March 2024 Reading Summary

March saw us do a week of travelling, and though I managed to read some at airports and at night in hotels, I did lose a lot of reading time overall.  There were also several astronomy nights in there, where I traded my night time reading for star gazing.  Despite this, I managed to get through 11 books, one of them a slim volume of poetry.  So here they are....

 

This month included my last Silverberg SF reading.  All done.  Tout fini, as they say in Montreal.  This time I read the last volume of his short stories, published in chronological order.  So these were stories from the late 90s  up to around 2010.  VOLUME 9:  THE MILLENNIUM EXPRESS 1995-2009 contains 16 stories, each one introduced by the author.  Several are novellas, which was Silverberg's preferred length of story (70-90 pages, usually).  Many of the stories are quite poor and not really worth reading, but there were a few gems.  "A Piece of The Great World" is from 2005, and is 72 pages long.  This novella is directly related to Silverberg's brilliant full length novel series told in At Winter's End and The New Springtime.  He had plans to write a third novel in the series, but it never came to be.  However, a detailed outline was written, and this novella relates one part of that unfinished trilogy.  Though a good enough story, it cannot replace the missing epic novel we all hoped would be forthcoming one day.  The story takes place 200 years after people have left the long winter cocoons.  Readers get to fly across the country this time, and then visit part of the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea, on an anthropological expedition to find the last remaining group of a vanished race.  The entire premise of the story is quite sad, though.  Well worth reading for fans of the two novels.  "Defenders of The Frontier" is from 2010, and is 40 pages long.  A depressing but well told tale that Silverberg wrote for an anthology of stories about warriors.  This would make a great little film, or even a theatrical live stage production.  11 men at a frontier outpost have lost contact with their home city over the years.  When no other enemies can be located, they contemplate leaving their fort and attempt to return home.  Well done!

 

Cover art by Tomasz Maronski.

 

Savage Scorpio is the 16th book of Kenneth Bulmer's Dray Prescott series, and the second one in the Valian Cycle.  Bulmer is now so comfortable with his Dray Prescott hero, as are we, that we can enjoy seeing his character trying to grapple with his own character development.  He considers himself a peaceful man, even as he goes about chopping up enemies with his sword.  These enemies, however, are usually asking for it, and attack first.  The ones who survive an encounter with Dray are usually conked on the head and put to sleep while he carries out various clandestine actions.  There is usually some form of humour on nearly every page, which also helps keep the pages turning.  In this adventure, the Emperor of Vallia, Delia's father and Dray's father-in-law, is being poisoned by enemies, and Dray and Delia must get him to the sacred pool in time to save his life.  There is no love lost between the two men, and Dray only helps because of Delia.  This adds to the frustration level of things for readers, for Dray is never thanked for his life saving heroic deeds, but it also adds to the humour, as the tense scenes between the two men are often quite funny.  As usual for each successive volume, we learn a bit more about the Star Lords, those mysterious figures who seem to control Dray as if he were their puppet.  This is another solid entry in the series.

 

From 1956 comes E. C. Tubb's Trail Blazers the kind of story that most people would recognize as a 'true' western.  It concerns a cattle drive from Texas to Cheyenne, Wyoming, before there were any cattle trails to follow.  Besides natural obstacles such as desert, gullies, rivers, mountains, etc. there were also Indians to consider, and an evil bunch of gangsters in Kansas called the Jayhawkers.  Once again Tubb's very enlightened view of Indians comes through loud and clear in the voice of his hero.  But that doesn't stop a lot of Indians from getting killed, as well as whites who get in the way of the drive.  One of my favourite TV shows as a kid was called Rawhide.  It starred a very young Clint Eastwood as the assistant head drover, and Eric Fleming as the man in charge.  It ran for 8 seasons and a total of 217 50 minute episodes.  The unforgettable theme song was by Dmitri Tiomkin.  Tubb's novel predates the series by 3 years, but is so close to the Rawhide series in spirit that it's hard to believe that it wasn't part of it.  As usual with Tubb, this is a good read, and not far from the truth of what the early west was like.

From 1995 come the first book in Michael Moorcock's Second Ether Trilogy.  It is called Blood: A Southern Fantasy, is 336 pages long, and is a truly awful book.  Mixing SF pulp fiction (the really bad kind) with some kind of avant garde style of writing, there isn't a single redeeming page in this unholy mess of a novel.  This isn't the first Moorcock novel this reviewer has panned, but I hope it will be the last.  There are four main characters, two men and two women.  They are gamblers, after the Earth has pretty much been swallowed up by a vast black hole sort of thing near Biloxi, MS.  After all, what else do people in Mississippi do but gamble.  Our heroes inject themselves into the Game of Time, and play for stakes that only Moorcock might understand.  As usual, it's Chaos against Law, and the gamblers are hoping to keep a balance in the multiverse.  So what.  Many reviewers of Moorcock are truly afraid to call him out when he goes off the rails and wastes our time.  This novel goes way off the rails (deep into the muddy Mississippi River) and wastes our time.  I dread the thought of reading the two sequels, and may not...

 

Lastly from the Avon/Equinox stable of writers comes the next book, Havana Hit, from 1974, in the exciting series of adventures undertaken by Burt Wulf, vigilante.  It is 154 pages and is book #5.  Formally of the NYPD narcotics squad, and before that a Vietnam veteran, Wulf is out to single handed take down the drug trade in America.  So far he is doing a pretty good job, too.  Though this one has its share of murder and explosions, and even a sort of car chase, it is a much more restrained story than the previous ones.  Leaving Las Vegas for New York with his valise of recaptured heroin, Wulf's plane is hijacked to--where else--Cuba.  Virtually everyone there who comes in contact with the valise becomes instantly corrupted by the financial possibilities.  Wulf wants his captured valise back, where he has plans to take it to New York, where it had been stolen from the evidence room at the precinct by a bad cop.  But he has his work cut out for him in Havana.  There is a lot more introspection and existentialism in this novel, mostly involving thinking about death.  Wulf is helped by an American freelancer, before ultimately being betrayed by him.  For the second time we see Wulf getting close to someone, but this relationship goes sour at the end.  As usual, Malzberg's writing can get the reader's blood flowing quickly and the heart pounding at times.  Chapters often fly past without readers even knowing they have begun a new one.  A good series so far, and definitely a guilty pleasure.  Still, it's not that much different from a good samurai tale.

 

Now we can move on to my collection of Delphi Classics writers, which seems to grow each month.  Moving alphabetically through the list of writers use to take about a year before I'd be back at the "A" authors.  Now it's more like a year and a half.  I began with a collection of 40 poems by Rabindranith Tagore.  Called The Crescent Moon, it is from 1913.  Several poems, each one about a page long, are accompanied by watercolour images done by friends, harkening back to the tradition of Indian miniature painting.  The earliest poems express feelings towards a new baby (which he compares to a crescent moon), while later ones give a child's perspective looking out towards mother and father.  "Authorship" is quite charming, as the child questions his mother as to why father is always writing at the desk.  They are easy to read, but offer no hint as to what is to come from this man's pen.

 

Next is Olaf Stapledon's third novel.  Odd John is from 1935, and purports to be a case study of a rare and unique child growing up in England.  The author acknowledges the influence of another British writer.  J. D. Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder is from 1911, and it's genius child, Victor Stott, is mentioned in Stapledon's book more than once.  Beresford in turn credits Jules Verne for influencing his writing.  Now we just need to establish who influenced Verne.   John's  life is short (he will die at 23, we are told near the beginning).  After 11 months he is finally forced from the womb, but is still premature and only just manages to survive.  He finally decides to walk at six years, and his talking starts late, too.  By ten he is a criminal and murderer, but manages to get his life back on track, though his 'experiments' continue on Homo Sapiens.  The narrator is a journalist, a friend of the family, and becomes John's companion in many of his adventures.  The book becomes much more interesting in the final chapters, as John and others like him establish a colony on a remote South Sea island.  Many races are represented, including two Africans, something I cannot recall from any other novels until recent time.  All are telepaths, and far beyond humans in most things.  In addition, these people are not just freakish in their intelligence, but also in their physical features, which are more than somewhat grotesque.  The main thing that the book makes clear is that a very few people are so far beyond being human in intelligence that they find it impossible to remain sane while living among them.  Stapledon, so far as I have read (first 3 novels) is not so much a storyteller, but a chronicler.  The difference between an author telling us a story and a journalist, if you like.  But he is a pretty amazing journalist.  This book is an odd one, like its main character.  It's difficult to put it into a category of SF, as like his two previous books, it pretty much stands alone.  Worth a read, especially if you sometimes feel like you don't really belong to society.

 

Jules Verne's From The Earth To The Moon was published in 1865.  Like other novels by Verne, this story is filled with the latest up to date science from its day, as well as geographical knowledge of America.  But it's not all about the science; the satire is priceless.  Parts of this book, especially the early chapters, are among the funniest things I have ever read.  Largely poking fun at Americans and their love of guns (some things never change), many other countries also take a hit, especially Britain.  But the author also pokes fun at France, Switzerland, Spain, and many others.  Having recently visited the Florida State Highpoint (345'), it is amusing to see the giant gun built atop a Florida hill over 1800' high.  Also at the time, the highest point in the American Rockies was 10,600', where a large telescope was needed to build to see the projectile once launched (!).  And that mountain was in Missouri!  But geography and science facts aside, Verne hits a home run with this fanciful tale of three men launched to the moon from Earth.  Great fun!  The sequel came later, and will be reported upon here someday.

 

First English edition cover art.

 

Next came another great old classic, H. G.Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, from 1896.  This is much more a horror story than a SF one, and indeed becomes quite horrifying at times.  Some of the atmosphere comes through well in the 1930s Charles Laughton version, but the book itself provides all the necessary inner pictures necessary to imagine the island, the doctor, and the native inhabitants.  There have been so many novels set on uncharted Pacific islands, but this must remain as one of the best of them.  What the storyteller has to go through by the end of the novel has to be one of the most harrowing adventures ever told in fiction.  Permanent damage is done to his pysche; even once back safely in London he can no longer view people as harmless and with the ability to love one another.  Moreau's vivisection experiments and his alteration of beasts into men would likely drive anyone mad.  Some parts are actually difficult to read.  A completely amazing and original novel, and one that I would likely read again.

 

The original cover from the 1877 edition. 

 

The Duchess of Padua is a five act play from 1883, and was Oscar Wilde's 2nd play.  It was written for a specific actress, who refused it.  The play has never done well, though in the late 1890s it played in New York for 3 weeks.  It reads like a weak Shakespeare entry.  The action centres around a young man who is groomed to avenge his father's death at the hands of a cruel duke, and the duke's wife, who falls in love with the young man.  It's all been written before, and there are no new lines of any value here, despite a bit of Wilde's wit coming through in the later acts.  It certainly shows promise, however, as the events, action, and writing show the writer to have been very well read and able to maintain a certain tradition and uphold its values.  But we must be patient.  Soon the Wilde we all know and love will be ready to show his stuff.

I finished up with an early Edgar Wallace crime novel called The Four Just Men, from 1905.  The story is about a small group of vigilantes who carry out assassinations of people worthy of being murdered.  In this case, an unjust law (in their humble opinion) is about to be passed in the British House, and they threaten to kill the minister in charge unless he retracts the bill.  Wallace stretches credibility somewhat in his attempt to make the four men super intelligent and infinitely resourceful.  However, in the end, while they do achieve their goals, they barely manage it, and one of them gets killed.  This is pretty good writing, and the pages turn almost on their own.  It helps that the novel isn't overly long.

Mapman Mike

 

 

January Books Read

I read 13 books last month, including the 7 authors remaining from my Avon/Equinox SF Rediscovery Series, and 6 from the miscellaneous shelf.

 

Volume 7 in The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg is called We Are For The Dark.  Each of the ten stories is introduced by the author, and he also has written a 5-page intro to the volume.  The finest tale is the title one, a novella.  One of my very favourite kinds of SF stories has to do with found ancient alien technology, art, and/or music.  Silverberg has written a masterful story about true exploring, which is usually a search within oneself.  But he has done both types here, by combining it with an outward search.  We visit several planets, and learn why humans are going beyond the 100 light year radius decreed when colonization began.  One of his best stories, it is from 1988.  Lion Time in Timbuctoo is from 1990, also a novella.  The African story setting takes place in the same world as the author's 1967 novel The Gate of Worlds.  In that alternate history story, the plague decimated Europe until only about 10% of the population survived.  As a result, there was no European colonialism in the new World or in Africa or Asia.  The Turks rule a huge swathe of Europe, the Aztecs and Incas are still in control on their side of the ocean, and China remains a small player in world affairs (as does England).  This is the second of what Silverberg had planned as three stories set in that world, and it's a good one, more political intrigue that anything else, but very well written and fun to imagine.  Also noteworthy is Enter A Soldier. Later. Enter Another One, from 1989.  It is a novelette built around a discussion between Pizarro and Socrates about right and wrong.  

 

Under A Velvet Cloak, from 2015, is Piers Anthony's 8th and final book in his Incarnations of Immortality series.  This is not a slight series by any means, though Anthony often treats the material very lightly.  The series is needlessly complicated as it backtracks through time, moves into the future, and sees events from the perspectives of many different characters.  Most of the time reading I was not exactly lost, but in so deep that I didn't really care very much, except for wondering when the book would end.  If you like the first book you will probably enjoy reading the others, but beware.  Things get overly complicated.

 

Bulmer's 7th Dray Prescott novel is called Arena of Antares, and is from 1974.  This new adventure sees Dray captured (yet again) and made a fighting slave of an evil queen.  Yawn.  On it goes, with the remainder of the novel set in a gladiatorial arena, with fight after fight, usually uneven, for the delight and satisfaction of the bloodthirsty populace.  I was quite bored soon after the arena scenes takes over the plot.  Luckily for us, Dray and Delia are saved at the last second by their friends in an airship, who rescue them from the arena and take them to safety.

 

Tubb's 4th Dumarest novel is called Kalin, and is from 1969.  So far this is a pretty good series. 

Dumarest has a habit of ending up on dead end worlds, those that are depressing, have no honest work or way to earn money, and are nearly impossible from which to escape.  This time he hits a poisonous mining colony, worked by slaves.  The few free men have to scramble hard to find enough food to eat, and enough warmth to keep them alive over the winter.  The local wildlife is on the dangerous side, too.  He and Kalin, a psychic woman, arrive there after their passenger ship explodes, and they manage to escape in a life pod.  They are picked up by a slaver, but luckily for Dumarest he has enough money to buy his way to freedom, and Kalin's.  Her story becomes more complicated the further one reads, and by the end we are left dazzled by Tubb's plot.  Making their usual beneficial appearance are the religious brothers; making their usual harmful appearance are the Cyclans.  This is one of the better entries so far, in a series that will run for a very long time.

 

Cover of the month for January 2023.  The artist is John Schoenherr.

 

I finished up the 4th volume of The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, reading the first half in December, and finishing it up in January.  There are volumes in the series that I do not have, but they cost hundreds of dollars and I have no interest in getting them.  His early stuff is mostly so much juvenile crap anyway.  So this ends my affair with Jack's fiction, except to read his highly anticipated autobiography in February.  The volume of short stories I finished up is called Spider Island.  The only decent story of his from the January reading is called Released Entropy, from 1939.  The story raises the question of how strongly was Williamson affected by Olaf Stapledon's writing.  A lot, it would seem.  Worlds within worlds, and universes within universes.  Despite the cop out ending, this is a fun story to read.

 

Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock contains four linked novellas from 1963-64 (updated slightly more recently) on the further--and final--adventures of Elric.  While none of the stories really stand out, they are fun to read.  Elric is certainly a unique sword and sorcery type of hero, so different from Conan, the heroes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, or even from Fafhrd and Mouser by Fritz Leiber.  All of Elric's adventures are tied up with sorcery, and especially with his soul stealing sword.  If this is your thing, then Moorock and Elric are for you.

 

Malzberg and Pronzini teamed up for their final novel in 1979.  Night Screams is a bit frustrating to read as a murder mystery.  The reason is that the story is written so that virtually anyone could be the murderer.  The writers wouldn't even have to make up their own minds until the last chapter.  So it's a cheat if you want to try guessing who did it.  And it you are correct, then it is likely that you guessed, or drew the name from a hat.  The story uses psychics as the victims of gruesome murders, with the setting a snowed-in village in New England.  As usual, there are too many victims for one novel.  The authors have collaborated on a few books of short stories, which will be reviewed here someday soon. 

 

Turning now to the six books from the shelf, five of them were taken from my Delphi Classics collection on Kindle.  Only one book actually came off a (dusty) shelf.  Black Cloud Rising came from an honest to goodness bookstore in Detroit (Source).  I went in and asked if they had anything on the American Civil War from a Black perspective.  I was shown this book by D. W. Falade from 2022.  A work of fiction, it has many truths to tell.  We follow a Black sergeant and a Black regiment of soldiers as they go about their day to day marching and fighting in the South during the Civil War.  There were no surprises to this reader regarding the rampant racism in the North and South (but especially the South), and to the higher standard that the Black regiment was held.  Though led by whites, the leaders (the colonel, anyway) are willing to learn about their men as they go.  There are no major battles, but there are opportunities for the regiment to show their stuff, and as they did in real life, they accounted themselves very well.  One does not have to have an interest in the Civil War to read this wonderful story about growing up Black, becoming a freed slave, and enlisting in the Union army.  Highly recommended.

 

Next came a truly delightful and slightly mad story by H G Wells called The Wonderful Visit."  From 1895, an angel accidentally crash lands on Earth, is shot and wounded by the vicar (a nature lover and collector who thought it might be a rare flamingo), then brought home to rest and recuperate.  This is not an angel of God, but one of art, like a muse.  This one is a violinist.  The story stabs at the heart of Christian society, however, and almost every page sends out a zinger or two.  I had not expected much from this story, but it turned out to be a real gem.  Chapter Two, where the author discusses English gentlemen scientific nature "collectors," has never been bettered.  Definitely worth a read.  Apparently Joseph Conrad loved the book.  Marcel Carne made a filmed version in 1974, which I have yet to track down.

 

Vera is from 1892, an early play by Oscar Wilde.  Loosely based on a real Vera, it tells of the Nihilists in Russia who wish to overthrow the Czar.  Political intrigue, hard socialism, and the defeat of monarchy is at the heart of this adventure tale, in four acts.  It was performed for a week in New York around the time it was written, before closing suddenly.  I doubt if it ever sees the light of day much anymore.  It certainly isn't a terrible play, though I doubt that Americans would have cared for the plot.

The Voyage Out was written between 1912-15, and was Virginia Woolf's first novel.  A lot of this novel is sticking with me.  It's one of those books where nothing much happens, but everything happens if one is aware.  A little bit autobiographical, a woman of 24 years ships out with her father, who owns a shipping company.  They are off to Brazil.  Also on board is her uncle, who is a scholar, and her aunt, who takes the girl under her wing.  The young Rachel Vinrace has been raised by maiden aunts in Richmond, and is pretty much clueless about life, men, and about love.  The novel traces her slow awakening, and of her first love.  The novel is slow to grip the reader, and it didn't really happen to me until we'd been in Brazil for some time.  There are a lot of minor characters, and we even get a brief trip up the Amazon.  But most of the action takes place in a small town not far from the river, in the villa where Rachel lives with her aunt and uncle, and in the hotel where the other British travelers stay.  Born in 1882, Woolf is about the same age as Rachel, and was obviously a thoughtful and observant woman.  Her first few drafts were heavily revised on the advice of friends, who found her original story too harsh an attack on society.  It's easy to read between the lines to see what she often meant, however.  It is an amazing first novel, and well worth reading.  It is a long one, at just over 500 pages. 

Next came a volume of poetry by W B Yeats.  The Wandering of Oisin and Other Poems was published in 1889.  The title poem is an epic ballad from Irish mythology, and is quite good.  Having read the Mabinogian, this one recalls similar doings.  It is about a normal man who falls in love with an eternal spirit, and they dwell in happiness for many a hundred years.  Eventually, however, he wants to return home, somehow expecting everything to be as it was.  Though warned that he would never be able to return, he heads for home.  It is the only early poem that Yeats liked in years afterward, and I must say that the rest were not very memorable at all.

Lastly came Sherwood Anderson's first novel, Windy McPherson's Son, published in 1916.  Divided into four books, the first deals with Sam's youth, growing up in a small town in Iowa.  He sells newspapers, and his enthusiasm and flair for selling and getting ahead impresses the locals.  He is guided by an artist, and a former school teacher.  His father is the town drunk, and his mother is the local washerwoman.  In book two he heads for Chicago to earn his fortune in sales, and indeed he prospers beyond anyone's wildest expectations.  He becomes a ruthless businessman, working tirelessly to make more and more money.  In book three he chucks it all and heads on the road, becoming a (rich) wandering vagabond.  He is in search of meaning to his life.  He and his wife had planned to raise children as their main goal, but their attempts result in three failures, all nearly killing his wife.  And so he goes in search of the big something.  Book four is very short, and brings him to the end of his journey, and at least a partial answer to his still burning questions about life, the universe, and everything.  The book will not be everyone's cup of tea, but for those lost souls who still haven't found what they seek (luckily, this reader has), the book will be a welcome journey into oneself.  Surprisingly good writing, though the novel is not critically acclaimed.

Mapman Mike