I've put up a new review for 'The Masks of Time' by Robert Silverberg.  This novel, along with Bester's 'The Demolished Man' had a pretty big effect on my reading of SF.  I read both novels when I was a kid, both introduced me to some new ideas for a kid, and broadened my horizon somewhat.  I actually remembered Demolished quite a bit better than Masks of Time, I forgot the title for Masks for several years there.  And when I looked it up on wikipedia it brought back a few plot points that I'd completely forgot.

I don't know if the review I wrote for 'The Masks of Time' is what you would call a 'good' review.  This is a book that I read when I was a kid that had a pretty profound impact on my enjoyment of SF, I can't really take a very critical eye to it, or rather I don't really want to.  Also I don't really want to read it again, in that it's kind of like 'Stranger for a Strange Land' in that I'm reluctant to read it again and be relieved of all the good feelings I have for the book.  Sometimes we just have to acknowledge that we don't exactly have the most objective standpoint for why we like a certain book.  This is one of them for me.  So take the review as it is.

In my last post I said I was going to try and put some ads up on the site.  Apparently that didn't work out, they won't let me put ads up.  The only thing I can think is that my review for 'The Void Captain's Tale' is a little too sexually explicit, I know it barred me from looking at the site from a public computer or two.  Oh well, I liked that review, thought it summed up my thoughts on the book pretty well.  So there won't be any ads showing up on my website just yet.

I ordered several more books from thriftbooks recently, and though I know I'm kind of a shill for that website I can't help but blow their horn one more time.  They even sent me a 15% discount for my birthday, which I thought was pretty cool.  Which is good because I'm apparently out of the Kindle business.  My Kindle just broke, it was my third one, so I think I'm gonna let the technology go for a little while until it's durability catches up to it's usefulness.  I even tried to dismantle the two broken ones I had and switch around components, either the components for the different brands of Kindle are incompatible or my technological prowess is not what I though it was.  It's a toss up between the two.

I'm reading 'Bones of the Earth' by Michael Swanwick.  Mostly because I find it hard to believe that the author of 'Stations of the Tide' could write a book about time travel and dinosaurs.  I'm not very far into it so I expect it to get pretty weird.

On a note completely unrelated to SF I just read an article about a New York politician and Bail bondsman, a woman who passed as a man her entire life.  She came over from Europe dressed in boys clothes and for the rest of her public life acted entirely as a man.  She was married twice and even adopted a daughter.  That she was a woman only came to life on her death and, get this, the part that shocked people the most was that she had been able to vote.  This blows my brain, and I find it kind of embarrassing that women haven't even been able to vote for a hundred years.  That story is better than any SF I've read in quite awhile.  I tried to find a book about the person, Murray Hall, but apparently no one has written one.  That's really too bad.

 

1985 Nebula Award Nominee- 'The Remaking of Sigmund Freud' by Barry N. Malzburg

This book could be a prime example that our surrounding and mindset has almost as much to do with our enjoyment of a novel as the content.  'The Remaking of Sigmund Freud' has everything that an SF reader should want in a novel, originality, humor, complexity, interesting writing style, but somehow the book comes off as flat.  I'm forced to ask myself if this was just my experience in reading, as I was on vacation and this book followed several other superior novels, or is this the general experience in reading the book?

I never assumed that Sigmund Freud would make for a good protagonist in a novel, and I don't think Malzburg believed that either.  The character of Freud in the book comes off about as well as one would think he would in real life.  His internal monologue and actions are frustrating throughout the novel, kind of what you would expect if Sigmund Freud actually were to go on the sort of space adventure we see here.

You have to applaud Malzburg for originality here, no matter what else you think.  The concept of famous people from the twentieth century somehow ending up on spaceships, no matter the faulty logic involved or the convoluted reasoning behind it, is pretty awesome.  Deserving even more applause is Malzburg's choice of which twentieth century personalities to showcase in his novel.  If I were picking famous people to place on a spaceship I would probably go with Ghengis Khan, or George Patton, making it a military SF novel seems like a logical move.  Even Sir Richard Burton or some other explorer in space would make sense.  Malzburg's idea to resurrect Freud, Mark Twain, and Emily Dickenson deserves some degree of respect.  This is probably the only novel ever published that will feature these three characters on a spaceship.

The actual commentary that Malzburg is trying to make with these characters borders on the profound but is ultimately derailed by the distraction of using real life characters.  Some of the comments the author attempts to make about mental illness and the future of humanity in space are interesting, but when Sigmund Freud shows up complaining about Carl Jung the entire thing goes off the rails and any gravitas the author was attempting to bring turn into a spate of giggles.

Towards the end there is a bit of introspection regarding fame and success, and how close each of these major historical characters perhaps was to being largely forgotten by history.  Freud then trades in his entire fictional life from the book for the real life that we are aware of.  It's an interesting bit of metafiction and kind of a cool question to think about, the random choices in a life that can lead to success or failure.  But, by and large doesn't save the novel from earlier distractions.

This isn't the first book I've reviewed that attempted to take a preposterous premise and treat it seriously.  I think 'The Void Captain's Tale' wins the prize in that regard.  Whereas in Void Captain Norman Spinrad's talent as a writer was able to keep the reader grounded and suspend disbelief (stave off the giggles) for the duration of the novel, in Remaking Malzburg is not quite up to the task of making us take this story seriously the entire time.

Malzburg would have done better to emulate a writing style more like Philip Dick who even in his earlier, less ridiculous work, never seemed to take his writing too seriously and and was never scared to let the originality of his idea overshadow everything else.  Jonathan Lethem's 'Gun, with Occasional Music,' would be a modern idea of this, where the author never demands that we take the novel too seriously, and is therefore able to command our attention through a good story.

Remaking is an interesting novel that gets points for originality.  It's just what the reader should be looking for in a Nebula nominee from the early eighties.  Flawed but original, I'm sure every review for the novel was bound to say 'something new' somewhere in it, which this book definitely is.  Though 'The Remaking of Sigmund Freud' never really had a chance to win any awards, it was published in the same year as 'Ender's Game' and 'Blood Music' after all, but it's more than deserving of a nomination, and I'm glad it was.  Otherwise it might be totally forgotten by now.



I finished off my review of 'The Void Captain's Tale' yesterday.  It was a tough book to review actually, it's kind of difficult to convey just how off the wall the story actually is, compared with how steadfast the writing style is.  I'm really glad that Void Captain got a nomination in 1984, that year and 1983 were fairly traditional years for the Hugo and Nebula.  Almost all the nominees for that year were traditional SF writers at the end of their career.  83 and 84 saw the last nominations for Asimov, Heinlein, and McCaffrey three solid and well known writers.  There were also nominations for Gregory Benford and Jack Vance, some lesser known but still respected SF authors and editors.  These two years also saw nominations for Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun' series, which is just great taken as a whole and the winner of both awards for 1984 was 'Startide Rising' by David Brin, which is more than deserving.  Also there was 'Tea with the Black Dragon' which is just a great little book that I'm glad got nominated otherwise it might be totally forgotten.  Looking at this list of books maybe I'm wrong to say these two years were dull or traditional, they might just look that way because 1985 saw 'Neuromancer' which was a groundbreaking work, and the years prior were still flying high on the craziness of the 70s.

I'm still reading 'Dhalgren' by Delany, and I probably will be for awhile.  It's going to take awhile to finish this one.  I'm going to start setting myself a goal of reviewing two books a week, which will be kind of tough.  I know most people haven't read Void Captain so the review is unlikely to appeal to most people, but I think it's important to bring some of these older books to peoples attention.  A lot of older, less popular SF novels are completely out of print.  Void Captain is one of these, and it's not likely to come back into print any time soon unless Norman Spinrad sees a huge upswing in popularity.  I get a lot of these older novels from online used bookstores like thriftbooks, but the SF publisher Gollancz is doing a lot of cool work with e-books.  They're one of the few places that are working to make sure less recognized work is still available to the public, they have an e-book version of Void Captain available at Amazon, which is pretty cool.  It's a little ridiculous that the e-book costs eight bucks and the used version is only a dollar, but it's nice to know that these books will still be available for years to come.

I won't even try to guess what my next review will be, I'm going to try and stick with my plan of reviewing one older book followed by a more recent novel.  So my next review will be a newer novel, I just don't know what it will be yet.  I'll try and have it up by Friday.

1984 Nebula Award Nominee- 'The Void Captain's Tale' by Norman Spinrad

I've talked before about SF authors setting their sights a little too high, and some of the novels nominated for the Hugo or Nebula getting by more on concept than actual delivery. In my review of 'Dark Universe' I talk a little about Samuel Delany's opinion on 'story' and 'writing' and why I think he's wrong to say a novel's delivery cannot be exceeded by it's concept. I might be putting words into Delany's mouth (I had trouble finding the actual quote), but either way Void is a good example of the concept, no possible story could live up to the originality of the idea. This is a story about spaceships piloted by orgasm. Let that sink in for a second. No actual story could live up to that, could it?

 This story has a spaceship piloted by orgasm and a Captain so enthralled by a woman, so consumed by her that he is willing to sacrifice his spaceship, passengers, and himself just to give her what she wants. This book doesn't just have sex scenes in it, this book is about sex, around sex, on top of and underneath sex. There's no way to extract the sex from this novel without completely changing the story.  It's there on the first page and it's there on the last.  It's as if someone challenged Spinrad that he couldn't write a compelling novel that was intrinsically about sex and he used the nuclear option to prove them wrong.

People have found this novel offensive or distasteful, but some people have felt that way about most of the author's writing. Spinrad was a big proponent of the ‘New Wave’ SF movement going on in the 60s and 70s.  New Wave strove to intentionally push the boundaries of what could be written about in SF, going out of the way to shock readers. Not necessarily a good thing, but many of the books that were adherents of this, some almost banned at the time, are more curious than offensive now (Spinrad's most famous novel 'Bug Jack Baron' is a good example of this).  On the other hand Void Captain, which came out several years after the heyday of the New Wave, would have offended people no matter when it was written, and that's probably a good reason why it's mostly unknown.  People have been offended by books with a lot less sex than this one.

 

Long passages of the book are given over to either descriptions of sexual acts or orgasms themselves. Some of these work out better than others. One would assume that these scenes would be salacious and pandering, that the actual sex scenes in the book border on the gratuitous, but they don't.  The style and tone in which Spinrad presents the topic almost precludes any notion that this is pornographic.  The best way to describe his writing style is 'detached.'  Spinrad has the narrator maintain the tone of a captain throughout the novel.  Even as his life spirals out of control and he agrees to destroy everything he has worked for to help his mistress 'Go On' and commit a form of sexual suicide the narrator's voice never changes.

 

This style is wordy, and strange enough quite formal.  This can be off putting, and can read somewhat dated, but readers should note that this is a style Spinrad affects for this story, his other works like Jack Barron are written in a completely different tone. I think the tone of the novel does a good deal of the work in helping the story not devolve into farce or pornography, something that could have easily happens with a lesser writer.  By working so hard to keep the narrator dignified in speech throughout the novel, even as he loses all his dignity in everything else, does a lot to maintain balance in a book that gets pretty out there.

 

The style also does the work of presenting the future as an alien place, foreign to us. The characters in the story choose their own names, and any introduction between two characters begins with the sharing of names, and how each character settled upon the names they have.  Spinrad injects foreign words and phrases into the daily conversation of his characters, something he also has done in 'Child of Fortune.' It is not as distracting as it sounds, and does a lot to contribute to the tone I was talking about.

The story is interesting in that the narrator lays down the entire tale on the first page. There is no suspense regarding what will occur, only how and in what manner it will be presented. The novel begins with the captain sharing his 'name story' with the reader, followed by a quick section in which he lists the action of the novel.  Nothing is hidden, if readers were expecting some major twist or surprise from the book they will be sorely mistaken, Spinrad plays no tricks and the entire tale is there at the beginning.  It's an interesting tactic on Spinrad's part, and I thought it played to the novel's strength and originality.

This novel sits in my brain, and I cannot and probably will never be able to separate how good the story actually is from how original and fascinating I find the concept. A lot of time I read novels off the list of Hugo and Nebula nominees and find a real masterwork that has been sadly forgotten, think 'Stations of the Tide' by Swanwick. A lot of others are middle of the road SF whose authors were popular years ago, their work still worth a look but nothing to scream about. Occasionally, I'll find something like Void Captain, which defies categorization. Something truly original doesn't ever come in a form you would expect (obviously), and people rarely know how to judge it. Despite being a book over twenty years old this is still one of the most original works I've ever read. 

 

Does 'The Void Captain's Tale' set it's sights too high?  Maybe, maybe not.  Like I said, I don't know if any novel could live up to the promise and originality of that premise.  But the novel is good and gets points for being both classic and postmodern, oddly enough.  Does it strive to be shocking?  Yeah, a little, I have to admit the ending where the captain sets out to sleep with every woman on his stranded ship so as to figure who would make the best replacement pilot felt a little weird.  But if a novel this original and out there can't exist in the halls of Science Fiction then where can it?