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From: donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Book Reviews (IV)
Message-ID: <834@sdchema.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 28-Aug-83 06:04:26 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdchema.834
Posted: Sun Aug 28 06:04:26 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 31-Aug-83 07:38:57 EDT
Organization: UC San Diego Chemistry Dept. NIH Research Resource
Lines: 127

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.'

*NIFFT THE LEAN.  Michael Shea.  DAW.  Someone showed me a review
from LOCUS which said more or less that this was a very good book,
resembling Vance at his best.  Since I like good Vance I bought the
book.  NIFFT is not a bad book, but I don't think it is a very good
book either.  The main deficiency is the lack of depth to the
characters; the character of Nifft, the master thief, is not drawn very
convincingly, and the remaining characters are merely bit parts.  A
more minor problem is the writing style, which is similar to Vance in
its use of ornate syntax but never manages to emulate Vance's fluency
or consistency.  (Or Vance's facility for inventing names.) There is
also (sigh) a certain predictability to the plots of some of the
stories.  However the settings of the stories are well-imagined and
there is some fun in exploring the ramifications of the worlds of
Nifft's exploration.  'Come Then, Mortal -- We Will Seek Her Soul' is a
descent into Shea's version of Hell; 'The Fishing of the Demon-Sea' is
perhaps the best story (and longest), in which Nifft and his friend
Barnar are forced to descend into the domain of the demons in search of
a boy who made a mistake in casting a spell; 'The Goddess in Glass' is
about a city where the tutelary deity is an alien insect six stories
tall encased in glass and is (incorrectly) believed by the citizens to
be dead and mummified. (5.5)

*THE ROBOT WHO LOOKED LIKE ME.  Robert Sheckley.  Bantam.  This book is
a collection of post-Modern Sheckley; the stories in this book are
newer and less radical than the ones in his collection CAN YOU FEEL
ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS? but much odder than the Classic Sheckley of
THE PEOPLE TRAP (for example).  Some of the stories are reminiscent of
Classic Sheckley but they are all darker in tone and share a
playfulness with style that Classic Sheckley tends to lack.  The title
story is almost a Classic Sheckley piece, about a man whose schedule
won't accommodate romance, so he has Snaithe's Robotorama make a double
of him who can court his selected future wife without interfering in
his business transactions.  'Voices' is a superb little shocker whose
simple premise is, 'Every man must follow the dictates of his own inner
Voice.' 'Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon
Westerley Dead' is the last space opera novel (and is blessedly short
for the genre, at 6 pages).  In 'Welcome to the Standard Nightmare', a
spaceman meets an alien civilization and conquers it for Earth
single-handed -- or does he? 'The Never-Ending Western Movie' sounds
like a joke but in fact it is a serious story about a retired actor who
is called on to play his part just one more time in a 'real-life'
Western.  'What Is Life?' is a completely unserious treatment of the
question whose answer isn't 'a bowl of cherries'.  'Is THAT What People
Do?' is a nasty bit of paranoia about a voyeur who finds a rather
peculiar pair of binoculars.  I still get annoyed by Sheckley's
attitudes toward women, which don't appear to have changed much over
the years (his female characters are always out to marry the male
protagonist, settle down in New Jersey and have babies), but on the
other hand he has published a fair amount of this stuff in Playboy,
Penthouse and even Cosmo so I expect the editors like it.  By and large
this is a good collection though. (8.0)

DRAMOCLES.  Robert Sheckley.  Holt, Rinehart and Winston.  (I cheated
-- this book is still in hardback edition (and not at all cheap) but I
decided to add it to these reviews anyway...) This novel is subtitled
'An Intergalactic Soap Opera', and while it is a parody of soap operas
it is also a parody of lots of other things too, with special attention
given to science fiction and its fans.  In his funniest material,
Sheckley skillfully skewers the Baedeker's descriptions of foreign
cultures found in Burroughs and most space opera which are always
careful to mention something unusual so that you'll have at least one
thing to remember besides the name.  I can't resist quoting at least
one passage:

    'The inhabitants of Ystrad, the Ystradgnu, were a non-Glormish
    people of considerable antiquity.  They were a gentle folk, and
    hospitable to strangers, except on the occasions when they needed a
    sacrifice for one of their deities.  Their principal exports were
    poetry and songs, which were in great demand among the races of the
    galaxy with no poetry or songs of their own.  The annotation and
    analyzation of the Ystradgnu arts provided an entire industry for
    the analogists of the neighboring island of Rungx.

    'Most of the Ystradgnu made their living by grazing herds of
    porcupines on their green hillsides and exporting the quills to the
    Uurks, a nonhuman people who had never disclosed why they needed them.

    'The Ystradgnu had a method of ground transportation unlike
    anything else on Glorm.  Travel between points on Ystrad was
    effected by trampoline networks.  The trampolines, spaced an
    average of fifteen feet apart, criss-crossed the countryside.  The
    trampolines were made of heavy canvas and dyed in various bright
    colors -- though by ancient tradition never yellow -- and a large
    part of Ystrad's revenue went to their upkeep...'

You might imagine that it would be impossible to build a story out of
this lunacy, but every time you think the whole apparatus of the novel
is going to collapse in tatters, a bizarre plot twist occurs and leaves
the previous problems behind.  In fact it is possible to establish that
there is a protagonist, King Dramocles of the planet Glorm, son of King
Otho the Weird, who has reached his fiftieth birthday without making
much of a name for himself; that Dramocles begins receiving messages
from himself which he planted thirty years before and then erased from
his mind; that these messages purport to spell Dramocles' destiny,
ordering him to start an interplanetary war; and that while things
aren't turning out they way Dramocles expects them to, he IS making a
name for himself...  I kept the household up with my uncontrollable
laughing until 3 AM last night, trying to finish the book -- I suggest
that other readers choose an earlier hour to start on it.  I think this
is by far Sheckley's best novel. (9.0)

*MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES.  Robert Silverberg.  Bantam.  This is a
collection of stories set in the world of Silverberg's popular novel,
LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE.  People who adored LORD VALENTINE'S CASTLE
will love MAJIPOOR CHRONICLES; people who merely liked the novel may
find these stories somewhat annoying.  The book has a frame-story,
about a young boy who discovers how he can access the master vault of
all the memory-recordings of everyone who ever lived on Majipoor, and
uses these recordings to relive the pasts of ten people.  Some of the
people are interesting, most are not; in an attempt at realism,
perhaps, Silverberg has deprived most of these stories of any real
dramatic impact.  The stories with a moral tend to fall flat when
nothing but the moral exists to support them:  two stories are about
sex with aliens, two are about poor girls who make good, two are about
men who kill (one a murderer, the other a soldier) and feel
dishonorable...  you get the picture.  The only two stories I felt much
liking for were 'In The Fifth Year of the Voyage', about an attempt to
circumnavigate Majipoor, and 'The Desert of Stolen Dreams', which takes
place on the strange southern island of Suvrael.  Borrow this one
rather than buy it... (6.0)