THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE – Philip K. Dick (1962)

Glad that I finally read this – the first PKD I truly liked. Reading it almost never happened, as after Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said I decided to stop seeking out more Philip K. Dick. But as I’m also slowly trying to read all big classics of scifi, I had to tackle it one day.

The Man in the High Castle got Dick a Hugo award, and is one of the stalwarts of alternative history. It is considered his most literary novel – Ursula Le Guin even claimed it “may be the first, big lasting contribution science fiction made to American literature.”

Obviously it ticks many boxes for those that like to analyze things: it has meta-fictional parts, references to real and imaginary Nazis, characters with false names, characters pretending to be someone else, questions about the nature of reality & authenticity & art, a formally inventive origin story (Dick used the I Ching to plot the novel), ruminations on other cultures, totalitarian & leftist politics, and one of the biggest what if questions of the 20th century. A postmodern smorgasbord.

Yet none of that really sold it to me.

THE CYBERIAD – Stanisłav Lem (1965)

Cyberiada is a short story collection by Stanisłav Lem. Michael Kandel’s outstanding translation appeared in 1974, but omits five stories that were in the Polish edition.

Lem writes about Trurl and Klapaucius, two brilliant constructors living in a far-future, galaxy spanning world that’s populated by robots and humans, in a setting that borrows heavily from medieval tropes: knights, dragons & kings. Gradually it becomes clear that Trurl and Klapaucius are robots themselves as well.

The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age is considered to be humorous, satirical fiction – but I think such a description, while not untrue, doesn’t fully do the collection justice.

This was my third Lem: Solaris was great, but Fiasco was marred by characters behaving stupidly. I’m glad The Cyberiad renewed my faith in Poland’s most famous speculative author. The Cyberiad is five star material, and deserves to be widely read – also outside of genre fandom.

VERGETEN SCHEDELS – Louis Paul Boon & Roger van de Velde (1946 & 1969)

Next post will be about Meganets by David Auerbach, a non-fiction title on “how digital forces beyond our control commandeer our daily lives and inner realities”.

In the meantime, a post in Dutch, consisting of 3 short reviews.

The first is about the third book by Louis Paul Boon, Vergeten Straat, written during the war and published in 1946. “Forgotten Street” is about a street in Brussels that’s accidentally closed off as a new railway is being build. The inhabitants of the street struggle to make the best of it by trying to build something utopian, but ultimately fail.

The other two are on Roger van de Velde, another Flemish author. Van de Velde is way less known than Boon – one of the biggest voices of 20th century Dutch literature. During the 60ies, Van de Velde, a journalist, was imprisoned in psychiatric wards because he was addicted to Palfium – the result of several gastric surgeries. He wrote two works about his predicament, even though he was forbidden to publicize anything. As a result his wife had to smuggle out the handwritten texts hidden in her underwear.

De Knetterende Schedels, “The Crackling Skulls”, is a collection of short stories on fellow psychiatric prisoners, and Recht op Antwoord, “Right of Reply”, is a long pamflet denouncing the way the Belgian judicial and penitentiary system dealt – and still deals – with psychiatric patients. They were both published in 1969, just before Van de Velde died in 1970, 45 years old.

THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH – Walter Tevis (1963)

Walter Tevis has some serious cultural clout. Two-thirds of his literary longform production was transformed into other forms – high profile forms at that. He wrote six novels: four of those were adapted for the screen.

The Hustler (1961) won 2 Oscars and was nominated for 7 more. The Color of Money (1986) was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese, and nominated for 4 Oscars, of which Paul Newman won Best Actor. The Queen’s Gambit became a very successful & critically acclaimed Netflix series in 2020.

The reception of the movie based on The Man Who Fell To Earth wasn’t as glowing, but it does star David Bowie. On top of that, the book was made into a TV-series twice, once in 1987 – conceived as a sequel to the 1976 movie – and in 2022, by Showtime. Bowie’s 2015 musical Lazarus – directed by the internationally admired Ivo van Hove – was also inspired by the novel, continuing its story.

Another thing that struck me was that at least three of Tevis’ books deal with addiction: The Queen’s Gambit‘s prodigy protagonist is addicted to painkillers, humans in Mockingbird’s future “spend their days in a narcotic bliss or choose a quick suicide rather than slow extinction” and Thomas Newton, the humanoid alien from Anthea and protagonist of The Man Who Fell to Earth, becomes an alcoholic. So when I did a bit of research for this review, I wasn’t surprised to learn that Walter Tevis was an alcoholic himself.

‘Write what you know’ is an often parroted as writing advice. So, did Tevis’ condition make this a better novel?

TERMINAL BOREDOM: THIS IMMORTAL INCAL (3 short reviews)

Taste is a strange thing. We all know it, yet it continues to amaze me how different it can be, even in between people who often align. This post collects some thoughts on 3 books that were highly recommended by other bloggers whose tastes at times tend to be similar to mine.

As you can guess, none of the three titles – Terminal Boredom by Izumi Suzuki, This Immortal by Zelazny and The Incal by Jodorowsky and Mœbius – worked for me.

In each case, I advise you follow the links to the other blogs to check out the other reviews – otherwise you might miss out on a book that could be a gem for you.

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TERMINAL BOREDOM – Izumi Suzuki (2021)

According to Jesse from Speculiction, this collection of short stories was the best book he read published in 2021, and he gave it 5 stars – which doesn’t happen much on his blog. Also Ola from Re-enchantment was generally impressed, albeit not as much.

Terminal Boredom collects 7 existential science fiction stories written between the mid-70ies and the mid-1980s, before Izumi Suzuki committed suicide in 1986, aged 36. Apparently she is a bit of a countercultural icon in Japan, and she had a tumultuous life, working as keypunch operator, hostess, nude model, and actor – both in pink films as in avant-garde theater.

It is the first time her work appears in English, and the stories were translated by 6 different people: Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi and Helen O’Horan.

It’s interesting that this collection is framed in feminist terms, many reviews stressing the gender content. I think this framing is more dictated by marketing in our own times than the actual foundations of the stories themselves. While gender is a theme, no doubt, I would not say it is Suzuki’s focus, not at all.

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE – Shirley Jackson (1962)

Harold Bloom – the literary guru that claimed literature and politics should have nothing to do with each other – challenged the idea that Shirley Jackson’s work should be included in the Western canon. Nevertheless, in 2001 he edited a volume of Jackson’s short stories. There he wrote that “Her art of narration [stays] on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even ‘The Lottery’ wounds you once, and once only.”

Bloom is dead, and in 20 years time his work likely will only be read by a few academics. I think there’s a fair chance Shirley Jackson will still be read widely 50 years from now.

I’m not trying to dis academia, but Bloom’s tale is stark warning for us meta-writers to not confuse talking taste with pontificating. I have not read The Lottery – I will – but based on We Have Always Lived in the Castle, I’d say that Bloom’s claim about Jackson’s “art of narration” is a bit off.

The Western canon seems a bit of an outdated concept, or, at least, it is outdated as an apolitical idea: the reasons why something becomes a “classic” surely ain’t devoid of politcs. Either way, there is no doubt about the fact that Shirley Jackson belongs at least in the canon of speculative fiction – that peculiar subset of literature.

It turns out that We Have Always Lived in the Castle doesn’t contain any speculative or supernatural elements, yet it evokes an uncanny atmosphere that will delight many readers looking for Otherness. However strange it may be, Jackson manages to stay close to the human experience, and as a result she has written a book that will keep on resonating with generations to come.

HAWKSBILL STATION – Robert Silverberg (1968)

It is one of the wonders of the written word that a novel about time travel actually functions as a time machine itself – albeit a shaky one. Reading Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station takes us back to the end of the 60ies, but not fully: the possibility of truly experiencing the context in which readers in 1968 read this short novel for the first time is forever lost in time.

According to Lawrence Block, Silverberg wrote 4 books a month at the end of the 50ies and the beginning of the 60ies, “a quarter of a million words a month”. He did so in lots of genres, including “about 200 erotic novels published as Don Elliott” – to pay off the house he bought.

If anything, Hawksbill Station shows that Silverberg was indeed a hardened professional: the prose is rock solid and the pacing is great. But solid prose and great pacing don’t necessarily save a novel from becoming dated. So, has this story about a penal colony for future political prisoners in the early Paleozoic aged well?

THE WALL – Marlen Haushofer (1963)

I don’t know why, but it seems I am drawn to books about singular women that have a heightened contact with nature. I’ve just read The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip, about a female wizard that grew up in isolation, surrounded by fantastic beasts. I also have fond memories of Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by the Polish Olga Tokarczuk – who won the 2018 Nobel Prize. And don’t get me started on The Door by the Hungarian Magda Szabó: while my review of that 1987 book was just short, it is one of my favorite reads ever – if you haven’t read it, I urge you to give it a try.

25 years older than The Door and 46 years younger than Drive Your Plow…, The Wall also has a central European origin: Austria. Marlen Haushofer wrote it in German, and Die Wand was translated in English in 1990 by Shaun Whiteside.

The story has a clear speculative premise: the female protagonist gets trapped in the Austrian mountains, as a suddenly appearing giant transparent wall closes her in, encircling the hunting lodge and the surrounding landscape – mountains, woods, an alm, a valley. It seems all animal life outside the wall is dead, and the woman is left to her own devices to survive – together with a cow, a dog, and a cat.

Those expecting a full-fledged sci-fi romp will be disappointed if they can’t appreciate anything outside genre. The origin of the wall is never explained, nor explored. It is something of a paradox that the story’s only speculative element is at the same time very dominant, yet hardly present. Haushofer’s choices make for a novel that hasn’t dated at all.

The Wall takes the form of a first-person account of the woman, who writes about her ordeals to keep madness at bay. The book has no chapters, and its 224 pages are one long sequence describing chronologically what happened, with the occasional foreshadowing rumination. The story’s focus is rather monomaniacal, and what happens is more or less predictable: she turns to a farming life, one that might offer her better chances of self-realization than her old life.

In a way, it is a miracle Haushofer managed to write an utterly compelling novel, rather than a drab, boring tale about someone planting potatoes again and again. The Wall sucked me in after 30 pages, and if I could, I would have finished it in one sitting.

FAREWELL, EARTH’S BLISS – D.G. Compton (1966)

There’s a few slow projects in progress on this blog: rereading favorites I haven’t reviewed yet (Foundation, Anathem, Frankenstein and maybe some Banks are in the queue), working my way slowly through the KSR, Greg Egan and M. John Harrison I haven’t read, reading Frank Herbert’s lesser novels (a form of masochism), read more of my non-fiction TBR, digesting the oeuvre of Flemish writer J.M.H. Berckmans, and checking out some of the vintage scifi Joachim Boaz recommends on his site Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Some of Boaz’ recommendations have worked out really well for me: Non-Stop, Stand on Zanzibar, Beyond Apollo, Dying Inside, We Who Are About To…, An Infinite Summer, others less so: Ice, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, A Funeral for the Eyes of Fire.

The British author David Guy Compton’s second speculative title falls somewhere in between. I didn’t fully love it, but it is not to be discarded either. Farewell, Earth’s Bliss combines 2 tropes: colonizing Mars and the prisoners’ colony.

I’m sure the story of unwanted people that are sent to a distant island or so has been told lots of times in regular fiction too, but science fiction obviously offers a bit more possibilities than some version of Australia. In 1967 Robert Silverberg published Hawksbill Station – a novel I have yet to read, and he uses time travel as the method of exile. [update: I read it in January 2022, click on the title for the review.] In the 1980ies Julian May takes that same idea for The Many-Coloured Land and makes an entire series out of it – one I loved as a teenager.

Stories about communities in isolation being abundant, the question then is whether Compton uses his Mars setting effectively – to wit, distinctively. The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is a bit more nuanced, as Farewell, Earth’s Bliss is social science fiction, no hard sci-fi or space laser stuff.

That’s easily explained by the fact that Compton simply was not interested in science fiction as such, and has read none of his peers’ stuff, as he expressed in a fairly long 2019 interview with Darrell Schweitzer on Black Gate:

THE DROWNED WORLD – J.G. Ballard (1962)

“The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea of its total memory.”

At times, I read up on books while reading them, and this time my explorations of other reviews significantly colored my reading, in particular the review of BlackOxford on Goodreads.

In that review, BlackOxford develops a mostly symbolic reading of the text that accuses Ballard of racism. The arguments are interesting, but the reading might be reductive. On the other hand, Ballard seems to encourage this interpretative method of searching for latent symbolism.

Before I will add my two cents to the debate – and I’ll keep it short – let me do the non-political part of the review.

JELLYFISH – Lisa-Ann Gershwin (2016) & ICE – Anna Kavan (1967)

2 reviews in this post: first the best jellyfish monograph published to this day – I’ll treat you with a bunch of stunning facts at the end of the review. After that, a much lauded slipstream classic.

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JELLYFISH: A NATURAL HISTORY – Lisa-Ann Gershiwn (2016)

Good books on jellyfish are hard to find: there hardly exist any. I’ve had the German ‘Quallen’ by Thomas Heeger (2004) for years, and that used to be the only comprehensive scientific monograph on the subject: someone should translate that in English.

I’m fascinated by the subject, so when I saw this very book in the biography of the underwhelming little book on jellyfish that Peter Williams published in 2020 I bought it instantly.

This book isn’t really about 50 jellyfish as advertised on the back: it rather is a monograph on 5 subjects: jellyfish anatomy, life history, taxonomy and evolution, ecology and finally the impact of humanity on jellyfish. Each subject gets about 20 pages in text (and some graphics & pictures), and after that Gershwin each time presents 10 jellyfish that illustrate some of the stuff from that particular chapter’s subject. Each jellyfish gets a full page photograph, and one page with additional information.

This makes for a bit of a hybrid: this is both a coffee table book with great, clear illustrations & a fairly thorough introduction to jellyfish biology. I doubt experienced marine biologists with an interest in the subject will learn a lot of new things from Gershwin, but for the general public the book is detailed nonetheless.

SOLARIS – Stanisław Lem (1961)

At the beginnings of my forays into science fiction, it quickly became clear Solaris was one of the key texts, and so a physical copy of the book has been on my shelves for years. There were two reasons I didn’t take it out sooner. The main thing was me having the wrong idea of what it was about. I’m not sure why, but I thought the story focused on a crew slowly growing mad, and I’d mentally labeled it something like ‘psychological horror in space’, a genre I’m not that interested in. The other reason was Steven Soderbergh’s adaption: I’d seen it in a movie theater when it came out back in 2002, and while I don’t remember any other thing about it, at the time my reaction was lukewarm at best.

It was only after a conversation in the comments to my review of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves that I realized I had the wrong idea about the book. That conversation was with Polish native Ola G, and it turns out she wrote two excellent pointers about Stanisław Lem, here and here – do click on those if you want an accessible yet fairly thorough overview of Lem. On the strength of Solaris and Ola’s posts, I have added Fiasco, The Invincible and The Cyberiad to my TBR.

Before I look a bit closer at the novel itself, a few notes on the translation. The English translation from 1970 by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox was based on a French version. Not ideal, and Lem wasn’t satisfied with the result either. Sadly, it is the only available English version in print, even though Bill Johnston completed a direct translation from the original Polish in 2011 – a version Lem’s wife and son thought “captured the spirit of the original.” Johnston’s translation was released as an audio book and a Kindle edition, but a paper edition is stuck in legal limbo. I can’t say the prose was bad, but some sections felt a bit dry & lifeless, and I’m chalking that up to Cox & Kilmartin. Just to be clear: all this is no reason to not read this book – it is a deserved classic – but should you have the option: go for the Johnston version.

As in lots of Stanisław Lem’s stories, an important theme of Solaris is “the complete failure of human beings to understand an extraterrestrial intelligence”. I will not write a whole lot more about it here, as heaps of pages been written about it already. Curiously this theme is largely absent from the two latest movie adaptations, while it is central to the novel.

UBIK – Philip K. Dick (1969)

When I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 5 years ago, I approached it the wrong way. That novel is full of plot holes & other inconsistencies, and while I appreciated the mood, I ended up being bothered by its mushy core. I decided to not make the same mistake for Ubik, and see if a go-with-the-flow attitude would yield another reading experience.

Being who I am, I still ended up writing down numerous inconsistencies, but indeed, they did not really bother me. Maybe that is because Ubik simply is a much better novel, I don’t know: I’d have to reread Androids, and that’s not going to happen.

A bit before I started Ubik, I read a review on Calmgrove that determined my reading experience this time. It hinted at Serious Levels of Depth, and that provided the novel with lots of my credit upfront. It made me go down another rabbit hole this time: in search for truths about life & death.

For the uninitiated: Ubik is a strange novel, in which Dick draws back the curtain numerous times, only to close it a bit later on. It involves time travel – or not?, strange temporal digressions, merged states of half-life, a conflict between two psychic mutant factions, a trip to the moon and capitalist consumerism satire. An American-made Kafka: light in calories, and with a dose of cigarettes, X-Men & half-baked religion.

THE MAN IN THE MAZE – Robert Silverberg (1969)

Robert Silverberg’s bibliography is massive. The guy wrote tons of stuff. In 1968, the year he published The Man in the Maze serialized in Worlds Of If, Silverberg released three other novels, 8 books of non-fiction and 8 short stories, according to this glowing review on Fantasy Literature. Ah, quality and quantity.

Then again, this novel is just 192 pages in a pocket edition – the good old days of brevity. Today, a story like this would be published as a novel of at least 492 pages, adding lots and lots of world building and an attempt at deep backstory for the characters. In other words: authors and publishers alike would try to give it the veneer of serious literature. The wonders of word-processing indeed – it only makes the length and depth of Dune or LOTR all the more impressive.

So, what we get in The Man in the Maze is ideas condensed to their basic form, draped in a fast paced action/mystery story to make the medicine go down. It’s snappy pulp, yes, but it has deep ambitions – or does it?

I was drawn to read more of Silverberg since I read his classic Dying Inside, a fantastic fuck off to intellectual snobbery, that even today is mistaken as serious literature with metaphors about dying. His tone just felt right.

What about The Man in the Maze?

DUNE MESSIAH – Frank Herbert (1969)

I’ve always considered the Dune series the best SF I’ve ever read, but as I read it fairly early in my ventures into SF, a reread is in order. Do my past opinions still hold, years & years and books & books later?

My reread of Dune itself was a fantastic experience, and before reading this review, I politely urge you to read my 5000+ word analysis of Dune – it deals with the question of determinism & Paul Atreides as a tragic hero, among other things, and I’ll talk about those themes here too.

I remember that when I first read the sequels, I thought Dune Messiah and Children of Dune to be a lesser affair than Dune itself. I also remember feeling Herbert got into his full stride again with the final 3 installments.

We’ll see how all that holds later, but my feeling on Dune Messiah turns out to be more or less the same. I really liked it, but it’s not on the same level as Dune: 4 stars, instead of 5. It’s also of note that I liked it a bit better now than the first time around.

I’ll try to keep this text under 5000 words, so that’ll be all for the introduction. In what follows, I first compare Dune Messiah to its big brother: why exactly is it a lesser book? That part is the proper review, so to say.

Afterwards, I’ll zoom in on a few things for those interested in a deeper analysis. I’ll first write about Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, and how that ties into Paul being a tragic hero. I’ll finish with a discussion on determinism & free will in Dune Messiah – even though I’m starting to feel I’m beating a dead horse on this blog, especially after my massive post on the same subject and Lord of the Rings. The last two parts will be heavy with quotes.