People's Park by David Agranoff (Release Party Special edition) BUY IT NOW!!!!

 

People’s Park Release Party

People’s Park by David Agranoff National Book Launch

 1:30 PM Sunday April 7^th Bloomington, Indiana Monroe County History Center

202 E 6th St, Bloomington, IN 47408 (while you are there check out the "Punk at the Old Library," exhibit!)

Readings, signing, Q and A!  hosted by author, researcher, publisher and (PKD)Dickheads co-host D. Harlan Wilson 

From the author of The Last Night to Kill Nazis and Punk Rock Ghost Story comes a sci-fi horror love letter to freaks and weirdos and the places they gathered before the internet….

“David Agranoff is a razor sharp writer, a storyteller with hard rock pacing, a magician of ideas...An idealist in hell." - John Shirley, cyberpunk legend and Screenwriter of The Crow

Help us launch this book that is a love letter to the Bloomington underground culture!

***NOTE: The novel will be released by the fine folks at Quoir. You’ll be able to buy it anywhere but There will be a signed and numbered limited edition sold at the book that will come with extra goodies including classic Bloomington punk flyers, a bonus flash fiction called Hoosier Time Slip and surprises. If you buy and reserve a copy to pick-up at the party you’ll save $4. If you order a special edition to be mailed you will need that money back for shipping. 

People’s Park Special edition, Paperback 220 pages $15.  ($4.00 Shipping)

Includes trade paperback signed and number up to the first 1-50. (can be personalized and will be numbered based on when purchased online)

Two reprints of classic Bloomington punk show flyers. (random selected from 40 classic flyers)

One flyer comes with an exclusive flash fiction and the other with an essay about the writing of the novel.

https://venmo.com/u/David-Agranoff

 

PayPal: count.agranoff@gmail.com

 

People's Park in Bloomington Indiana, is not in radical Berkley but in the heart of the conservative Midwest. It was a home away from home for punks, skaters, metalheads, hippies, schizos, homeless vets, and anyone who didn’t fit in the mainstream. In the middle of the downtown business strip near the campus the park itself was out of place.  None of the young kids who called the park home knew their spot wouldn’t have been there if the Klan had not bombed a black-owned business in 1969. One witness to the bombing was Electric Fred, often dismissed as crazy Fred listens to blasting static on his Walkman and writes conspiracy theories in his notebooks. To Justin and his friends it is all part of the world out of the mainstream they are discovering by hanging out in the park in the summer of 1989.  Fred’s rantings about evil forces are easy to dismiss. As the forces of hate grow stronger the warnings scribbled in his hundreds of notebooks are coming true.

 A true 80s coming of age Bizarro horror novel People’s Park is Stranger Things with punk rock and skateboards with a blend of mind-bending Sci-fi.  Author David Agranoff did grow up in Indiana in the 80's and brings a personal touch to this genre defying novel has several mind-bending twists.  At its heart People’s Park is a love letter to freaks and weirdos.  David Agranoff is the author of 11 books and the long time co-host of the Dickheads podcast devoted to the work of Philip K. Dick.

 

“People’s Park is a wild sci fi coming of age story where the freaks, weirdos and punks get their time in the spotlight. And it just might be David Agranoff’s best work yet.” -  Desmond Reddick Host of the Dread Media podcast

People’s Park is published by:

www.quoir.com/

www.dharlanwilson.com

https://anti-oedipuspress.com/  

About the Authors:

David Agranoff Grew up in Bloomington, Indiana hanging in the park that inspired this novel. His future wife worked at the Spoon serving the real-life Electric Fred. They live in San Diego with two Electric Fred’s notebooks and a house full of rescued animals. David is a novelist, screenwriter and a Horror and Science Fiction critic. He is the Splatterpunk and Wonderland book award nominated author of 11 books including the novels the WW II Vampire novel - The Last Night to Kill Nazis, and the science fiction novel Goddamn Killing Machines from CLASH BOOKS, The Cli-fi novel Ring of Fire, Punk Rock Ghost Story He co-wrote a novel Nightmare City (with Anthony Trevino) that he likes to pitch as The Wire if Clive Barker and Philip K Dick were on the writing staff. As a critic he has written more than a thousand book reviews on his blog Postcards from a Dying World which has recently become a podcast, featuring interviews with award-winning and bestselling authors such Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Alma Katsu and Josh Malerman. For the last five years David has co-hosted the Dickheads podcast, a deep-dive into the work of Philip K. Dick reviewing his novels in publication order as well as the history of Science Fiction. David’s non-fiction essays have appeared on Tor.com, NeoText and Cemetery Dance. He just finished writing a book, Unfinished PKD on the unpublished fragments and outlines of Philip K. Dick. He lives in San Diego where you can find him hooping in pick-up games and taking too many threes. 

D. HARLAN WILSON is an award-winning American scholar, novelist, editor, literary critic, playwright, talkshow host, and college professor whose body of work bridges the aesthetics of literary theory with various genres of speculative fiction. Critically referred to as “a genre unto himself” with a “style that is completely without peer,” he is the author of over thirty book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, and hundreds of his stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies across the world in multiple languages. Wilson serves as reviews editor for Extrapolation, managing editor for Guide Dog Books, and editor-in-chief of Anti-Oedipus Press. With authors David Agranoff and Langhorne J. Tweed, he is also the co-host of the Dickheads Podcast, devoted to the life and writing of Philip K. Dick. For more biographical and bibliographic information, refer to Wilson’s entries at Goodreads, Amazon, Wikipedia and SF Encyclopedia.

Book Review: Riding The Torch by Norman Spinrad

 

Riding the Torch by Norman Spinrad

172 pages, Paperback
Published June , 1984 by Bluejay Books (NYC)

Full review coming: 

My Dickheads podcast Interview with Norman Spinrad 

 When I interviewed Norman Spinrad for the Dickheads Podcast he told me my first question was stupid. In fairness, I was trying to break the ice and I asked how he discovered Science Fiction. I get it, he was on a Philip K. Dick podcast and I am sure he assumed I was nothing but a super fan of his late friend who died in 1982. Spinrad eased up on me when it was clear I was a nerd for his books and knew his canon pretty well. Riding the Torch is my 10th Spinrad experience and 11th if you could the brand new novella The Canopy in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Published 8 years into his Science Fiction career, Spinrad had already made a name for himself, still a part of the Southern California scene. At the time he had already written two episodes of Star Trek one that was made (The Doomsday Machine), and had a controversy with the British banning of his novel Bug Jack Barron.

Riding the Torch is one I had heard was great but didn’t have it until I picked it up recently on a trip to Los Angeles. I think I got it at the Illiad, shout out to Lisa Morton. This novella comes with great illustrations by Tom Kidd and two afterwords that break down some of the themes and ideas at play. I wish more books would include essays like that.

The story is an entry in a classic subgenre of the generation ship. From Heinlein’s Universe to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora and River Solomon’s Unkindness of Ghosts the diversity of these tales that approached this theme are vast. Decades apart and done with very different tones and styles Spinrad seems to be making a similar point.to Aurora the KSR novel that I consider to be one of the best Hard SF novels in this century.

Spinrad doesn’t write hard or so-called realistic science fiction. My favorite of his space-faring SF novels The Void Captain’s Tale is so strange that it borders on fantasy. Riding the Torch is similar in this vein. For a thousand years or more “The Trek” (the intentionally ironic) name for the wagon train to the stars that humanity has been on since the human race destroyed their home. When our story opens the council of pilots is sending a probe to a world that may be a new home for our species.

“We’re all refugees too. We’ve killed the living world that gave us birth. Even you and I may never see another.”

The harsh message of this novel is nothing new, ecologically minded science fiction was common but Spinrad is doing more than saying killing the earth is bad. He is making a point that might seem sacrilegious to the genre – The earth is the planet we evolved on, and Spinrad is challenging the idea that any other planet could ever sustain us. That was the bummer message of Robinson’s Aurora as well.  It is a bummer in part because we morons are destroying the sustainability of the only planet we have. Science Fiction often presents false hope that Mars or some other world could be our new home.  

Riding the Torch is an interesting read in part because the way it makes the point is so oddly new wave while having a slight fantasy feel. The Trek feels odd and that is right because it is supposed to depict a human civilization that has spent generations in space. So the way society functions is strange and Spinrad has thought out many aspects – but keep in mind that is mostly just world-building. One way it is deeper than world-building is in the form of the Voidsuckers.

“The voidsuckers have been out there in the flesh for over half a millennium, spending most of their with no tap connection to the Trek, to everything that makes the only human civilization there is what it is.”

While most of the people who live on the Trek are in denial, the Voidsuckers are the ones who embrace the void.. They have these religious experiences when they go out alone into space. I was fine with how these scenes were written but honestly, I would have enjoyed even more of this stuff.

“We man the scoutships to reach the void, we don’t brave the void to man scout ships.” She said. “We sacrifice nothing but illusion. We live with the truth. We live for the truth.”

The truth is something hard to come by in the Trek.  Because it would kill morale, it is interesting because I kept thinking for our species to survive we need to do the opposite. Stop protecting people’s feelings. But protecting their feelings is what they do.

“We already know that 977-Beta_II is dead,” Sidi said. “We knew it before we reported it to the council of pilots. This whole mission like hundreds before it, is an empty gesture.”
“But why have they been lying to us like this? D’Mahl shouted. “What right did you have? What-“
“What were we supposed to say? Bandoora shouted back. “that it’s all dead? That life on Earth was a unique accident? That nothing exists but emptiness and dead matter and the murderers of the only life there ever was? What are we supposed say D’Mahl? What are we supposed to say.”

We are not on the Trek. Spinrad seemed to write this novel to remind us. You don’t want to be on the Trek. This planet is special, and there may not be another habitable planet in our reach, it seems unlikely but we may be alone, or at least in this region of space. Spinrad writes political science fiction. He likes to challenge doctrine, he likes to write genre that is outspoken and with a clear point of view. Riding the Torch is that, it is short but a masterpiece in my opinion but I have always been partial to Spinrad.  

Book Review: Fever House by Keith Rosson

 

 

 Fever House by Keith Rosson

417 pages, Hardcover
Published August, 2023 by Random House

A podcast interview coming!

How in the holy hell did I not hear of this book sooner? Weird crime, occult horror, a wee bit of metal, and some (punk)rock and roll set in many of my old haunts in Portland. I have no idea how I missed this one that would have made my best of 2023 list had I read it in time. It was a best-of-the-year ranking from the Talking Scared podcast that got this book on my radar.

I like crime novels, but I LOVE weird crime novels. I know the Pulp Fiction comparisons will be beaten to a pulp but think more about Elmore Leonard. I was thinking of Lansdale a bit, I know he feels so geographic it is hard to make that comparison to anything set outside of the South. Fever House is maybe not quite as laughter-inducing, although I chuckled often enough. This is a fun read, disturbing at times but I read it fast over a couple of commutes and almost missed my stop.

Fever House is the story of several characters spread out around Portland Oregon. It opens on tough guy Hutch Holtz. You might be thinking this is his story and you wouldn’t be far off. I read this book cold, knowing nothing of the plot. I thought OK we are chasing down a gangster’s money, then Hutch finds the hand in a wonderbread bag in the freezer. That is when things start to get weird.

The hand affects people around it. Makes them violent, quick to anger. I think the freezer might have blocked it. Hutch is afraid that the hand might implicate him and his friend takes it to dispose of it but the chaos starts right away and also opens the mystery of what the hell is this thing?
We get introduced to Hutch’s boss, a Dark Ops agent looking for the hand, a friend Nick Coffin, and his former rock star mom Katherine who went from touring to agoraphobia. Nick and Katherine interestingly become the protagonists of the book after we start on Hutch. It is an interesting narrative switch-a-roo that had me wondering if that was an accident by the author. Had Rosson intended to center the book on Hutch?

Nick and Katherine and their character elements were as interesting to me as almost anything in the book. Hutch drops out of the book and I could see some editors or storytelling Gurus saying that was a mistake structure-wise. It didn’t bother me but it was a strange choice to give me a hundred to like a character who disappears. That said Katherine is a fascinating character, and alongside her son Nick that novel is in good hands.

If you trust me and want to go in unspoiled let me just assure you of some things. This is a horror crime novel that mixes street-level brutality, humor, and supernatural elements. Much was made in the review of the hard rock or metal edges to the book but I thought those were minor. The crime aspects are where Rosson hooked me. Good crime novels excel in characters and dialogue, and this novel does those moments well. The horror elements work but not as effortlessly as the crime. It is a banger, and despite being long-ish it works. One of the best moments in the novel highlights for me the excellent writing and storytelling chops at play.

This happens late in the novel when Katherine after suffering from intense agoraphobia has to escape into the night.

“Katherine steps out, expecting gunfire and helicopters Men in a perimeter around the door, screaming at her with their weapons drawn.
Instead the night smells of rain. A city street, a boxy white moving van parked at the curb. A street of featureless office parks and garages. More warehouses. Alleyways dark with tangles of blackberry bushes. Lights shining from windows like squares cut out of dark paper.
The door clicks shut behind her. Katherine breathes for a single moment and then runs out into the world with her gun.”   

Fever House is filed with powerful moments like this. Many reviews with focus on the brutal bits, and the humor. That is much of the appeal. The writing is excellent on all levels. This is  really cool hybrid novel, and I am excited to read the sequel.
 

Book Review: The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl

 

 The Way the Future Was: A Memoir by Frederik Pohl    
293 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published May 1979 by Ballantine Del Rey

I am starting to figure out that all these OG golden age Science Fiction authors wrote memoirs. I am starting to think if you read Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee, Futurians by Damon Knight, and all their memoirs you might feel like you were around back in those days when Science Fiction was young and the genre was new. Let's not totally idealize those far-from-progressive days but it is nice to get all those people’s points of view.

Fredrick Pohl is a huge name in Science Fiction who won Hugo awards for both writing and editing. He worked for publishers and agents reading slush piles, he was an agent himself and took the reins of Galaxy magazine from the stewardship of Horce Gold considered one of the best SF magazine editors of the era. He wrote classic novels with CM Kornbluth like Space Merchants and his own classics in Gateway and Man Plus.

He is a big deal in Science Fiction, in the rest of the world he is a nerdy dude. His story is important to us. I listed all the things he has not just to explain why Pohl is important but why his story is important. Growing up in Depression-era Brooklyn is interesting enough but the story of how he found science fiction in the 20s is fascinating to me. Pohl was at the ground level of the genre itself so his story includes the first SF fan club meetings, and conventions, and stretches through the industry it became by the time of his memoir.

If you want to understand the growth and mechanics of the genre in the 20th century this book is an excellent place to start. It also has 16 pages of great pictures. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of Science Fiction.  

Book Review: We Are the Crisis by Cadwell Turnbull (Convergence Saga #2)

 

 

We are the Crisis by Cadwell Turnbull   (Convergence Saga #2)

338 pages, Hardcover
Published November, 2023 by Blackstone Publishing

The first book in this series No Gods, No Monsters was by first book by Cadwell Turnbull. It is an Anarchist werewolf novel with lots of cosmic horror. It is a book that has a major character who is a member of a collective book shop that is a bi-racial, asexual trans anarchist who grew up reading Leguin and Bakunin alike. In many ways, this novel’s pitch-black fantasy and moments of cosmic horror combined with monsters we can root for feels like Clive Barker’s Cabal if he grew up listening to anarcho-punk and being an activist. If I read the book without a bio and author photo I might have stereotyped the author as a green-haired crust punk, but Turnbull is a black author who grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Interview I did with Cadwell on book 1  (My audio is messed up he sounds great)

Now in the interview, he admits at the time he had not yet read Barker, the comparisons were not intentional. This series referred to as the Convergence Saga takes place mostly around Boston after ‘the fracture effect’ an event that outs the existence of monsters to the world. The first novel that centered around an anarchist bookstore and activism was something I related to and had locked me in for this series.

Set three years after the first book, members of the wolf pack are starting to disappear and the suspects are a radical ant-monster group called Black Hand. This group seems to mirror the rise of MAGA and anti-LBGTQ organizing that we have seen rise as society has become more accepting.  On the surface, it would be easy to paint this series as a civil rights allegory. It is that but also touches on cosmic horror elements and magic itself.

As much as I loved the first book I had to re-read my review to stoke my memory, that said as soon as I started to read the story came back to me. Again the activism at the heart of the story worked better for me than the action.

Like the first book, the first scene to stand out to me was a meeting of New Era a pro-monster group. Turnbull is interested in how these communities organize, and you do that through meetings. “Ridley, for those who don’t know me, I co-own the bookstore in Union Square, in Sommerville. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but when you say ‘protect each other,’ how far are you willing to go?”

No one has an easy answer to that question. The scene where a woman becomes a wolf in the meeting is one of the most powerful of the series.

“You can look at her,” Ridley is saying.  “That’s the whole point. See that she is not dangerous.”

In the modern world, the right is organized around and by othering, and creating fear of immigrants, Trans people, and liberals themselves who they mock as Lib-tards. The chief allegory of this series could seem on the nose if it was so accurate in scenes like this. This could come off as silly, and it requires the reader to step off the cliff with their imagination a bit.

 Civil rights and the debate over them appear to be the theme of this book and the cosmic forces directing the pro and anti-monster in a war or conflict is where we are heading. If there is one weakness the monsters are not as weird and diverse as they could be. That said weird monsters are not exactly the point. We Are the Crisis feels like it says sides, corners, and ideas I can’t come close to understanding all of. I think that is one of the best things about it. The level of thought and care in the storytelling is clear. If you were dispassionately describing the concept it might sound goofy. It is not, it is powerful storytelling that speaks to the struggles of otherness in our culture.

Book Review: Nerves by Lester Del Rey

 

Nerves by Lester Del Rey

153 pages, Paperback

Novel First published June, 1956 Novelette September 1942.

Reviews take time and research support my efforts here:  Buy me a coffee!

Recently recorded a podcast for my Science Fiction Hall of Fame series on the classic story by Lester Del Rey Helen O’Loy. I have to admit before reading that story I have not read any work by the famous Golden Age author. I was familiar sure, when I was a young Science Fiction reader Del Rey's books were a mark of quality to me. I didn’t realize at the time that there were two people behind that name who had built that brand. (that is another column)

Podcast on Helen O'Loy and Del Rey

When preparing for the podcast I pulled this book off the shelf that I had there for a few years now waiting to be read. Lester Del Rey is an interesting character in Science Fiction who grew up in rural southeastern Minnesota unlike the New York Futurians he was alone and invented some hilarious mythologies about himself, and how he got his famous pen name. Leonard Knapp chose to live as Lester Del Rey and that is that.

In the late 30s like many young writers in that era, he was writing to please and sell to Astounding editor John W. Campbell. Once Del Rey had relocated to New York City and was a part of the community he became one of the authors that Campbell gave seeds of ideas to authors. As Issac Asimov’s Foundation became a loosely adapted AppleTV the world of Harry Seldon and the Galactic empire began with Campbell giving Asimov one of those seeds.

This novel Nerves is often cited as an example of predictive SF appears to have started with Campbell’s fascination with Nuclear power several years before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. According to Alec Nevala- Lee’s biography of Campbel Astounding “Del Rey’s Masterpiece was ‘Nerves,’ a thriller about a nuclear accident that the editor pitched “not merely as an idea, but as to the viewpoint and the technique that made it possible.”  And that was what interested me. To write a novella about a Chernobyl-type meltdown in the early days of WW II is an excellent piece of speculative writing. The nuclear stories were enough to cause government agents to show and question Campbell, who would have told you it was reading scientific journals.

The Novella of Nerves first appeared in the September 1942 issue of Astounding. It is a great issue of the magazine The issue opens with a time travel novella by Anthony Boucher (six years before starting his Berkeley SF classes), Fredric Brown who was known for bringing humor to SF in the golden era, and Lewis Padgett the joint pseudonym of the science fiction authors Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. 

The novel published in 1956 is called an expansion or fix-up but it is different. It is the same idea and characters just written with a narrative structure. While the novelette version was overseen by Campbell as editor, Fredrick Pohl who was serving as Del Rey’s agent in 1956 oversaw the novel, enough that Del Rey dedicated it to him. This story coming from 1956 is a little less impressive but the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, in the Soviet Union had been going for two years. Still, the short story was 12 years before that.

The story is centered around Doctor Ferrel the lead medical personnel working in the atomic planet in Missouri. It is not stated in the story what year this is, but it is implied that the country has been using atomic energy for a few decades. We are introduced to the Doctor when he is on-call and breaks back to the plant to deal with an emergency. Del Rey (or Campbell) was smart to use the angle of the medical staff. It puts one of Campbell's beloved competent heroes in the story but the medical doctor doesn’t have to have to knowledge of atomics that an expert would.

The politics of the plant and where it was placed in the world were very curious to me. Del Rey plays with the idea that neighborhoods were built around the plant but over time people didn’t want to keep living close to it. The retro nature of this story is right on the surface once the crisis starts there is a scene when they try to find the scientist from the plant and they are calling restaurants and nightclubs around town. Del Rey didn’t envision a future when a cell phone or even a pager existed. But the paper printout on 1940s spaceships is one of the reasons we read the old stuff right?

Through the eyes of the doctor much of the action and suspense centers around the burns and damage to the workers. Even though the theme is in the title, it is often overlooked the role of fear of what could happen.

“Nerves! Jorgenson had his blocked out, but Ferrel wondered if the rest of them weren’t in as bad a state. Probably somewhere well within their grasp, there was a solution that was being held back because the nerves of everyone in the plant were blocked by fear and pressure that defeated its own purpose.”

The idea that fear and nerves are caused by working so close to powers so great is much of the building of terror and suspense. In some ways, the shorter more compact novelette from 1942 sells this better. The art of terror-filled faces certainly didn’t hurt.

Nerves is a better artifact than a novel, like CM Kornbluth’s Takeoff of a Moonshot written 17 years before humans made it there. It is interesting to explore. I enjoyed reading this novel but if you don’t find the out-of-date stuff charming and interesting it may not work for you. Is this canon for the genre? Who am I to say but I think the way it predicted stuff is important and interesting so in that sense yes.  I consider this canon, of course, that is just my opinion but that is what I am here for. Nerves offers much to study and understand. It teaches us what the speculation of a nuclear accident was like. We now have three real-life accidents to compare it to. To many the events in the real world only added to its power.  

Book Review: Shrapnel: Contemplations by Lance Olsen

 

Shrapnel: Contemplations by Lance Olsen

298 pages, Hardcover
 Expected publication: February 1, 2024 by Anti-Oedipus Press

  I admit Lance Olsen who has written many books was new to me. AOP and the works published by my Dickheads Co-host D.Harlan Wilson have for years been an automatic read. The many cover designs had me thinking this might be a horror or ultra-violent story collection but it instead it is a collection of essays of intense literary criticism, musings, and ideas. The last bit is interviews with the author.

This might sound like a backhanded compliment but this book is loaded with big words and highly academic language, I admit some of goes over my head.  The essays tend to move effortlessly from commenting on reading and writing.  The first six essays "Limit Situations"  my favorite these essays was "Reading/Writing as Tangle."

"Nietzsche, Bataille, Deluze, and others are emblematic  of the appreciation that exists in any meaningful way until the event of reading occurs, and that event is a form of writing and unwriting."  When Olsen suggests without the right mind a piece of writing doesn't work as well. He does a lot to get into feelings I know well.  Reading is different for writers. I enjoyed this essay.

The 2 section Autrebioprahies has a few great essays like  Literary Autism and  the wonderfully snooty title of "Ontological Metalepses & the Politics of the Page." Section 3 Speech Acts are interviews with Olsen or ones he was a part of.

This time of book of essays is one I might not have read if I had been gifted a copy but I am glad I did. It was a thought-provoking work. I had to slow down from time to time and think about passages. This is not a light read. What is important about what AOP is doing here is making these types of books available in mainstream release. Not ultra-expensive academic publishing editions that are cost-prohibitive to most readers. Two or three of the essays would be worth the volume alone but every single essay has value.

Book Review: The Female Man by Joanna Russ

 

The Female Man by Joanna Russ

 214 pages, Paperback
Published March, 2000 by Beacon Press (First published in 1975)

Literary awards:

 Nebula Award Nominee for Novel (1975), 

James Tiptree Jr. Award for Retrospective (1995)

There are certain novels in the science fiction canon it is a straight-up crime I have not read. I was beginning to feel like a poser having not read any Russ before last year. Experiencing Joanna Russ for the first time for the best SF novel of 1968 debate episode of Postcards from Dying World (the podcast!) I knew I had to read more.  I mean Picnic on Paradise was good but The Female Man was considered her masterpiece, so I ordered it right away. It took me a couple of months to get to it.
In the past, this is where I would do a little history lesson on the author her place in the greater genre. I am saving those types of commentary for a future Amazing Stories column. Let’s just focus on this book.

After some traditional Science fiction much like the fantasy adventure of Picnic on Paradise Russ wrote plenty of essays and was teaching. When she wrote this novel she was teaching at the University of Colorado, Boulder.  Russ was not driven by market forces. She could experiment with her next novel and she did. The result was a surreal feminist utopia that is deeply tied to the second wave of feminism.

As a science fiction writer or an essayist, she was more directly a feminist thinker and commentator than many of the other major women writers in the genre. Most of the women who were foundational in the early like Leigh Brackett mostly stayed away from telling tales that addressed gender issues or talked about being a woman. But Catherine Lucille Moore made a middle-aged woman her sword-carrying fantasy hero.  Judith Merril made it into the SF Hall of Fame with Only a Mother but it was not until Leguin and Russ that feminism made it into the major award categories as the point. Certainly, womanhood was a part of the genre before Russ and Lisa Yazsek’s amazing collection The Future is Female is filled with examples (at great place to start if you are seeking examples). The Female Man is pure undeniable feminism that is meta and hardly allegory. It makes it different.

Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness deals with gender but through the lens of a very alien culture, but it is something in the still fairly sexist 70s that a novel that explores Feminism would be nominated for a Hugo. Science Fiction was a' changin'. I get that I am not exactly the target audience for understanding everything Russ is trying to express. Much of the novel speaks to experiences lived and felt by women. I am however the target audience of SF readers. I think Russ was trying to reach us because the concepts are fun. You can sell this novel as a lesbian time-traveling novel that starts in a female utopia. It is that, but also more.

The narrative is spread over nine parts, that revolve between four different points of view characters, one of which is Joanna herself. The four women whose names all start with J live in four different realities and times.  We open in Whileaway… “Whileaway you may gather, is in the future. But not our future.” Like a far future extrapolation of Tiptree’s Screwfly Solution, this future was the most interesting part to me it is pretty much our future utopia woman Janet has to interface with our world at least as it is in the 70s the book was unleashed into. We are introduced to Joanna who is clearing a meta version of our author. The last J women who make up the four POVs are Jeannine who lives in an America whose great depression never ended.  The final point of view is Jael who has been fighting an open and literal war of the sexes com between men (Manlanders) and women (Womanlanders).

Often those critical of this novella say they like the idea but the story serves as a framework for the sometimes surreal commentary. There is a story, in fact as you can see there are four stories at work. Some people think that Mad Max Fury Road doesn't have a story because it happens during a chase. There is plenty of story in this book.

One of the strengths of the novel in a science fiction concept Russ gets to play with the World-building A female Utopia, the alternate history and the war of the sexes. There are tons of fun SF nuggets throughout but the strength is the commentary. So-called Anti-woke readers will hate it, and people who want subtle messages will likely be turned off as well. Russ speaks to common frustrations

“If you scream, people say you're melodramatic; if you submit, you’re masochistic; if you call names, you're a bitch. Hit him and he'll kill you. The best thing is to suffer mutely and yearn for a rescuer, but suppose a rescuer doesn't come?”

The book is filled with quotes that hit hard like that one. I could put twice as many into this review. This novel speaks hard truths.

Inequalities...
 
“Finding The Man. Keeping The Man. Not scaring The Man, building up The Man, following The Man, soothing The Man, flattering The Man, deferring to The Man, changing your judgment for The Man, changing your decisions for The Man, polishing floors for The Man, being perpetually conscious of your appearance for The Man, being romantic for The Man, hinting to The Man, losing yourself in The Man. 'I never had a thought that wasn't yours.' Sob, sob. Whenever I act like a human being, they say, 'What are you getting upset about?' They say: of course, you'll get married. They say: of course you're brilliant. They say: of course, you'll get a PhD and then sacrifice it to have babies. They say: if you don't, you're the one who'll have two jobs and you can make a go of it if you're exceptional, which very few women are, and if you find a very understanding man. As long as you don't make more money than he does. How do they expect me to live all this junk?”
 
Cultural expectations of women...

“Of course, you don’t want me to be stupid, bless you! you only want to make sure you’re intelligent. You don’t want me to commit suicide; you only want me to be gratefully aware of my dependency. You don’t want me to despise myself; you only want the flattering deference to you that you consider a spontaneous tribute to your natural qualities. You don’t want me to lose my soul; you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way; you want a devoted helpmeet, a self-sacrificing mother, a hot chick, a darling daughter, women to look at, women to laugh at, women to come for comfort, women to wash your floors and buy your groceries and cook your food and keep your children out of your hair, to work when you need the money and stay home when you don’t, women to be enemies when you want a good fight, women who are sexy when you want a good lay, women who don’t complain, women who don’t nag or push, women who don’t hate you really, women who know their job and above all—women who lose. On top of it all, you sincerely require me to be happy; you are naively puzzled that I should be wretched and so full of venom in this the best of all possible worlds. Whatever can be the matter with me? But the mode is more than a little outworn.

As my mother once said: the boys throw stones at the frogs in jest.

But the frogs die in earnest.”

That last line is to me the most powerful of the book. I found it powerful to experience the frustration and rage Russ was expressing. It is what makes this novel special and different.

“I’m a sick woman, a madwoman, a ball-breaker, a man-eater; I don’t consume men gracefully with my fire-like red hair or my poisoned kiss; I crack their joints with these filthy ghoul’s claws and standing on one foot like a de-clawed cat, rake at your feeble efforts to save yourselves with my taloned hinder feet: my matted hair, my filthy skin, my big fat plaques of green bloody teeth. I don’t think my body would sell anything. I don’t think I’d be good to look at. O of all diseases self-hate is the worst and I don’t mean for the one who suffers it!”

This is a classic worthy of being a Hugo winner representing most years. The problem with that fate of The Female Man is it was the same year as Philip K. Dick's  Flow My Tears and Leguin's  The Dispossessed. It appeared that year belonged to a showdown of the class of 1947 at Berkeley High School.  Leguin deserved the award and that is the novel I would have voted for in that position. As Dickian you might be surprised to know I think The Female Man would have been my second place. either way, they are all three great achievements.  

Russ created a masterpiece of SF Commentary, there are better stories, and storytellers but the story is only part of the point here. This is a masterpiece for reasons that go beyond just the story.It is a must-read classic.

Magazine review: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2023 Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

 

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, November/December 2023 Edited by Sheree Renée Thomas

 I just want to say a few things about this issue. The cover story The Many Different Kinds of Love by Geoff Ryamn and David Jeffery is an incredible modern SF novella, this was my first modern read after a whole bunch of Cordwainer Smith and Joanna Russ to kick off the year. I was behind reading this issue, but this cover story hits some awesome notes. Being about AI, and exploration of Enceladus - a moon that only recently became known as being one of the most interesting places in the solar system is a great example of a story being of the moment. It is a great and mind-expanding SF novella.  

Some other favorites include Longevity by Anya Ow, a story about long-lived humans that takes great advantage of the setting of Singapore. A city that should be in more prose SF -after being seen in Westworld. Lastly the story Meeting in Greenwood by R.K. Duncan is a great example of World-Building.

Book Review: The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith

 

The Planet buyer by Cordwainer Smith

156 pages,Pyramid books

First published October, 1964
Literary awards: Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novel (1965)

Since this is my second Cordwainer Smith book in a row,  and I talked about who he was in the last review I will skip that. I want to save you some time, I know this was expanded in later editions to become a larger novel called Nostralian. I know OK. I also know a few people will respond to my posts of this review and tell me again. I have this edition, not that edition.  Also after reading the brilliant collection The Instrumentality of Mankind, I looked at this book on the shelf and I had to read THIS edition for a specific reason. The Planet Buyer was nominated in 1965 for the HUGO and lost the award. That is fine. Plenty of great novels are never nominated let alone lose the Hugo. The thing is 1965 is the year that the worst Hugo winner was given to the most notoriously shitty of all Hugo winners Fritz Lieber’s novel ‘The Wanderer.’

It also beat out Brunner’s The Whole Man (I suppose I have to read that now, which is fine as Brunner rules) Nonetheless, I am probably going to talk as much about Leiber’s novel as much as CS’s The Planet Buyer.

Why do you read old-school science fiction? Me I love how weird and out of time it is. Two human beings living in 2024 have a similar context for trying to imagine the future. Paul Linebarger moonlighting from his job as professor of Far East studies as Cordwainer Smith the science fiction writer wrote weird stuff. We know the man used his imagination to write weird political thoughtful science fiction since he was a teenager. This novel has everything A CS short story has so yeah, it is great.

 Unintentionally you see similar ideas to Dune (which was not a thing yet they were written around the same time) Rod McBan from planet Norstrilia, the source of immortality drug Stroon, buys Old Earth. Rod is lucky because his computer designed to lie to everyone except him helps him buy Earth for the rock bottom price of “Seven thousand million million megacredits.” That is two millions in a row that is how they do in Nostralia.

My favorite scene came 100 pages in when Lord Redlady confronts Rod about how he bought Earth and how they have to protect him.

“You’d kill me Lord Redlady?” said Rod. “I thought you were saving me?”
“Both,” said the doctor, standing up. “The commonwealth government has tried not to take your property away from you, though they have doubts about what you will do with Earth if you buy it. They are not going to let you stay on the planet and endanger it by being the richest kidnap victim who ever lived…”

Plenty of fun stuff like this in the novel. It is a treasure trove of weird ideas and funny moments like the court held in a moving van. But if there is a mission statement, it might be a character confronting the long lives of humans in this world. Would Rod become a hero buying Earth and helping spread Stroon?

 “And that is what the instrumentality is trying to do for mankind today. To make life dangerous enough and interesting enough to be real again. We have diseases, dangers, fights, chances, its been wonderful.”

Is The Planet Buyer a great science fiction novel? Yes, it is a great science fiction novel for readers who enjoy that totally foreign land that is a future conceived in the past. It is loaded with ideas, political and weird, thoughtful and fun. Is it a masterpiece? No.

Was it better than Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer? For fuck’s sake it is.  Let's talk about that novel. When I recount the totally bizarro insanity of The Wanderer it sounds way better than the book I read. It has more plots than a cemetery, and with 15 story threads, you would think that at least a couple of the characters might be interesting. Nah, not really. The story is an interesting one. A planet suddenly appears in between the moon and Earth, this is a death star-like artificial planet filled with super-intelligent horny cat ladies who have anarchist politics and are on the run from galactic forces. They come to Earth because they have spent all their fuel living in hyperspace and our moon is just the raw materials they need. When they start crushing our moon up it sets off tidal forces and earthquakes.

It sounds weird and hilarious, and it is entertaining in the same way a Michael Bay movie can be. It is crazy that this book exists but winner of the Hugo? It might have been a lifetime achievement award but come. I’ll get back to you on the Whole Man but for now, I can safely say The Planet Buyer is a more deserving novel for the 1965 Hugo Award.  

Book Review: Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith

 

Instrumentality of Mankind by Cordwainer Smith

238 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published May, 1979 by Del Rey / Ballantine

Cordwainer Smith is more famous than the real-life person behind his work. The author publishing under that name had a short career in science fiction. He was prolific considering the short span he worked in and the busy life he lived under his real name. Paul Linebarger was a famous professor, a noted East Asia scholar, and an expert in psychological warfare. He was also Cordwainer Smith.  I am going into his story more in an upcoming Amazing Stories Column. I have heard many times that Cordwainer Smith was one of the best weird SF writers active in a window between the Golden Age and the New Wave. His death at 53 years old in the early 60s means we have very little to go on.

Cordwainer Smith lived up to all the hype. I knew he was a weird writer but the loudest LOL I had when read it on my bus commute, Let's just say I was not prepared for the Martian Kiju Mao Tze-Tung "I'm a pro-Soviet Demon," said the apparent Mao Tze-Tung. "and these are materialized Communist hospitality arrangements. I hope you like them."

The Instrumentality of Mankind is a 14-story collection that is set loosely in the same fictional future Smith envisioned for 13,000-16,000 AD.  There is a helpful timeline published at the opening of the book. I now feel I should have looked at it a bit more. The stories were produced mostly in the last decade before the author died, but most curious is War No. 81-Q which was published in 1928, and two were published long after his death in the late 70s with the first edition of this. "The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All" and "The Queen of the Afternoon" were new to this book.

The fun thing about the 1928 story was published when Linebarger was 15 years old in a Washington D.C. schools publication. It doesn’t come off as Juvenile at all. It was clear that this soon-to-be-famous academic grew up much like many of the authors who walked that line between the major eras. He was reading SF magazines and making up his own stories early.

“No, No, Not Rogov!” Written in 1959 highlights the author’s knowledge of political issues and makes it a great introduction to the collection. The first story highlights some of the science fiction elements that CS was great at. A more common idea today the telepathy spy helmet is very cool. “With infinitely delicate tuning he had succeeded one day in picking up the eyesight of their second chauffeur and had managed thanks to a needle thrust in just below his own right eyelid, to “see” through the other man’s eyes as the other man, all unaware, washed their limousine 1,600 meters away.” I liked that the telepathy espionage was difficult.
 
“Mark Elf” the story has a bit of WW II German feeling to the start. It is a German rocket test that curiously sends a Nazi into the far future. The atmosphere of this story played to CS’s talents. His knowledge of other countries and cultures is one of the keys that makes his books stand out.
My favorite story in the collection is the one that graces the cover of the Del Rey paperback. “When the People Fell” is a delightfully weird tale of Chinese colonists using balloons to land on Venus. It is a little out of date and silly but if you like retro SF that is a feature, not a bug. “The Waywonjong didn’t come to Venus. He just sent his people. He sent them floating down to Venus, to tackle the Venusian ecology with the only weapons which could make the settlement possible  - people themselves. Human arms could tackle the loudies, who had been called “old ones” by the first Chinesian scouts to cover Venus.”

What most amazed me was an incredible story called “Think Blue, Count Two.” That included a spaceship with a solar sail and the description is not that far off from how the solar sails work on the breakthrough star shot. The fact that the ship in the story uses the sun for the first 80 years of the journey and has to find interstellar sources for the rest was amazingly ahead of the times.
Another great story is “The Colonel Came Back from the Nothing-at-All” which tells the story of the first ship to “Planoform” which is the Cordwainer Warp/Hyperdrive hand wavium device. The story reminded me of the TARDIS from Doctor Who and my favorite Leigh Brackett Novel The Big Jump.

As a three-decade-long ethical vegan the 1962 story from “Gustible's Planet” brought up tons of ethical issues that of course disturbed and pleased me at the same time. In the story, humans make contact with intelligent bird-like creatures the Apicians.  They are telepathic and smart and when a bunch of them are burned in a spaceship accident meat-eating humans discover they are delicious. Played mostly for laughs I found this to be a misanthropic little ditty.

So yes the hype is real. Cordwainer Smith’s stories are great examples of mid-20th century transitional Science fiction that has the influences of the golden age while planting seeds for a coming revolution of the New Wave. The next review will be his Hugo-nominated novel The Planet Buyer.