Some time ago, John Carr decided to embark on an ambitious, perhaps foolish or even madness-inducing project: to read one book from every stack of shelves in the reserve stacks, by an author he had never read before. On this page, you will find his microsummaries of the good, the bad, and the outright bizarre that he has encountered so far on his quest to confirm Sturgeon's Law.
By the cover, this is another John Moore comic fantasy. On closer examination, the author's first name is spelled Moira. When you get into reading it you realize it's not like that at all.
Fate reaches out and taps people in pairs, one a Source whose job is to save the world and one a Shield whose job is to save the Source from himself and the effects of his power. They can only work as a team. They must work as a team, together for the rest of their lives, love each other or hate each other.
The author hints that this is a colony world gone bad rather than Fantasyland but the setting looks like pre-Industrial Revolution Europe plus some weird stuff so it quacks like a fantasy.
I suppose I liked it -- I read the sequel too -- but I'm pretty sure I didn't care as much about the characters and situation as the author meant me to. Perhaps I'm not a romantic at heart.
Earth spies try to take control of the great weapons left behind by an ancient race before the rebellious colonies get their hands on it. Includes obligatory tough girl sidekick and love interest.
About what you would expect from a pre-New Wave SF spy novel.
Set in Dystopian future Sweden. What appears to be an exaggerated satire on cultural trends, including an accurate prediction of the rise of reality TV, is revealed in the appendix to be based on true stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s. A Swedish correspondent tells me the author stopped writing after receiving some sort of genius grant.
Recommended.
Is a man who hears voices in hyperspace delusional or the Messiah? Does it matter?
Better than I expected given the premise of God talking to starship pilots.
Humorous short fiction about a mad scientist inventor and his robot sidekick.
Funny but old fashioned.
Inspired by the postwar sensory deprivation experiments.
I didn't feel there was enough story in here. I may have been judging it by science fiction standards rather than mainstream literary standards.
Cold War rivalry freezes the earth. Everything dies except humans, but that's OK. Oh, and there's a girl torn between two guys and a guy torn between two girls.
The science is kind of screwy. In the novel, mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter leaves behind a sort of ash with bad properties.
A below-average entry in the field of disaster fiction.
Classic story of a search for long-lost treasure with a meeting with an alien culture thrown in. While the narrator makes a point of saying that there were no women on the expedition nor should there be women on such an expedition, the stills in this 1980s movie tie-in edition show Hollywood's obligatory female lead tagging along.
My middle school library also classified this book as science fiction. It has characteristics found in some subgenres of science fiction and fantasy, a voyage of exploration to see the artifacts of the elder races. However, it is not King Solomon's Mines but the scientific romances of Haggard's contemporaries that gave birth to modern science fiction.
The modern reader may find it more interesting to observe the alien-to-us 19th century European frontier culture than the alien-to-them depths of blackest Africa.
This is a distant cousin to a favorite sub-genre, the alien death trap story. The young narrator journeys from future California to Jupiter in order to face his destiny in the reality TV of the future. Will he be able to make contact with aliens, or will he die trying like those who came before him?
I feel like I shouldn't like this, but I did anyway. In contrast I felt like I should like Wheelers by Stewart and Cohen but I didn't. Wheelers features a trip to Jupiter and a boy who can communicate with any animal. I could read it again imagining Rex Harrison as the boy, but I won't.
An Asian man conquers much of the world, kind of like in M. J. Engh's Arslan, until Americans rally to defeat him in a climactic naval battle.
This edition comes with a review in the back calling it unremarkable and making one wonder why the publisher chose to reprint it decades later. I thought it better than the reviewer but much of the interest was in the view of the 1930s as seen from the 1920s.
It is two books, perhaps -- the personal story of a witness to the rise of an Emperor, and the dry story of a global war. The modern reader might or might not find the racial conflict worth reading.
In a post-nuclear underground colony, humans see their surroundings by sound or thermal infrared. The idea that humans would react to darkness and radiation by evolving new senses was good. Perhaps it was not totally convincing to some modern readers, but I bought it for purposes of the novel.
I was ambivalent in spite of the interesting ideas. A man who saw me reading it said he thought it very good.
Nuclear scientists melt the polar ice cap and cause a Biblical flood. Survivors are rescued by Noah's Ark. The story is told on a personal scale rather than an epic scale.
Another below-average entry in the field of disaster fiction.
Humorous short SF, possibly what Robots Have No Tails would have been written two decades later in an academic setting.
Funny. Some of the stories are a bit dated, being nearly 40 year old gadget SF. Recommended.
Human transported to another world dons a loincloth and spear to become the great liberator. In the same genre as early Gor.
Undistinguished alternate world adventure novel. You might as well read Tarnsman of Gor. People will respect you more for it. Or disrespect you more.
A tiny village is transported to an uninhabited future earth. The most interesting idea is the vision of evolution of plant life post-humanity.
A man can't have his ex-wife, so he clings to his daughter. He can't have his daughter, so he clings to this blind alien girl who thinks he's a great kisser. There's also a superficial morality tale about IQ tests not being a complete measure of a person's worth.
Not much worth reading here. The idea of alternate senses has been better done elsewhere.
Short stories. I loved the unexpected meaning of the title story, which turned from annoying stream of consciousness New Wave to something good with the twist ending.
Recommended.
Time travel to the age of dinosaurs. Some people have an ability to step back in time. Most can go decades or centuries. One can go millions of years. Our hero has difficulties with girls because of his rejection by a manipulative woman when he was a nobody instead of a world-famous time traveler. In spite of his psychological problems he sometimes submits to time travel groupies, two at a time if necessary. The cover reminded me of Keith Laumer's Dinosaur Beach.
Some interesting ideas, but unremarkable.
A future man is unsurprised to encounter a person being chased by agents of a prehistoric god and joins forces to fight the menace.
Unimpressive.
A couple vacationing in Central America meet up with and fall victim to an evil man who has an evil plot I didn't understand. This book is not science fiction at all despite being found in a science fiction library.
Good, not great.
Ingredients: male hero, attractive daughter of scientist who needs help rescuing her father, alien artifacts, dinosaurs.
This cliched and superficial novel nevertheless has a couple ingredients that showed up in later, greater works. Areas where gravity becomes strong and deadly are also found in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic, along with the idea that man is to higher intelligence as ants are to man (not an original notion, I'm sure). Areas of high gravity may have been to divide the world into regions each of which was a specially crafted zoo for particular captives. This is reminiscent of Jack Chalker's Well World series and Dean Ing's novel Cathouse (from the Man-Kzin Wars series). A depression full of mobile rocks reminded me of a scene from Chaos in Roger Zelazny's Amber series.
But the scattering of good ideas doesn't blend into a good book.
If the clothes make the man -- and they do, they really do -- who makes the clothes?
Recommended.
A black Buddhist is recruited by one of that religion's deities as an agent to save the world from devastating nuclear retaliation after an accidental catastrophe is mistaken for an attack.
It has some funny parts while managing not to impress me.
The cover and opening pages reminded me of the Heaven's Gate cult, which committed mass suicide in order to be taken away by aliens. This book may be best read in the late 1960s with the aid of some serious drugs. Certainly if there is a deeper meaning to the weirdness it escaped me.
Impressive in its weirdness, though not in its quality.
YA novel. Siblings take a walk out of their boring city and end up in fairyland where they are much more important people doing much more important things.
Generic YA fantasy. Not bad. Best left to its intended audience.
When I started reading this book I more or less dismissed it as a generic cold war novel about Soviet bioterror experiments run by Nazi scientists. Perhaps a spy novel, perhaps a proto-technothriller. By the time I got to the 1970s card stock cigarette ad in the middle I realized I had misjudged both the plot and the quality. There was a scientific puzzle behind the facade.
The science was a bit weak, unfortunately. I couldn't buy the central biological premise. Also, a scene where a mother and father chipmunk rescue their babies is contrary to fact. Male chipmunks do not help raise babies. This is true of the squirrel family in general.
A screaming came across my brain as I realized that no matter how much I tried, how long I stared at a page-long sentence, blurring like mist through my tortured eyes, how much I stood back and tried to diagram the sentence, the chapter, the characters, the plot in my head, struggling against the distractions in the library around me, I was destined never to fully understand this tale of a postal conspiracy stretching from the Holy Roman Empire across time and space to drug-addled Twentieth Century California and the mystery woman named Oedipa (Oedipa?) whose journeys up and down the Golden State threatened to shake the foundations of the Vatican Library, obscure playwrights, and philately itself.
I laughed occasionally. Out loud. I never imagined that Pynchon would be funny. But I still ended up feeling that I missed the point.
In the grim darkness of the tenth century, more or less, a Martian shoots dead a pair of cute, innocent, curious squirrels.
In other news Mars is being destroyed by a wall of ants reminiscent of the scientific accident in the Strugatsky brothers' Far Rainbow. The last survivors use the telepathic powers of their enormous heads to direct Vikings where they need to go to save the world from the woman who gave birth to the ant plague.
This is a fast, simple read, probably aimed closer to the men's adventure market than the traditional SF or fantasy market. Martians are Martian, with tiny, obsolete bodies that exist as life support systems for their giant brains. Heroes are heroes, big, tough, and smart. Women are women, erotic and pneumatic. Christians are Christian, in the traditional sense where they do nice things and also lay waste to their enemies.
But at the end of the book the squirrels are still dead.
As both the United States and Soviet Union blame each other for the destruction of spacecraft the President's top troubleshooter seeks to find anybody else to blame. He has only days to work because the Soviet Union would rather start a global nuclear war than delay its next launch while they figure out what went wrong.
As luck would have it, on his journey he becomes reacquainted with a beautiful woman he has lusted after for some time and forces her to have sex with him, an act which is not presented as rape because in the tradition of such fiction she decides she likes it halfway through. He, on the other hand, is able to fend off a nymphomaniac whose ugliness foreshadows her evil. Lucky him.
In retrospect, the villain may have been inevitable for a work out of that period.
A young genius inventor full of 1960s idealism has an invention too terrible to let the government get its hands on, so he picks up an easy young women of the sort that were evidently easy to come by in Southern California at the time and tries to hide from his past. The notion that progress is decay reminds me of Vonnegut's Player Piano. The title suggests a relationship to Spider Robinson's Mindkiller but the plot leads in another direction.
The last few pages throw in a plot twist I especially dislike, that undermines the rest of the book. The book starts from the idea, "what if there were a device that could affect the mind in this way." The ending throws in another idea of greater magnitude that would put the book in a different subgenre if exposed earlier. I had a similar problem with Michael Marshall Smith mixing genres in Only Forward and Spares.
There are two references to the squirrel family.
On page 74, "Lila is always framed in the whiteness of the bed linen with the natural curved grace of a badger or marmot against a snowbank." (The book is written in the present tense.)
On page 96, battery stockpiles are scattered around the country "like the caches of a hyperactive ground squirrel." In fact within the squirrel family scatter hoarding is most characteristic of tree squirrels of genus Sciurus. Ground squirrels tend to hibernate in the winter, sleeping or eating in their burrow, rather than ranging widely above ground to recover stored food.
This 1956 novel, a satire on politics, advertising, and television, takes a humorous look at the 1960 presidential campaign. Dogs and sex have been done to death, so what shall be the theme this year, the first year when both parties fully embrace Madison Avenue as the road to the White House? The year when the policies are determined by the advertising experts rather than the politicians too ignorant to sell themselves.
1960 is the year of the voter as consumer. "The poor, dumb, beat-up, oppressed, cheated, neglected, ignored and humiliated consumer. The stupid, unorganized, helpless, nameless, faceless, numberless consumer. The ridiculous, prat-falling clown, the almighty slob."
There is an incidental reference to the ad campaign that threatens to kill your baby unless you buy the right brand of tires. I had not realized it was so old.
A classic that I had never read.
Now we all know what happens to disembodied brains. Freed from the confines of the flesh they grow more powerful. In the early 20th century, we didn't know that, and Donovan's Brain was key to introducing the concept.
Worth reading.
This novel is the ancestor of the modern comic fantasy. It was was evidently considered quite racy for the 1930s. There is suggestive language, onscreen kissing, and indications that sex may have occurred offstage.
Our hero is a stock character, the bachelor inventor uncle. His inventions tend to explode, but he has finally produced a working device.
An uncle does not exist in a vacuum. He is paired with a nice niece, a naughty nephew, and the rest of his annoying sister's annoying family.
The style wobbles between comedy and farce. One scene degenerates into fish slapping. Much of the novel concerns the activities of statues of the Greek gods who have been brought to life by uncle's invention.
Squirrels are scarce, only mentioned once: "The events of the night had not dealt kindly with Mr. Wetmore Brightly. He had sustained a double loss. His scarecrow had been outraged and his watchdog turned to stone. On the other hand, the squirrels in the forest had a new mystery to solve."
Overall, funny at times but most readers will prefer a more modern style.
You wake up with no memory, knowing something bad must have happened. Now what?
The stock opening leads to a decent detective story, set in a 22nd century orbital habitat on the verge of launching a colony ship to the stars.
It is interesting to note that the portable personal AI our protagonist carries has a personality but very limited memory. Less than 25 years after the novel was written the amount of memory that can fit into a portable device is more than sufficient to hold a lifetime of conversation compressed to text plus annotations. While the memory limitation is necessary to the plot, I'm not sure it is even self-consistent.
The portable computer also serves as a video phone, and very well, but even in the future people still retain landlines.
I would have liked this story more when it was published. I intend to read more Stith novels, some day.
There are prophecies and ugly evil lands and beautiful good lands and old gods imprisoned under the earth and a man and a woman fated to breed and produce a powerful heir.
In the vein of old Zelazny -- and more generally much of the genre in the 1960s -- science fiction and fantasy elements mix. Our Hero carries a magic staff, for example, that is clearly high technology left by the ancestors from the stars.
The style is definitely not New Wave. It is much more simple and straightforward. Too simple, at times.
People not living on the icecap call ice "frozen rain." The intent is to suggest strangeness but the effect is distracting. The Eskimos are reputed to have many words for snow -- but residents of temperate America do too.
The evil king has his enemies executed by placing them at a ring of archers armed with poison arrows. The results are predictable.
Our Hero doubles as a stage magician and freely uses mechanical aids in addition to his magic/technological staff to trick people into believing he has more power than he does. I was reminded of Barry Longyear's Circus World. Fortunately for the forces of Good, nobody thinks to effectively search Our Hero and relieve him of his implements of distraction and destruction, other than the obvious magic staff.
One country is a prison colony that grew up. I thought of Australia, but the author does not seem to have followed up on that parallel.
Humorous play about a troublemaking alien who lands in Virginia during the Cold War. And I have little else to say. It was worth my time.
I have mixed feelings about this book. It was good in parts and felt disjointed in others. I did not feel the sense of struggling to save humanity like I was intended to -- at least, as the cover blurb would have me believe I was intended to. The experience was kind of like reading a C. J. Cherryh novel, but with less conviction that there was an underlying plot and it would all make sense if only my reading skills were up to the task.
Our heroes are spaceborne salvage and rescue specialists, kind of like a tow truck carrying an EMT. A new competitor has appeared with a spiffy new ship. This is apparently a bad thing.
Part of my problem was point of view, or more specifically the breaks from the point of view rule I expected. The author gives us occasional glimpses of the enemy, enough to break the pattern of watching one set of characters take on the problem but not enough to tell both sides of the story. We also get authorial commentary on the physical attributes of the female character. She has a pouting navel, though what that is or why the reader ought to know I couldn't tell you.
At the end when all was revealed I doubted that it followed necessarily from what had gone before.
A cursed artifact -- a diamond stolen from the temple where it belongs -- makes its way around the world bringing doom and despair on those who would possess it. We take a trip to colonial India, revolutionary France, reconstruction era New Orleans, and wartime Japan.
The author's lapses into omniscient narration are distracting. On page 96 the evil lead of that section refers to his minion as a "cowardly little chipmunk" for refusing to rob the diamond from a dying woman. The name chipmunk is actually a slight anachronism. The alternate name "chipping squirrel" and alternate spelling chipmonk were more common in the 19th century. But with any book set in a different culture, the author has to decide what to translate and what to leave in local dialect.
The author's lapses into omniscient narration are a bit distracting. Overall, a readable but not exceptional adventure-with-a-trace-of-horror story.