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For Us, the Lusting
From time to time one comes across a work of fiction meriting almost perfect scorn, indignation, and hate. Heinlein’s FOR US, THE LIVING is such a book. This is a review of the first hundred pages or so, since I lack the fortitude to continue past that point.
Published posthumously, this was Heinlein’s first attempt at a manuscript, and one which he wisely never a second time attempted to sell, breaking one of his own rules about selling everything he wrote. It is not a novel properly so called, and not meant to be read as one: it is a series of lectures or ideas about a libertarian utopia, written in the same style as the utopian speculations of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and HG Wells’ A Modern Utopia and Aldous Huxley’s Island. Like his later books Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land, the plot is basically an excuse for the lectures.
More Borges! Funes and Ruins, Asterion and Aleph
This is a review of four more baffling short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, a writer of great power, subtlety, craft and intellect, who was cheated of the Nobel Prize for literature, to the everlasting shame of that corrupt and partisan award.
I adduce these reviews to my previous (first part is here http://johncwright.livejournal.com/329660.html) as part of the ongoing effort of the entire New Space Princess literary movement (http://johncwright.livejournal.com/76001.html) to convince the Secret Masters of Fandom to award Borges a Nebula, which, in my opinion, is an award meriting more prestige and honor than the degraded Nobel Literature Prize.
Since I am not a reader of great power, subtlety, craft or intellect, be aware that these reviews deal only with the most superficial aspects of the tales, that is to say, their science fictional aspects. The deeper meaning of Borges’ meditations on memory and dying, dream and reality, monstrosity and redemption, omniscience and sorrow, I leave to deeper commentators. My only comment along those lines will be to say that to me at least it seems that Borges is portraying with exquisite cruelty the arid implications of modern philosophy, the hollowness of a world without objective metaphysics. Even a magician who could create life from nothingness, or a poet who can capture the cosmos in a glance, omnipotent and omniscient, would be as lost as a beast bewildered in a labyrinth if our universe is one where names mean nothing, and nothing means anything
SPOILERS ABOUND! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! BEWARE!
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
This is a review of four baffling short stories that promise to delight anyone whom they do not repel. It is an author whom I approach with much trepidation, since, at first glance, he seems to embody that type of experimental, formless, and pointless fiction which delights the postmodern literati and disgusts simple men of sane and simple tastes likemine. The author is Jorge Borges, and only because Gene Wolfe, a particular hero of mine, favorably recommends him, do I surmount my trepidation.
My unexpected reaction is one of fascination with the work. Apparently that experimental, formless, and pointless fiction which delights the postmodern literati turns out to be a close kin, if not a monstrous Siamese twin, of science fiction & fantasy. These stories could appear without a blush between the covers of Moorcock’s New Worlds, Farnworth Wright’s Weird Tales, or Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
To describe them beggars my powers of description and insults the author. I cannot discuss them without giving away the surprises, and without betraying the luminous quality of the work, which shines through even the translated versions I met. Nonetheless, my hope that these words will find forgiving readers rather than just ones props up my fainting courage.
SPOILER WARNING! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED! Read the remainder of this entry »
Book Review: Gene Wolfe and Paul Johnson, plus a kind word about dragontraining
THE SORCERER’S HOUSE by Gene Wolfe. Perhaps the best book I’ve read all year. The book consists of a series of letters from and to an ex-convict named Bax, just out of jail, desperate for money and looking for a place to stay, who trespasses into an odd and empty mansion called Black House in a small town, only to discover, perhaps by coincidence, that he is (or is mistaken for) the true heir.
The house is larger than it seems, and certain windows and doors open up into places beyond the fields we know. Other squatters also might be living in the house, some human, some less so, some from this world. One intruder (half of a pair of good-and-evil twins) is the son of a mage, and drops his instrument, called a triangulus, during a scuffle. Bax lines up the three compass-rings of the triangulus and moves the pointer over to a certain sigil …
Whatever you summon, comes in threes.
Most of the letters are to the narrator’s twin brother, his brother’s wife, or the narrator’s ex-cellmate. Since Bax is begging for money from a brother he apparently defrauded, we do not know how much to trust. Like the narrator, the book is ambidextrous. And Black, the original owner of Black House, may still be alive. But the thing in the trunk in the locked garage may still be alive as well, not to mention the she-wolf summoned by the sorcerer’s son, or perhaps the evil twin brother of the son of the sorcerer.
Let me tell you what Gene Wolfe captures in this book, captures as well as anyone writing genre literature, as well as Neil Gaiman or John Crowley: in the days before Tolkien, who made elves into noble prelapsarian Norsemen, and in the days before Shakespeare made fairies into butterfly-winged sprites who could hide in an acorn-cap, the faerie realm was both beautiful in an unearthly way and dangerous in an unearthly way, almost terrifying.
