FMK #4: Pre-Golden-Age SF

[melannen]

Okay, so FMK is going to be Tuesdays now. :P I forgot that on normal Mondays, a little distraction is good, but on busy Mondays I basically don't have time to sit down at the computer from Saturday evening until Monday evening, and that doesn't work so well. (and today was a snow day so I spent it sewing, it was excellent.)

Anyway, FMK #3 K winner was Tarnsman of Gor and the F winner was Kushiel's Dart. I, uh, haven't finished Kushiel's Dart. I'm 500 pages in! If it was a reasonably-sized novel, that would be done twice over! Anyway short version: I am enjoying it a lot although not ravishingly in love, have already recommended it to a friend who actively enjoys brick-sized books full of court intrigue, and keep getting Cassiel the Angel of Bromance mixed up with SPN's Castiel the Angel of... *ahem* "Bromance". I will post a fuller response either later this week or when I am finished, depending on which comes first.

I also started reading Tarnsman of Gor I know! I am breaking my own rules already! But I want to be able to make fun of it fairly, okay? And it's like, 20% the length of Kushiel. I did put the other two Gor books I inexplicably owned on the dump-unread pile, though?

This week's FMK theme: English-language SF written before 1930! here is where we find out who is voting entirely based on gendered author names

How FMK works: I am trying to clear out my unreads. So there is a poll, in which you get to pick F, M, or K. F means I should spend a night of wild passion with the book ASAP, and then decide whether to keep it or not. M means I should continue to commit to a long-term relationship of sharing my bedroom with it. K means it should go away immediately. Anyone can vote, you don't have to actually know anything about the books.

I pick a winner on Friday night (although won't actually close the poll, people can still vote,) and report results/ post the new poll on the following Sunday Monday Tuesday.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #18088 FMK #4: English-language SF written before 1930

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 51

View Respondents

The Bowl of Baal by Robert Ames Bennet (1917)

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F
10 (58.8%)

M
1 (5.9%)

K
6 (35.3%)

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan (1678)

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F
13 (38.2%)

M
7 (20.6%)

K
14 (41.2%)

Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1923)

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F
9 (42.9%)

M
3 (14.3%)

K
9 (42.9%)

The Worm Oroborous by E. R. Eddison (1922)

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F
12 (52.2%)

M
7 (30.4%)

K
4 (17.4%)

A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)

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F
9 (52.9%)

M
3 (17.6%)

K
5 (29.4%)

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald (1872)

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F
21 (63.6%)

M
11 (33.3%)

K
1 (3.0%)

Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt (1924)

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F
10 (62.5%)

M
3 (18.8%)

K
3 (18.8%)

Armageddon 2419 A.D.: The Seminal "Buck Rogers" Novel by Philip Francis Nowlan (1928)

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F
9 (52.9%)

M
1 (5.9%)

K
7 (41.2%)

The Vampyre by John Polidori (1818)

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F
13 (54.2%)

M
7 (29.2%)

K
4 (16.7%)

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1818)

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F
13 (28.9%)

M
30 (66.7%)

K
2 (4.4%)

The Skylark of Space by E. E. "Doc" Smith (1928)

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F
18 (72.0%)

M
4 (16.0%)

K
3 (12.0%)

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)

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F
13 (31.0%)

M
24 (57.1%)

K
5 (11.9%)

Roverandom by J. R. R. Tolkien (1925)

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F
13 (56.5%)

M
5 (21.7%)

K
5 (21.7%)

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764)

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F
17 (60.7%)

M
3 (10.7%)

K
8 (28.6%)

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells (1898)

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F
19 (52.8%)

M
12 (33.3%)

K
5 (13.9%)

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

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F
18 (43.9%)

M
18 (43.9%)

K
5 (12.2%)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf (1928)

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F
18 (50.0%)

M
17 (47.2%)

K
1 (2.8%)

Comments

[ambyr]

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed The Worm Oroborous once I adapted to its, umm, very particular style.

[melannen]

I have heard good things about it, and they are pretty much all along the lines of your comment. ^_^ I like Dunsany, does that help?

[seekingferret]

Castle of Otranto is so great. There is a giant murder helmet on page one.T

[melannen]

I really should read more Gothics and that seems like a fine start!

[sophia_sol]

I haven't been participating in your polls because choosing books for other people to read and/or cull is somehow even more stressful than making such decisions for myself, but I'm enjoying your FMK posts a lot and I just wanted to say that!

[melannen]

I can recommend getting other people to make the decisions for you, though!

I'm terrible at helping other people cull books because my friends' and families' libraries are "books I can read whenever I want but don't need to store" so where is the downside to them being as large as possible???

[rachelmanija]

It says 'seminal.' Ha ha.

Of the more obscure books there, A Voyage to Arcturus is worth reading. It's really, really strange. I don't even know how to describe it. I think it's an allegory but I'm not sure of what. If you fuck, at least keep fucking till you actually get to Arcturus and everyone's bodies start morphing (this will continue); I vaguely recall a totally irrelevant first chapter set on Earth that is probably just there because of at-the-time genre conventions.

I like The Princess and the Goblin but MacDonald's masterwork is the short story "The Golden Key," which I would highly recommend whether you like the former or not. It starts out a fairly conventional fairytale with old-school morals like "Wash your face" (seriously) and then turns into something really amazing and powerful. The Princess and the Goblin is fine but not his best work.

I have made multiple, determined attempts at The Worm Ouroboros and have never gotten very far. Some day I will be in the perfect mood and possibly find it entrancing.

[melannen]

...I was tempted to look up what exactly they meant by "seminal" but really it's better to just leave it there, I think...

I have A Voyage to Arcturus in the most 1960s edition possible and I feel like that's a very suitable embodiment for what I have heard about the book's contents. I think that's one I might need to be in exactly the right mood for, though.

[auroramama]

I loved and still love The Golden Key, which is the deepest of the stories. But The Light Princess is part of me, and some of The Day Boy and the Night Girl.

[the_rck]

I think that Pilgrim's Progress is mainly readable as an anthropological/historical artifact.

I hated Gulliver's Travels with a passion, but I was thirteen or fourteen, so my opinion should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

I voted F on the Burroughs and the Smith because, while they're likely to contain some appalling things in terms of racism/sexism/etc., they were written with the intention of being entertaining.

[melannen]

I started Gulliver's Travels when I was ten or so, I think? I had just read Swiss Family Robinson and loved it (as I had loved every other book about people shipwrecked on an island that I had ever read to that point) but I never managed to get very far in Gulliver.

I kind of want to keep a copy of Pilgrim's Progress in my library because for a couple centuries it was the one book everybody in the US and England had a copy of. Like a grounding of my library in my ancestors'.

I have read a lot of Burroughs and enjoy it for what it is (you will pry Barsoom out of my cold hands). I get the impression Smith is substantially less racist/sexist than Burroughs but that's a low low bar.

[espresso_addict]

For once a list I've actually read a lot of the contenders... Avoid The Pilgrim's Progress, it's unbelievably boring, but that's the only one of this set I'd kill. Several of these would be on my must-read list, but perhaps especially Frankenstein and The Picture of Dorian Gray. I'd love a review of Roverandom, which I haven't read; I love some of JRRT's non-Ardaverse works (especially Smith of Wootton Major) but others are decidedly odd and/or twee in all the worst ways.

[melannen]

I enjoy the non-Arda JRRT I've read, too, most of them the ones that were reprinted in the 60s and 70s when LOTR got big, like Smith of Wootton Major (and the Father Christmas Letters were a childhood favorite). Roverandom wasn't published until much later, though, which is somewhat worrying, and sounds like it was never really intended for publication at all. But it has a really nice dust jacket with Tolkien's original art on it!

I should really read the Picture of Dorian Gray. I had a really cool dream last week about a kid named Oscar whose superpower was that any drawings of him came off the paper and moved around, and he let one of the art nerds who had a crush on him do a full-on painting of him for a final project without telling him about his superpower and the portrait came alive, came out, named himself Dorian and started dating his best friend Henry.

Which a) would make a really cool YA novel and b) is definitely a sign that I should read that book already.

[watersword]

The Castle of Otranto is a DELIGHT.

[melannen]

I am told there is a giant murder helmet! Is there anything actually supernatural or is it one of those gothics where it turned out it was just Old Lady Jenkins in the attic all along?

[nicki]

I read Gulliver's Travels in college. Mostly I wanted to smash the hero over the head with a bar stool.

[melannen]

I feel like that's the kind of thing that would be likely to happen to him, anyway...

[rushthatspeaks]

I love many of these books passionately, including The Worm Ouroboros (I once saw E.R. Eddison's handwriting! it looked exactly like runes, only in English!) and Voyage to Arcturus and The Princess and the Goblin and I grew up reading E.E. "Doc" Smith and imprinted forever.

But I clicked F on Ship of Ishtar because it is the kind of screamingly-batshit pulp they just do not make 'em like anymore. The copy I read had a completely incoherent and gaudy cover which turns out to be not only literal but downplaying the scene, which is not one of the stranger scenes in the book. I can't remember how it does on racism and sexism; I was too busy boggling. Merritt is generally bad at race and time-period-decent-to-middling on gender. If you ever come across it, I highly recommend his masterpiece, Seven Footprints to Satan, which is one of the most sheerly entertaining books I know. But Ship of Ishtar is pretty boss.

[katherine]

That is... quite the cover.

[snickfic]

The Princess and the Goblin had some scenes in it that made a deep impression on me when I was young, even though I don't really remember anything else about the book now. It's a bit gothic in the sense that the princess lives in this castle so large that sometimes she stumbles across rooms and people she's never seen before - shades of The Secret Garden.

None of that is really a rec or an anti-rec, just musings. I think I clicked F for that one.

[melannen]

Okay, that did more to get me interested in it than everything else people have said put together. ^_^ (It's way ahead on F right now, so you're not the only one.)

[gehayi]

I think this is the first poll where I saw no reason to vote K on anything.

[melannen]

There's no immediate standout K on any of these, which is interesting! Even Pilgrim's Progress is close to tying on K vs. F. I was expecting a lot more K given how hard people were coming down on racism and sexism in previous polls, but then I didn't vote K on any of these either.

[vass]

I loved the prose in The Worm Ouroborous, but hated the characters and the politics. In some ways it's like Greek epic heroes but without the endearing qualities. Or a sense of humour. The prose is GORGEOUS, though.

I may or may not have chosen "marry" for The Pilgrim's Progress on the grounds of wanting someone else to suffer too.

I chose Kill for Dorian Gray, but influencing my decision here was that if you chance your mind, it's not like it's gonna be hard to get a free ebook.

I liked Gulliver's Travels, but WOW did it feel like I was missing a lot of background, even with endnotes.

[melannen]

I suspect I might have read Gulliver's Travels before now if I had, like, a gorgeous modern edition with as much annotation and introduction as it has text, but alas I have a cheap walmart edition with none of that. (Probably the solution is to K the cheap edition and keep my eyes out for a better one, but it doesn't actually come up all that often at used book sales.)

[stellar_dust]

I started Orlando while we were working at Knole and really, truly could not get into it. Possibly it's just too dense and odd of a book to read while most of my brain is doing fieldwork? But it's obviously very genderbendy and supposedly is also almost a love story about the house and grounds as well as about Vita. You shold read it and report back!

Also i clicked M on everything written before 1900 just on principle.

[melannen]

I feel like a novel about a bisexual genderfluid immortal that is also a love story with a house should be exactly in my sweet spot, but all the Virginia Woolf I have does indeed look very very dense. Were a lot of people working at Knole trying to read it? :D It seems like it might be the thing to do.

[malnpudl]

Topic-adjacent, since I know this is about physical books and what to do with them... but FWIW, I found that the only way I could consume Pilgrim's Progress was in audiobook format, which was actually entirely tolerable as background listening while doing other things. I appreciated the book for the sake of cultural literacy, which is the only reason I bothered with it at all, so at least there was that payoff. But if I'd had to sit down and read the thing, I'd never have persevered.

[melannen]

I wonder if Pilgrim's Progress works well as the kind of book you, idk, read out loud to the family one chapter a night all winter, or something. It must have *something* going for it, it's not like it was the only Christian allegory available in the period where it was a runaway bestseller.

Did you listen to a librivox edition? I do enjoy boring background listening.

[gool_duck]

I love Orlando. I found it much more readable than other Virginia Woolf books. It had more of an adventure story feel to it.
But also part of the love came from the edition I had, which gave excerpts of Virginia's letters to Vita Sackville-West and showed the parallels and references etc.

[melannen]

Oooh, that sounds like excellent edition!

[dhampyresa]

I voted for Bowl of Baal because I'm always there for SF novels with Carthaginian deities in the title.

[melannen]

I suspect that's why I acquired it! Baal gets too little love.

[muccamukk]

I voted fuck on a lot of these (I don't believe in marriage before fucking).

I enjoyed the hell out of Gulliver's Travels, but I also know a lot of the context/period references, and a LOT of it is cranky 18th century in jokes. Swift himself was incredibly cultural conservative and a classics snob, so there are a lot of extended rants about kids these days, and how this newfangled science bs is a waste of time. Which I mostly found pretty funny. There are a lot of early science concepts and science fiction/fantasy concepts that were really interesting. He's got an amazing grudge against the Dutch! The ending is very, very effectively creepy.

The Castle of Otranto: Absolute crack. The author was a bored rich kid and made this trope soup of a book that accidentally kicked off the gothic thing. Wall to wall crack, very short, worth a tumble.

The War of the Worlds: Another one I read recently and think is worth a look, especially for some of the very early SF concepts.

[melannen]

I could probably get *some* of the cranky 18th century in-jokes, especially the science-y ones. An annoted edition is sounding better and better, though.

Apparently I had entirely the wrong impression of Otranto! You all are selling it really well.

War of the Worlds is one where I probably have the entire plot pretty well down from osmosis, but have never actually attempted to read.

[copracat]

Ah Doc Smith, one of the most compellingly boring of the Golden Age writers. I actually read a whole lot of them before I made myself stop out of sheer self preservation. I've never really been able to read the overly technical, underly everything boys since. Seriously, if I wanted to know how a thing worked, I would read a manual or a book of pop science if I were feeling lazy.

Still, I will never forget the awesome book (name? that I forgot) where the Lensman crash landed on a planet and repaired his ship from first principles. He prospected, he mined, he smelted, he cast, he built a forge and forged! It was ridiculous and sublime. And was a little bit inspirational. A lot of what I do as a hobby - bread-making, baking, sewing, knitting, gardening for food are because in my heart I think I should be able to do things from first principles. And goddammit, if you gave me some ore and a muddy, woody creek bank I would bloody well smelt and cast you some metal.

[melannen]

"He repaired his ship from first principles" sounds like exactly my thing, though! (And after all, kids in the 20s didn't have Minecraft.) We share a lot of hobbies.

The closest I have managed to that was the time last summer when I went to see if the bog iron deposits in the creek were still bleeding from the spring run-off and got my second-worse case of chiggers ever. ;_; If someone in the area offered a "bog iron to pig iron with nothing but mud and wood" class I would so be there, though.