Tag Archives: fantasy

December’s Scifi Book Club Meeting

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Sorry for the delay in posting this recap. Our scifi book club meeting for December was our best-attended yet, with 11 participants! We read Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels. It’s a very dark story of Horty, a boy with mysterious powers, who runs away to the carnival.

Perhaps because Theodore Sturgeon was primarily a short story author, we all agreed that The Dreaming Jewels felt very much like three different short stories loosely connected by the central character. First is a very YA-feeling story of the boy running away to the carnival to escape an abusive home situation; then a psycho-social family drama involving Horty’s long-time crush Kay and his step-father; then a high fantasy-style showdown with the Big Baddy. Because the three stories were so different in tone, different people liked different stages of the book. Almost nobody liked the entire book.

The themes of the book were a mixed bag, and that’s part of the reason the different sections of the book felt so different.

The first and last stories are very concerned with alienation and connection - Horty’s abuse, and his unusual origins, make it very difficult for him to form normal relationships with his family and friends. His only points of contact with friendship and love are two women - his childhood crush, and the dwarf who “adopts” him at the carnival. [Point of interest: “dwarf” is the term used in the book, which was written in 1957.] In the last story, the final battle reveals the nature of the titular dreaming jewels - beings so alien that humans are are unable to comprehend their purpose:

All earthborn life proceeds and operates from one command: Survive! A human mind cannot coneive of any other base.
The crystals had one-and a very different one.
Horty almost grasped it, but not quite. As simple as “survive!”, it was a concept so remote from anything he’d ever heard or read that it escaped him.

Doesn’t that sound just like something you’d read in HP Lovecraft?

Oddly, for the 1950s, the first and second stories have a lot to say about gender. There are only two female characters - Horty’s crush Kay and his surrogate mother Zena. Both behave in fairly stereotypical feminine ways. Kay is pure Virgin, unable to take control of her sexuality and powerless against the judge who victimizes her. Zena is a loving but very manipulative mother figure, unwilling to let Horty take control of his own life until external circumstances force his hand. It gets interesting when Horty takes control of his own shapeshifting powers - and changes into each of them. It seems as though every time Horty grows as a person, he first has to become female.

The second and third stories consider the nature of force and power, especially the power of a powerful father figure over his subordinates. The second story is the subtler of the two. Horty’s step-father, now a judge, is victimizing Kay. Kay is timid, virginal, and utterly powerless, until Horty anonymously helps her escape. But then Horty assumes her form, and takes control of the power of female sexuality to seduce his stepfather (!) and get his revenge. In the third story, the Big Baddy - literally the circus’s ringleader - goes toe-to-toe with Horty in a battle of psychic power. In the end the battle hurts the victims at least as much as the Big Baddy himself. The direct confrontation of power against power is disastrous for everyone concerned.

There was a lot of grist for the mill in this one, but in the end our consensus was that it was more interesting as an intellectual exercise than as a story. The writing was direct, almost like a kids’ chapter book, and the main character was so alien(ated) that it was difficult to care about him. Our average score for the book was about 6.5/10 (although personally I gave it an 8.5, the highest score of the group).

Join us next week, January 4th 2011, for Sarah Hoyt’s The Darkship Thieves. The author lives in southern Colorado, and she said she may join us, schedule permitting.

Scifi Book Club discussion: Brains, a Zombie Memoir

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Last night’s scifi book club meeting was a little smaller, only four people, but I suspect that’s because a) the book didn’t appeal to the broader scifi crowd and b) it was voting day. We read Brains, A Zombie Memoir, by Robin Zecker. It’s a slim volume, only 178 pages, and it’s an almost-parody of the zombie genre.

The consensus among us was that it was an entertaining read, fast-paced and often very funny. It’s chock-full of pop-culture references, the perfect inner monologue for a self-aware zombie who knows how deep into cliche he’s falling. Zecker did a really good job with the main character, showing by turns his pre-zombification personality (total jerk) and his totally alien nature as a zombie. There are vestiges of human feeling in their little zombie posse - a sort of family bond - coupled with a bizarre lack of empathy for the living.

But the ending was a little strange. In broad terms, there were several climaxes to the story, as though the author lost track of the arc of the action. And specifically, [[spoiler alert] the final confrontation with the scientist who created the zombie virus felt very deus ex machina - there was no real reason for him to come out to meet the zombies and talk with them, and his death was pretty anti-climactic.]

We spent most of the rest of the meeting comparing and contrasting other zombie media and the differences between zombies and other paranormal fiction. The dominant paranormal theme is always the price you would pay for immortality. But with vampires, the metaphor is sex and death. With werewolves, the metaphor is the symbolic death of the ego, subsumed in animal awareness - not so much immortality as not caring about the possibility of death. But with zombies, the metaphor is alienation - to become immortal, you have to become one with death, and the dead cannot retain their humanity.

We voted on the books for the first half of next year:

- January (Modern) Darkship Thieves Sara A Hart
o Ppb 4/1/10 - Space opera political/thriller style – a woman who hates space is forced into space adventure
- February (Classic) Brain Teaser (That Sweet Little Old Lady) Mark Phillips
o 1959 - funny short novel – psionics are real, FBI investigation
- March (Modern) The Search for Wondla
o hb 9/28/10 - YA - young girl is forced to flee from her underground home with only a mysterious piece of cardboard
- April (Classic) Pirates of Venus Edgar Rice Burroughs
o 1934 - “astronaut Carson Napier crashes on Venus and is swept into a world where revolution is ripe, the love of a princess carries a dear price, and death can come as easily from the blade of a sword as from the ray of a futuristic gun”
- May (Modern) Shades of Gray by Jasper Fforde
o ppb 3/1/11 - “a screwball comedy future in which social castes and protocols are rigidly defined by acuteness of personal color perception”)
- June (Classic) The Mysteries of Udolpho Anne Ward Rudcliffe
o 1794 – Ultra-gothic – prelude to modern horror/fantasy genre

Join us December 7 to discuss the Dreaming Jewels by Theodore Sturgeon: a very dark tale of a boy with secret abilities escapes from his abusive home to join the carnival

Hugo & Nebula Awards!

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It’s that time of year again; the grass is turning green, the trees are budding out, the Nebula awards ceremony is coming up and the Hugo award nominees have been announced! The Nebula nominations were announced in February, of course.

I haven’t read any of them myself (sad day!) but I’m about to start Boneshaker - a steampunk zombie adventure. How could you go wrong? I love zombie movies, and Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, and I even liked Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (in defiance of the box office, movie critics, and the opinion of everyone I know).

Also! One of the nominees for the Andre Norton YA Scifi Award (presented with the Nebulas) is actually a free online novel: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making How cool is that?

Even if you’re one of those who “don’t read scifi,” there are plenty of boundary-defying books on the lists to satisfy you. Some of them, like Palimpsest and The Love We Share Without Knowing, aren’t even marketed as scifi or fantasy.

Did you like The Time Traveller’s Wife or The Lovely Bones? Or anything by Haruki Murakami or Kenzaburo Oe? The Love We Share Without Knowing is a very Japanese collection of strangers awakening to the strangeness and connection of everyday life. Or you might go for Palimpsest, where sleep takes you to a dream-city populated by other dreamers.

How do you feel about police and crime procedurals, like CSI on TV or maybe Anne Rule? China Mieville’s The City and the City is the story of a cop in the Extreme Crimes Division solving a murder in a universe right next door, with just hints of the supernatural for flavor. I’ve heard it’s a good match for fans of Jim Butcher or The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, too.

Similarly, for the mystery buffs out there, Finch is a noir mystery set in a city under occupation. Reviewers have compared the setting to modern-day Kabul or Baghdad - this could be a good choice for fans of military fiction or thrillers like David Baldacci or Preston & Child.

Or maybe you enjoyed the post-apocalyptic dystopias of The Road or The Book of Eli. Julian Comstock would be a good bet, taking place after a series of disasters that drastically reduced the world population. The Wind-Up girl has a similar mood, though it takes place in a much more overtly-scifi urban environment.

The nominations for best new writers are also exciting - Gail Carriger’s sassy Victorian paranormal mysteries will appeal to fans of light-hearted paranormal romance or maybe the Stephanie Plum novels. Seanan McGuire’s paranormal mysteries are similar but closer to Kim Harrison or Jim Butcher - a little darker, with a little more action.
The Hugo ballot has six novels and the Nebula ballot has five. I’m always interested to see which selections, if any, overlap. It’s usually a good indication of excellence. This year there are two:
The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey, May09)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor, Sep09)

The Nebula team also has these three on their list:
The Love We Share Without Knowing, Christopher Barzak (Bantam, Nov08)
Flesh and Fire, Laura Anne Gilman (Pocket, Oct09)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland Press, Oct09)

And the Hugo has these three:
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Wake, Robert J. Sawyer (Ace; Penguin; Gollancz; Analog)
The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade)

I think we’ll be getting most of these in the store over the next few weeks - check them out and expand your horizons!

Making Money Pratchett Style

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Well, I can hardly wait - I’m biting my fingernails, waiting on tenterhooks, with bated breath - all those great expressions. For what am I waiting so anxiously? For the 36th Discworld book by Terry Pratchett, even now being processed at the local library. If my name isn’t first on the hold list, I don’t know what I’ll do!

For those of you who are uninitiated into the wonders of Discworld, I am taking this opportunity to attempt a conversion/introduction. The more people who read Terry Pratchett, the better this world will be.

The Discworld is, appropriately, a flat, round disc-shaped planet, resting on the back of four elephants which stand on the shell of a giant turtle as it swims through space. Among the many mysteries of Discworld science is how exactly the world can turn on the elephants’ shoulders without causing the mother of all friction burns. The most likely answer? Magic. Of course a world as illogical as this can’t exist without a substantial magical field in place. The answer to any question of technology or history is magic. Much to the dismay of Rincewind, the Disc’s most incompetent wizzard (note spelling), there is no such thing as special light sensitive paper for taking pictures of things. When you point a little black box at something and push the button, a tiny imp inside the box paints the scene for you. And when lightning strikes, it is because the gods are having a particularly bad day, not due to the build up of some unknown force in the air.

Naturally, for a world so steeped in magic, the presence of magic workers is essential. Discworld’s Wizards and Witches make life easier for the average citizen, mostly by doing nothing in the case of the wizards (they don’t use magic but they do it in a dynamic way, not like people who don’t use magic because they can’t, but because they can, they don’t. It makes sense to them, and lets them eat huge meals and lounge around on tenure doing nothing and feeling very accomplished.) Of course, no mention of the wizards is complete without introducing their librarian, who loves bananas and says ‘Oook’, due to his unusually ape-like physiology. Just don’t call him a monkey.
The witches, on the other hand, do quite a lot for everyone, but they also avoid using magic whenever possible. In their case, they figure why waste magic when good old headology (psychology) works so well? No need to curse someone when you can mutter under your breath and have them jinx themselves out of fear. Granny Weatherwax and Nanny Ogg hold local farmers in thrall - Granny by her cussedness, and Nanny by her atrociously bad jokes.

All of the Discworld is, of course, carefully watched by Death, a seven foot tall skeleton who SPEAKS IN CAPITAL LETTERS and tries very hard to understand the humans in his care. A surprisingly personable fellow who even has a granddaughter (she fills in for him on his occasional disappearances) and a pet, of sorts. Death of Rats SQUEAKS IN CAPITALS, but at least he’s some company.

The Discworld is a wonderfully comfortable, familiar place, with the kinds of people you could pull off of any street here. So, go out to your local library, or bookstore (yes, we do carry them!) and start reading! First, read The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. Then, go wild! And when you’ve worked your way through the wonders of Terry Pratchett’s fabulous imagination, you can get in line behind me to read Making Money. I promise you, it will be well worth the effort!