Black Gate

Internet kerfuffles almost inevitably become incestuous loops of recursion and fail–and, if not, they’re hardly any fun at all. But John Scalzi’s response to Adam Roberts’ complaint about this year’s Hugo slate at least led me to do one thing: I ordered Roberts’ Gradisil, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.

The rest of my reaction is sort of a-plague-on-both-your-houses-ish. I cannot take seriously complaints about a shortlist from people who could have participated in shaping it but did not. This is not an original observation: it was made by a number of people on Roberts’ blog, on Scalzi’s blog and elsewhere. And when it arises, someone always replies, “Oh, I’ve heard that before.” As if that were some kind of answer. You have heard it before because it is true. No one listens to people who sing the blues without paying their dues.

[Meta-kvetchery abounds beyond the jump.]

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It seems that the deterioration of the American public library is worse than I had at first feared. At least if I am to use the Beverly Hills Public Library as an example. (Beverly Hills isn’t exactly the best example of any trend in North America, being a bizarre entity that I think J. G. Ballard invented for one of his novels, but in terms of civic decline I think I’m on safe ground using it.)

I recently posted about my discovery that a coffee shop—with fudge included, for some reason known only to “Kelly”—had mysteriously arisen inside the BHPL. I tried to satisfy myself with the knowledge that the library would at least strive to keep the coffee and fudge behind the glass doors of Kelly’s Staining Bean Juice and Contaminating Sugar Sludge, away from the precious volumes of books and helping to keep at bay the armies of paper-munching insects that might like to snack on old copies of Gormenghast.

However, on my last visit to the library, I made some disturbing discoveries. I hadn’t received the full story about the Kelly’s invasion.

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Who was the greatest American fantasist of the 20th century? People will have their own notions about this (as opposed to the greatest British fantasist of the 20th century, where most lists will begin with Tolkien). Personally, I think Fritz Leiber is several of the century’s greatest fantasists, and other obvious candidates would include Robert E. Howard, Kuttner and Moore, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ursula Le Guin. John Crowley has his advocates; no doubt there are others. One name I always think of in this connection is Roger Zelazny.

Zelazny was not a perfect writer. He was an avowed risk-taker, and some of his experiments didn’t come off. Others, which may have read well when they were first written, haven’t aged gracefully. His motto was “Trust your demon,” and demons aren’t always trustworthy. But Zelazny’s method (put less theologically: writers should be prepared to junk their outlines and follow whatever wild hairs present themselves) does tend to take the reader interesting places. Almost no one had heard of Zelazny before 1962. A few years later he was an acknowledged giant in the sf/f field. By end of the decade people were saying he was on the skids. De gustibus non disputandum. In my view (and many others) few fantasists will ever reach the heights Zelazny achieved in his later period.

In any case, his historical importance is beyond dispute, and when an sf/f author of historical importance needs an archival collection, you have but to wait politely and eventually NESFA Press will produce something stunning on the order of “The Collected Stories of Roger Zelazny”. (Volume One and Two are the subject of this review; Volumes Three and Four are now out; Volumes Five and Six are slated for release later this year).

[Showers of sparky details beyond the jump.]

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I’ve been traveling the past week-plus, from the Arabian desert to the hallucinatory green of the currently rain-sodden mid-Atlantic, north to Readercon outside of Boston (where I stood bareheaded in the rain!!), and then back again to Philadelphia. Among the many joys and oddities of return: the drivers in these cities are so calm and polite, and so observant of the traffic rules that I feel at peace on that crowded femoral artery of Philadelphia, the Schuylkill Expressway.* Which just goes to show the power of relativity.

Readercon is one of my favorite cons. It’s a small convention with programming pretty much only about books, and the dealers’ room (or crack den, as my friend Vickie calls it) sells no t-shirts or other tchotchkes, only books and magazines. One of my panels was about re-reading the classics, a poor choice by Programming since my reading history is lamentably patchy. Somehow (I think all I said was that Shakespeare was hard to read for speakers of present-day English) I seemed to become the person who thought the classics were all irrelevant. It’d be more accurate to say that I think the classics are valuable if not always relevant.

One interchange was about Homer, and how great the Odyssey was, and how much of the whole history of literature the Odyssey had influenced, and how Joyce’s Ulysses contained the whole of human experience (this last from critic and fellow panelist Michael Dirda). …

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One good thing about the recession is I have more time to catch up on my reading. And  I don’t have to worry about spending money on books during tough times as I already own a ridiculous number of volumes that I never had the time to get around to.  One of almost recent vintage is Shambling Towards Hiroshima by James Morrow. It’s a clever premise: a parallel effort to the Manhattan Project is to develop a race of super lizards to level Japanese cities and end World War II. The irony here is that the whole Godzilla mythos of badly made, badly acted 1950s Japanese movies was a metaphorical projection of the atomc bombings.  The plot, such as it is , concerns an American horror monster actor who is recruited to provide a realistic demonstration of the lizard’s destructiveness to force the Japanese surrender without having to deploy the monsters (what many critics of the U.S. atomic bombings argue might have sufficed instead of targeting cities).  Morrow is one of my favorite authors, though this is a minor work; even at novella length, the premise is stretched a bit thin, and maybe would have  worked better at a shorter length in pruning some plotting that doesn’t really advance the theme.  Still, worth checking out.

I’m almost finished with Elizabeth Hand’s  Mortal Love, which I bought new in hardcover in 2004 and is now available for a penny (before shipping ) on Amazon. I’m also a big fan of Hand’s, despite the fact that plotting isn’t her strong point. The story spans several historical eras and deals primarily with a lost Gaelic princess who down through the ages can’t help but seduce human males, with unfortunate consequences for her paramours. It all seems headed to a resolution which seems to be setting me up for a letdown (but not having finished it in time for this week’s deadline, I don’t know yet). Anyway, who cares?  Hand is masterful in creating mood and setting. Besides, we have the same tastes in music, of which there are the usual high quota of references.  Even without having finished it, recommended reading for this summer, or any time of year. And at a recession price that can’t be beat.

My first thought upon hearing that Andrzej Sapkowski had won the inaugural David Gemmell Legend Award (which happens to be the award most suited to home-defense — just try to scare off a burglar with a Hugo rocket) was “great, there goes that post I planned examining if Abercrombie’s work really fits the spirit of David Gemmell’s fiction.” My second thought, of course, was “just who exactly is Andrzej Sapkowski?”

In his native Poland, people don’t have to ask that question because there Sapkowki is a Really Big Deal, author of a fantasy series that outsells the works of Stephen King (all the press releases love to use that datum — but for all I know Poles don’t like Stephen King). In the Anglophone world, Sapkowski’s work is just now being offered in translation, but his world is probably most widely known as the subject of a computer role playing game which saw world-wide release (The Witcher).

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