Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site sdchema.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn From: donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley) Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers Subject: Book Reviews (II) Message-ID: <832@sdchema.UUCP> Date: Sun, 28-Aug-83 05:58:26 EDT Article-I.D.: sdchema.832 Posted: Sun Aug 28 05:58:26 1983 Date-Received: Wed, 31-Aug-83 07:35:16 EDT Organization: UC San Diego Chemistry Dept. NIH Research Resource Lines: 153 Some reviews of my recent reading. Stars next to titles indicate collections or anthologies. All the books are paperbacks, with the publisher or series title shown. Ratings are 0-10: 0 = 'I don't know why I bought this trash,' 5 = 'Readable but disappointing,' 7.5 = 'I liked it (but I don't know about other people),' 10 = 'Kill for this book.' CONTROL. William Goldman. Dell. Over the past several years William Goldman has developed a flair for engrossing (and best-selling) thrillers with interesting characters and witty dialogue. I sort of wish he would do another book like THE PRINCESS BRIDE (a hysterically funny parody of romance and adventure novels -- highly recommended) but I'll take what I can get. In this case I got CONTROL, another novel in the thriller vein -- which is part of its problem, because it is just a vein; the book can't seem to decide whether it is a police novel, a secret-agencies-of-the-US-government paranoia thriller with fantasy sprinkled in like Stephen King's FIRESTARTER, a historical romance or (yes) a science fiction novel. It has cliches from ALL of these genres and yet doesn't firmly belong to any of them; they don't cohere in any comfortable way. Despite this niggling flaw, CONTROL is quite readable and it kept my attention very thoroughly. The book has an amazing narrative trick which I don't want to give away by explaining too much of the plot, but I will say that the science-fiction element involves a plot to travel back in time and kill Alexander Graham Bell before he can patent the telephone. Nice light reading. (7.5) *DIFFERENT SEASONS. Stephen King. Signet. King claims that these stories are not horror fiction; I claim that they are merely not supernatural horror fiction, except possibly the last story, 'The Breathing Method'. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the stories are excellent. Together, I think the stories in this book are better than anything King has done previously; while he has done stuff that is scarier (see especially his short novel 'The Mist' in the anthology DARK FORCES), none of it is as nicely structured and intellectually entertaining as this. 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption' is a prison story with lots of local color, stimulating characters and an amazing breakout. 'Apt Pupil' is the story of how an all-American adolescent discovers that he lives down the block from an ex-Nazi concentration camp commandant in hiding under an assumed name; the boy is disappointed to find that the old man is a bit of a soak instead of an evil murderous SS officer, but in time he helps the fellow to regain some of his past glory. 'The Body' is an homage to pre-adolescence, but doesn't suffer from excessive sentimentality. A group of boys sets off to find the body of a man who has reputedly been run over by a train; they are innocently eager to see what a real dead body looks like, and they almost find out the hard way. 'The Breathing Method' is unusual for King, in both style and substance; it is a story within a story, about a mysterious club where the upper crust meet to tell stories to one another, and the story one man tells about the curious tragedy which befalls a pregnant woman to whom he has taught 'the breathing method' of delivery. Reminds me of Fritz Leiber, somewhat. Recommended. (9.0) THE WORLD AND THORINN. Damon Knight. Berkley. It's nice to see Damon Knight with a new novel, even if this novel is really 'old' -- the first part is based on material he wrote some 15 years ago. This novel tells the story of Thorinn Goryatson, a child cripple who lives in the land of Hovenskar, in a region so far north that it is possible to see the pole, called 'Snorri's Pipe', 'so tall that it seems to prick the sky like a needle; and around it the sky turns, half light and half dark. Therefore at high noon there is an eye of darkness peering over the rim of Hovenskar, and at midnight an eye of brightness.' Does this capture your curiosity? It caught mine -- THE WORLD AND THORINN is no ordinary fantasy novel; beneath the veneer it is purest science fiction, an excellent example of the 'classic' style. When suddenly the world shakes and Snorri's Pipe begins to roar and pieces of the sky break off and fall to the ground like frostflakes, Thorinn's adoptive father puts a curse on Thorinn and seals him within a well as an offering to Snorri. The curse says, 'Go down;' and Thorinn goes down, through a hole at the bottom of the well, into the Underworld where dwell mysterious beasts and strange peoples and magic engines. Down, down he goes, ever deeper to the center of the world; and what he finds at the end of his quest is beyond all expectation. The novel suffers a bit from its episodic format, somewhat like disconnected stories, but by and large it is quite satisfying. (8.5) *CHANGEWAR. Fritz Leiber. Ace. This is a collection of stories that are related in theme and subject matter to Leiber's Hugo-winning novel, THE BIG TIME. It seems that there are two factions struggling for control of Time, the Snakes and the Spiders. Neither side is particularly good or evil; both are prepared to go great lengths to achieve their aims. Their method is to change the past so that certain events occur or do not occur, leading in the future to events favorable to the changing side or unfavorable to the enemy. The idea is interesting, but only one of the stories is executed in an interesting way: 'No Great Magic', which tells of a traveling company of theatrical players who REALLY travel; this story is a kind of 'prequel' to THE BIG TIME. The other stories are written in a rather cute, gabby style that never really achieves believability. The story 'The Oldest Soldier' is perhaps the best of them; it's about a man who has retired from a career as a mercenary in the Second World War (and the Napoleonic Wars, and the Second Colonial War of Mars vs. the Earth and Moon), who discovers that there is no retirement from a war where the enemy can track you through time. Leiber has done better stuff than this, I'm afraid. (6.5) *MEMOIRS OF A SPACE TRAVELER. Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek, with illustrations by the author. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book forms a set with THE STAR DIARIES and THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS, being the collected works of the fictional space traveler, social observer, futurologist and all-around nice guy, Ijon Tichy. In fact, this book and THE STAR DIARIES were published as one volume in the original Polish. These stories are just as fantastically funny and thought-provoking as those in THE STAR DIARIES, and I fail to understand why they weren't all published at once. In 'The Eighteenth Voyage' Tichy is responsible for creating the universe (but the job is bungled); in 'The Twenty-fourth Voyage' the state is threatened by 'disorder and disregard for the law,' so it commissions a Machine to bring 'perfect and absolute order,' with results which any computer programmer can predict. In 'Further Reminiscences of Ijon Tichy', Tichy remains on Earth and finds that adventure may be encountered even in one's living room. I won't spoil these five little gems by giving away their plots, except to note that the last one is subtitled 'The Washing Machine Tragedy' and it deals with the end of life as we know it. In 'Doctor Diagoras' Tichy finds a man who has created not one but two unique life forms which appear to communicate with each other but have no apparent means of communication which the poor Doctor's experiments can uncover. 'Let Us Save the Universe: An Open Letter From Ijon Tichy' is a public service announcement where the service is pure silliness, with illustrations. What can I say? No one else is Ijon Tichy. (9.0) *A PERFECT VACUUM. Stanislaw Lem, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This book is so good it leaves me speechless. Well, almost. The device of the book is that it is a collection of reviews of nonexistent books. This makes it extremely difficult to review properly, of course, and the task is not made any easier by the fact that the very first review in the book is a review of the book itself! How does one cope with such subterfuge? Willingly, and with much amusement in my case. I will make a stab at describing a few of these pieces without giving any of the good parts away: 'Gigamesh' is a review of a book that outwakes Finnegan; 'Gruppenfuehrer Louis XVI' is a review of a novel that tells how a Nazi squad leader named Taudlitz becomes king of 'Parisia', a copy of France in the midst of the Brazilian jungle; 'Being, Inc.' is a review of a story about the ultimate consequence of the existence of companies who can make your dreams come true; 'Non Serviam' is a review of the latest report on the cruel science of 'personetics', the study of intelligences that are created within universes built by computer simulations; 'The New Cosmogony' is a speech by a recipient of the Nobel Prize describing the work of his predecessors which led him to conclude that the physical properties of the universe are a consequence of a game being played by incredibly ancient and patient beings. This book may seem too literary to some and too philosophical to others, but for me it captures the spirit of the best of science fiction. (10.0) [A question: There is also apparently a book by Lem called IMAGINARY MAGNITUDE that consists of introductions to (as opposed to reviews of) nonexistent books. Does anyone know if this has appeared in English, and if so, from what publisher? A note: 'Non Serviam' appears in THE MIND'S I by Hofstadter and Dennett, along with a review (!?) by the editors.]