112 pages, Paperback
First published June 20, 2017
Reissued 4/2024
Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction (2017)
World Fantasy Award Nominee for Novella (2018)
Podcast coverage and full NEW review on the way,
Sunday, May 4, 2025
Book Review Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones (Re-issue, re-review, podcast coverage on the way)
Book Review: New Tomorrow by Cody Goodfellow (Full review soon)
NewTomorrow by Cody Goodfellow
484 pages, Paperback
Book Review: The Deading by Nicholas Belardes (Full review coming)
The Deading by Nicholas Belardes
Book review: Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback
Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 by Hugo Gernsback
Some books are more important than they are actually good. Ralph for short (better than R1+AROY) is an important historical document, despite not exactly being good writing or storytelling. If read the right way, it can be very entertaining. Written in 1910 or 1911 by Hugo Gernsback in his magazine Modern Electronics. This was of course, a new field, electronics. John Ambrose Fleming, the first professor of electrical Engineering at University College in London got that gig less than a decade earlier. Gernsback was a publisher, but he saw himself as an inventor. This radical thought experiment showed him going far beyond what was currently technologically possible.
Perfect for Science fiction, just one problem, the genre didn’t exist yet. Ralph as a story is very, very important, not just because of how crazy ahead of the time it was. First serialized in 1911 in his electronics journal Ol’ Hugo had no idea that in sixteen years he would be inventing not technology, but a storytelling genre.
There is a reason the science fiction award is called the Hugo, and yes, I am aware that SF in a sense already existed, but Gernsback, Amazing Stories, and indeed Ralph play a role in inventing the genre we see expressing itself across media. Now the edition I read is based on the text of an edition from the 50s, and it had been revised a bit in 1928, but still the ideas are quite revolutionary for 1928, but in 1911 it is CRAZY.
From a universal translator, thumb drive newspapers. Anti-gravity flying cars, microfilm, vending machines, satellites, tape recorders, solar energy, and a few others are accurate or close to accurate predictions. This is all fun stuff to read about, and the technologies that were pretty close to the eventual thing that was invented. Even more fun is the stuff that never happened. One of my favorites was a postage stamp-sized newspaper you buy to download the news.
This is an important book, but make no mistake, the story and characters are thin. You are reading it for the thought experiment of the technology at the time. For that, it is a valuable snapshot of wild speculation of many sitting at a typewriter in 1911 and thinking about the future and certainly a better example than Poe’s The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," which still people traveling in balloons in a thousand years.
As far as a work of Pre-Science Fiction I think this novella is a must-read. The faults are many, but the strengths are enough to validate its importance.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Book Review: Gather at the Hall of Planets by K.M. O'Donnell (AKA: Barry Malzberg)
Gather at the Hall of Planets by K.M. O'Donnell (AKA: Barry Malzberg)
I generally will give more time and attention to a Barry Malzberg novel, and while I enjoyed this one, this felt like a SF satire spin of the Day of The Burning, that I read last year. I think this one came out first and by indications this was a Donald Wollheim concept, much like Campbell suggesting Foundation to Asimov. OK, is a little less of a big deal of a concept but you get the idea.
My favorite thing about this novel is picturing a smoke-filled office in NYC with Wollheim and Malzberg being two cranky old school SF dudes developing the idea. What I am sure they started with is a novel set at a WorldCon was a good way for Malzberg to vent all his anger and frustrations with being a SF writer, woah boy, does he do that.
It was also a way for him to get in some jabs at their old pals and colleagues, and sell a few Ace Doubles. This novel owes much to Anthony Boucher’s murder mystery, Rocket to the Morgue published 30 years earlier. That locked door mystery featured caricatures of LA-based SF writers with whom Boucher was in a writers' collective. This group included Robert Heinlein, Hubbard, and more. I can’t help but compare the two novels, and Boucher’s satire or caricatures of major SF figures were more obvious in Rocket. That novel was pre-scientology, and while you might guess that Gather was aiming at Hubbard, it is more AE Van Vogt, who was an early follower, that gets the treatment in Malzberg’s novel. I am assuming he had a Van Vogt experience like the one in the novel. Seekers of Tomorrow editor Sam Moskowitz and his tensions with Author/editor Fredrik Pohl are treated with humor for those in on the joke. I am sure that will be lost on 99% of anyone attempting to read it today.
The concept is that Sanford is warned a malevolent alien has infiltrated the Worldcon SF convention, and you need to find him. The alien storyline is the same as the Day of the Burning, a later Malzberg novel, and that storyline is better told in that novel. In Gather it is more of an excuse for Malzberg to vent. On the surface, it is about the struggles of an SF writer, but Kvass like BM ended up writing Erotica.
Sanford Kvass is a cranky old SF writer; maybe worse than Barry and that is saying something. The book is meant to be funny, and maybe if I were in a different mood, I might have laughed more. I mean, Malzberg uses Kvass to take a literary dump on the problems of being a writer in SF. “You don't have to refund the money, you idiot, they're canceling. They're dropping the whole science fiction line effective immediately and converting to sex books period if you would deliver the book when you were supposed to deliver it you would have $2000 and all the rights back to because they would have released it, but now you've only got 1000 and you can't even write the book. I want my money, Sanford, I mean that. I can't go advancing people and being screwed this way give me the money.”
Did Kvass/Malzberg want to be SF writer? Not really. And he makes that clear. Even their intentions when starting in the genre seemed lost…
“At around the time you become a professional writer a startling realization hits you it may come during the course of writing a book or more likely in the periods(longer and longer and more agonizing) in between books, and that realization is that what you are doing has absolutely no connection with what you thought you were going to do when you fell into it in the first place.”
Knowing what I know about PKD’s book deals with this part when Kvass refers to paperback only authors as “paperback prostitutes,” is an eye-opening look at the business of it all.
“But then of course, you take the fast deal with the paperback prostitute, you're Just filling in time, just going from month to month period, there are no royalties or increments with paperback. On the other hand, who has the time to angle for a hardcover? Then too, hardcover can be a worse deal than paperback unless you get some kind of edge or a break in reviews. Most affairs end dismally and are more expensive than simple relationships with prostitutes. “Paperback prostitutes” Kavass mumbles, and then, embarrassed, plunges his head into the coffee cup.”
The best and probably most grumpy part of the book was this exchange when Kvass explains his feelings on the entire process….
“Besides, there is an audience out there. At some point along the way, people have gotten around to “reading” your “books”; there are certain “responses” towards your “books”, and every now and then they give you indication, through postcards or strange notes to one another in the subculture called “fanzines” that what you have been doing has some connection to them after all. This is the most insane thing of all, because it is impossible to imagine that anyone could take this seriously, there are people who find it consequential. They form “opinions.” they purchased copies in enough quantities of sometime items to guarantee “royalty rates.” Many of them turn out to want to be “writers” themselves and ask for advice. They want to know what's the best way to go from specialized sale at the beginning or whether they should go right out and try to sell big a commercial novel so that they can make “big money” and spend the rest of their lives “doing the kind of work that we really want to be doing.”
This novel is pretty tongue-in-cheek on topics I find funny and ripe for satire, so I am surprised I didn’t enjoy it more. It maybe a function that I read at a busy time, none the less I don’t think it is one of the more important Malzberg works but I may have to give it another spin.
Sunday, April 6, 2025
Book Review: Stangelove Country by D.Harlan Wilson
Strangelove Country by D. Harlan Wilson
222 pages, Hardcover
This is a book I have talked about a lot before reading it, so I came to it with a bit of foreknowledge but from the beginning, I was skeptical about the concept that Kubrick could have such an impact on the meta-narrative of greater science fiction but I was ready to be convinced. The reason to be skeptical is essentially Kubrick’s direct impact on SF cinema is the futurist trilogy (Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange) and A.I.: Artificial intelligence, the film that Spielberg completed after Kubrick’s death.
I thought
DHW’s job of arguing the impact of Kubrick’s films as having an out-sized
impact would be difficult, but the case is so thoroughly made there is no doubt
that this book will become one of the most important deep-dives into this
master filmmaker. Words like schizoanalysis and filmosophy, are common in
the DHW toolbag and the big words, and bigger ideas are what make this book
special.
“Other monads that distinguish Kubrick's cinematic consciousness include themes like violence, sublimity, sexuality, primitivism, obsession, and the grotesque; Movements and periods like “post)modernism, surrealism expressionism, classicalism, futurism, and Victorianism; And more specifically identity markers like “wargasm,” doppelgangers the fault ability of machines, the phallus, original sin, chess board precision (and prevision), uncanny visual symmetry, and the Kubrick stare, a term coined by Kubrick's director of photography Doug Milsome describing the detached, unsettling gaze that signals that a character is ‘piercing through the illusion of conscious life just by the deep archetypal forces that shape reality.”
Strangelove country is also about more than just Kubrick, it is about the SF megatext and certainly DHW touches on PKD briefly, and the science fiction inspired by all this.
“For Dick, empathy is a human logo that machines increasingly wear themselves as he declares in “The Android and the Human (1972)…” and later on the page connecting to Kubrick. “This is the state of (in)animation we see in 2001, a quasi-Phildickian exploration of techno humanities corporeal and cognitive incarnations.”
There are moments that show how deep the analysis is, and DHW devotes chapters to each of the four SF project to show how it all informs the greater “Kubrickian consciousness” even touching how other Kubrick films like Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut flirt with SF ideas.
Here are a few ideas presented in this book that show DHW’s unique point of view.
“It's an anti-SF film that shows how our innate science fictionality predates the genre, going back to the primordial hordes depicted in the quote dawn of man” sequence. It's also post SF-film, redefining expectations of what cinematic SF could be, and a meta SF-Film, aware of itself as a newborn star child in the SF megatext and the history of cinema. Finally, 2001, the most important impactful cog in the cognitive apparatus of the KFM, essentializes the Kubrickian. The molecular filmid thinks harder than any other KSF.”
I really enjoyed the breakdown of 2001, but I might have enjoyed the chapter on AI even more as its place as the film Kubrick almost made but ended up in the hands of another director is fascinating. “In A.I., we witnessed the Dusk of Man become the Dust of Man as the SFM, riding the bomb of KFM takes us home.” This means the Spielberg Film Mind finishes the work of the Kubrick Film Mind. DHW quite brilliantly connects the opening scene of 2001, to the end of A.I.
This is a special book, a one-of-a-kind look at one of the greatest filmmakers. Kubrick is a director who is so important that you cannot teach the history of cinema without talking about his films. DHW gives him the proper context, and explains just why he is so important not just to film history but all Science Fiction that comes after his work.
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