A Sci Fi Reading Odyssey - 50 Novels

When you do get around to reading that collection I will be very interested in your thoughts on it and it’s place in the history of science fiction
 
farseer2 said:
If you are disliking it so much, just allow yourself to leave it unfinished. No need to torture yourself.
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Thanks, farseer, very humane. :) I probably should. I've read even more boring stuff in my English Lit. studies, but I guess I got soft and lost some reading muscle. lol... also, and maybe this is significant, I've come to want and need a measure of entertainment (along with the substance) from Sci Fi. A "Sci Fi" book, just shouldn't be that slow. Of course genres are only generalities, and this one is really Literary Fiction with a Sci Fi premise. As it turns out, the book (at max bore), finally hinted it might partially redeem itself - something actually happened! Got about 75 pages to go, so I should make it. But to the rest of you, I would say, like Spock superciliously to Bones "You would not have survived" :p (name that episode?)
 
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Was interested. Looked it up. I do not know how to mark something a spoiler. I found the episode. It is "I S"
 
pogopossum said:
I do not know how to mark something a spoiler.
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At the beginning of the spoiler you want to cover up, type [S P O I L E R] (without the spaces), and at the end type [/ S P O I L E R] (again without the spaces). Result! :D

It should look like this!
 
Hobbit said:
At the beginning of the spoiler you want to cover up, type [S P O I L E R] (without the spaces), and at the end type [/ S P O I L E R] (again without the spaces). Result! :D

It should look like this!
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Thankee Marc
And the answer is!!! (Trumpet blast)
The Immunity Syndrome
Eureka!
 
Wow! And a timely title. Don't even remember much about the plot. What stuck mostly was that classic, smug Spock line and its delivery to Bones after Spock survived a rough ride in one of those little crafts they had (trivia-- official Star Fleet name for those little ships?) lol.. more fun (added) Remembered... Shuttlecraft, no?
 
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If you did not finish it and the series you are in good company.
I gave up on the series about 50 pages into God Emperor of Dune and never looked back beyond picking up copies of the later works as they showed up on the shelves of my local books to read the blurb on the back cover.... I sort of felt dirty just touching some of them.
I have been told by a youngster just out of university that she had read the whole damm series as it was required reading in a "modern English speculative writing class" it was the only reading assigned for the class. I really felt sorry for her.And angry that a professor could such a thing to a young mind... I gently guided her on the path back to fantasy with Terry Pratchett of course but I fear it may be some time before she ventures back to Science Fiction after a semester being force fed the later works of the Dune story factory family.
 
Windshadow said:
If you did not finish it and the series you are in good company.
I gave up on the series about 50 pages into God Emperor of Dune and never looked back beyond picking up copies of the later works as they showed up on the shelves of my local books to read the blurb on the back cover.... I sort of felt dirty just touching some of them.
I have been told by a youngster just out of university that she had read the whole damm series as it was required reading in a "modern English speculative writing class" it was the only reading assigned for the class. I really felt sorry for her.And angry that a professor could such a thing to a young mind... I gently guided her on the path back to fantasy with Terry Pratchett of course but I fear it may be some time before she ventures back to Science Fiction after a semester being force fed the later works of the Dune story factory family.
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Whereas I'm one of the ones that rate God Emperor of Dune quite highly. I admit it was hard to come to terms with it being set so much further into the future than the first three books, but once I got over that it's a very absorbing book. I found Chapterhouse: Dune to be my least favourite of the series and a bit of a disappointment as an ending. I only wish Frank had lived long enough to write one more.

I agree that any course on speculative fiction that only uses the Dune Chronicles is a rather poor one. I would have thought a wide range of books would be more appropriate and useful for instruction.
 
Windshadow said:
If you did not finish it and the series you are in good company.
I gave up on the series about 50 pages into God Emperor of Dune and never looked back beyond picking up copies of the later works as they showed up on the shelves of my local books to read the blurb on the back cover.... I sort of felt dirty just touching some of them.
I have been told by a youngster just out of university that she had read the whole damm series as it was required reading in a "modern English speculative writing class" it was the only reading assigned for the class. I really felt sorry for her.And angry that a professor could such a thing to a young mind... I gently guided her on the path back to fantasy with Terry Pratchett of course but I fear it may be some time before she ventures back to Science Fiction after a semester being force fed the later works of the Dune story factory family.
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Windy, interesting post. It's really unfortunate what that prof. did. Oh, the blindness!! The *only* reading in the class? That's mean, dumb and arrogant, regardless of whether the Dune sequels are great or awful. Did he/she think that would be great fun? To damn a whole class to reading his/her favorite books? And that that is a desirable, adequate summation of speculative fiction? Achhh!
 
Matt H. said:
Windy, interesting post. It's really unfortunate what that prof. did. Oh, the blindness!! The *only* reading in the class? That's mean, dumb and arrogant, regardless of whether the Dune sequels are great or awful. Did he/she think that would be great fun? To damn a whole class to reading his/her favorite books? And that that is a desirable, adequate summation of speculative fiction? Achhh!
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Matt, The same thing happened to me but in my last year before university. The English teacher for that year was in his first year after he graduated from university with a masters in English lit. and would not normally be given that senior course in his first year but the assigned teacher died so he went in at the deep end (an aside here Private schools in the USA (would be called Public schools in the UK), unlike public schools, do not require teachers to have teaching certificates in most states. (Or they did not in the 1960s may be different today)

He wrote his thesis on the works of Thomas Hardy his favorite author and so we were assigned every novel he wrote... I now tend to twitch just seeing one of Hardy's books on the shelf in a books store... Top of my most despised author list.
 
Windshadow said:
Matt, The same thing happened to me but in my last year before university. The English teacher for that year was in his first year after he graduated from university with a masters in English lit. and would not normally be given that senior course in his first year but the assigned teacher died so he went in at the deep end (an aside here Private schools in the USA (would be called Public schools in the UK), unlike public schools, do not require teachers to have teaching certificates in most states. (Or they did not in the 1960s may be different today)

He wrote his thesis on the works of Thomas Hardy his favorite author and so we were assigned every novel he wrote... I now tend to twitch just seeing one of Hardy's books on the shelf in a books store... Top of my most despised author list.
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Isn't it funny how higher education can be such a crap shoot? I had some truly horrific teachers over my long, undistinguished academic career, and far fewer even decent ones. Either you get a totally green guy like you described, or worse you get gross, nasty, tenured old men who hate teaching undergrads, superior, outdated, blind, a-holes who really, really suck at teaching! What an awful thing to do to a young receptive mind, eh?

So the Hardy class probably affected your overall impression of Eng lit of that period/ilk? Or were you able to limit the damage to Hardy only? I read 2-3 Hardy unforced, on my own, long ago just to fill in a gap in my Lit knowledge. I don't remember much, except that I didn't hate them outright, though recall them being slow and inward, etc. If I revisited them, wonder how they would seem...
 
Yes in large part it did wreck my appetite for them, through many of the
Waverley Novels - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Waverley_Novels
by RLS I tend to avoid... but to be fair I only read 3 of them and I sort of cherry-picked them from my Scottish great grandfather's 48 volume leather bound set that was left to my by a great uncle. Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Peveril of the Peak, and I think one other in the series the name and plot now escape me, They do look very nice with the gold stamped letters on their spines upon the top shelves of my bookcase. Dickens, I quite like, and later on towards the end of the 19th-century Kippling... many of his short stories like "The Man Who Would Be King" (also one of my favorite films) and His novel Kim and his children's stories.
 
I've had Ivanhoe on my bookcase for 3 decades at least. Never got to it. To recall my favorite writers of the "canon" I liked E. Bronte, Dickens, Twain, of course (Poe, Hawthorne, Melville are great as I remember them) some of Henry James (Turn of the Screw?). In progression, also liked some of DH Lawrence and Forrester (but Howard's End is awful dull), like V. Woolf a lot, Joyce Dubliners, and my other later favs are J. Conrad and Nabokov.

For stuff with more fun flavor - Forgot R.L. Stevenson, Conan Doyle, and I too liked Kipling a lot. It's hard to imagine a more perfected adventure story than RLS, Treasure Island (it's pure meme because it's pure good). Kidnapped is also a super-delicious comfort read. (as I remember it!)
 
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Earth Abides by George Stewart [1949]
Ballentine
345 pages
Reader Response by Matt H. [v 1.24] from Reading Odyssey
Rating: Not recommended, ambitious but quite dull

Story and Setting

Young Isherwood Williams, (“Ish”), a geographer and ambitious academic, lives on San Lupo Drive in the San Francisco Bay area of California. One day, after returning from a long solitary excursion into the nearby woods, he is bitten by a rattlesnake and he must rest for several days by himself in a lonely cabin. When he finally makes his way back to the town and to civilization he slowly realizes that the whole world has changed. Humanity has been almost completely wiped out.

Though there are very few other survivors, a myriad products of civilization are still available for use, at least for the time-being. Canned food can be scavenged, and cars and roads used for travel. Ish must make do the best he can. He soon resolves to undertake an epic and dangerous trip to reconnoiter the remains of what was the U.S. He travels east by car and encounters some isolated groups of survivors, but none he judges to be promising long-term companions. He soon returns to his home on San Lupo. Through time he carefully notes and ruminates upon the ways in which nature is re-asserting itself. Escaped pets, plants, agriculture, pests and parasites, even buildings, bridges and cities are all in flux and re-adjusting to humankind's absence. Ish has bouts of despair and loneliness. Will humans ever come back? How long will it take and what route will it take?

By chance, Ish later encounters a survivor worthy and suitable with which to form a “team.” Her name is Em and soon they have a child. Then, a few other survivors, George, Ezra, their wives and others join the group. Ish and Em and the others have many children

Years later the little colony sends out an expedition in a Jeep to again explore eastward. After many months they return with a stranger, Charlie, whom the boys favor joining the colony. But things go awry and they are forced to make a horrible decision. A sense of innocence is lost, and soon a wave of further destruction devastates the colony. Ish is racked with conflicting thoughts and feelings. Civilization is fading and disintegrating before his eyes, though he tries to teach the children to read, and about the “old times.” With few exceptions his efforts seem to fail. Ish becomes very old but the generations increase. He eventually finds some peace and sees that human culture probably will survive, though it must follow its own path forward, in its own time and in a re-leveled harmony with nature.

Critical Reader Appraisal

This is a substantial, often ponderous book that explores a basic premise interestingly and in great depth. What would happen if people almost entirely disappeared? Could the few survivors re-start civilization? It has a consistent tone throughout and a sense of detailed realism. It also has a literary-fiction style prose, that with some exceptions, is quite well-crafted. The protagonist is admirably real-seeming, non-cliched, being far from a tough guy or a super-man.

But for all that (and it should be credited with those virtues) it failed badly in the reader care department. It’s just a hell of a dull book. It’s far too long. Plot events of any significance are about 100 pages apart, and there are only about 3 of them. It has mostly shot its plot-bolt within the first 20 pages. The rest is almost all dense, plotless, dialog-less, 3rd person omniscient inner protagonist musings, along with many, many italic “super-omniscient” commentary passages.

The musing are not perhaps all bad, but their sheer volume and repetition within the somewhat sterile confines of the protagonist’s mind was painfully tedious. In the italic passages, Ish’s thoughts are sometimes repeated almost exactly. (Why?) But the italic tone is elevated even further from reality, in a vein distinctly pseudo-scriptural. It just keeps going on and on, apparently secure in its own profundity, taking a reader’s bandwidth and giving no story value whatsoever in return. There’s a pattern to the boring waves – from minor thought, to musing, to philosophizing, to italicized scripturalizing. Over and over again. Cow, dogs, grasses, lice all get the treatment. Aside from musings the only other subject is the honestly too trivial concerns of daily life, which once you’ve had 40 years of detail, you’ve had enough. It’s gone way beyond fleshing-out the situation.

The most unlikable thing about the inner monologue was the sense of ultimate vagueness, of endless shillyshallying, a “kinda this, but kinda that” philosophizing on re-cycled themes, nearly in identical words. It lost any chance for a real statement not through poetic ambivalence, but from cop out. Many will say that this is realism; and perhaps it is more like real life. But it’s normally the job of fiction to super-charge reality with a story, with movement and progression and to make the reader care.

A further aggravator is how the writer repeatedly teases you, making you think something plot-worthy is actually going to happen. But in two such instances it turns out to be a dream. (Lame?) When something finally *does* happen, the writer sadly does his best to de-dramatize it, and lessen its significance. When the water forebodingly runs out, and the reader prays for some shape within the shapeless narrative, still nothing happens! You’re fooled. It makes no difference whatsoever. Just like Ish’s 80-page boring cross county trip. He goes, nothing happens; he comes back, still nothing happens.

Realism! Realism! I still hear the cry. Ok, but let’s note some frayed edges in this area too. So he’s a geographer, and has a certain measure of outdoorsman competence. But instead of reconnoitering increasingly wide areas grid-wise, he decides on one dangerous, mega-journey across the whole continent to New York? The rationale seemed weak. Why not Los Angeles, only a few hundred miles distant? He does this twice – once himself, and once in the expedition he arranges for his sons to undertake. No policy for his sons on picking up strangers on their journey? He has many months to think about it. Seems unlike a practical guy like Ish. Similar is the lack of forethought about the water supply fed by a reservoir only a mile distant. For 20 years they used water daily but never thought about its continuance?

Futility, repetitious self-doubt, inconsequentiality can be portrayed. You don’t need to make the reader go through their analog. Stewart really had something with this one, a good theme, an engaging tone, necessary writing skill, even a decent plot – but for a book of 145 pages not 345. For me, he went way overboard, and he lost my affection early on. A lingering resentment, as well as a pretty texture-less experience might be obscuring more good. You know… the italics cut, and thought passages reduced by 50%, this could have been grand!
 
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I liked your review for its clarity. You make clear statements with examples as to the causes of your likes and dislikes - (You then have a slight tendency to say something nice for generosity's sake.)
Another reason I liked your review is that, to misuse the words of Gerald Ford after Nixon quit, "Our (your) long national (reading) nightmare is over."
And also that you have cured me of any tendency to want to read the book. Thank you.
 
pogopossum said:
I liked your review for its clarity. You make clear statements with examples as to the causes of your likes and dislikes - (You then have a slight tendency to say something nice for generosity's sake.)
Another reason I liked your review is that, to misuse the words of Gerald Ford after Nixon quit, "Our (your) long national (reading) nightmare is over."
And also that you have cured me of any tendency to want to read the book. Thank you.
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Thanks for reading, Pogo. (still touching up a few things...)

Yeah, I feel like I was rescued by a Coast Guard chopper after three months lost at sea. :-)

Time now for a few fun, breezy books... Carson of Venus? (yes, prepared for the camp), Lord of Light?
 
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