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.

 

I'm going to write a review for 'The Masks of Time' by Robert Silverberg.  It's kind of an odd book in that I can't actually say what the merit of the novel is with any objectivity, but the book has had a pretty profound influence on me personally.  I read it when I was pretty young, and while I imagine large portions of the book would be almost laughable now, to a fourteen year old kid they could be downright life altering.  I should have the review up pretty soon.

I've been trying to put up ads on the blog recently.  I don't know how it's going to work, and if I don't like how it's going I'll take it down.  Really I would just like to be able to put a link to Thriftbooks at the end of each review that a person could click on to guy buy the book from them.  I love thriftbooks and actually just recently bought a whole bundle of SF from them.  It's one of the best (cheapest) sites I've found to buy books online and I recommend everybody buy books from them.  They're much cheaper than the competitors, and the shipping is always free.

I had told myself when I started doing this blog that there was no way I would put ads up unless I got at least five hundred site visits in a month.  When I started doing this it seemed impossibly high, but apparently I had too low of expectations because I've more than hit that number this month.  We'll see how the ads work out, if they don't I'll just shill for Thriftbooks for free.  I'll try to put the review up soon.

I haven't posted anything in a little while.  I was on vacation and didn't have access to the internet.  But, on the bright side while I was on vacation I finished 'Jack of Shadows' by Roger Zelazny, 'Shadrach in the Furnace' by Robert Silverberg, 'The Remaking of Sigmund Freud' by Barry N. Malzburg, and I'm almost done with 'Iron Council' by China Mieville.  So I've got a lot of reviews to post here pretty soon, and I also got a tan. 

'Jack of Shadows' wasn't the best Zelazny I've read, though it does some interesting things with character sympathy.  I'll read whatever he wrote based on how much I enjoyed 'Lord of Light' but I haven't found anything else of his yet that lives up to that wonderful novel.  Zelazny seems to be more fantasy based than SF based for most of his work.  In my limited experience (I don't read that much Fantasy) most fantasy seems to build a very familiar world, something the reader is used to, and inhabit that world with new and interesting characters.  Zelazny is almost the exact opposite of this, while his characters can trend toward the one dimensional his worlds are always amazingly original and interesting.  This is especially the case with Shadows.

'Shadrach in the Furnace' is really classic Silverberg.  I've posted a link to his bibliography before and I'll do it again here.  This guy wrote a lot of books, and that bibliography isn't even complete.  His best work seems to be done between 1967 starting with 'Thorns,' and ending with Shadrach in 1977.  Following Shadrach Silverberg had a dry spell in which he published almost nothing for about two years.  Samuel Delany talks about the publishing world of SF in his book of essays 'The Jewel Hinged Jaw,' and he specifically mentions Silverberg as being burnt out after writing two or three full length novels a year for ten years.  It's sad that this had to happen to such a great author, but no one can deny the quality of work he produced in that time span.  In several of those years Silverberg had multiple nominees per year.

'The Remaking of Sigmund Freud' is an experimental novel I would normally associate more with the Nebula Award, but it was nominated for a Hugo instead.  I've had it on my Kindle for several years now but just couldn't get into it.  I finally finished it and it was alright, interesting.  You won't find it at any bookstore these days except a second hand store, and the only place to buy it new is online.  Gollancz is still doing a lot of good work placing out of print SF books online in e-book format.  Their work seems to contain a lot of typographic errors but for availability they just can't be beat.  It's kind of shocking to realize that so many Hugo and Nebula nominees just aren't worth the cost of priniting anymore, but it's nice to see a publishing house putting the effort into making them available online.  I can still find copies of books like this online at thriftbooks.com but in ten years or so Gollancz might be my only option to find some of this less popular work.

I'm really liking 'Iron Council.'  Mieville has his problems, and the complexity of his work, especially his New Crobuzon work, seems to be dropping off each novel.  'Perdido Street Station' was one of the most complex and original works I've ever read, 'The Scar' was less so but had enough going on that it was still amazing, 'Iron Council' has almost none of that and I could see it being published by a less accomplished author.  I'm not finished yet and maybe the last fifty pages holds some surprise for me we'll see.  If there is some drop off in originality you can't really fault the author anyway, it seemed like he threw thirty years worth of ideas into Perdido, that novel had everything in it.

Anyway, I'll post reviews for these novels as soon as I can, got to get back into the swing of things after vacation.

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.