What Not by Rose Macaulay

 

Listened to this driving home from Chicago. Absorbing but not that great. Wanted other books by her but couldn't find anything else recorded. Sci fi dystopian 1920 Britain, the Dept of Brains, people are classed by mental acuity and breeding laws passed to try to limit stupidity. Love story within all this.

Fascinating but thin.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

 

V. late to the party here, as the novel came out in 1979 - my senior year of high school! - and if I missed it then, I'm certainly not going to get on board now.

It's somewhat amusing - the anti-poet stuff is hilarious to me (prisoners are strapped in "Poetry Appreciation Chairs" and forced to listen to the terrible poetry of the Vogon leader) - but nothing is really continued, it jumps for scene to scene, with no regard for science, or fiction, or character development really.

Earth's entry in the titular Guide was "harmless" - later amended to "mostly harmless," which Arthur, the main earthling character, is saddened to see after the earth is destroyed early in the book.

In my mind, it's like extremely minor Vonnegut - but even minor Vonnegut would be better than this.

In my mind, at that time, I was really into Tom Robbins for awhile, STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER (which I recently tried to re-read, and just could not), and had read Vonnegut's best in high school (and still re-read him joyously today). This is more Jonathan Livingston Segal-country to me - pop sci-fi w/ a philosophical bent, but a slightly caustic sense of humor that I do enjoy. Next: ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYLE MAINTENANCE, which I can't believe I've never read. Maybe I did, and just forgot it.

Postscript: in the end, I actually enjoyed the end of the book. The planet of used ballpoint pens (where DO ballpoint pens go? how many have I used in my life), the Ultimate Question, the greatest (and second-greatest) computer in the Universe, the white mice who are actually in control of Earth/Universe.

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb by Philip K. Dick

 

Reading the Modern Library edition of five of his early novels.

This one is slow going - a thalidomide quad electronic repairman and the architect of a nuclear holocaust, among other characters. Fascinating as always.

Picks up speed halfway through, as we are suddenly jetted into the future - the late 1980s - from the 1972 starting point when a couple is launched into orbit, and a global thermonuclear war suddenly and literally explodes.

In the 80s, we pick up with survivors, who live their cultural life via nightly transmissions from the orbiting vessel, where the man (who was quickly widowed after the launch, reads aloud from his digital library. Animals have mutated and grow in intelligence, there is a barter economy, and local law and order (and violence).

Martian Time-Slip by Philip K. Dick

 

More PKD. He writes sci-fi, but is really interesting in how he addresses human relationships and psychological health under that genre.

The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley

 

Okay time travel book, if a little bit overblown prose style. The 1840s-era Arctic exploring ships details are the most vivid.

The Ministry of Time is set in near future UK.  A time travel "door" has been discovered time travel, and the Ministry performs experiments on its effects on humans, by taking historical figures from the verge of death and bringing them to the present.

The narrator's voice and POV are a little melodramatic. She falls in love with her historic figure, Graham, Arctic sailor who is hot and also Victorian-repressed.

The two gay characters are most interesting - Maggie from the 1600s who speaks in a delightful Shakespearean patois, and Arthur, rescued from the trenches of WWI (I think).

The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard

 

Turgid, boring, another failed attempt to read Ballard's fiction.

Chronopolis: The Science Fiction of J.G. Ballard

 

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard

 

Struggling to get through this. Ballard has an odd, clinical, detached narrative style that fits his futurism - but is none too pleasurable. 

A gigantic modern high-rise in Britain in an unnamed future begins to distintergrate as its 2000 inhabitants begin violently attacking each other, first by sector (bottom, middle, top) and then by floor.

Four Novels of the 1960s by Philip K. Dick

 

The Man in the High Castle: Fascinating, weird, psychological alternative history, set in 1962, in the Rockies and in SF, after Germany and Japan won WWII. Dick has quite a beautiful prose style, and several of the characters are obsessed with the I Ching, and the process of casting and reading it are beautifully rendered.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch: Even more gripping. A future (2016!) where the solar system has been colonized and conscripts from Earth are drafted to inhabit the rough and ugly planets, surviving by regular hallucinegenic dosing and fantasizing about life inside a barbie-like game construct of Earth. Dick maneuvers the reader into a labyrinthe of real/unreal/surreal settings - his characters don't know if they're dreaming life or living it.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?: Renowned as the basis for the film BLADE RUNNER, it actually bears only the slightest resemblance. The movie is all neo-noir and stream-punk moody atmospherics, but the novel is more about relationships between the human and non-human, and conversations about the importance of living animals and.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

 

Must have read this before but don't really remember it. It's interesting but seems to be an early (1963) experiment in Vonnegut's more mature and radical books Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions.

The fantastical human-based religion of Bokonism, the short chapters that always end with a flair (if not much narrative oomph), the sci-fi flirtation of the doomsday weapon ice-nine, are all elements to be perfected later.

Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein

 

Pairs of twins on earth are trained as telepathic modes of communication: one will embark on space travel and the other will stay earthside, and together they will transmit news and updates instantaneously across a trillion miles. Time, however, will pass more slowly for the twin travelling through space at a speed just below the speed of light, making for uneasy relationships between twins who started out the same age but end up vastly separated by time AND space. Interesting although not much happens.

Orphans of the Sky by Robert Heinlein

 

Continuing my sci-fi jaunt through the mesmerizing imagination and intelligence of Robert Heinlein. A marooned "generational spaceship" is a complicated mini-world where the diverse population has forgotten the reason for the original journey from Earth to a distant star system, and reverted to a primitive (if still high-technology) culture and belief system.

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein

 

Vivid memories of reading this as a teenager, I'm remembering complete sentences (at least in the first 50 pages, did I read the whole thing?).

It's got a bit of a cheesy late fifties-early sixties vibe, some of the slang and the general misogyny.

But Heinlein deftly imagines an interplanetary and advanced  future and how a human born and raised on Mars (by Martians) might be welcomed on earth. The concept of "grokking" (i.e., knowing fully, but also sexual consummating and cannibalism) was unleashed upon an unknowing America, and one must still only wonder at how many people have actually read the book as opposed to how many use the term "grok" fluently.

Too long and too polemical, the action really dries up in the (lengthy) middle of the book. Still, a fascinating novel of ideas.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

 

Great, surprising book. Mike the Computer alone is worth it, for Heinlein's witty fortelling of artificial intelligence. And the political discussion is bracing an intelligent, swirling around the Moon's struggle for independence from the Earth -- a lunar population  descended from convicts and conscripts banished from the mother planet -- the political discussion covers democracy, autocracy, libertarianism, and anarchy.

Nova by Samuel R. Delaney

 

Wacky. Interesting. Got halfway through!

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

 

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

 

Re-reading another favorite book from my childhood - now that Disney has made a movie of it, we get a new edition -- with photos from the movie production, including Reese Witherspoon as Mrs. Whatsit and Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Which. And Zach Galiafinkis as the Happy Medium. And whatshername as Mrs. Who.

Another horror of the modern age. 

Might have to see it, just for the blood-bath of criticism it will stir up in me.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

 

Hesitate to call it science fiction, as it's a very realistic social commentary on what we would do if an invisible man was in our midst. Particularly like the IM's Beckettian slave Mr. Marvel, whom he enslaves to carry around all the money's he's stolen, as the IM can't carry stuff. And so on.

Artemis by Andy Weird

 

Underwhelming. Least favorite of his three novels. His "female narrator" voice not convincing.

War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells