivable. However, the projectionist makes an offhand comment about someone else who just viewed that film--a Professor Weygand from the university. A bit of nosing around and the Inspector discovers the good professor gave a paper recently about some aspects of time, and while he didn't understand most of the paper, the inspector got the idea that the professor thought time travel might be possible.
Perhaps it was time to talk to the professor.
=====
"I'm Scared"
Unlike Charles Fort who collected information about strange and inexplicable happenings that seemed unconnected and that had no apparent effect on the world, the anonymous narrator in this story finds that his collection of odd and anomalous events may point to something far more serious. It almost seems as though people and events sometimes come loose from their appointed place in time and appear elsewhen, sometimes with tragic results. And, they are happening more often lately.
=====
"Home Alone"
Charley is home alone as his wife and daughter are off somewhere. On the sixth day he glances upwards and sees a hawk in the sky, motionless as it lays on the updraft from the warm concrete below. Suddenly Charley wants to do just that: not fly in a powered plane but just hang there quietly and see what's below. And, the only way to do that is with a balloon. So, Charley begins to study up on balloons and then decides to make one.
Sometimes one's dreams do come true . . .
=====
"Second Chance"
The anonymous narrator is a young man who is obsessed with a classic automobile: the Jordan Playboy. He finds one, battered and beaten, and spends most of his time (left over from school, chores, and part-time job) restoring it. Finished, he takes it out for a drive along a deserted stretch of an old two-lane road that's been bypassed by the new four lane highway. And, then some strange things begin to happen. But, the strangest doesn't happen until months later, long after his first (and ultimately last) jaunt in the restored Jordan Playboy.
It's too bad the universe isn't really like this.
=====
"Hey, Look At Me!"
Peter Marks may have discovered why some people come back as ghosts.
This is not a book to be raced through and then put aside. It is best taken in small doses and savored before moving on to the next tale, a few days or weeks later. It has a long shelf life and won't spoil if ignored for a day or two or three. Read each story and then let your mind play with it for a while.
Showing posts with label FINNEY Jack. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FINNEY Jack. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Friday, May 2, 2014
Some novels, stories, and poems that I revisit regularly
The following is a short list of some novels, poems, and short stories that I reread irregularly for the most part. There's no particular order or schedule to this. One day I will get the urge to read something once again, and so I dig it out, settle down in my recliner, surrender to the cat's demand for some lap time, and leave this world for a while. There are others whose names I can't come up with right now, but sometime tomorrow or the next day, week, month, year, I will see one in my bookcase or read a comment by somebody about it and that's it--time for a another visit.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
These three books are the ones that I have read more than any other work on my reread list, which is strange because I prefer SF to fantasy. Right now, I am slowly reading The Silmarillion and expect to get to the others this year.
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
This may be the second most reread book on my list. I first read it while an undergraduate sometime during the years 1958-1961. It was for a lit course, and I had to choose a novel from a list provided by the professor to write the outside paper on. I choose this one, probably because of the title, and I haven't stopped reading it since. I am now on my second hardbound copy as the first one is falling apart.
Life in a TB sanitarium doesn't sound that enthralling, but once begun, I found it impossible to put down. It's partially based on a true experience. Mann's wife went to a sanitarium for several months because of a lung complaint. While visiting her, Mann underwent some testing and, like his hero Hans Castorp, was told that it would be a good idea if he signed himself in. Unlike Castorp, he refused and, instead, wrote a novel about the experience.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
I've reread this a number of times, perhaps as often as The Magic Mountain, or close to it anyway. I consider this book a very significant work because it first introduced me to Dostoyevsky (I think I've read everything of his that's been translated into English), secondly it introduced me to Russian literature, and thirdly it was my introduction to foreign literature. Moreover, I may not have selected Mann's The Magic Mountain a year or so later. and instead. I might have gone with an English language work instead.
Raskolnikov believes himself to be a superior person who is not bound by the laws of human society. The average person is someone who, if he kills someone, is caught and punished. On the other hand, superior people, such as Napoleon, can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and are seen as one of the Great Ones. He kills a pawnbroker, someone useless and odious, to prove that he belongs among the elite.
Jack Finney
Time and Again
Simply the best time travel novel ever written. Time is a mental construct, and the mind can be fooled into traveling into the past if the environment is appropriate and if the individual can be convinced that he or she is actually living at that particular time. It's a mystery and a romance, and Finney provides sufficient information, along with appropriate photos, to make this a special work, and one that leaves me wishing this was real.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
A marvelous amalgam of mystery and history and religious conflict is all that this is. Brother William of Baskerville, a monk, has been called to the monastery to act as a mediator and a witness between two conflicting religious ideas of importance. While there, he is persuaded to investigate a series of murders in the monastery, and his name should provide a vital clue as to his methods. If he is unable to solve the murders, the Inquisition will be called in, and nobody wants that. Adso or Adson of Melk is his amanuensis. The novel is supposedly an edited copy of Adso's recounting of their stay at the monastery.
PD James
Anything
I've read all of her mysteries a number of times, even though I have figured out the villain shortly after getting into the story. The plots and characters are complex, carefully drawn out. There seldom is the expected denouement at the end where Commander Adam Dalgliesh gathers all the suspects in the drawing room and slowly works his way around the room, pointing his finger at each in turn. Instead, the process is a slow one, developing throughout the novel as each suspect is considered and then dismissed until it's a matter of uncovering the final bit of evidence rather than uncovering the identity of the guilty party.
Jane Austen
Everything including her juvenilia.
I tried reading Pride and Prejudice several times, but I always stopped reading. Then at age 42 I returned to graduate school in the English Department. In the first course I took, the reading list included Sense and Sensibility. I groaned a bit and then settled down to read it. I loved it and then went out to read everything else by her. I guess I had to mature a bit before I was ready for her. If I was forced to list my favorites among her works, I would say Persuasion would be No. 1 and Mansfield Park would be next. The others follow closely behind. It's been a while since I read them all, so I shall probably dust them off and settle down once again.
Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
This is one of my favorite post-holocaust novels, thanks to a Chaucer course I took a year or two prior to reading the novel. In the Chaucer course, we had to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (the language it was written in). I struggled mightily because I had always hated reading something that wasn't written in Standard English. I really didn't want to pay attention to the language; that was too much work. However, at the end of the course, leaving the classroom for the last time, I felt as if I had lost a world somehow that I would never return to.
A year or so later, I had to take my qualifying exams and The Tales was on the list. I decided to play it smart and bought a modern translation and settled down to read. However, something important was missing, and so I got out the Middle English text and happily reread it in Middle English.
What has this to do with Riddley Walker? The answer is simple: Russell Hoban has written the novel in what he speculates English would be like maybe 500 years from now after a nuclear war and during that period most people have been illiterate. Those few who could read and write learned from their predecessors and not from teachers or texts which would have kept the language unchanged. If I had not learned to accept non-standard English texts from the Chaucer course, I never would have finished the novel. The following is the opening paragraph. If you read it out loud, as you should do with poetry, you will find it much easier to read.
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I've made some other posts about Riddley Walker and some other works by Russell Hoban. You may want to check them out. Russell Hoban is a unique writer, with a wild imagination. Reading anything by him is well worth the time spent.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It too is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The locale seems to be somewhere in New Mexico, where monks at a monastery manage to survive as monks did during the so-called Dark Ages perhaps almost 2000 years earlier. And, along with their farm duties (they have to be completely self-sustaining) they also are dedicated to keeping records of the achievements of the past, even if they don't know what it is that they are painstakingly copying. They have faith that some day human knowledge will increase to the point that these arcane books and schematics and diagrams will be not only intelligible but also help to spark a resurgence of human learning.
Their task is much like that of the Encyclopediasts in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation series." However, the monks of the Order of Blessed Leibowitz do not have high tech aides and spaceships to travel about, but only sandals, and if they are lucky, a mule. The novel is really three novellas, set roughly centuries apart, with only monastery and the monks' task of preserving knowledge to link them. Well, there's always Benjamin, but he really can't be the Wandering Jew, several thousand years old, could he?
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
I'm never certain about whether this is a short novel or a long novella, so I will guess this time and call it a novel. It's the work by Conrad that I've read most often for I find it fascinates me, both in its description of the countryside, the inhabitants, and the Europeans who plague the inhabitants. It's a biting indictment of the treatment of the black Africans by the white Europeans who have come there supposedly to civilize and bring the benefits of European civilization and in reality end up brutalizing them in search of profit.
The POV character is Marlow, but the center of the novel is Kurtz Marlow has taken a job as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Far up the river is a trading outpost run by Kurtz, who has been amazingly successful in obtaining ivory for the company. Suddenly all shipments stop, and after a few months of silence, Marlow is ordered to take the steamer up the river to Kurtz's trading post. He is accompanied by the district manager and a group of ivory hunters and treasure seekers, along with a crew consisting of a few cannibals. Marlow becomes obsessed with the idea of Kurtz and only slowly does he realize that Kurtz is not only at the heart of darkness, but also he is the heart of darkness.
The film, Apocalypse Now, is loosely, very loosely, based on the novel--more of an adaptation than a recounting. The film is set in Vietnam during the war. Captain Willard, of the US Army, is sent up the Nung River into Cambodia to find Col. Kurtz and assassinate who has set himself up as a god among the local tribes people and is conducting his own brand of guerrilla warfare against the Viet Cong. While much of the novel has been changed for the film, I still found the film to be very close in capturing the tone or atmosphere of the novel--the absurdity and arrogance of the white invaders.
Something happened that I did not account for. I initially said that this would be a short list, something around ten, maybe even fifteen, but the list keep growing. I'm now at ten and I still have the same amount left. I guess I will end this here and continue with the rest on Part Two. I hope this doesn't turn out to be similar to those fantasy trilogies that reach double digits.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings
These three books are the ones that I have read more than any other work on my reread list, which is strange because I prefer SF to fantasy. Right now, I am slowly reading The Silmarillion and expect to get to the others this year.
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
This may be the second most reread book on my list. I first read it while an undergraduate sometime during the years 1958-1961. It was for a lit course, and I had to choose a novel from a list provided by the professor to write the outside paper on. I choose this one, probably because of the title, and I haven't stopped reading it since. I am now on my second hardbound copy as the first one is falling apart.
Life in a TB sanitarium doesn't sound that enthralling, but once begun, I found it impossible to put down. It's partially based on a true experience. Mann's wife went to a sanitarium for several months because of a lung complaint. While visiting her, Mann underwent some testing and, like his hero Hans Castorp, was told that it would be a good idea if he signed himself in. Unlike Castorp, he refused and, instead, wrote a novel about the experience.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment
I've reread this a number of times, perhaps as often as The Magic Mountain, or close to it anyway. I consider this book a very significant work because it first introduced me to Dostoyevsky (I think I've read everything of his that's been translated into English), secondly it introduced me to Russian literature, and thirdly it was my introduction to foreign literature. Moreover, I may not have selected Mann's The Magic Mountain a year or so later. and instead. I might have gone with an English language work instead.
Raskolnikov believes himself to be a superior person who is not bound by the laws of human society. The average person is someone who, if he kills someone, is caught and punished. On the other hand, superior people, such as Napoleon, can be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, and are seen as one of the Great Ones. He kills a pawnbroker, someone useless and odious, to prove that he belongs among the elite.
Jack Finney
Time and Again
Simply the best time travel novel ever written. Time is a mental construct, and the mind can be fooled into traveling into the past if the environment is appropriate and if the individual can be convinced that he or she is actually living at that particular time. It's a mystery and a romance, and Finney provides sufficient information, along with appropriate photos, to make this a special work, and one that leaves me wishing this was real.
Umberto Eco
The Name of the Rose
A marvelous amalgam of mystery and history and religious conflict is all that this is. Brother William of Baskerville, a monk, has been called to the monastery to act as a mediator and a witness between two conflicting religious ideas of importance. While there, he is persuaded to investigate a series of murders in the monastery, and his name should provide a vital clue as to his methods. If he is unable to solve the murders, the Inquisition will be called in, and nobody wants that. Adso or Adson of Melk is his amanuensis. The novel is supposedly an edited copy of Adso's recounting of their stay at the monastery.
PD James
Anything
I've read all of her mysteries a number of times, even though I have figured out the villain shortly after getting into the story. The plots and characters are complex, carefully drawn out. There seldom is the expected denouement at the end where Commander Adam Dalgliesh gathers all the suspects in the drawing room and slowly works his way around the room, pointing his finger at each in turn. Instead, the process is a slow one, developing throughout the novel as each suspect is considered and then dismissed until it's a matter of uncovering the final bit of evidence rather than uncovering the identity of the guilty party.
Jane Austen
Everything including her juvenilia.
I tried reading Pride and Prejudice several times, but I always stopped reading. Then at age 42 I returned to graduate school in the English Department. In the first course I took, the reading list included Sense and Sensibility. I groaned a bit and then settled down to read it. I loved it and then went out to read everything else by her. I guess I had to mature a bit before I was ready for her. If I was forced to list my favorites among her works, I would say Persuasion would be No. 1 and Mansfield Park would be next. The others follow closely behind. It's been a while since I read them all, so I shall probably dust them off and settle down once again.
Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
This is one of my favorite post-holocaust novels, thanks to a Chaucer course I took a year or two prior to reading the novel. In the Chaucer course, we had to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English (the language it was written in). I struggled mightily because I had always hated reading something that wasn't written in Standard English. I really didn't want to pay attention to the language; that was too much work. However, at the end of the course, leaving the classroom for the last time, I felt as if I had lost a world somehow that I would never return to.
A year or so later, I had to take my qualifying exams and The Tales was on the list. I decided to play it smart and bought a modern translation and settled down to read. However, something important was missing, and so I got out the Middle English text and happily reread it in Middle English.
What has this to do with Riddley Walker? The answer is simple: Russell Hoban has written the novel in what he speculates English would be like maybe 500 years from now after a nuclear war and during that period most people have been illiterate. Those few who could read and write learned from their predecessors and not from teachers or texts which would have kept the language unchanged. If I had not learned to accept non-standard English texts from the Chaucer course, I never would have finished the novel. The following is the opening paragraph. If you read it out loud, as you should do with poetry, you will find it much easier to read.
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I've made some other posts about Riddley Walker and some other works by Russell Hoban. You may want to check them out. Russell Hoban is a unique writer, with a wild imagination. Reading anything by him is well worth the time spent.
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It too is set hundreds of years after a nuclear war. The locale seems to be somewhere in New Mexico, where monks at a monastery manage to survive as monks did during the so-called Dark Ages perhaps almost 2000 years earlier. And, along with their farm duties (they have to be completely self-sustaining) they also are dedicated to keeping records of the achievements of the past, even if they don't know what it is that they are painstakingly copying. They have faith that some day human knowledge will increase to the point that these arcane books and schematics and diagrams will be not only intelligible but also help to spark a resurgence of human learning.
Their task is much like that of the Encyclopediasts in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation series." However, the monks of the Order of Blessed Leibowitz do not have high tech aides and spaceships to travel about, but only sandals, and if they are lucky, a mule. The novel is really three novellas, set roughly centuries apart, with only monastery and the monks' task of preserving knowledge to link them. Well, there's always Benjamin, but he really can't be the Wandering Jew, several thousand years old, could he?
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
I'm never certain about whether this is a short novel or a long novella, so I will guess this time and call it a novel. It's the work by Conrad that I've read most often for I find it fascinates me, both in its description of the countryside, the inhabitants, and the Europeans who plague the inhabitants. It's a biting indictment of the treatment of the black Africans by the white Europeans who have come there supposedly to civilize and bring the benefits of European civilization and in reality end up brutalizing them in search of profit.
The POV character is Marlow, but the center of the novel is Kurtz Marlow has taken a job as the captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Far up the river is a trading outpost run by Kurtz, who has been amazingly successful in obtaining ivory for the company. Suddenly all shipments stop, and after a few months of silence, Marlow is ordered to take the steamer up the river to Kurtz's trading post. He is accompanied by the district manager and a group of ivory hunters and treasure seekers, along with a crew consisting of a few cannibals. Marlow becomes obsessed with the idea of Kurtz and only slowly does he realize that Kurtz is not only at the heart of darkness, but also he is the heart of darkness.
The film, Apocalypse Now, is loosely, very loosely, based on the novel--more of an adaptation than a recounting. The film is set in Vietnam during the war. Captain Willard, of the US Army, is sent up the Nung River into Cambodia to find Col. Kurtz and assassinate who has set himself up as a god among the local tribes people and is conducting his own brand of guerrilla warfare against the Viet Cong. While much of the novel has been changed for the film, I still found the film to be very close in capturing the tone or atmosphere of the novel--the absurdity and arrogance of the white invaders.
Something happened that I did not account for. I initially said that this would be a short list, something around ten, maybe even fifteen, but the list keep growing. I'm now at ten and I still have the same amount left. I guess I will end this here and continue with the rest on Part Two. I hope this doesn't turn out to be similar to those fantasy trilogies that reach double digits.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Favorite SF Novels
The following is a list of my fifteen favorite SF novels . All are permanently on my must reread list, even after three or four reads. This is not a list of the fifteen best SF works, although I like to think some of them might be. Time is the ultimate judge, though; those that persist in being read should be at least favorites in any Best List. (Actually, there are sixteen in the list. I came up with another that I just couldn't leave out and I couldn't decide which one to drop. So the list of fifteen of my favorites really has sixteen.)
The list is in alphabetical order, by author, and is in no way an attempt on my part to rank them.
1. Isaac Asimov: The Caves of Steel
Asimov combines two genres here, the SF story and the police procedural. It's centuries in the future and humanity has become, for the most part, agoraphobic. The thought of going outside terrifies most humans. The cities have become huge conglomerates, completely walled over. Most people spend their lives indoors, seldom even glancing out one of the rare windows that still exist. The exceptions are the Spacers, those humans who have left earth and settled on a number of planets. While they come across as being almost god-like, they also have their flaws, as serious as and in some cases more serious than the earthman's agoraphobia.
This novel could be considered an SF police procedural as the main character, Lije Baley, is the New York police officer assigned to solve the murder of one of the Spacers. He is forced to take a partner, one R Daneel Olivaw. The problem is that the "R" stands for robot. The knowledge that a Spacer robot is loose in the corridors of the City would spark a riot. Baley now has two reasons for solving the crime quickly: his pride won't let him lose out to a robot and he needs to get the robot back to Spacetown before its identity is revealed.
====================
2. Gregory Benford: the "Galactic Center" series.
This is a set of six novels that range in time from the 1990s to some 35,000 years in the future, from Earth to the black hole, the Eater, at the center of our galaxy. It's a grand adventure tale, along with a strong dose of astrophysics. That Benford is an astrophysicist might have had some influence here. He begins with what's known and then lets his imagination roam the galaxy. I have already posted a commentary on each of the six novels in the series: In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity.
====================
3. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination
Bester's novel contains one of the most interesting characters I've found in SF--Gully Foyle. At the beginning he's one of the lowest of the low on a spaceship crew--barely human--he can with extreme difficulty manage to speak somewhat coherently. At the end of the novel, he has educated himself to be able to move easily and freely in the highest social and cultural levels. However, inside he's still the brute he was at the beginning, and his one object in life is to revenge himself on those who left him to die in the cold dark reaches of the solar system. It appears to me that there's a slight flavor here of The Count of Monte Cristo here.
Bester postulates a future in which the aristocracy bases itself on its ancestry in various corporations. He has also created a world in which teleportation, moving oneself from place to place by the power of the mind, is commonplace. There are schools that will teach anyone to teleport, and only a few are unable to do this. Consider a world in which most people can transport themselves merely by thinking about it to anyplace they have once been and have studied closely. Knowing this, whom would you let into your home?
====================
4. Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man
Just as his previously mentioned novel explored the effects of teleportation on society, this work postulates telepathy as a real possibility. What happens to a society when some of its members are able to read the minds of others? How does a society deal with that? The focus in this novel is on the legal system. One of the main characters is a police officer and a powerful telepath. What happens to the concept of privacy when some members of society are able to read minds, especially when some of those members are in law enforcement?
The other significant character is a man who wants to commit a murder. How can he do this with mind-reading cops around? How does one even plan a murder under these circumstances?
====================
5. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Books burn at that temperature. In a not too distant future, I fear, fireman will not be those whose job it is to put out fires but will be those who upon learning of a hidden stash of books will immediately rush over there and burn them. This short work was first published in 1951, when memories of pictures of book burning events in Germany were still fresh. Recently I have seen photos of similar events in this country, held at a Christian school. I wonder if this was one of the books so honored.
Guy Montag (if I'm not mistaken, that's German for Monday) is a fireman and perfectly happy burning books and saving society from various evils. It only when he impulsively saves a book from burning and begins to read it, that his attitude begins to change.
As one of the characters in the novel says, books are dangerous and unsettling, for they give people ideas. I think that may be a quotation from Frederick Douglas' autobiography of his life as a slave. It was considered dangerous to teach slaves to read and write, for it gave them unwholesome ideas.
====================
6. Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
An alien space ship enters our solar system. In a short time, it will have passed through and be gone. A crew of scientists is sent to meet the ship and make contact with its crew. They rendezvous with the ship and are able to enter it, and find it empty, or so it seems anyway. The story follows the efforts of the crew to discover as much as possible about the ship and its mission and its builders.
====================
7. Jack Finney: Time and Again
The best time travel tale I've ever read. I would say the best ever written, but I haven't read all of them. This is one of those rare stories that, after finishing it, I sat there and wish it could be possible. The main character goes back to late 19th century New York City and solves a mystery and falls in love.
One of the strengths of the work, along with Finney's prose, is the liberal use of photographs from that period.
====================
8. Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I suspect there may be many who think I should have selected Stranger in a Strange Land. But, while Stranger was an enjoyable read and reread, I find that given a choice between them I would choose The Moon more often.
Others have pointed out some similarities between The Moon and the US during the revolutionary period: a far distant and unsympathetic governing body, lack of representation on that body, and the use of both as penal colonies.
It's a great action oriented novel, but still filled with some of Heinlein's ideas on the nature of the evolution of the family, on politics in a superficially democratic (actually it's a republican form of government), and on the potential power of a self-aware AI that can tap into anything even remotely connected to a computer or phone line.
====================
9. Frank Herbert: Dune
Dune is felt by many critics and commentators to be one of the two novels that broke down the walls of the SF ghetto and put made SF legitimate reading material for the general public. The other was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
I think Dune was the first SF novel to have a fully developed, a fully realized planet with a culture that clearly was based on the environment. The planetary environment shaped the culture, attitudes, and religion of the Fremen tribes, the humans now indigenous to the planet.
In addition to the Fremen, Herbert has created a number of groups all struggling for control of Arrakis or Dune. As the Wikipedia entry on Dune puts it:
"The story explores the complex and multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the forces of the Empire confront each other for control of Arrakis and its "spice".
====================
1o. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker
The most unique post-holocaust novel I've ever read. If you love playing with language, you'll love this one. It's a quest tale, and the quest is Riddley Walker's as he attempts to make sense of a riddle. The language is a character in this novel:
Opening lines for Chapter One. It's a first person narrative and Riddley is speaking:
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I think it's his matter-of-fact attitude that makes him a favorite character of mine--"Your tern now my tern later." It also suggests a realization and acceptance of the basic equality of all living creatures. It's not a bragging statement denoting his superiority over the boar, but a simple recognition that the boar's "tern" is now and his will come later.
====================
11. Ursula Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
One I always recommend. I did a brief commentary on it here back in March 2010. Genly Ai, an ambassador from the Ekumen, arrives on Winter to arrange for diplomatic relations between the planet's inhabitants and the Ekumen. The inhabitants are completely human except for one significant difference. They are sexually neuter for about three weeks and then become either male or female for about 3-4 days. Le Guin's point here is to explore the gender behavior patterns to see which are inborn and which are learned. No lectures here, though, just an interesting plot and some good action sequences. See Ai and Estraven's journey over the glacier.
====================
12. Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It is really three novellas, which focus strongly on a religious order of monks who initially were followers of Leibowitz, a scientist. Most of the few survivors of the war turned hostile to intellectuals and scientists, executing them whenever found. Eventually, in some communities, literacy became grounds for execution. Leibowitz gave his followers the task of preserving whatever scientific knowledge they could find. Like the monks of the Middle Ages, they spent their lives copying out whatever written materials they could find. The three novellas take place several hundred years apart, going from a subsistence level of existence in the first part, to a society that is now rich enough to permit some of its members to do something other than bring in food in the second section, to a society that has developed science once again to the point that they now have nuclear weapons.
====================
13. Kim Stanley Robinson: "Three Californias" (aka The Orange County stories)
Imagine a particular place, a real place that is, and then project three different futures on this place. Kim Stanley Robinson does exactly that to a part of California, Orange County to be precise. These are not serials since they all take place at roughly the same time but in alternate universes.
The Wild Shore is a post-holocaust novel. The US has been eliminated as a world power, and isn't even a unified country. The enemy destroyed the communication and transportation systems and now uses satellites to detect and destroy any attempt to develop communities over a few thousand people and to destroy any attempt to rebuild the railway system. Robinson has created a coming-of-age story of a young man in what was once Orange County who finds himself trapped in a society that exists at a subsistence level while the rest of the world remains highly developed, for only the USA was attacked. The USA's allies were grateful they weren't attacked also and quietly accepted the situation.
The Gold Coast is also set in Orange County, but no war has taken place. It seems to be an extension of today, focusing on several young people who are trying to make their way in a world dominated by the military industrial complex, with an ever-expanding population, a California gone mad. The young people's lives seem pointless, in which cars, sex, drugs, and rock music are the main ingredients. Then, in an attempt to fight back, they get involved in industrial terrorism. Now they are going to attract the attention of society.
The Pacific Edge is probably the most unlikely of the three scenarios that Robinson has created. The world has become an ecotopia--or in today's language, it has gone green-green--green. Small is beautiful; the world has completely reversed itself. Now there are rules that prevent any organization from going beyond a certain size. Any construction deemed necessary by the ruling bodies has to be voted on by the population.
The conflict is not between those who favor this development and those opposed to it. Instead the conflict centers around the limits to growth. The conflict is between those accept the limits as reasonable and logical and those who think it's a bit too low. How would hiring one more person for a company be a threat to the world environment? Even though it is unnecessary, how could increasing the water supply to the town be a threat?
I've found three constants throughout the novels. One is that the main characters in all three are mostly young people in their late teens and early twenties. Secondly, the novels open with the young people digging up various items. Thirdly, there is an old man who remembers what it was like 50 years ago.
====================
14. George Stewart: Earth Abides
One of the best post-holocaust novels I've ever read. It's a quiet novel which focuses on the effects on those who survived a war in which over 90% of the human race died. The title comes from Ecclesiastes:
"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
but the earth abideth for ever. "
====================
15. A. E. van Vogt: The Voyage of the Space Beagle
It was by accident that I discovered that this novel was the middle link in a chain that begins with Charles Darwin and ends with Star Trek. Shortly after Charles Darwin returned home from his journey on a British exploratory vessel, he published a book about his journey. The title of the book is The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839. A little over a century later, van Vogt published his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It is actually a fix-up novel, based on several shorter works, the first two actually published in SF magazines in 1939, one hundred years after Darwin. Like Darwin's Beagle, van Vogt's Beagle is an exploratory vessel, exploring the galaxy just as Darwin's Beagle explored the remote oceans and far off lands of earth.
In an interview, Gene Roddenberry said that van Vogt's novel was one of the primary sources for the development of the concept behind Star Trek and the five year mission of the Enterprise. The missions of the two Beagles and the Enterprise were essentially the same--to explore new worlds, etc. Perhaps, as a way of reminding viewers of the program's long and honorable ancestry, in one of the last Star Trek episodes, the Enterprise's mission involves locating a lost exploratory spaceship--the Beagle.
====================
16. Gene Wolfe: "The Book of the New Sun"
This series consists of four books. Sometime later a sequel appeared. And later, a small volume with commentary on the work by Gene Wolfe, as well as a dictionary for some of the more obscure terms also showed up on the shelves.
The work is set on Earth in the very far future and is one of the SF subcategories known as a "dying earth" work. Earth is tired and worn out, her vast mineral treasures have been reduced to rust and dust. It's so far in the future that even the sun is showing its age. It's a quest, of course, and perhaps a brief review of the quest for the Holy Grail might be informative.
The main character is Severian, and he is a member (apprentice at the beginning of the first novel) of the Order of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence, also known as the Guild of Torturers. He is a torturer and an executioner. He violates one of the rules (shows mercy to a prisoner) and is punished by being sent out to be a torturer and executioner in a land as far from the capital as can be found. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It is at this point his quest begins, and as in the quest for the Holy Grail, his task is to heal the wounded king or autarch.
The four novels in the set are The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch.
Four years later, Wolfe published a sequel to the set The Urth of the New Sun. Wolfe also published a companion work The Castle of the Otter, the title of which comes from a news item about the fourth book in the series. Whoever wrote the article got the name wrong: The Citadel of the Autarch got transformed in the reporter's mind into The Castle of the Otter. Wolfe liked the title so much that he gave it to this little volume which contains background information to the series and a vocabulary, to help the despairing reader translate some of Wolfe's obscure terms.
====================
I have to stop here, or I will never finish. As I started to review and clean up this post, I remembered C. J. Cherryh whose action-oriented novels really do have me gasping for air at the end. How can any list exclude P. K. Dick's numerous novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the film Blade Runner, which is one of the best SF films I have seen. And Larry Niven's Ringworld or . . .
The list is in alphabetical order, by author, and is in no way an attempt on my part to rank them.
1. Isaac Asimov: The Caves of Steel
Asimov combines two genres here, the SF story and the police procedural. It's centuries in the future and humanity has become, for the most part, agoraphobic. The thought of going outside terrifies most humans. The cities have become huge conglomerates, completely walled over. Most people spend their lives indoors, seldom even glancing out one of the rare windows that still exist. The exceptions are the Spacers, those humans who have left earth and settled on a number of planets. While they come across as being almost god-like, they also have their flaws, as serious as and in some cases more serious than the earthman's agoraphobia.
This novel could be considered an SF police procedural as the main character, Lije Baley, is the New York police officer assigned to solve the murder of one of the Spacers. He is forced to take a partner, one R Daneel Olivaw. The problem is that the "R" stands for robot. The knowledge that a Spacer robot is loose in the corridors of the City would spark a riot. Baley now has two reasons for solving the crime quickly: his pride won't let him lose out to a robot and he needs to get the robot back to Spacetown before its identity is revealed.
====================
2. Gregory Benford: the "Galactic Center" series.
This is a set of six novels that range in time from the 1990s to some 35,000 years in the future, from Earth to the black hole, the Eater, at the center of our galaxy. It's a grand adventure tale, along with a strong dose of astrophysics. That Benford is an astrophysicist might have had some influence here. He begins with what's known and then lets his imagination roam the galaxy. I have already posted a commentary on each of the six novels in the series: In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, Great Sky River, Tides of Light, Furious Gulf, and Sailing Bright Eternity.
====================
3. Alfred Bester: The Stars My Destination
Bester's novel contains one of the most interesting characters I've found in SF--Gully Foyle. At the beginning he's one of the lowest of the low on a spaceship crew--barely human--he can with extreme difficulty manage to speak somewhat coherently. At the end of the novel, he has educated himself to be able to move easily and freely in the highest social and cultural levels. However, inside he's still the brute he was at the beginning, and his one object in life is to revenge himself on those who left him to die in the cold dark reaches of the solar system. It appears to me that there's a slight flavor here of The Count of Monte Cristo here.
Bester postulates a future in which the aristocracy bases itself on its ancestry in various corporations. He has also created a world in which teleportation, moving oneself from place to place by the power of the mind, is commonplace. There are schools that will teach anyone to teleport, and only a few are unable to do this. Consider a world in which most people can transport themselves merely by thinking about it to anyplace they have once been and have studied closely. Knowing this, whom would you let into your home?
====================
4. Alfred Bester: The Demolished Man
Just as his previously mentioned novel explored the effects of teleportation on society, this work postulates telepathy as a real possibility. What happens to a society when some of its members are able to read the minds of others? How does a society deal with that? The focus in this novel is on the legal system. One of the main characters is a police officer and a powerful telepath. What happens to the concept of privacy when some members of society are able to read minds, especially when some of those members are in law enforcement?
The other significant character is a man who wants to commit a murder. How can he do this with mind-reading cops around? How does one even plan a murder under these circumstances?
====================
5. Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
Books burn at that temperature. In a not too distant future, I fear, fireman will not be those whose job it is to put out fires but will be those who upon learning of a hidden stash of books will immediately rush over there and burn them. This short work was first published in 1951, when memories of pictures of book burning events in Germany were still fresh. Recently I have seen photos of similar events in this country, held at a Christian school. I wonder if this was one of the books so honored.
Guy Montag (if I'm not mistaken, that's German for Monday) is a fireman and perfectly happy burning books and saving society from various evils. It only when he impulsively saves a book from burning and begins to read it, that his attitude begins to change.
As one of the characters in the novel says, books are dangerous and unsettling, for they give people ideas. I think that may be a quotation from Frederick Douglas' autobiography of his life as a slave. It was considered dangerous to teach slaves to read and write, for it gave them unwholesome ideas.
====================
6. Arthur C. Clarke: Rendezvous with Rama
An alien space ship enters our solar system. In a short time, it will have passed through and be gone. A crew of scientists is sent to meet the ship and make contact with its crew. They rendezvous with the ship and are able to enter it, and find it empty, or so it seems anyway. The story follows the efforts of the crew to discover as much as possible about the ship and its mission and its builders.
====================
7. Jack Finney: Time and Again
The best time travel tale I've ever read. I would say the best ever written, but I haven't read all of them. This is one of those rare stories that, after finishing it, I sat there and wish it could be possible. The main character goes back to late 19th century New York City and solves a mystery and falls in love.
One of the strengths of the work, along with Finney's prose, is the liberal use of photographs from that period.
====================
8. Robert Heinlein: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I suspect there may be many who think I should have selected Stranger in a Strange Land. But, while Stranger was an enjoyable read and reread, I find that given a choice between them I would choose The Moon more often.
Others have pointed out some similarities between The Moon and the US during the revolutionary period: a far distant and unsympathetic governing body, lack of representation on that body, and the use of both as penal colonies.
It's a great action oriented novel, but still filled with some of Heinlein's ideas on the nature of the evolution of the family, on politics in a superficially democratic (actually it's a republican form of government), and on the potential power of a self-aware AI that can tap into anything even remotely connected to a computer or phone line.
====================
9. Frank Herbert: Dune
Dune is felt by many critics and commentators to be one of the two novels that broke down the walls of the SF ghetto and put made SF legitimate reading material for the general public. The other was Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.
I think Dune was the first SF novel to have a fully developed, a fully realized planet with a culture that clearly was based on the environment. The planetary environment shaped the culture, attitudes, and religion of the Fremen tribes, the humans now indigenous to the planet.
In addition to the Fremen, Herbert has created a number of groups all struggling for control of Arrakis or Dune. As the Wikipedia entry on Dune puts it:
"The story explores the complex and multi-layered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as the forces of the Empire confront each other for control of Arrakis and its "spice".
====================
1o. Russell Hoban: Riddley Walker
The most unique post-holocaust novel I've ever read. If you love playing with language, you'll love this one. It's a quest tale, and the quest is Riddley Walker's as he attempts to make sense of a riddle. The language is a character in this novel:
Opening lines for Chapter One. It's a first person narrative and Riddley is speaking:
"On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. He dint make the groun shake nor nothing like that when he come on to my spear he weren't all that big plus he lookit poorily. He done the reqwyrt he ternt and stood and clattert his teef and make his rush and there we wer then. Him on 1 end of the spear kicking his life out and me on the other end watching him dy. I said, 'Your tern now my tern later. . ."
I think it's his matter-of-fact attitude that makes him a favorite character of mine--"Your tern now my tern later." It also suggests a realization and acceptance of the basic equality of all living creatures. It's not a bragging statement denoting his superiority over the boar, but a simple recognition that the boar's "tern" is now and his will come later.
====================
11. Ursula Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness
One I always recommend. I did a brief commentary on it here back in March 2010. Genly Ai, an ambassador from the Ekumen, arrives on Winter to arrange for diplomatic relations between the planet's inhabitants and the Ekumen. The inhabitants are completely human except for one significant difference. They are sexually neuter for about three weeks and then become either male or female for about 3-4 days. Le Guin's point here is to explore the gender behavior patterns to see which are inborn and which are learned. No lectures here, though, just an interesting plot and some good action sequences. See Ai and Estraven's journey over the glacier.
====================
12. Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Canticle for Leibowitz
This is another of my favorite post-holocaust novels. It is really three novellas, which focus strongly on a religious order of monks who initially were followers of Leibowitz, a scientist. Most of the few survivors of the war turned hostile to intellectuals and scientists, executing them whenever found. Eventually, in some communities, literacy became grounds for execution. Leibowitz gave his followers the task of preserving whatever scientific knowledge they could find. Like the monks of the Middle Ages, they spent their lives copying out whatever written materials they could find. The three novellas take place several hundred years apart, going from a subsistence level of existence in the first part, to a society that is now rich enough to permit some of its members to do something other than bring in food in the second section, to a society that has developed science once again to the point that they now have nuclear weapons.
====================
13. Kim Stanley Robinson: "Three Californias" (aka The Orange County stories)
Imagine a particular place, a real place that is, and then project three different futures on this place. Kim Stanley Robinson does exactly that to a part of California, Orange County to be precise. These are not serials since they all take place at roughly the same time but in alternate universes.
The Wild Shore is a post-holocaust novel. The US has been eliminated as a world power, and isn't even a unified country. The enemy destroyed the communication and transportation systems and now uses satellites to detect and destroy any attempt to develop communities over a few thousand people and to destroy any attempt to rebuild the railway system. Robinson has created a coming-of-age story of a young man in what was once Orange County who finds himself trapped in a society that exists at a subsistence level while the rest of the world remains highly developed, for only the USA was attacked. The USA's allies were grateful they weren't attacked also and quietly accepted the situation.
The Gold Coast is also set in Orange County, but no war has taken place. It seems to be an extension of today, focusing on several young people who are trying to make their way in a world dominated by the military industrial complex, with an ever-expanding population, a California gone mad. The young people's lives seem pointless, in which cars, sex, drugs, and rock music are the main ingredients. Then, in an attempt to fight back, they get involved in industrial terrorism. Now they are going to attract the attention of society.
The Pacific Edge is probably the most unlikely of the three scenarios that Robinson has created. The world has become an ecotopia--or in today's language, it has gone green-green--green. Small is beautiful; the world has completely reversed itself. Now there are rules that prevent any organization from going beyond a certain size. Any construction deemed necessary by the ruling bodies has to be voted on by the population.
The conflict is not between those who favor this development and those opposed to it. Instead the conflict centers around the limits to growth. The conflict is between those accept the limits as reasonable and logical and those who think it's a bit too low. How would hiring one more person for a company be a threat to the world environment? Even though it is unnecessary, how could increasing the water supply to the town be a threat?
I've found three constants throughout the novels. One is that the main characters in all three are mostly young people in their late teens and early twenties. Secondly, the novels open with the young people digging up various items. Thirdly, there is an old man who remembers what it was like 50 years ago.
====================
14. George Stewart: Earth Abides
One of the best post-holocaust novels I've ever read. It's a quiet novel which focuses on the effects on those who survived a war in which over 90% of the human race died. The title comes from Ecclesiastes:
"Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh;
but the earth abideth for ever. "
====================
15. A. E. van Vogt: The Voyage of the Space Beagle
It was by accident that I discovered that this novel was the middle link in a chain that begins with Charles Darwin and ends with Star Trek. Shortly after Charles Darwin returned home from his journey on a British exploratory vessel, he published a book about his journey. The title of the book is The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839. A little over a century later, van Vogt published his novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle. It is actually a fix-up novel, based on several shorter works, the first two actually published in SF magazines in 1939, one hundred years after Darwin. Like Darwin's Beagle, van Vogt's Beagle is an exploratory vessel, exploring the galaxy just as Darwin's Beagle explored the remote oceans and far off lands of earth.
In an interview, Gene Roddenberry said that van Vogt's novel was one of the primary sources for the development of the concept behind Star Trek and the five year mission of the Enterprise. The missions of the two Beagles and the Enterprise were essentially the same--to explore new worlds, etc. Perhaps, as a way of reminding viewers of the program's long and honorable ancestry, in one of the last Star Trek episodes, the Enterprise's mission involves locating a lost exploratory spaceship--the Beagle.
====================
16. Gene Wolfe: "The Book of the New Sun"
This series consists of four books. Sometime later a sequel appeared. And later, a small volume with commentary on the work by Gene Wolfe, as well as a dictionary for some of the more obscure terms also showed up on the shelves.
The work is set on Earth in the very far future and is one of the SF subcategories known as a "dying earth" work. Earth is tired and worn out, her vast mineral treasures have been reduced to rust and dust. It's so far in the future that even the sun is showing its age. It's a quest, of course, and perhaps a brief review of the quest for the Holy Grail might be informative.
The main character is Severian, and he is a member (apprentice at the beginning of the first novel) of the Order of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence, also known as the Guild of Torturers. He is a torturer and an executioner. He violates one of the rules (shows mercy to a prisoner) and is punished by being sent out to be a torturer and executioner in a land as far from the capital as can be found. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It is at this point his quest begins, and as in the quest for the Holy Grail, his task is to heal the wounded king or autarch.
The four novels in the set are The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch.
Four years later, Wolfe published a sequel to the set The Urth of the New Sun. Wolfe also published a companion work The Castle of the Otter, the title of which comes from a news item about the fourth book in the series. Whoever wrote the article got the name wrong: The Citadel of the Autarch got transformed in the reporter's mind into The Castle of the Otter. Wolfe liked the title so much that he gave it to this little volume which contains background information to the series and a vocabulary, to help the despairing reader translate some of Wolfe's obscure terms.
====================
I have to stop here, or I will never finish. As I started to review and clean up this post, I remembered C. J. Cherryh whose action-oriented novels really do have me gasping for air at the end. How can any list exclude P. K. Dick's numerous novels, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the basis for the film Blade Runner, which is one of the best SF films I have seen. And Larry Niven's Ringworld or . . .
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