Books Archive
I am attempting to get back into reading intentionally... I will put some stuff here as I finish it... maybe...
The Pastel City, M. John Harrison, 1971
July 2025. wow great! beautiful!! I was mostly only aware of this guy by his writing against ‘worldbuilding’ as a literalistic practice in genre fiction, an angle I think I mostly agree with. But this book at least does not have a terribly heterodox or metatextual approach to such questions really!! I am interested to read the later ones. It’s ‘roadside picnic conan the barbarian’ if I had to nail it down!!! The LANGUAGE is sometimes really spectacularly beautiful I think; he’s confidently and elegantly 'doing the voice' of this sort of thing. The genre innovation here feels at the same time a little ahead-of-its-time, AND a little dated because the way we talk and think about 'scifi technologies' has changed a lot more in 55 years than the way we think and talk about ‘pseudomedieval adventures.’ Does that make sense. ON THE WHOLE it is basically a perfect book to me and I can’t believe I hadn’t read it, or even really heard it described in a way that feels remotely appropriate. It is a virtuosic pulp thing. Really a smart beautiful and laser-focused way to use an invented setting as a thematic, poetic sort of structure. Really not unlike PANZER DRAGOON SAGA. Also worth mentioning that within the first several pages of this book from 1971 a light saber from star wars is presented to the reader. Also also, some of the best names-of-things I have ever ever encountered in secondary-world fiction.
Dawn, Octavia E. Butler, 1987
July 2025. man pretty wild book!!! I begin to see the outlines of of Butler’s FASCINATIONS, between this and a few other things a few years ago. There is a disorienting, overwhelming array of wild and fascinating ideas thrown at you pretty nonstop… BUT exposition is fairly elegant and focus is always on Lilith’s limited experience of her surroundings, which I think is a great move. It’s basically a succession of limited environments Lilith is living and working through in process of integrating remaining humans into a new uncanny sort of life… and I LIKE the weird sense of claustrophobia each of these sections builds up, but it does wear a little thin tonally in my opinion. Like it’s a little drab, a little TOO claustrophobic or something, a little TOO suffused with preposterous creepy ideation. On the whole though it is really full of POWER MOVES; I am really hit by it; I will read the other 2 sometime
Earth Abides, George R. Stewart, 1949
July 2025. I guess obviously I couldn't get out of comparing this to The Stand; at first it feels like a sort of more emotionally restrained, novel-of-ideas angle on the same sort of story, but it becomes something really huge and totally unlike anything I have read. Really affecting. In the first HALF or so, there's an overt focus on the big-picture ecological fallout of practically every human being immediately dying, which is interesting and I thought pretty well-incorporated into a story told on the level of human characters... Though Ish seems often really unusually abstracted, dispassionate in a way that frustrated me!!! But that I also often felt like I Related to more than maybe any point-of-view character I have read!! Also there's tons of little conservative ideas built-into it, about the role of authority and the state, and certain ideas around inherence etc... BUT THEN it sort of changes into a much bigger and more HUMAN story, and all of those social assumptions become the sorts of things it is interested in picking apart and dismantling just as it was doing with the ecological material from the start. Builds into a really affecting structure; works with ideas around generational knowledge and what civilization and literacy and history even ARE in ways that I haven't seen attempted. Feels like it's about aging, or it's about seeing people grow up younger than you in a different world than your own, or it's about how huge and inscrutable the systems we live in are, or it's about dying! I will be thinking about this book forever
The Twenty Days of Turin, Giorgio de Maria, 1975
June 2025. pretty unsettling; sometimes really funny; the texture of romance-language-translated-into-english always kind of makes everything feel more ironic or something to me. Borges comparison loudly suggests itself but it's a little less uhhh rigorous?? than Borges. Kafka also maybe?? Interesting imagery around violence emerging almost unaccountably out of the generalized malaise of a population... I guess I should know more about the 70s political violence in Turin that this seems to be grown out of... Sometimes this feels really focused, and sometimes it feels like a bunch of practically-disconnected short stories orbiting around ideas of 'collective unconscious,' 'psychogeography,' etc. I think I got something out of it.
Behold, the Man, Michael Moorcock, 1969
June 2025. really compelling... I had only read some Elrics and it's fun to see Moorcock do this. I am totally won-over by a political, pointedly anti-mystical angle on the Jesus story, personally. The big Reveals are a bit dopey and uhh science-fiction-magaziney, and the whole thing ends up being more about identity and myth as such than about the Jesus stuff in particular, BUT I liked it a lot and I want to get really into Moorcock more
The Dragon Masters, Jack Vance, 1963
June 2025. Great! Balances pulpy with otherworldly textures I thought. Detail and sense of place is kind of sparse but it's to its credit that it works extremely well and clearly even so.
