Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts

Monday, August 21, 2017

Brian Aldiss, RIP

Unfortunately, Brian Aldiss's family have this morning confirmed his death, on Friday, his 92nd birthday.


It is with great sadness we announce the death of our beloved father & grandfather. Brian died peacefully at home on his 92nd birthday ^TA
8:00 AM - 21 Aug 2017

And the full statement, courtesy the Brian Aldiss Fan Page on FaceBook:

Announcement of the death of Brian Aldiss O.B.E.

It is with sadness that we announce the death of Brian Wilson Aldiss O.B.E. author, artist and poet, at his home in Oxford in the early hours of Saturday 19th August 2017, aged 92. Author of British Science Fiction classics Non-stop, Hothouse and Greybeard, Aldiss's writing spanned genres and generations, bridging the gap between classic science fiction and contemporary literature with his Helliconia Trilogy and Thomas Squire Quartet. Aldiss was also an entertaining memoirist, notably basing his Horatio Stubbs saga on his wartime adventures in Burma and the Far East, as well as the autobiography The Twinkling of an Eye.

A friend and drinking companion of Kingsley Amis and correspondent with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldiss was a founding member of the Groucho Club in London and a judge on the 1981 Booker Prize. Awarded the Hugo Award for Science Fiction in 1962 and the Nebula Award in 1965, Aldiss's writings were well received by the critics and earned a strong following in the United States and in Britain as well as being widely translated into foreign languages. In later years his cultured world view and enduring curiosity found expression in the novels Harm and The Finches of Mars, dealing with the contradictions of the war against terror and the logistical difficulties of accommodating different terrestrial belief systems in space.

Among his considerable body of short fiction are the ‘Supertoys’ stories, adapted for film as A.I., on which Aldiss collaborated with Stanley Kubrick for over a decade before its completion by Steven Spielberg. His novel Frankenstein Unbound was made for screen by Roger Corman.
In 2000 Brian Aldiss was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Reading and received the title of Grandmaster from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He was honoured by Her Majesty the Queen for services to Literature with the O.B.E. in the 2005 Birthday Honours list.

my post last night began:
'I quote to him something he wrote in 1990: “Just as the [literary] establishment is philistine about science, the bulk of the science-fiction readership is philistine about literature.” “Ha!” he cries gleefully, “offends both parties.” “Well done, Brian,” says Alison, rolling her eyes.'

--Brian Aldiss, reveling in telling what is too frequently the truth...though these days, it's more likely philistinism between contemporary-fiction writers and fantastic-fiction writers, aside from those who have frequently done both, such as Aldiss. This quotation from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/brian-aldiss-interview-much-snobbery-science-fiction/

Further links:

And my own thoughts about his work, from this morning on a discussion list which includes many of his friends, and simply long-term readers such as myself:

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" and "Full Sun" were my first Aldiss fictions, when I was 9yo and, with "Police State" fascinated by the concept of the hellish jail, a sort of water-wheel structure, the protagonist found himself in...probably introduced me to the concept of a police state, as well. And the reverse lycanthropy of "Full Sun" amused me. His and Harry Harrison's annual Best SF '71 was one of the first of my father's anthologies I read at about the same time, introducing me to Donald Barthelme as well as Barry N. Malzberg, Cynthia Ozick as well as Robert Sheckley, and gave me my first taste of non-cartoon Gahan Wilson...

The memoirs and critical writing joined my encounters with further fiction not long after. 

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Friday, May 12, 2017

FFB: TURNING POINTS edited by Damon Knight (Harper & Row 1977); DREAM MAKERS: VOLUME II interviews conducted by Charles Platt (Berkley 1985)

Two books about sf and fantasy and what's around them, Damon Knight's pioneering gathering of essays from various sources, about "The Art of Science Fiction" as the subtitle notes (there had been numerous all-original symposia, and some collections of criticism by individual writers, including Knight himself, but no anthology drawing widely on the previously-published literature)...and the second and perhaps more surprising volume of interviews with sf and fantasy writers by the always ready to be contentious Charles Platt (there are two editions of Dream Makers by Platt...the first his first collection of interview essays, the second Platt's selection of entries from both the first two volumes--I recommend reading the entirety of the two earlier volumes).

 Knight's volume, which includes a bit of new material in its time (1977, most notably Knight's own essays on the nature of sf and writing and selling the literature) also offered the first widespread access to certain other documents, published, if at all, only in fanzines of varying degrees of obscurity. This is true of the debate, of sorts, between the rather obscure Philip Geffe and four rather prominent scientists or ex-secientists in the sf field about how scientists are
treated in the fiction, and Joanna Russ's speech, "Alien Monsters," which might be even more controversial, citing as it does an illustration in an sf magazine that no one, apparently, has since found...and which I suspect refers to the resolution to Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People...which Russ cites along the way toward calling for much greater sophistication in dealing with characters and characterization in SF. There is no single thread to the essays Knight collects here, sometimes even within the subheadings the selections are classed with in the table of contents, and I don't think Knight ever intended us to consider each contribution to be the equal of every other one, so much as various sorts of nudges to get the reader new to sf, or a veteran reader or otherwise more involved, to consider or reconsider both conventional wisdom or their own opinions about the field...since the book is mostly about sf, rather than the larger field of fantastic fiction, even if the other sorts of speculative fiction by necessity are discussed. 

 The contents:
i. A Walk Around the Topic
II. History without Tears
III. Criticism, Destructive and Otherwise
IV. S.F. and Science
V. How To, in Four Tricky Lessons
VI. S.F. as Prophecy
VII. Confessions
(The Franklin item, from his book-length study Future Perfect [Oxford, 1966] was omitted by the ISFDB listing for the book; possibly for some reason it's missing from the Macmillan/Orion 2014 ebook edition.)

Casting one's eye over the contents, one can see contributions from those with careers at the heart of the SF fields, including such critics and historians as Versins and Franklin, and those who made notable contributions, sometimes their most important contributions, but who are best-remembered for other work, such as Richard McKenna, whose bestselling historical and only novel The Sand Pebbles might be better known than his notable fantasy short story "Casey Agonistes" and his other work in his brief career in and out of SF, or  Amis, Lewis or Huxley...Lewis definitely considering himself a fantastic-fiction writer, and Amis as well when so engaged, and Huxley apparently not too worried about being so tagged. I do wish another essay by James Blish was included here, though this one is clearly close to Blish's heart, even if the core assumption, that any sentient species is likely to construct a pantheon of gods since humans all over the world do so, seems to me to be shaky anthropomorphism at its most self-reassuring. 

It's a fine and useful book, and I'm glad to see it's once again available, even if solely electronically. 

Charles Platt, for his part, took a few more chances and widened his remit rather better for the interviews gathered for his second collection of interview-based profiles...he, with not much justification, insisted that most of the women writers in SF were essentially fantasy rather than sf writers, so there was only the most begrudged space given to Kate Wilhelm as the only woman writer in the first volume of Dream Makers. And that because Platt didn't have access to Damon Knight, so the married couple interviewed each other for Platt's book, making that the only entry which was not the result of a visit by Platt to the habitation of the writer (or editor) being queried. And to wrap the book, writer and fellow interviewer Douglas Winter interviews Platt (Winter's similar book of interview essays with horror-fiction writers, Faces of Fear, would be released the same year as DM2.
But, despite the presence of Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke in this volume (along with the somewhat later arrivals such as Joe Haldman, Larry Niven and Keith Launer), Platt mostly felt freer to include more writers beyond the Old Lions of the field, and with Russ, Alice Sheldon ("James Tiptree, Jr.")  and Kit Reed managed to take in three of the more important women writers, even if none was averse to fantasy, science fantasy or otherwise not have a periodic table of the elements at hand at all times while writing. Andre Norton, then as now, was vastly better known for her YA fiction than her adult work, and others, such as D. M. Thomas, William Burroughs, and to some extent Robert Anton Wilson, were often seen as apart from SF, no matter how much or how often their key works either were firmly in SF traditions or drew heavily on SF viewpoints or techniques. Alvin Toffler was the one non-fiction writer, albeit an allied futurist, included.  But interviews with Russ, the often interview-shy John Sladek, D. M. Thomas (I prefer his sf poetry to his bestseller, in part a time-travel fantasy, The White Hotel)(William Kotzwinkle's The Exile deals far more nimbly with similar materials, I'd suggest). Sturgeon and Laumer capture each at crucial moments in their careeers, or (as in Russ's case) when cagily willing to discuss questions of sexual identity that had not, as far as I know, been stated even as not quite plainly as they are here. And the candid opinions of such writers as Harry Harrison and Stephen King are more than useful in this context; King's cogent assessment of the work of Lin Carter wasn't likely to arise in too many other discussions he'd have in public, much less transcribed. Platt doesn't actually get to see L. Ron Hubbard, but puts an oar in to suggest he was still alive by the time of their 1983 correspondence. 

These two books are collections of useful, if not always the most reliable, statements of thought by mostly major figures in the fields of fantastic fiction, and even those who are not major for one reason or another are worth hearing from even if mostly for the bad example they set. And the mutual appearance of Sturgeon, Russ and Laumer in both volumes isn't the only reason you might gain something from reading them together. 

Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of today's books.
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Tuesday, September 6, 2016

"The Labor Day Group" by Thomas Disch (and a rejoinder by George R. R. Martin)...An oddly timely 1980/81 codicil to the Humanist/Cyberpunk consideration from last Friday and the recent WorldCon fracas

One of the less well-rendered F&SF covers so far
On this day after Labor Day, around which had been the traditional annual weekend for the literary/fannish science fiction (and more) WorldCons before the more media-oriented Dragon*Con running the same weekends started making things Difficult, here's a reprint of an essay that Thomas Disch wrote as a Books column entry in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1980, published in the February 1981 issue, "The Labor Day Group," wherein he cited a group of writers who had emerged in the 1970s as writing work that stroked fannish sensibilities, and as a result were often the recipients of the Hugo and Nebula awards (the Hugos being awarded from membership polls at  the WorldCons)...as well as to some degree or another among the more popular writers of the decade. 

 Amusingly, the Disch review, which also includes a rave assessment of Gregory Benford's novel Timescape, is in the form of dealing with the three best of the year sf annuals published in 1980, devoted to the presumed best short fiction of 1979: those edited by Terry Carr (Ballantine/Del Rey), Gardner Dozois  (E. P. Dutton) (the early series of rather slim volumes, which he'd taken over from Lester Del Rey; Ace Books, then Dell, had been doing paperback reprints), and Donald Wollheim and Arthur Saha (DAW Books)...amusingly to me, anyway (quite aside from my fascination with BOTY volumes and their sometimes eccentric selections), since the example of Bruce Sterling's writing in Cheap Truth I quote in the Friday piece was also a BOTY review, for the first of the current series of fat volumes of sf edited by Dozois...and it, too, is at least as much an attempt to catalog schools of sf writers).  (The Disch link above is to the University of Michigan Press's site, which reprints the essay from their volume of Disch, On SF, without crediting F&SF nor fixing the typo introduced somewhere along the trail that renders Benford's short story "Time Shards" as "Lime Shards"...tasty, the latter, I'm sure, and no more sour than some other things.) (Gregory Feeley notes on FaceBook that the text as posted also mispells Judith Merril's name, with an extra L.)

The Disch essay, on publication, stirred no little controversy, including this response by George R. R. Martin, one of the writers Disch considered part of the group. (Martin in his rebuttal does note a factual error of Disch's, citing Connie Willis's "Daisy, in the Sun" as her first published story, or at least--rather more true--the beginning of her career...her "Santa Titicaca" in the magazine Worlds of Fantasy in 1970 was for some years her only published story; "Daisy" was more like her sixth.)

 And a year ago, on the F&SF site, publisher and former editor Gordon Van Gelder (utterly coincidentally 50 years old today) published links to a reprint of the Disch essay (perhaps since taken down at the request of the U Michigan Press) and to the Martin response as transcribed on his website...which post drew a comment from none other than David Truesdale, the short fiction reviewer who was rather famously ejected from the WorldCon last month after turning a panel discussion of short fiction today into a forum for his dislike of "PC bullies" in SF publishing today...an event that isn't quite prefigured by Truesdale's comment to Gordon (who coincidentally was a late arrivee to speak on that panel), but it comes close to being so...(further utter coincidence, or evidence of how small the sf community can be: some objected to Truesdale at the panel trying to use the recently late David Hartwell as an example of sf editor who agreed with Truesdale's resentment of perceived PC trends in sf, and one of Hartwell's more important projects had been the Timescape line he founded at Pocket Books, named for the Benford novel Disch praises highly).

 Literary history doesn't exactly repeat itself, but patterns do recur. This will come as news to almost no one, I'm sure...
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Friday, October 3, 2014

FFB: SF in the World, and the World is Changed: BENCHMARKS CONTINUED by Algis Budrys; THE DREAMS OUR STUFF IS MADE OF by Thomas M. Disch


I watched the new documentary on The New York Review of Books the other night, as it debuted on HBO (and, later, when I should've been catching up on sleep even more blatantly, a good chunk of the documentary about Iceberg Slim on Showtime), and decided that a similar hagiography could be produced about any magazine of any ambition over the last fifty years and be about as fascinating (and noted how gorgeous as well as intelligent and understandably filially blinkered about their father Slim's daughters are or, in the late not so elder eldest's case, were) (aside from a similar documentary about Harper's or The Atlantic or The New Yorker or New American Review or for that matter the likes of Salmagundi or The American Scholar, consider the potential for a documentary about, say, Fantastic, which aside from introducing the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin and Kate Wilhelm--and Thomas Disch--to the reading public, was edited by people with important or at least interesting connection to crime fiction writing and editing [the worst of the editors of the magazine, Paul Fairman, went on to be managing editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and to ghost books for a number of major writers--quite aside from the enjoyment even his version of the magazine gave to young readers such as Bill Crider and Mike Ashley], Hollywood scripting, the bridal/wedding industry, public-school teaching, the comics industry and American expatriate life, literary agencies and American drama, avant garde literature and erotica, jazz and rock journalism, and graphic design...quite aside from the often brilliant and usually frustrating magazine itself). Whether one realizes it or not, This Stuff Matters. As much as anything in the arts does or ever has. And that last is not insignificant.

 So, I'm in a Mood to consider these two books, by writers who wrote often brilliantly and usually well, who both furthered the art of at least several sorts of fiction (and Disch, poetry), which are in large part about why this stuff matters. It doesn't hurt that these two are among those whose critical work helped shape my own approach to such activity, along with the similar work of Anthony Burgess, John Simon, Joanna Russ, Dorothy Parker, Damon Knight, Gore Vidal, James Blish, Vivian Gornick, Le Guin, Barry Malzberg, Harlan Ellison, James Agee, Spider Robinson, Anthony Boucher, Judith Merril and others...almost all of whom were at least some of the time writers of fantasy (and not a few also of crime fiction, and I'm making no apologies)...Gornick and Simon, the major exceptions, were not averse to the fantastic (nor the criminous).  For that matter, one of the few Budrys short stories published when he was busy writing ad copy and critical essays in 1960s won the Edgar; Disch wrote some notable crime fiction, in collaboration with John Sladek and on his own, the latter with usually some fantasticated elements, and the last set of novels from him were notable, linked horror volumes. Both were underappreciated in larger literary world and perhaps taken for granted even in the spheres where they were most productive, and both died horribly. I've written a bit about that last here on the blog.

 But before that, they did the critical writing gathered here, which I still haven't completely crystallized my thoughts about these two brilliant, wide-ranging books, that deal in large part about the significance of fantastic fiction in the larger world, and will hope to return to the subject sooner rather than later. Budrys's is a collection of his review essays from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the first of three volumes collected those (and all three follow, some years after, a single volume of his similar, earlier work for the magazine Galaxy), and the Disch is spun out from essays published in Harper's and elsewhere, and to some extent his work in F&SF.  Both books are brilliant, the Budrys slightly moreso since it was Budrys at the height of his abilities, the Disch lessened only slightly by the breadth of its ambition...but even though I'm still putting off the head-on look, yet again...life is not cooperative.

 However, Patti Abbott is, and is collecting today's book review links at her blog.
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Thursday, July 24, 2014

Ovation cable channel's web series: TOUCHING THE ART - Episode 2 - "Postmodernism, Post-Net & the Art Market"...and, for the hell of it, LIFE IN THE ARTS episode "Suminagashi Japanese Paper Marbling"

Panelist Carol Cheh was a highschool-mate of mine.


And, from 1999, another highschool-mate, Rebecca Ramos, leads off this episode with instructions for paper-marbling. (I'm pretty sure Becca and I were the only members of the [Honolulu] Punahou Class of '82 born in Fairbanks, Alaska.)(Becca definitely has a Bob Ross-style purr down cold.) Ramos currently co-chair of the studio art department at Cabrillo College.
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Friday, July 18, 2014

FFM: P.S. #1, April 1966: contributions from Avram Davidson, Alfred Bester, Nat Hentoff, Gahan Wilson, Jean Shepherd, Ron Goulart, Charles Beaumont, Russell Baker, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, et al.; Edward Ferman, editor; Gahan Wilson, associate editor; Ron Salzberg, assistant editor

This is a magazine I've been looking for copies of (in a casual way) for about 35 years, maybe a little more. I've written about it a little previously in the blog (and received some interesting and helpful comments there), and here's the (slightly corrected) index from the FictionMags Index previously reprinted at that occasion: 

P.S. [v1 #1, April 1966] ed. Edward L. Ferman (Mercury Press, 60¢, 64pp, 8" x 11") Gahan Wilson, associate editor; Ron Salzberg, assistant editor
    Details supplied by Cuyler Brooks (and augmented by me).

  • 3 · Don Sturdy and the 30,000 Series Books · Avram Davidson · ar
  • 12 · Would You Want Your Product to Marry a Negro · Alfred Bester · ar
  • 16 · The Gentle Art of Brick Throwing · Ron Goulart · ar
  • 24 · Freaks · Gahan Wilson · ar
  • 32 · Child Things · Russell Baker · ar (The New York Times 1965)
  • 34 · The Lost Lovely Landscapes of Luna · Isaac Asimov · ar
  • 39 · Lugosi: The Compleat Bogeyman · Charles Beaumont · ar (F&SF 1956)
  • 42 · When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed · Ray Bradbury · pm
  • 44 · Joe Louis in Atlantic City · Jerry Tallmer · ar
  • 49 · The Thirties Quiz · Robert Thomsen · qz
  • 50 · Sweet and Lowdown: The Lost Jazz Years · Nat Hentoff · ar
  • 58 · Captain Ahab Is Dead; Long Live Bob Dylan, Or, Are the Beatles Really the Andrews Sisters, In Drag? · Jean Shepherd · ar
  • 62 · Now You See Them · Ron Salzberg · ar
As often the case with an example of this much delay in gratification, the contents of the issue don't quite live up to my expectations (I can see why Davidson's good, but not superb, essay hasn't been reprinted, for example), but nonetheless I'm not sorry I paid a reasonably high price (though not as exorbitant as prices often are on this title, when it can be found) to finally have it at hand. The Davidson essay deals with the series adventure books aimed at children from the first several decades of the 20th century, produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate (whose products have included Nancy Drew, Tom Swift and Hardy Boys novels)...several of the examples Davidson considers from a thrift-store scrounge were among such series as the Don Sturdy and Bomba the Jungle Boy books (durable creature in comics as well) that he'd read in his own childhood, and some attributed to the same "Roy Rockwood" house name that Rich Horton was treating with in his FFB last week. 

Bester's essay is telling about the delights of commercial (in at least two senses) practical censorship in the period when American apartheid, at least in certain areas, was still just beginning to come undone, and the pressures newly applied by the likes of the Congress of Racial Equality from their direction to further make things Interesting for those in the advertising and commercial radio/television industries in what we can now think of as the Mad Men era. (Bester also notes that the best actor who'd auditioned to play Charlie Chan in the radio series Bester was writing in the late '40s was spiked because the actor was black, and who'd dare have a black man play a Chinese-American detective...far safer to settle on eventual star Ed Begley, Sr.). And while there is a bit of mockery of what was already being tagged Political Correctness in certain quarters in both the Davidson and particularly the Bester essays, the Shepherd is an unsurprisingly unsubtle bleat about the then-new androgyny as seen by the radio and print satirist, with particular contumely expended toward Tom Wolfe and to a lesser extent Andy Warhol; mocking the claims to the brawling life by Bob Dylan seems a bit more grounded. 

Gahan Wilson's thoughtful essay about the history of the freak show (with special attention to the activities of P. T. Barnum and his associates), Isaac Asimov's survey of the end of Romantic Mars with new Mariner probe imagery and data, and particularly Charles Beaumont's memoir of his meeting with Bela Lugosi very near the end of the actor's life (and by the time of this reprint, presumably from Beaumont's film column in F&SF, Beaumont was already far gone in his fatal premature Alzheimer's), Ron Goulart's run through the history of George Harriman and Krazy Kat, and Nat Hentoff on the jazz legends of his youth are all fine, and some at least among the pioneering writing of the time about these matters. The magazine as a whole, in its first of only three issues, is more about nostalgic reflection than I expected, with the Shepherd blast (and to some extent the Bester) being the prime example(s) of the kind of pop-sociological consideration I expected to comprise more of the content, but it really is a pity on several counts that this magazine didn't flourish. It was a good start. 

For more actual books this week, please see Patti Abbott's blog. I'll be (rather more promptly) hosting the links over the next two Fridays at this one.
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Friday, June 14, 2013

FFB: THE MEN IN MY LIFE by Vivian Gornick; BENCHMARKS CONTINUED by Algis Budrys...books about books and writers...

I first became aware of Vivian Gornick through her collection of essays, including quite a number of book-review items, Essays in Feminism, and her book-length survey, Women in Science. (It didn't hurt my feelings any that many of my favorite writers within the 1960s-onward resurgence of feminism were particularly interested in literature, from Joanna Russ to Gornick to Joyce Carol Oates to bell hooks.) In this small, charming book she highlights what she learned from some of her favorite male writers, not only in how to put prose together but also in how to handle the pressures and slights, the alienation and disappointments life is likely to dump on writers...even when they are men from the dominant ethnic and even social groups of their time and place...they are each given their own short essay: V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. (Of these, I'd barely heard of Gissing, and haven't as yet read any Carruth that I remember, but was glad to be introduced thus.) It's a charming, thoughtful book, a hardcover from Boston Review Books/MIT Press the size of a reasonably slim mass-market paperback, and while it isn't the Gornick to start with (that would probably be Essays in Feminism or Fierce Attachments), I'm glad we have it.
I'd cited the publication of this one previously, but decided it's time for a capsule review...Algis Budrys, more than anyone else reviewing books in the fantasy/sf media with the occasional exception of his fellow critic in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1970s, Joanna Russ, was passionately engaged in not only limning the qualities of individual works in question but also helping to place the significance of the art at hand within world literature, and not afraid to draw our attention to works supposedly outside our canons (it didn't hurt that he was also reviewing a wide range of books for The Chicago Sun-Times and contributing critical-historical essays to the likes of TriQuarterly in those years). And he did so with a dry wit and elegance that few others could match.  The latter '70s were a relatively hopeful and prosperous time within the fantasy/sf community (even as the wider US economy, at to some extent that of the West generally, was stagnant at best) and the efflorescence of various interesting new developments in publishing didn't escape Budrys's sometimes skeptical, sometimes enthusiastic attention...he even had not completely implausible (if slim) hopes of being on a major television chat show to plug his first new novel in more than a decade.  With Tolkien setting new sales records for hardcover fiction and this new guy Stephen King beginning to reliably appear at the top of bestseller lists (and not they alone), and science-fantasy films repeatedly dominating pop culture, and fantasy and sf generally seeming to gain ever more attention from wider audiences at various levels, it was an interesting time to be looking critically at the fields. As this volume demonstrates.

 Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of this week's books.
David Redd's much better review of the Budrys than any I have yet written.
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Friday, April 15, 2011

FFBs: HRF Keating: CRIME & MYSTERY: THE 100 BEST BOOKS; Lupoff & Thompson, eds.: ALL IN COLOR FOR A DIME; Peter Nicholls, ed. SCIENCE FICTION AT LARGE


H.R.F. Keating passed on 27 March, and we lost another gentleman, by all accounts, in the CF field, one who had been a fine fiction-writer (most famously for the Inspector Ghote stories) and critic both, and this book, widely available but barely in print (the current edition is handsome, but still a product of the collapsed Carroll & Graf; one hopes Running Press or someone might reissue it), is a gimmicky (in format, and I think the first of its series for C&G, which series has also included notable volumes on sf and horror fiction) but no less valuable selection of a hundred important and valuable books in the CF field, most of them of the "true" mystery rather than suspense or other related fields, some collections (leading off, unsurprisingly, with a Poe collection) though most novels, all given two-page essays to limn their virtues and what flaws they overcome. The Keating assessments are bookended by Patricia Highsmith's two-page introduction (even Highsmith had nothing but good to say of Keating) and an unsigned "Publisher's Note" adding a 101st entry, for one of Keating's own Ghotes. Aside from the insightful and deftly-written vignette entries, Keating also doesn't respect received wisdom: he nominated for Ross Macdonald The Blue Hammer and for John D. MacDonald The Green Ripper, the often-dismissed last novels in the two Macs' famous series (Lew Archer and Travis McGee), and makes the case for these specific novels well (hey, I started reading RM with The Blue Hammer, and I wasn't sorry), while the all but inarguable classics (Stanley Ellin's short fiction, The Maltese Falcon, Murder on the Orient Express, The Friends of Eddie Coyle) are treated similarly. Despite at least one dunderheaded comment I've seen, going on about how "outdated" this book is since it was published in 1988 (remarkable how books spoil, isn't it), the book is joy to go through, argue with, and be informed as well as amused by.

 Also "outdated" (I mean, it hardly deals with comics after the '40s! I mean, come on!), All in Color for a Dime, which I've reread in the Krause Publications 1997 reissue, retains the enthusiasm of the new ground being tilled (since most of the essays at least have roots in articles in Xero and Alter-Ego, with Comic Art pioneering comics (and other matter) fanzines from the earliest '60s, and this book was pioneering when first published in 1970). The contributors run most of the changes one could want on their subject matter (and they range from such passionate professional writers of fiction and pop-culture history as Ron Goulart, Harlan Ellison, and Lupoff himself through folks with feet in multiple camps such as Ted White and Jim Harmon, to folks whose primary work was extraliterary, but nonetheless, such as Chris Steinbrunner, had a long engagement in criticism or other sorts of similar work in literary circles (Steinbrunner was, among other things, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's a/v columnist for a decade or so: "Bloody Visions"). While, as I mentioned last week, the Blue Beetle is nowhere mentioned (the book is not attempting to be comprehensive), the coverage of the evolution of the Love Romances Publications line of comics, Planet Comics and its stablemates, would be worth the price of the book alone, as would the pioneering Lupoff article on Captain Marvel and his eventual clan, or Ellison on the George Harriman-esque George Carlson (only Carlson was busy where Harriman was lean).




















Science Fiction at Large, the first anthology of critical essays (speech transcriptions rendered into essay form) I read, which had somehow found its way into my first high-school's brand-new library in 1978, and featured impressive essays by Ursula K. Le Guin and Thomas Disch which were to grow into or form important parts of later books (UKL's "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown" was collected in her The Language of the Night; "The Embarrassments of Science Fiction" is integral to Disch's The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of and has been collected in his On SF), as well as by Harry Harrison, Alan Garner, John Brunner, Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, and the editor; Edward De Bono's introduction to his take on "lateral thinking" was very useful to me then, and remains so. I haven't yet reread John Taylor's essay, and Alvin Toffler's remains slight. A book worth seeking out.

 For more of this week's "forgotten" books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.
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Friday, January 14, 2011

FFB: Joe Gores: SPEAK OF THE DEVIL (Five Star, 1999); John Simon: MOVIES INTO FILM (Dial Press, 1971); JOHN SIMON ON FILM: 1982-2001 (Applause, 2005)

Joseph Gores, 1931-2011.



From the Contento index:
Speak of the Devil: 14 Tales of Crimes and Their Punishments Joe Gores (Five Star 0-7862-2035-X, Nov ’99, $20.95, 200pp, hc)
· Speak of the Devil · ss
· The Second Coming · ss Adam Aug ’66
· Raptor · ss EQMM Oct ’83
· Plot It Yourself [“Detectivitis, Anyone?”] · ss EQMM Jan ’88
· Smart Guys Don’t Snore · nv A Matter of Crime v2, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli & Richard Layman, HBJ, 1987
· Watch for It · ss Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, ed. Hans Stefan Santesson, 1973
· Quit Screaming · ss Adam’s Reader Nov ’69
· Killer Man [“Pro”] · ss Manhunt Jun ’58
· Faulty Register · ss Two Views of Wonder, ed. Thomas N. Scortia & Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Ballantine, 1973
· You’re Putting Me On—Aren’t You? · ss Adam Bedside Reader, 1971, 1970
· The Andrech Samples · ss Swank Sep ’70
· Night Out · ss Manhunt Oct ’61
· Sleep the Big Sleep · ss EQMM Apr ’91
· Goodbye, Pops · ss EQMM Dec ’69

Joe Gores died the other day, and I have seen nothing but fond remembrance of him as a person, as a pro's pro, as a guiding light of a man. Of course, few run around insisting what a bastard the recently deceased might be, unless they are inarguably so, but this outpouring bespeaks of the kind of person one is utterly glad to have known. I tend, at least sometimes, not to want to disturb such folks with fan letters and such, assuming (probably incorrectly) that they might not need any more affirmation from random folks off the street. But a number of the stories collected in this volume are among the most influential fiction I've read, at very least "The Second Coming," which I read at about age ten in one of the adult Hitchcock Presents: anthologies, probably one of Harold Masur's (I could go look it up, and probably will). I hadn't thought too hard about capital punishment at that point, but was not fond of the concept; this story, about would-be hipsters thinking they're about to have a kind of strange lark in weaseling their way into being among the witnesses of a state execution, and how that experience affects them, certainly affected me. I have been a confirmed opponent since.

Other stories here have stuck with me over the decades, as well..."Watch for It" and "Goodbye, Pops" were also in AHP: volumes, and made Gores's curiously upfront name (he certainly knew how to hook up into one's gut) one to look for; I can't remember for the life of me where I first read "Quit Screaming" all those years ago. Sitting down with the Contento/Ashley and/or Stephensen-Payne indices would probably tell me that, too.

But for now, I'm just ready to buy a copy of this collection, and remind myself of some of the talent and compassion, the anger and grace of the writer we just lost. And, again, condolences to all those folks fortunate enough to know the man, as well.

My greatest obligation is to what, correctly or incorrectly, I perceive as the truth. It is also a genuine satisfaction to express the truth as you feel it should be expressed.
--John Simon, "The Art of Criticism (No.4)," The Paris Review, Spring 1997.




I've recently been re-reading Movies into Film, the first John Simon book I read, and the relatively recent (and still in print) John Simon on Movies, and it remains an enjoyable and compulsive pastime...to read a critic who is not wedded to a specific ideological framework, who is so clear in esthetic judgments and open about his biases but nonetheless strives to take the work in question on its own terms...if those terms are in the pursuit of what he sees as actually achieving art, or at very least intelligently-assembled amusements. His criteria can be questioned, of course, as every Barbra Streisand idolater will insist, but not his commitment; his wit and elegance and open-mindedness are models for me that I only infrequently begin to emulate.

It’s wonderful to be hated by idiots. A German writer whom I love and whom I’ve translated, Erich Kästner, gives advice in one of his poems to a would-be suicide. He tries to give this man various reasons for not blowing his brains out. The man remains unconvinced, so Kästner says, in essence, all right, the world is full of idiots and they’re in control of everything. You fool, stay alive to annoy them! And that, in a sense, is my function in life, and my consolation. If I can’t convince these imbeciles of anything, I can at least annoy them, and I think I do a reasonably good job of that. --ibid.

As with all good critics, even when you find yourself disagreeing with his conclusions, you can see where he's coming from. He mildly enjoyed Tootsie, a film which rather bores and annoys me; he utterly dislikes The Rapture and Before Sunrise, films I see virtues in, particularly the former. But his reactions are well-explicated and only very rarely wrongheaded--there is one instance in the newer collection where he clearly misunderstood what was being suggested by the film under review, but I don't have the book at hand and don't remember which it was (I'll slip that in later), but this instance is surprising in its near-uniqueness, in my experience. More often, part of what he so very good at is in isolating what is wrong with a deeply flawed film, whether it be Midnight Run or In the Company of Men, without losing sight of their strengths; in thoroughly castigating the dishonest film, such as Smooth Talk (where the greatest dishonesty is in how it traduces the career-making short story by Joyce Carol Oates that it supposedly seeks to adapt, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?") and celebrates the great, nearly perfect attempt to crystallize truth, such as Badlands. And he is not afraid to turn his analysis to the work of other critics, often demonstrating more virtues in Pauline Kael, for example, or even Andrew Sarris, than I might otherwise credit them with.

I think it's time I finally dug out his Acid Test, and picked up my own copy of Private Screenings, which I believe I've read but am uncertain. Dwight Macdonald's introduction to the first is probably worth the cost of admission in itself, or so I hope.

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog for a roundup.
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