melannen | FMK #37: New-To-Me Authors

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FMK #37: New-To-Me Authors

So I read the one you voted on last week, and I'm almost finished another one! And I even did the canon review for the exchange fic that y'all decided to make me be responsible about (and even wrote the fic already, whooo.) At this rate, I may make up the backlog before we're finished with voting.

This week: I Have Never Read Anything By This Person, Not Even A Social Media Post

How FMK works, short version: 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 Tuesday, and write a response to the F winner sometime in the next week.

Link to long version of explanation (on first poll)

Poll #19532 FMK #37: New-to-me Authors

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 25

View Respondents

Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford (1984)

F
5 (41.7%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
7 (58.3%)

Pilgrimage to Earth by Robert Sheckley (1978)

F
6 (60.0%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
4 (40.0%)

Earth Ship & Star Song by Ethan Shedley (1979)

F
3 (33.3%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
6 (66.7%)

Sight of Proteus by Charles Sheffield (1978)

F
3 (37.5%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
5 (62.5%)

All the Traps of Earth by Clifford D. Simak (1979)

F
7 (46.7%)

M
3 (20.0%)

K
5 (33.3%)

The Third Ear by Curt Siodmak (1971)

F
5 (41.7%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
7 (58.3%)

A World Between by Norman Spinrad (1986)

F
7 (58.3%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
5 (41.7%)

Castaways of Tanagar by Brian M. Stableford (1981)

F
3 (27.3%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
8 (72.7%)

A King of Infinite Space by Allen M. Steele (1997)

F
4 (36.4%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
7 (63.6%)

Necessary Ill by Deb Taber (2013)

F
5 (62.5%)

M
2 (25.0%)

K
1 (12.5%)

The Seedbearers by Peter Valentine Timlett (1974)

F
2 (28.6%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
5 (71.4%)

The Starry Rift by James Tiptree (1986)

F
14 (63.6%)

M
8 (36.4%)

K
0 (0.0%)

Mammoth by John Varley (2006)

F
10 (83.3%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
2 (16.7%)

Station Gehenna by Andrew Weiner (1987)

F
2 (22.2%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
7 (77.8%)

Beyond the Gates by Catherine Wells (1999)

F
7 (77.8%)

M
1 (11.1%)

K
1 (11.1%)

Empire of Bones by Liz Williams (2002)

F
10 (71.4%)

M
3 (21.4%)

K
1 (7.1%)

The Pandora Effect by Jack Williamson (1969)

F
7 (53.8%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
6 (46.2%)

The Flaxen Femme Fatale by John Zakour (2008)

F
3 (27.3%)

M
0 (0.0%)

K
8 (72.7%)

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If Mammoth is the book I'm thinking of, it's SO BAD. SOOOOO BAD. I voted kill, but it's so terrible it's almost funny enough to read for the B-movie entertainment value. (The plot includes things like a Death Laser mounted on top of a downtown L.A. high rise that is suddenly introduced at the point 2/3 of the way through the book when it becomes plot relevant, because who doesn't have a Death Laser lying around?)

Edited 2018-02-21 00:50 (UTC)

...I. I thought it was about de-extinction and rewilding. Where. Where do the Death Lasers come in?

(although tbf I am currently writing a fanfic where a character built a giant death ray because he was bored, but it's an important character note in that one!)

...I. I thought it was about de-extinction and rewilding. Where. Where do the Death Lasers come in?

This was pretty much my thought process while I was reading the book, tbh. And I just looked it up on Wikipedia and yes, it IS that book, so ... yeah. XD

I got about four paragraphs into a comment about Varley's work when my laptop crashed. I will attempt to reconstruct that tomorrow. His work is, generally, in the category of Fucking Weird. Some of it needs warnings for a 1970s author writing his idea of sexually liberated women. Varley does acknowledge bisexuality and same sex relationships but I always got the impression that he was assuming something more on the order of pansexuality and gender fluidity as human default.

I read a bunch of his stuff in high school, during the early 80s. It's stuck with me because I kept poking at his ideas and going, "But people don't work that way!" to a lot of it.

Some of Varley's stuff is honestly quite good, allowing for dated attitudes. His short stories are WAY better than his novels, IMO. I liked his short stories enough to read most of his novels, and the latter range from entertaining and inventive but absolutely batshit bizarre to just plain bad. I have not read Mammoth because I heard it was just plain bad. I'm voting F anyway for entertainment purposes but with the caveat that his short stories are still worth picking up.

Let me give you an example of the batshit. One of his books is set in a giant orbital ruled by an actual literal Goddess who sometimes manifests as a 700 foot tall Marilyn Monroe. The native intelligent life, among other beings, consists of multicolored hermaphrodite centaurs who love John Philip Sousa, can self-fertilize*, and lay eggs.

*Well, they could until the Goddess decided to limit their population by trapping a hapless human spaceship captain, making her immortal, and making all the centaurs infertile unless the captain put their eggs in her mouth.

Edited 2018-02-21 04:15 (UTC)

I decided to switch to F because now I'm actually kind of hoping it wins. :D

I don't remember a lot of the details now, but I DO still remember the giant Marilyn Monroe! I also remember that, while my parents didn't exert much control over what I read*, I went through those books (which I had gotten out of the library) in the desperate hope, all the more so the deeper I got into them, that my parents wouldn't pick THIS of all times to ask what I was reading.

*The one hilariously misguided exception I remember was my mom telling me that I was allowed to read a book that young-teen-me had taken from my parents' shelves, as I did nearly everything that was on said shelves, on the condition that I promised absolutely, under no circumstances, was I to read Chapter 32 -- I had to skip over it. I'm sure you can guess how THAT went. (That chapter, which OF COURSE was the first one I read, involved the protagonist and his girlfriend having sex in the same room with the dying murder victim they'd just killed, who was bleeding out on the floor. It was a little disturbing but c'mon, mom, after all the Harlan Ellison and Robert Anton Wilson, that's what you think is going to give me nightmares?)

Do you remember the orbital of short pagan lesbians? And I think King Kong?

haha, I'm starting to think it's probably just as well that I've forgotten as much of it as I have. At this point it's all a vague mishmash of weird quasi-religious stuff, main characters mutating into other things and/or getting reincarnated as different people, bizarre alien ecosystems I don't remember the details of (in which weird sex featured prominently), and the protagonist essentially being the Satan to the planet-goddess's insane deity and being hunted all over a hollow world in which every living creature was potentially spying on her.

That's about how I recall it too. Written down like that it sounds like Jack C. Chalker. Only Varley's less trashy and more trippy.

...I just bought the trilogy on Kindle. What have I done.

He was definitely a member of the "hallucinogens and sex were major inspirational forces on this novel" school of 1970s SF.

You must report back! :D

Go mammoths, go mammoths ...

You know, "tempt other people to read strange old SF" was never a goal of this, and yet it still feels like a victory....

Edited 2018-02-21 20:58 (UTC)

I originally voted K on John Varley, but I've changed over to F because I think I read his trilogy Titan, Wizard, Demon years ago, back when I was a middle-school reader left (unwisely) unsupervised in the sci fi section of the used bookstore. I don't remember much about them except that they were Fucking Weird, so now I'm very curious about the one you've got.

Well, Sholio seems to also be putting in a vote for Fucking Weird, so you may be right!

I read that trilogy too, at about the same age! Fucking Weird is definitely how I remember them, too, although in a somewhat different way from the above. (Actually I remember the trilogy existing on a sliding scale from Fucking Weird to Really Fucking Weird to What the Actual Fuck is Even Happening Here.)

Come to think of it, he also wrote Millennium, which had a cool high-concept premise - time travelers body-snatch victims of plane crashes and other disasters right before impact, to repopulate Earth in the future without messing with the timeline too much - but the execution was also Fucking Weird. I'm noticing a pattern here.

Ha! Good to see that his talent for Fucking Weird did not leave him as the years passed. Now I really want

melannen to read Mammoth so that I can judge whether I should attempt to find the trilogy again.

Ohh, I just attempted to describe it above. I accidentally made it sound WAY less weird than it actually is.

Millennium started out as a short story which was pretty great because it was limited to just the concept. The book expansion was kind of a giant mess, IIRC. I think he's way better at short stories.

I have read one book by Allen Steele
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3078755.html
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/3079118.html
and on that basis voted k

On the one have, ugh. On the other hand, "space hippies defeat nsa using weed" is a plot that in theory I would be there for. On the gripping hand, I am done done done with stories where the dude murders his wife in a fit of rage.

I think I have this one mostly because I liked the Shakespeare title.

I am torn on the Tiptree, because on the one hand I very much think you should read Tiptree, and on the other hand that is...not a great place to start.

I should definitely read Tiptree! It doesn't turn up used much for some reason- I suspect once you have one you keep it forever.

I voted F for The Starry Rift because it's a fix-up of some fairly minor Tiptree, but if you have never read any Tiptree at all you should remedy that! Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is a recent-ish collection--maybe ten years old?--that includes most of her best-known work.

Her Smoke Rose Up is already pretty high on my list of "stuff to get via ill once you are through enough backlog to have an excuse to ill even more."

I came in to say pretty much exactly this! Her Smoke Rose Up Forever is the best!

I've read a few of these, not most. Liz Williams is generally a pretty entertaining read, especially if you like demons and dragons and a vaguely Chinese-afterlife-story flair. The Varley is good, but Kim Stanley Robinson does environmental change and Ice Age stories better. It's not Tiptree's best; get a short story collection. The Steele has some disgusting bits, which is a shame because I really like the Coyote stories when they were serialized. (This all of the cuff, and in need of fact-checking to make sure I haven't confused similar names or titles.)

I do like demons and dragons and vaguely-Chinese-flavor! I think that's why I hung on to that one.

Steele is sounding like he's probably not my kind of author, between you and beccaelizabeth...

I only picked authors whose work I actually remember having read as opposed to I know that name and I think I read some of their stuff in a vague sort of way. Anyway, Benford scientist and his books are usually hard SF, don't recall much more than that. Simak, okay I can feel a smile coming on so his work didn't disturb me a lot. I remember he was a humanist and he wrote a book about dogs that I loved when I was much much younger. Tiptree, stick to the short stories, there are so many collections out there that you can't go wrong. (this book is a "cheat" neither a collection of short stories nor a novel.) For Varley I suggest his trilogy or The Persistance of Vision which was an excellent collection of his shorter works, and is still on my bookshelves nearly forty years afrter I first read it.

Simak's getting a surprising amount of love in the poll given that I don't think I've seen anyone talk about him on DW before!

It's not that The Starry Rift is bad, but it is totally uncharacteristic of Tiptree's actual usual mode and will give you entirely the wrong idea. Nthing the suggestion to get a short story collection... and then you can go to The Starry Rift as an antidote to the disturbing. There is something somewhere in Tiptree to upset almost anyone, but usually in a useful/constructive way.

Haven't heard of any of these. I voted for Tiptree b/c Tiptree, and for/against everything else on the basis of title.

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