Time for a quick book report.
I've been doing a major sci-fi classics and greats sweep for almost a year now. I grabbed a bunch of books, put them in chronological order by year of publication (which is why I was sh*tting on Heinlein a while back -- my god, he was an awful writer). Now I am in the mid to late 70s and just finished Ballard's classic, "High Rise".
The premise is simple: there is a 40 floor high-rise designed for modern living and offered to mostly middle to upper middle class professionals as a new way of life. It starts out as an obvious metaphor for social stratification and class resentment, but then takes off in a direction of utter civilizational chaos that starts with constant partying and debauchery with occasional power outages to complete collapse that leads to mayhem, riots, and social disintegration. It's a powerful book that's about 200 pages long. This one's gonna stay with me for a while. Highly recommended if you haven't read it and don't mind a little dystopic flavor in your diet.
(One thing I noticed when I queued the upcoming books in that date order is that somewhere around late 70s and early 80s we start getting books that longer in page count, and often are a part of a "series". Not like, say, Le Guin's Hainish cycle, which are all independent books constructed around some basic set-up, but like "first book in so and so's such and such series. Just an interesting side note.)
Some of the books that truly stood out for me:
- "Roadside Picnic" by the Strugatsky brothers. The premise is that there was an extraterrestrial visit in some small town somewhere ambiguous, and when they left, there were some artifacts they left behind and some reality distortion effects that still linger. It's about people who go in and retrieve items from that zone, and the name of the book is in reference to how much an ant could actually understand what it's facing if it ran into the trash left behind my someone's roadside picnic.
Note that this was the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky's classic movie "Stallker". The movie basically takes the premise and the central character as its starting point and moves in a different direction, apparently (terrific movie, by the way. Slow as slow gets in its own Tarkovskian way, but once you can calm your mind down, it flows like a meditation with stunning visuals). So yeah, the book is different and it's also very good.
- The three major Ursula Le Guin books: The Left Hand of Darkness, The Lathe of Heaven, and The Dispossessed. The first one was the Left Hand and that one took me out of my element in a way. I kept thinking "where is this story going?" I was able to get into it a little more when I realized that the answer is "nowhere; the journey is the thing". Both Left Hand and Dispossessed are books are about some form of cultural exchange. An observer is sent to some world and through them we get to see a completely different way of being that also reflects back on our world. In the Left Hand it's an outsider coming into a world where every individual is biologically sex-fluid (not gender, by the way) and in Dispossessed it's a person from a world with very different economy (can't decide if it's anarchist or communist, but it is certainly thereabouts) trying to cope with capitalism and poverty and all that. Both books have a way of silently sitting with you for a long time after you've read them. Now *that's* a good writer.
The Lathe of Heaven reads more like an extended Twilight Zone episode. Very good book. A page turner, but with a completely different vibe. With that one, there is an actual plat that keeps moving.
- Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" is a good one. It's an interesting sci-fi take on elements of Hindu mythology with some Buddhism thrown in the mix. It was disorienting at first because the chapters are not in chronological order of the grand story (which is pretty epic) with very little clue in the beginning as to what's going on. I had to put it aside at first because I was confused by the flow until I found out that the chapters go back and forth. After that, it was a great read.
- Joanna Russ' "We Who Are About To" is absolutely nuts and may well be my favorite up to this point. It's even a shorter book at 180 something pages. The first half is a bunch of people crashing on an unknown planet with not a lot to survive on, where the men especially decide they will colonize and populate the planet, while the narrative wants nothing to do with any of that, and the second half is a fever dream of the narrator slowly dying and her thoughts going in and out of reality.
When I was dabbling with writing fiction in my youth, this was exactly the state of mind I was trying to create with my words and every time I looked back at what I had put down a few days before, I was invariaably disappointed, I kept starting again and gettings sucked into an endless edit loop (and this was even before using word processors was a thing -- when those came along, they certainly didn't help), which is part of the reason I stopped dabbling with it and moved on with my life. So seeing Russ pulls this sh*t off with so much deft is a friggin' treat of a special order for me. I love this book. I don't think it will stay with me the way High-Rise or the Le Guin books did, but I am in awe of both the unreliable narrator bit in the beginning and that inward looking final act.
Next up for me is another Russ book "The Female Man", followed by Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" and Card's "Ender's Game", the latter of which I don't have any expectations around. It's in the list because I happened to have bought it year's ago on a friend's recommendation. After that a palate cleanser with a non-fiction book, then we're back to Doris Lessing's Shikasta, the first of a series! and OMG, I had no idea she wrote Sci-fi.
If you made it this far, thank you for indulging me. It's just that I can't enjoy something quietly. I have the urge to yak yak about it.