Archives for category: Literature

Novels to Read in 2024

January 31, 2024 //

Yes, this is a list of shame. So many great books I have not read! The asterisks mark books I am halfway through, but misplaced at some point during the reading; the paragraph markers are used to indicate books I’ve read, but need to read again.

But this reading plan depends upon a number of factors beyond my control, like surviving the next eleven months: It is all very iffy, “the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Adrian Barnes:

Nod

Julian Barnes:

The Sense of an Ending

Max Barry:

Jennifer Government

H.E. Bates:

Hark Hark the Lark!

Anthony Burgess:

The Kingdom of the Wicked

James Branch Cabell:

Something About Eve *
The King Was in His Counting House

Arthur C. Clarke:

The City and the Stars
Childhood’s End
The Fountains of Paradise

Peter DeVries:

The Prick of Noon

Philip K. Dick:

Ubik
The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike

Charles Dickens:

Bleak House

Lawrence Durrell:

Monsieur & and its sequels, the whole of the Avignon Quincunx

Vardis Fisher:

Jesus Came Again
We Are Betrayed

Günter Grass:

Local Anesthetic

Frank Herbert:

Dune

Hermann Hesse:

Narcissus and Goldmund
Magister Ludi §

William Dean Howell:

The Rise of Silas Lapham *

Aldous Huxley:

The Genius and the Goddess *
Antic Hay§
Time Must Have a Stop §
The Devils of Loudun

Stanislaw Lem:

Solaris
The Invincible

Christopher Priest:

A Dream of Wessex/The Perfect Lover
Inverted World
Expect Me Tomorrow

Ayn Rand:

Atlas Shrugged

Alistair Reynolds:

House of Suns
Revelation Space

James H. Schmidtz:

The Witches of Karres
The Demon Breed

Tom Sharpe:

The Midden

Olaf Stapledon:

Odd John
Star Maker §

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky:

Roadside Picnic
One Billion Years to the End of the World

Adrian Tchaikovsky:

The Expert System’s Brother

William Makepeace Thackeray:

Vanity Fair *

John Updike:

Roger’s Version *
S.
Gertrude and Claudius

John Wyndham:

The Trouble with Lichen

Categories Books/Reviews, Novels, Ultrafiction — F & SF

The Deus in the Machine

September 10, 2023 //

Science fiction has been eerily connected with outré religious development for the whole of my lifetime.

L. Ron Hubbard, an sf writer, invented first Dianetics and then Scientology — a notorious cooked-up religion, with an utterly science-fictional backstory (mythology).

And the various UFO cults that have developed are thoroughly drenched with science fiction ideas.

Indeed, the UFOs and alleged alien encounters are suffused with religious themes, pat morals about taking care of the planet, and a number of modern obsessions that match, as if in echo, the Marian revelations of the past. Jacques Vallee made much hay of this in his books of the Seventies and Eighties.

In the Fifties, editor Ray Palmer infamously treated the UFO subject as a matter of both science and sf, even embraced the bizarre, schizophrenic paranoia of Richard Shaver as a possibly true mythos, the “Shaver Mystery.” This split science fiction into a significant factionalist period, deeply upsetting leading science fiction writers, such as “skeptic” Isaac Asimov.

There is a sort of chicken/egg element to the science fiction/UFO connection. Science fiction writers were speculating about alien life, encounters, and invasions before the foo-fighters of World War II, the Battle of Los Angeles, the ”flying saucers“ over Mt. Rainier, the bizarre fiasco of Roswell, N.M., the wave of flying saucers over the White House, or dozens upon dozens of other stories that hit newspaper headlines across the country — and the world — mid-century.

During and after this period, sf writers took up the lore and turned it this way and that, just as Hollywood began making “cheap” and sometimes sophisticated ”flying saucer” movies, from the ridiculous Earth versus the Flying Saucers (1956) to the sublime The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). Notice how early on that latter-mentioned film appeared, so soon after the flying saucer craze began in 1947. And notice how religious the message was: science fiction had given us a machine-god deus ex machina.

What to make of it all is hard to determine. It is almost as if science fiction served a similar literary function to the cottage industry of “gospels” two millennia ago. And the ufology lore, some of it concocted by severely pixillated individuals, grew in parallel, as a sort of open-source science fiction.

A religion is indeed coming to birth in our time. But it is not as was conceived by John S. Dunne, in his Way of All the Earth. It has more to do with science fiction. It shall be stefnal. Perhaps the proper attitude to investigate these various strains of the new religion is to engage with the traditions as Dunne suggested we engage with religions not our own: exploratory, with an eye to seeking insight, but without expecting to commit to any dogma or way of life.

I certainly have not committed to any single explanation of UFOs, holding all in various degrees of epoché. I have resisted the allure of the new religion. Like a good science fiction reader should.

twv

Categories paranormal &tc, Ultrafiction — F & SF

Sleepless

January 17, 2023 //

I’ve lost track of two of the novels I’m halfway through reading, one by William Dean Howells and the other by Poul Anderson. Both are likely in my office, which I guess I’ll have to tidy up soon. So here I am well into the night and approaching morning, still wide awake, but tired, looking at a Poe collection, an elegant miniature hardcover from Könemann. I’m thinking of embarking on a formal essay on Nabokov’s Lolita, so Poe not surprisingly came to mind. There is a mystery behind Lolita, one uncovered a decade or so ago, and most of what has been written about it has been pishposh. And here it is, half after the beginning of the new day’s fifth hour, and I cannot remember having read Poe’s longest detective story. I know I read “The Gold Bug” in my teen years. But the others? I forsook Poe’s crime and horror fiction for his comedies, “The Imp of the Perverse” and “Never Bet the Devil Your Head.” Now it is time, perhaps, to return to my reading roots.

Or finish this whiskey. I am not awake because of missing books, but because of pain. There is no position of recumbency that evades pain, tonight, so every position prevents sleep. So how to sleep? The whiskey may help.

Or maybe Poe’s prose’ll do it.

twv

Categories Novels, Random musings, short fiction

Democracy & Anti-Democracy at Twitter

December 23, 2022 //

One theory of democracy is that it’s a stunt — a way to suck people into accepting more government than they would otherwise accept. Voting in elections is seen by these conspiracy theorists as fake, as a con job.

This is distinct from the idea that many elections are faked. Communists had an obviously fake form of democracy, where the outcome was nearly always known going in. It helps to have only one candidate, for example.

To discover that one or two or an alarmingly high number of elections are controlled not by voters but by hidden forces does not prove the conspiracy view of democracy, but it does suggest it. Which is why the Democratic sector of legacy media — most networks and news programs — is not reporting on the ongoing Twitter revelations much at all. Because Elon Musk has shown that social media interference in the dissemination of opinion and news during the 2020 presidential election was destabilized the integrity of that election, this is a topic too hot for propagandists to handle. It’s blankout time.

The Twitter Files, as subcontracted out by Mr. Musk to a handful of independent journalists, has been very instructive. Recently, we’ve learned that the FBI had a huge presence in Twitter’s employee ranks, with hundreds of former federal law enforcement and intel agency personnel swelling the ranks of the company. They even had their own employee server and new former-fed employee welcoming parties. And it turns out that the government paid Twitter to censor in partisan ways.

And Elon Musk has point-blank stated that the same sort of things were going on in other social media outfits.

This is not “regulatory capture,” where corporations imperialize bureaus by swapping personnel. This is partisan government-worker capture of business, not much different than how Nazi Germany worked: one party planting operatives in every major business.

Meanwhile, Mr. Musk has continued his goofy online polls. Earlier he had let Trump and “all” banned users back onto Twitter because of polling results. On the 18th he polled his audience about whether he should continue as CEO, saying he would “abide by the results of this poll.” A greater-than 14 point spread favored his resignation.

And then someone suggested that only paid blue-checkmark people should vote in such polls, and he accepted the idea.

The latest tweet of @elonmusk’s that I have read stated, “I will resign as CEO as soon as I find someone foolish enough to take the job!”

Stunt!

twv

Categories information vs misinformation vs disinformation, Institutional Reality, journalism

The Myra/Myron Substitutions

October 29, 2022 //

Most of the reviews on Goodreads of Gore Vidal’s Myron miss the point. These reviews have apparently been written by leftists who do not understand that Vidal points most of his satire not rightward, in this novel, but at leftist sexual [tranny] tyranny. The title character of the previous book, Myra Breckinridge, rapes and castrates her way to cultural power on a Club of Rome de-population agenda, made quite explicit. This is not “sexual liberation” but sexual tyranny and . . . propaganda by the misdeed. But Vidal does croak out the last laugh at conservatives in the final pages. Myron, Myra’s alter ego (they share the same body), literally has no idea that the world has changed and that he has lost his battle of personal identity and identity politics with Myra, hung up as he has been on defending Nixon.

The clue to the interpretation is that leftists seek to emasculate America and rightists have no “powells” (Vidal’s term for testicles — it’s a long story: see below).

Vidal spins a Lewis Carroll-like fantasy to make a grisly point about left and right in America, and straight-left readers would be too clueless to suspect such a thing from the pen of socialist Gore Vidal.

It is a Menippean satire, perhaps. The caricatures that are Myra and Myron make an almost allegorical tapestry, but with no reverence or piety or patriotism whatsoever. This is as thoroughgoing satire as I’ve read from an American. It tops James Branch Cabell’s Hamlet Had an Uncle (if not Jurgen), anyway.

Vidal employed similar technique — that is, a satire based on fantasy and gloriously fabulisitic and ultra-silly sci-fi — in his later send-up of early Christianity, too, Live from Golgotha . . . the best thing about which were the two pages explaining the Cleansing of the Temple in terms of loose and tight monetary policy.

These usually ignored fictions by Vidal are, from what I can tell, the novelistic stand-in for satyr plays. I could perhaps write more persuasively about this literary diptych had I read Myra Breckinridge (1968) a few years ago, not, as is the case, a few decades ago: my memory is not reliable about the first book. I have just finished reading Myron (1974) today. But I can offer advice for those who choose to read Myron: read the first edition, where Vidal uses an amusing set of euphemisms for the traditional set of naughty words. In later edition he jettisoned this comic apparatus. Pity. It is indeed funny. Vidal explains, in his helpful prefatory note to the first edition, which I read:

Categories Goodreads, Ideological currents, Novels, Ultrafiction — F & SF

The Martian Sphinx

October 23, 2022 //

I am going to be teasing my listeners and viewers with a thesis in a few videos and podcasts. The first is up:

And, after a few teasing mentions of the thesis, I will then defend it!

The thesis has to do with the importance of science fiction and fantasy for developing a more accurate picture of reality.

But I’m not in the mood to really get into it, so I am only dropping hints.

This latest video is also on Rumble:

I would greatly appreciate it if you could sign up for Rumble and subscribe to my channel (@wirkman) and “give a rumble,” too.

On Rumble is where my LocoFoco video channel resides, too.

I am recording a new podcast with David Ramsay Steele next week. So stay tuned. You won’t want to miss it.

twv

Categories Ultrafiction — F & SF

SF Epochs

October 9, 2022 //

The epochs of science fiction production and readership:

Iron Age: Lucian’s True History through all those utopias up till Mary Shelley.
Industrial Age: Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus through The Coming Race and Erewhon and the ultra-popular Jules Verne oeuvre (and many obscurities, such as the short stories of Edward Page Mitchell) to The War of the Worlds and The Food of the Gods.
Radium Age: From just prior to Great War to John W. Campbell’s hiring at Astounding in 1937, this period featured literary classics such as We and Brave New World, the pulp fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s extremely popular efforts and Gernsback’s considerably more obscure “scientifiction” crowd, and many breakthrough oddball efforts, like George S. Schuyler’s Black No More (1931).
Golden Age: This period featured stiff competition among sf journals, the popularity of writers such as Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke and Simak, and the rise of “sci-fi” fandom.
Philippians and the New Wave: Though hints of a new approach to sf can be found in the works of Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick, it was in the late Sixties that writers and editors such as Judith Merrill, Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Thomas M. Disch and others brought new literary sophistication to the genre. They called it “the New Wave,” and I am mainly familiar with the American wing of the movement, chiefly through Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology and its sequels.
Cyberpunk & Cinema: In the Eighties, a strain evolved out of catching the curl of accelerated but ambiguous history, and inspired by the work of many past masters, focusing on progressive technology and decadent culture. This “cyberpunk” came to dominate literary sf trends, at least until the rebirth of space opera in a more sophisticated, Midcult form, while popular sf and its fandom were subsumed under the Masscult phenomena that congealed around the cinematic series Star Trek and Star Wars.

It’s all been post-historical since then, a postmodern diversity.

twv

A Radium Age satirical novel I am reading, and Harlan Ellison’s celebrated anthology of 1967, which I devoured in the mid-70s.

Categories Ultrafiction — F & SF

A Forgotten Classic

October 1, 2022 //

Pikku taking her stand atop a bookcase in the midst of my most recent library reshuffle (ongoing).

Man vs. the Monsters

Murray Leinster’s The Forgotten Planet is as perfect an example of classic science fiction as one could hope to find. It’s a 1950s’ ”fix-up” novel of a few stories from the 1920s. In that sense, it is almost a century old.

On the surface it qualifies as pure adventure, and thankfully without the clunky sophomoric (as if teen-imagined) view of romance that used to dominate pulp sf. (You know: pulchritudinous blonde daughter of a bespectacled scientist thrown together with a teen athlete boy or a nerd.) But it is rigorously worked out from a simple premise, and is as “hard science” as this sort of thing can be.

It is, in fact, the best example of a fix-up that I can think of, for it is seamless in its construction. Well, not exactly, I guess: the prologue and epilogue are the most obvious fix-up parts, a tad more elegantly written than the crisply narrated body of the text. But that’s apt, too.

It really is impressive.

And it is an apparent inspiration for Brian Aldiss’s masterwork, Hothouse. Like it, we have non-civilized human being in the future in constant battle for survival on an alien planet. In this case, though, it’s not Earth. The planet is not named. After multiple seedings of life, the barren planet was forgotten by human interstellar civilization, and then a ship crashed on it, and the survivors had to fend for themselves, losing their culture in the process. The story features one young man who begins to develop an ability to think, and to dare to try new ways to survive. Against giant spiders and insects, mainly.

A very few typos in this edition. I have another, early Ace edition of this book, but cannot find it. When I find it I’ll sell one of them. Or both? I hate to get rid of books I may need to refer to again.

twv

Categories Ultrafiction — F & SF

A Few Short Stories

August 18, 2022 //

The first story in Out of the Unknown (1970), is by A.E. Van Vogt, and might best be categorized as adventure-horror. Titled “The Sea Thing,” the eponymous creature, which we learn is “the god of sharks,” goes on land and takes human form to wreak vengeance upon the isolated fishermen of a remote island. Van Vogt begins, and for much of the story continues, by using this creature as the viewpoint character. This is the unique thing about “The Sea Thing” — otherwise it is very old-fashioned, a sea-based horror fantasy.

Despite that apparently damning judgment of “very old-fashioned,” I do not seek to dismiss this collection of tales. First, they were all originally published in Unknown, a short-lived pulp edited by the great John W. Campbell — hence the book’s title. Second, the authors of the stories are a husband-wife writing “team” who, despite their alleged status as a team, wrote each story in the book separately.

The penultimate tale of this collection, Lord Dunany’s “The Sack of Emeralds,” is simple and effective. It is so simple that one might blink and wonder why we should take any notice of it. Dunsany wrote many similar stories. But they are timeless, and flawless in their own way. This is a little longer, I think, than his best short shorts, like “Charon,” from Fifty-One Tales, and is nowhere near as moving. But it is a worthy inclusion.

This anthology also contains Ray Bradbury’s grand exercise in low-key bizarrerie, “The Jar.”

This paperback, with its unfortunate torn top-right corner, is of a slightly smaller size than what we think of as a normal-sized pocketbook paperback. It was published in 1963, during the period when this size was most popular.

twv

Categories Books/Reviews, short fiction, Ultrafiction — F & SF

Squibs… Not This August?

August 9, 2022 //

With the FBI’s move on Trump, I once again wonder to myself:

Are Democrats now so evil that they make themselves stupid, or so stupid they make themselves evil?

In America, the right wing doesn’t know what the left’s doing, and vice versa, and I expect it all to come to some sort of frothy head soon.

Cyril M. Kornbluth wrote a novel titled Not This August in which the communists conquer the United States — and the American people conquer the country right back.

It is supposed to be quite good, but I bet, in context, it’d be depressing, for it is Americans who are now pushing towards phase one of the conquest project.

The basic ”deal” of a two-party democratic republic is that the two sides do not attack each other using state power when they secure a unitary government. The idea is to let each other get away with the usual inelegances, self-dealings and crimes and not take advantage of a temporary impregnable position.

When Trump, during the 2016 debates, threatened to put Hillary Clinton in jail for her many crimes (and she was and is deeply, deeply corrupt), this alarmed the establishment. The Administrative State (both Deep and Wide) depends upon bipartisan corruption to thrive, using both parties to keep their confidence game going. Trump was ‘reckless’ in promising to take Hillary down. And so the insiders in the CIA and FBI went on the attack against Trump, and with the help of a partisan propagandistic media, got Democratic voters to think they were right to do so — the boobs of the booboisie can always be counted on to get it wrong politically.

But notice: Trump did nothing. The Hillary-bashing was a mere empty threat. While Democrats and major media newsreaders/talking heads relentlessly portrayed Trump as a tyrant, he acted in a fairly normal-American manner for three years, and then was blindsided by the China-Fauci Team and their pet project, COVID-19.

Now Democrats are in power and they are on the warpath. They are so afraid of a second Trump run that they are breaking the basic “deal.” The FBI’s raid on the Trump compound in Florida is quite a coup, you might say — not a coup d’etat, but along those lines. It was a breakdown in the fundamental truce that makes a republic work.

It’s another step to civil war, as I see it, and Democrat voters just fall in line. I said it years ago: it is the Democratic Party that‘s the Stupid Party now. It is indeed very funny, because “the smart ones” daily prove their folly and cluelessness.

It is kind of breathtaking to watch.

But since it solidifies all my old fugitive opinions, my ultra-marginal notions about how power really works — not the standard civics text fairy tales — I guess I shouldn’t complain. Thanks, Democrats, for proving how awful your ideas always have been, and how slim-to-nonexistent your commitment to “democracy” really is.

Isn’t it odd how President Herbert Hoover was scorned and excoriated for the encampments of “Hoovervilles” during the Great Depression but no politician receives any brunt of the blame for the vast encampments of the homeless in Seattle, Portland, and California’s most woke cities?

Nicknames for the union:

I’ve long liked Gore Vidal’s: The United States of Amnesia.

I’ve often used this one: These Benighted States.

But how about this: The Self-Satirizing States of America. SSSA!

Categories Politics, Ultrafiction — F & SF