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How's this for funky? The world's greatest living British fantasist whose name isn't "Moorcock" lives in Wisconsin and he drew a cartoon mouse on a copy of my 'zine Zero Humility at ConVergence 2000.
Gaiman is one of those rare contemporary fantasy writers that treats his prose as a living creature rather than a necessary evil. Reading Gaiman's prose is like decoding an ancient text full of hidden meanings. If you're not alert, you'll miss dozens of compressed ideas and descriptive gems that range from the playful to the profound. Gaiman is a prose craftsman, and an unrepentant one, who anchors his fantasies with a fascinating landscape of language which proves that words are more than a means to an end. Neverwhereis one of the archetypical "underground fantasies" of recent years, postulating strange currents of magic dwelling hidden beneath the surface of the mundane world. In some hands, it's pure caricature and schlock. In his, it's like a good, stiff drink when you need it most. Stardustis a fairy tale, a novelization of an earlier graphic novel. If most of his other work is bourbon, this is a dessert wine. Don't take that as a criticism, because it isn't. Dessert is good for you from time to time. Hmm. Let's see. What can I say about The Sandmanif you haven't already fallen into it? A complex modern mythology. Endlessly fascinating characters. A self-absorbed king of dreams, wise despite himself, simultaneously omnipotent and adolescent. Talking dogs. Muses. Death. The Sandmanwas the first comic book to win a World Fantasy Award, for the "Midsummer Night's Dream" issue. I can't believe it's been seven years since I first picked this up. The series ended six years ago, and it still feels like it was written yesterday. Here are more than a few Sandman and Gaiman-related links. |
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I cried over Count Zero.Not for any twist of plot or character misfortune, but for the sheer vividness of Gibson's Sprawl, for the incomplete Fuller Domes half-hung in shadow and the miasma of human misery; for the charcoal skies over neon and glass, for the quicksilver geometries of dataspace as envisioned by someone who'd never even owned so much as an Apple II. I cried for future shock, for the fact that I could never visit this death-in-the-alleys dreamland of chrome and smoke.
Gibson's work explodes on the eyeball, stylized and highly self-conscious, painting a lived-in future that still raises an evocative longing, a ghost of nostalgia, in my heart. The craft of Gibson's prose is as important as the meat of his ideas. His "cyberspace," as conceived by a man who didn't even own a computer or really understand them, makes him the Isaac Newton of the cyberpunks, with cyberspace as his Brilliant Mistake. Gibson is a meticulous poet of the possible, in love with the romance of a high-tech future where human beings will still be bent and shady and a little rough around the edges. Here's an interview with Gibson from a few years back. I wish I could give you more (worthwhile) links about the man and his work, but they're a bit thin on the ground as of this writing. |
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I discovered Frank Herbert during the long, magical spring and summer of 1993, as I was going from fourteen to fifteen. It all began with Dune, of course. I still read that damn thing about once every two months. Stupid, stupid everlasting classics.
Herbert's writing, even when it veers off into his (cough) unique blend of psychosexual speculation and internal monologues (you might note that as Herbert's career went on, more and more of his characters began speaking more and more to themselves in more and more italics), displays the depth of his interest in just about damn near everything, from religion, politics, history and ecology to his own personal favorite, the study of individuals and societies under pressure. A word to the wise- skip the new Duneprequels by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. (shudder) Anderson. They're crap. |
| J.V. Jones appeared on the scene a few years ago with The Baker's Boy,the first in her "Book of Words" series. In the cover letter she sent with her first submission of the novel to its eventual publishers, she described her cast as "Chaucerian," and the description is very apt. The people in Jones' worlds are a lively, dirty, colorfully imperfect bunch living in a world designed to match. Her magic lies not so much in her prose but in her creations. I can't recall a dull moment during the entire "Book of Words" sequence, nor one character that I wished would simply get off the page. The bad guys are bad without being caricatures, the good guys are good without being plaster saints, and the bit parts are as spicy as the central cast. All the details of her fictional world, from cold grease congealing on roast duck to the bloody, exhausting results of her particular brand of sorcery, add texture to an already excellent setting. |
| If there's a Grand Old Lady of science fiction, Ursula K. LeGuin is it. While many of the "old timers" are revered simply for being old-timers, LeGuin is justly revered for her intelligence, depth, and experimental brilliance. Her science fiction work definitely takes a seat under the "social sci-fi" tent, and such it is, with its complex, fascinating studies of gender, politics, and, well, gender politics. If you like to masturbate over shining laser-cannons and registration numbers from Star Trekspaceships, it might disquiet the living shit out of you, so why not go read some soon? |
| One of Stanislaw Lem's stories spiced up the desert that was my freshman English required reading back in high school, and I've been a goggle-eyed fan ever since. Lem is Poland's most famous science fiction writer, and arguably the most famous to yet hail from behind the general vicinity of what was once the Iron Curtain. Lem's work is intricate, mathematical, and spine-shiveringly weird. It is by turns amusing and disturbing, the product of a unique mind. Lem spent much of his childhood composing false documents (passports, bank statements, work permits, etc.) for fictional people, and he wrote several books of reviews of "authentic fictional books." Imagine that mentality happily at play over dozens of novels and story collections. Tasty. |
| Johnathan Lethem has updated the hard-boiled Chandler/Marlowe private-eye voice and stirred it in a potluck with science fiction and what some timidly call "magical realism." Of course, that's not all he does, but that's what I've read so far, and it's a sly, vibrant combination, skillfully presented. Lethem's work is a great place to start for those who want to stretch the boundaries of their genre understanding, whether they're looking out from within the spec fic community or looking in from the "mainstream." |
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Several friends of mine spent months persistently telling me to read George R.R. Martin's fantasy cycle, A Song of Ice and Fire.Like a fool I didn't listen, and then like a fool I took their advice. Thus did I lose a week and a half of my precious life. Damn you, George R. R. Martin. Damn you for writing the fantasy epic that Jordan wants to write in his deepest, darkest wet dreams. Damn you for crafting something so bloody, bold, and rich. Damn you for raising the bar when it comes to sword-swingin' and political intrigue. Damn you for your amazing cast, your truly unexpected plot turnarounds, your vivid appropriation of historical precedents, and for the utterly merciless and shocking fates you hand out to your poor, poor characters.
Read Martin's work. It'll suck you in for long hours of your life, and you won't want them back when you're finished.
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China Mieville is someone to watch out for. His first novel, King Rat, is a sharply-done urban fantasy pitting a descendant of rodent royalty against a sinister modern revision of the Pied Piper of Hameln, who conceals his hypnotic call in the rhythms of "jungle" techno music. Perdido Street Station is something else entirely, urban fantasy to the nthdegree, set in the rusty, cancerous cityscape of New Crobuzon. Vivid, lively, and as intricate as a clockwork amoeba, I believe that Mieville's work is going to set the standard for revisionist fantasy in the next decade or so. If it doesn't, I shall just have to hurt people.
Runagate Rampant: The Unofficial Homepage of China Mieville
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Michael Moorcock is a one-man story industry, writing skillfully and prolifically in every fantasy form from sword-swingin' schlock to subtle philosophical speculation. He seems able to tune his prose opacity up or down at will. Any ten year-old can devour and enjoy The Jewel in the Skull, yet few grown adults can tell you what The Cornelius Chronicles are really on about. Moorcock understands and makes use of every possible fictional sensibility, from full-on pulp muscleman adventure to surreal metaphysical experimentation.
His fantasy adventure stories are fast reads, though not for any lack of substance. Moorcock cuts to the joints and sinew of each narrative, focusing on character discoveries and weird new encounters, avoiding the dull morass of trivial detail that weighs down a more recent generation of fantasists. In a Moorcock novel, entire deserts are crossed in a paragraph or two, and months of travel are compressed to a few sentences so the reader can get on to the beating heart of matters. He also has a fine touch for tragedy, and this lends his work a deep maturity. Did you know that all four books of the first Runestaffseries could fit into the page count of the first Wheel of Time book? Yeah, funny. In a recent interview at Science Fiction Weekly, Moorcock had this to say: "So I thought that any story for adults had to have two meanings. That was part of the deal. Part of the job you learned was to have an allegorical or symbolic meaning running through it. A moral argument. These fantasies of mine, they actually do have a symbolic meaning. I'm not saying others don't, but generally speaking, most don't seem to. They don't focus in on a social problem, they don't resonate between the modern world and that invented world. And the other thing that somebody asked me, they just asked me on the net today, "If I were doing a game, could you give me some extra details of the Young Kingdoms?" And I thought about this, and I said, "I'm not a world-maker, I'm a storyteller." When I travel, I don't know every detail of history and economics and culture of the places I travel to. The stories come out of both people and landscape. I get as much of the world as the story needs. The rest of that world, I know no more about it than about economics in Madagascar. "Younger readers will complain that my books are all right, but I don't go into enough detail, the way all these other writers do. Now as far as I'm concerned, those writers are boring farts. They're wasting my time and killing a tree to boot. That stuff I just skip automatically." The Michael Moorcock web nexus: Multiverse.org |
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Jeff Noon drinks deep from the well of weirdness. Scratch that, Jeff Noon staked a claim on the well of weirdness a few years back and takes daily baths in it.
Noon's first book, the delightful Vurt,described a world where human beings can enter a digital fantasy world by using nanotech feathers (yep, feathers, as in birds) of different colors. And that's the least surreal thing he's written. If Lewis Carroll, J.G. Ballard, and Joe Strummer had a clone baby and raised it on Gibson novels and mushrooms, you might get a creature approximating Jeff Noon.
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Around the same time J.R.R. Tolkien was polishing up his quaint three-volume cycle about a little gold band of some consequence, Mervyn Peake was publishing his baroque Gormenghast trilogy. The Gormenghast books are opulent nightmares, set in a vast, decaying Gothic castle which is a kingdom in its own right. The castle is ruled by increasingly senseless bodies of ritual and the ruling Groan family is poisonously eccentric and disjointed. A cunning kitchen servant, Steerpike, engineers a murderous and manipulative rise through Gormenghast's hierarchy as the young Lord Titus Groan comes of age and struggles to escape the inertial squalor of his surroundings. The setting is Kafka, the cast is Dickensian, and the prose is as dark, evocative, and lovingly grotesque as the world it describes.
If Tolkien's work is a deeply passionate, regressive melancholia, Peake's is a slyly-wrought meditation on chaos, order, and the struggle to break free from the gravity of one's surroundings. Both fictional cycles came to light as the British Empire was finally experiencing the sunset that the nineteenth century had sworn would never come, and I recommend them as complementary reads. |
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Author, editor, literary agent, visionary, and tireless friend of the science fiction community Frederik Pohl sneaks into these hallowed HTML tables on the strength of three novels, although I'll be reading as much of his work as I can get my paws on in the coming months.
When I read Man Plus, I suspected that Pohl was unusually good. When I read The Space Merchants I knew he was a fricking genius. Pohl, along with C.M. Kornbluth, crafted an outstanding satirical science fiction novel for the early twenty-first century fifty years in advance of its full relevance. Satire rarely ages well, but someone attempting to extrapolate a vision of corporate dystopia from the basis of knowledge available in 2002 could do a hell of a lot worse.
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I recently read that something close to one percent of all the books physically in existence on the isles of the United Kingdom are Terry Pratchett books.
Pratchett, best known for his Discworld series of fractured fantasy novels, is funnier than Douglas Adams and more prolific even than Piers Anthony, and it doesn't hurt that his work is approximately one-thousandth as annoying as the damn punny Xanth novels. In fact, Pratchett's stuff is the best antidote I know of for Corny Fantasy Poisoning. When one too many plaster saints have braved the Temple of the Requisite Evil and stolen the Ubiquitous Sword of Swaggishness, curl up for a few hours with one of the Discworld books and you'll soon be on the road to recovery. I honestly don't know how anyone could dislike Pratchett's work. My guess is that it would help to be a dour old bastard with a heart three sizes too small and an inordinate love of kicking children and poisoning daffodils. William F. Buckley and Jesse Helms probably wouldn't like it. Let that be its glowing epitaph here. |
| Although the Harry Potter series of books has been a highly amusing diversion for both myself and my better half, there is another young-adult fantasy series out there that dwells on an entirely different level. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is a twilight jewel of pure invention that plants the reader in one spot against his will and forces him to devour each page in a disbelieving glamour. To call this series "young adult" is a bit unfair when so much adult fantasy is all musclebound shenanigans and unpronounceable pseudo-Celtic names. Subversive, scary, and deeply involving., and apparently quite threatening to the sort of folks who are always dickering over whether or not the Narniabooks should be burned along with the Dungeons & Dragonsbooks. What more could you ask for? |
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Rudy Rucker is one of the "founding fathers" of cyberpunk as a literary movement. My first exposure to his work came in 1993, when I read the brief, jarring, colorful "Tales of Houdini" in the Mirrorshadesanthology.
Rucker is a professor of mathematics, a specialist in logic, and a motley fiddler in the realm of computer science and programming. In addition to his overtly cyberpunk works, he has cultivated a style he calls "transrealism." In his own words: "The essence of transrealism is to write about one's real life in fantastic terms. The Secret of Life, White Light,and The Sex Sphereare examples of my transreal novels. The first recasts a traditional coming of age memoir as a UFO novel, the second is about my time as a mystical mathematician in Geneseo, while the third turns my two years in Germany into a tale of higher dimensions and nuclear terrorism." Rucker, who lives (or writes, at any rate) by the axiom "Seek ye the gnarl," flash-welds vivid prose to neuron-boggling mathematics and serves everything up with sociology on the side. A healthy breakfast indeed, and how can you not approve of a guy who paints space cuttlefish? |
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Hyperion The Fall of Hyperion The first novel in the Hyperionseries is a broadly literate space opera loosely based on the structure of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Keat's unfinished poems from which the two novels take their title. You can't swing a dead cat within the pages of either without hitting a reference to Keats' life or work. Although they were written as one novel and split into two for publication, the conclusion of the second book is not quite as satisfying as the vivid mysteries of the first. Still, don't take that as a real complaint.
Endymion Almost three centuries after the events of the first two novels, a small band of heroes faces the menace of the undefeated AI TechnoCore and a resurgent Roman Catholic empire. Uneven, audacious, brilliantly described, and more than a bit rushed and inconsistent, especially in the later half of the second book. Simmons on an off day is still worth bending over backward for. Summer of Night The first half of this novel is perhaps the creepiest horror story written in the past fifty years. The last few chapters aren't quite able to deliver an envoy to match the incredible beginning. However, that's Simmons' curse, and if you can live with it, you'll be in awe for most of it. Carrion Comfort I don't read nine hundred pages four times over for just anyone. This is Simmons' horror masterpiece, a solidly-structured tale of psychic vampires, human manipulation, and unspeakable games that moves from the depths of the Holocaust to the heights of global power in the early 1980s. Simmons is one of those rare writers who excels in multiple branches of speculative fiction, his fortes being imaginative horror and kick-ass sprawling science fiction. A small list of Simmons web resources may be found here. |
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I would argue that there are a rare handful of people on earth who have, as of this writing, the sheer level of Geek Cred possessed by Neal Stephenson, a crypto-bio-lingua-socio-compu-punk whom some have hailed as a one-man "second coming of cyberpunk." Eh. Jury's still out on that one. But this dude, as they say, delivers the goods.
I recall reading an excerpt from Snow Crashas part of a required oral presentation in 11th grade English, and the number of dropped jaws and goggle-eyes I got from the rest of the poor dumbfounded suckers in my class convinced me that sci-fi was indeed the path I wanted to tread. Snow Crashis an attitude sausage pressurized to the bursting point with testosterone and wit, The Diamond Ageis a glass of warm nanotech whiskey, and Cryptonomiconwill simply make you its bitch. Neal Stephenson number one, Michael Crichton number ten, get it? Good. |
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Bruce Sterling is a writer of such startling clarity that the more of his work you read, the more you want to shoot him. It's just not fucking fair, to see such talent crystallized in one tiny node of the human species while the rest of us flail around like lungfish under a hot literary sun. If you've read Gibson, you're well equipped for Sterling. Gibson is the flashier of the pair- he takes the disposable culture of the 80s as a base, grows it in a petri dish, seeds it with recessive genes of voodoo technologies, and tells stories about familiar people in relatively near futures. Sterling is like the quiet roommate who read a little more and had more disturbing dreams as a small child. He touches the transhuman, slips us into his futures with less of a base of reference, but trusts that we are intelligent enough to find our own way. Gibson is the stage magician, and Sterling is the shadowy lunatic who appears out of an alley after the show with the Sybelline Books under his arms. Sterling's fiction is charged with the power of his awareness, his insatiable curiosity, and his extrapolative talent. Few authors, despite their marketing hype, can be said to have a truly global outlook. Sterling is, if not their king, at least their crown prince.
Sterling is a "What If?" guy in a "Has Been" market. "We want pulp, we want responsibility-free adventure, we want Heinlein and Asimov, we want it like it was back in the 50s," says Joe Buyer. "Here's another dead-on speculation about the utterly frightening way in which information technology and all of its newborn cousins might change our lives Real Soon Now," says Sterling. "Waaaaaaaah!" says Joe Buyer, "I'm going back to my basement to read Ben Bova! Bova never scared me!" Be sure to check out the inimitable Bruce Sterling Online Index. |
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And then there was Sean Stewart, who writes delicate, intricate stories about worlds with different rules but never goes over the top in revealing them. The narrative of Galveston(which I'll concentrate on here, since it was my first introduction to Stewart's work) flows into a few tide pools along the way, leaving the reader a bit uncertain about the resolution of certain plotlines, but what remains beyond that is brilliant. This novel tells the story of a newly post-industrial 21st century where magic in great and deadly quantities broke across the surface of reality in 2004. The nearly isolated community of Galveston now dwells in uneasy symbiosis with Carnival, a creepy, surreal realm of eternal revelry that reflects Galveston as it was on the night everything changed. Galveston is rich in ideas and in characters that are deeply fascinating without being entirely sympathetic. I should also mention that some understanding of Poker will deepen the appeal of this novel, but is not entirely necessary.
Stewart is a confident, amusing, self-effacing author with a home page to match. |
