Omphalos' SF Book Reviews

I know I have been negligent lately, when it comes to keeping this blog updated. All I can say is that work has been crushing; an average of three days out of town per week for the last 10 weeks. Fortunately, the end of my excessive travel is in sight, so I should find the time I need to at update this (personally beloved) site at least once per week.

In the meantime, here’s a new meme that I found over on Ian Sales’ wonderful, SF-centric blog, It Doesn’t Have To Be Right…, which used to finish with the admonition, “it just has to sound good,” but no longer does. I guess Ian thought the last phrase was best left unstated. Anyway, this meme came from the SFX Book Club (sorry, the original link on Ian’s site was busted. Just find it yourself). It’s supposed to be a list of SF classics. As per usual, there are a few weird and unexpected entries, but for the most part, some classics are listed. I’m supposed to bold the ones I’ve read. If I started the book and threw against the wall in a rage, I’ll italicize it.

1. The War Of The Worlds by HG Wells
2. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
3. Ringworld by Larry Niven
4. A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
5. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller
6. The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester
7. Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey
8. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
9. The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe
10. The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
11. The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
12. Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison
13. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin
14. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick
15. The Player of Games by Iain Banks
16. Pavane by Keith Roberts
17. Neuromancer by William Gibson
18. Collected Ghost Stories of MR James
19. I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
20. A Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
21. Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
22. Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
23. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
24. Blood Music by Greg Bear
25. Non Stop by Brian Aldiss
26. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
27. Dune by Frank Herbert
28. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin
29. A Case of Conscience by James Blish
30. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
31. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon
32. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
33. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R Delany
34. The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham
35. Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
36. Vurt by Jeff Noon
37. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
38. The City And The Stars by Arthur C Clarke
39. Strata by Terry Pratchett
40. The Centauri Device by M John Harrison
41. Earth Abides by George R Stewart
42. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
43. The Death of Grass by John Christopher
44. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
45. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
46. From The Earth To The Moon by Jules Verne
47. Interview With The Vampire by Anne Rice
48. Life During Wartime by Lucius Shepard
49. Perdido Street Station by China Miéville
50. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
51. Cities In Flight by James Blish

I really need to reread Star Maker and Pavane, so I can get them up here. I’ve read one book of Cities in Flight, but not all four. Someday I’ll get to that one, when I’m in a better mood. Blish, IMHO, requires enormous patience, but can be rewarding.

So I think having read this many makes me an SF classicist! 35 not counting the ones I’ve started and left unfinished, or thrown out a window, 40 counting them. I have turned my attention lately to new books. Guess my timing was right, ’cause I have read a lot of the old stuff!

A few years ago Joe Haldeman wrote a Heinlein-inspired coming-of-age novel about a young woman who traveled with her family to Mars where she became embroiled in an alien plot to control humanity. Carmen Dula, the young girl, became a pariah in the eyes of some, and a hero in the eyes of others when the conflict reached a head – ostensibly because of Carmen's failure – and the aliens struck out and nearly destroyed the Earth. Haldeman's newest novel is called Starbound. It's t[...]

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The story of The Genocides focuses on the fate of the inhabitants of a tiny village in northern Minnesota called Tassel, or rather, New Tassel. It is about an invasion of an enormous invasive alien plant that within a decade dominated the surface of the Earth. Of the thousand some pre-catastrophe inhabitants of Tassel slightly less than 250 survive at the beginning of the novel, which is set in the late 1970s, approximately ten years after the Plants first sprouted. Nobody knows where the Pl[...]

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The first time I ever read anything by Brian Aldiss I was in London. I was there for an extended "escape the States" vacation that actually turned into a working vacation coupled with as much hoboing as I could fit in. It was back in 1990 which doesn't feel like too long ago to me, at least until I do the math and realize it's been almost two decades since then. My, how the time does fly. I was there alone, chasing the most beautiful woman I had ever met back to her home i[...]

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You know that SF publishing is getting tough when . . . This has got to be the most pathetic marketing attempt I have ever heard of. It’s a good thing that the author has such a level head. Apparently the book is the next Nostromo. Good luck, dude! You’re gonna need it!

Actually this post should probably be titled, “You know that the self publishing industry has gotten too big when . . . ” Self publishing is a neat way to get a few copies of a novel to friends and family, but unsavory characters out there are marketing their services to the desperate a bit too much. Most of them get you to sign a contract where they get a big portion of book sale receipts, but only after you throw down for the privilege of having the books printed. The more disreputable of these publishers usually forget that authors exist once the books are printed, and I suspect that is what happened with this guy. With the downturn in the economy I’ve seen a lot less of these books out there, but before things got bad I’ll be a week didn’t go by that I did not get two or three “offers” to read and review these books. I should also point out that in addition to shoddy publishing and marketing tactics, the books usually feature less than stellar authors. Just the price you have to pay when you buy a book that no real publisher wanted. Now that things have gone south I get a LOT fewer requests for a review from these guys. I wonder if its that they all went out to get real jobs, or are the publishing houses really suffering? Probably a combination of reasons. Most of these publishers seem to be on the up and up, but there are more than enough of them out there out to make a quick buck that it sometimes feels like the markets (especially Amazon) are flooded with these damn things. What I can’t understand is why after this many years there are still so many authors who fall for the line of crap that these guys are feeding them. Too bad.

It’ll be a beautiful life, he thought. Beautiful . . . beautiful . . . beautiful.

Frank Herbert’s 1967 novel The Santaroga Barrier is probably best interpreted as a utopia novel, though there are strong psychological and drug use themes that run through it too. As a utopia, I cannot imagine anyone concluding that it is anything other than another ambiguous utopia. Santaroga tells the story of Gilbert Daesin, a UC Berkley psychologist during a visit to a Northern California community[...]

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The Patchwork Girl by Larry Niven is a 1980s short-novel entry in the author’s Known Space sequence. This three-pronged story is basically a murder mystery set on the moon, but it also delves quite deeply into the legal arena, both legislative and judicial. The novel is fairly typical for a Niven story; it is hard science fiction that deals with manufactured social issues – specifically Niven’s organbank controversy – that handles its internal conflicts in a procedural, almost workm[...]

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Collectively the two books by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer, individually titled When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide tell the story of a mission to save a small fragment of humanity from a planetary threat zooming towards Earth from the depths of space. Written in the 1930s, the books were crafted pretty well, and can be evaluated passably from a modern perspective. Part of the reason for this is that unlike many of their contemporaries they are not too off scientifically. The catas[...]

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Frank Herbert’s 1966 dystopic medical thriller The Eyes of Heisenberg is, like many of his other novel length stories, an expansion on an earlier short story. This book found its genesis in Herbert’s 1956 Galaxy-published short story Do I Sleep or Wake. It is the story of a far-future race of human drones that are watched over by a benevolent yet distanced cadre of genetically modified immortals called the Optimen. At least, that is how it seems. The ordinary people of this world [...]

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Here is a link to all of the Hugo Award Nominees that are currently available for free. Enjoy! FYI, these are the 2009 nominees that are being decided at the 2010 WorldCon, AussieCon, which is coming up in September this year.