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From: donn@sdchema.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Book Reviews (I)
Message-ID: <831@sdchema.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 28-Aug-83 05:52:19 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdchema.831
Posted: Sun Aug 28 05:52:19 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 30-Aug-83 23:29:50 EDT
Organization: UC San Diego Chemistry Dept. NIH Research Resource
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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.'

*BLOODED ON ARACHNE.  Michael Bishop.  Timescape.  A collection of
Bishop's short stories and novelettes spanning the period 1970-78.
Some good stuff in here, but occasionally damaged by excessive
seriousness.  'The House of Compassionate Sharers' is nice story about
prostitution, I believe it appeared in a Terry Carr collection; 'Leaps
of Faith' is a clever fantasy about fleas; 'Rogue Tomato' pokes fun at
poor Franz Kafka, the 'New Wave', and (yes!) Arthur Clarke; 'The White
Otters of Childhood' is a reverse version of THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR
MOREAU, with a twist of JAWS. (7.0)

*CHANGES.  Michael Bishop and Ian Watson, eds.  Ace.  A collection of
previously published stories, all dealing with the theme of
metamorphosis.  The stories vary wildly in style and content; most are
very good, a few are weak.  The good ones include 'Sisohpromatem' by
Kit Reed, in which a roach finds itself transformed into a gigantic
human being; 'The Byrds' by Michael G. Coney, a very funny story which
tells how anti-gravity led to the revival of avian culture; 'The Dark
of the June' by Gene Wolfe, about a future where people transform
themselves into ghosts to achieve immortality; 'Flies by Night', by
Lisa Tuttle and Steven Utley, about a woman who sheds her cocoon to
become her life's fantasy: a fly.  (7.5)

*THE BEST SCIENCE FICTION OF THE YEAR #12.  Terry Carr, ed.
Timescape.  Not the best BEST.  No stories of the caliber of Vance's
'Rumfuddle' in #3, or Wolfe's 'The Eyeflash Miracles' in #6, and I
expect Carr to come up with the ones I missed, like these.  Still some
nice stories, though:  'The Pope of the Chimps' by Robert Silverberg,
examines the peculiar relationship between animal behavior researchers
and the creatures they study; 'Souls' by Joanna Russ, a kind of
hard-edged Zenna Henderson story with depth (surprised me
considerably); 'Understanding Human Behavior' by Tom Disch, a course in
modern culture for 'erasees', people who have had their pasts
surgically removed, like an appendix; 'Firewatch' by Connie Willis, a
time-travel story with an old-fashioned plot, but handled well.  I was
rather disappointed by the Benford story 'Relativistic Effects' (a
reworking of Anderson's TAU ZERO with equally wooden characters but a
fancy style) and the Le Guin story 'Sur' (another too-good-to-be-true
feminist tract, about South American housewives who discover the South
Pole but are too nice to spoil the game for Amundsen and Scott).  I
should say that I thought Anderson's 'The Saturn Game' in #11 revolted
me even more than these stories and I believe it went on to win an
award, so there's no predicting some people's tastes...  (5.0)

*COLLECTED FANTASIES.  Avram Davidson (John Silbersack, ed.).
Berkley.  I am a hopeless Avram Davidson addict and I bought this
collection even though I have seen most of the stories in it before.
Oh well; if you haven't 'found' Davidson yet, FANTASIES is a good place
to start.  The stories date from 1955 to 1977 and contain some true
classics of Avramiana:  'Sacheverell', 'Help! I Am Dr. Morris
Goldpepper' (dentist SF which predates Piers Anthony's inferior but
still funny PROSTHO PLUS), 'Or All the Seas With Oysters' (a fantasy
story that won the Hugo, and deserved it), 'Sources of the Nile' (Ah! I
can't BELIEVE this one escaped getting an award, see Richard Lupoff's
WHAT IF? collection to find out more about it), and 'The Golem' (about
-- you guessed it -- the problems of golems).  Also some hard to find
older stories, like 'The Lord of Central Park', witty, nutty stuff,
'The Certificate', a little chiller about alien invasion, 'The
Cobblestones of Saratoga Street', about two little old ladies who save
a cobblestoned street from destruction (but not because they are
cobblestone fanciers), and 'Faed-Out', a story about a not-quite-dead
talking picture star.  Plus one of his more recent 'British Hidalgo'
stories, 'Manatee Gal Won't You Come Out Tonight', a funny and
discursive tale about lonely men and manatees.  Buy it, buy it.  (9.5)

THE WOLVES OF MEMORY.  George Alec Effinger.  Berkeley.  I hate to
stigmatize a writer by saying that he or she hasn't written anything as
enjoyable as their first novel, but in the case of George Alec Effinger
I have to say that none of his novels has been as much fun as WHAT
ENTROPY MEANS TO ME.  I am still waiting for him to produce a book that
has as much as half the imagination and invention as ENTROPY, or
characters that are even a fraction as believable and engrossing.
Having said that, I am willing to admit that THE WOLVES OF MEMORY is a
much better book than its immediate predecessors, although it is still
disappointing in some ways.  Effinger still maintains the same annoying
distance from his characters and has the same annoying habit of
re-using names and backgrounds of his protagonists, in this case Sandor
Courane, a man who is so foolish and incompetent that the central
computer which runs Earth, named TECT, decides that he is unfit for
human society and exiles him to a planet called Home.  As we learn
through flashbacks, Home is a lovely but boring prison which has the
unfortunate feature that everyone who has ever been sent to it has died
of a disease that slowly eradicates one's memory, producing both
retrograde and anterograde amnesia.  This rather bleak locale is the
scene for some amusing black humor in which the antics of the computer
TECT gradually become more and more funny and irrational, like a
character from Beckett.  In the end you have to wonder whether
Courane's death means anything to you (is it, perhaps, merely
entropy?); to me, it did, in a strange way.  Read this if you have a
strong intellectual stomach. (6.0)

*IDLE PLEASURES.  George Alec Effinger.  Berkley.  This book is
subtitled 'Science Fiction Stories About Sports', but it really is a
collection of Effinger stories, not to be mistaken for anything else.
Most of these stories are good and some of them are really good, with
that special touch of insanity that sometimes makes me think Effinger
is a refugee from THE TWILIGHT ZONE.  'Naked to the Invisible Eye' is
about a pitcher from Venezuela who spells an end to the modern game of
baseball; 'From Downtown at the Buzzer' is about Earth's first contact
with aliens, who seem blandly disinterested in everything except
basketball; 'The Exempt' is a sparkling Sheckleyism which involves a
man who is shopping for alternate universes the way we shop for
apartments; 'Heartstop' is one of Effinger's Gremmage stories, this
time about a man who stops in Gremmage, Pa., and becomes entangled in a
game of fairy chess that brings him to the land of fairies, or
psychosis, or both.  Not Effinger's best collection, but enjoyable
nonetheless. (7.5)