Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Dead Astronauts by Jeff Vandermeer. A sort of sequel to Borne, it's a book that flirts with being weird just for weirdness's sake but manages to be a worthwhile read.

James Redd, have you really read four memoirs by Isaac Asimov?

Can’t remember how many Opuses I’ve read so it might be more than that, assuming those count as memoirs.

Feel like the original “Dead Astronaut” was Ballard, although there were also Malzberg’s Falling Astronauts.

Another guy besides Nevala-Lee whose take I like is Matthew Cheney. His introduction to Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, “Ethical Aesthetics” is kind of good overview jump-start in itself.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of _Dead Astronauts_ by Jeff Vandermeer. A sort of sequel to _Borne_, it's a book that flirts with being weird just for weirdness's sake but manages to be a worthwhile read.

The Southern Reach trilogy? You can tell it's by the same author, but it's very different stylistically, while retaining the sense of unreality that the trilogy, and especially Annihilation, had. I suppose he's exploring some of the same themes--e.g., biology and its manipulation, alienation, and corporate cynicism--and but in a different voice.

I would recommend reading Borne first. I picked up Dead Astronauts as a special on Chirp, and while it stands on its own, the earlier book provides context.

Many thanks! Devoured the Southern Reach books in early 2021, will check out the new stuff.

I read Borne after reading the southern reach and was very disappointed. Felt quite rote by comparison.

Couple of lit sci-fi novellas

Stillicide by cylan Jones: thematically similar to children of men, ie unequal/divided post disaster Britain (this one’s climate change). Not as good.

The employees by Olga ravn (in translation). Very strange and eerie. Hard to follow but there is a very allusive plot. Solaris/annihilation themes but you can tell the writer is a poet. Not my cup of tea but can see what the fuss is about (eg well reviewed in the nyrb).

Out of office by Charlie warzel and Anne Helen Petersen. Vaguely leftist business/self help book. Not great tbh.

Hmmm, I'm only about 30% into it, but I wouldn't describe Borne as rote. Not entirely successful, perhaps, but it seems to me he was trying something different.

Rote is probably unfair. It’s much more conventional in form/voice than annihilation though.

Yeah, in terms of narrative structure it's much more conventional than Annihilation, let alone Dead Astronauts.

It's hard for me to think of another book that creates the sense of unreality and dread in me that Annihilation did.

Otm

THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS continues to be great reading. Brisk, clear, and generous to others. The world of publishers and magazines in their sketchy Manhattan rented offices - this could be a novel in itself.

Have you got(ten) to the part about his blurb writing yet?

What a cover!

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609156983i/1117714.jpg

Oopsh

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1609156983i/1117714.jpg

What, you don’t think that’s an accurate depiction of the way it was?

I love it!

My front cover is different - this one:

https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1232204135l/2876791.jpg

James Redd, not that part yet. It did occur to me that 'a novel about 1930s/1940s pulp offices in Manhattan' has, in a way, been written and is THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY. In that sense I think Chabon had a great idea.

Of course there's a whole thread for this stuff---but speaking of Campbell and pulp offices, here's the essential Alfie Bester's encounter with both:

I wrote a few stories for Astounding, and out of that came my one demented meeting with the great John W. Campbell, Jr. I needn’t preface this account with the reminder that I worshipped Campbell from afar. I had never met him; all my stories had been submitted by mail. I hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was like, but I imagined that he was a combination of Bertrand Russell and Ernest Rutherford. So I sent off another story to Campbell, one which no show would let me tackle. The title was “Oddy and Id” and the concept was Freudian, that a man is not governed by his conscious mind but rather by his unconscious compulsions. Campbell telephoned me a week later to say that he liked the story but wanted to discuss a few changes with me. Would I come to his office? I was delighted to accept the invitation despite the fact that the editorial offices of Astounding were then the hell and gone out in the boondocks of New Jersey.

The editorial offices were in a grim factory that looked like and probably was a printing plant. The “offices” turned out to be one small office, cramped, dingy, occupied not only by Campbell but by his assistant, Miss Tarrant. My only yardstick for comparison was the glamorous network and advertising agency offices. I was dismayed.

Campbell arose from his desk and shook hands. I’m a fairly big guy but he looked enormous to me, about the size of a defensive tackle. He was dour and seemed preoccupied by matters of great moment. He sat down behind his desk. I sat down on the visitor’s chair.

“You don’t know it,” Campbell said, “you can’t have any way of knowing it, but Freud is finished.”

I stared. “If you mean the rival schools of psychiatry, Mr. Campbell, I think—”

“No I don’t. Psychiatry as we know it, is dead.”

“Oh come now, Mr. Campbell. Surely you’re joking.”

“I have never been more serious in my life. Freud has been destroyed by one of the greatest discoveries of our time.”

“What’s that?”

“Dianetics.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It was discovered by L. Ron Hubbard, and he will win the Nobel peace prize for it,” Campbell said solemnly.

“The peace prize? What for?”

“Wouldn’t the man who wiped out war win the Nobel peace prize?”

“I suppose so, but how?”

“Through dianetics.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Campbell.”

“Read this,” he said, and handed me a sheaf of long galley proofs. They were, I discovered later, the galleys of the very first dianetics piece to appear in Astounding.

“Read them here and now? This is an awful lot of copy.”

He nodded, shuffled some papers, spoke to Miss Tarrant and went about his business, ignoring me. I read the first galley carefully, the second not so carefully as I became bored by the dianetics mishmash. Finally I was just letting my eyes wander along, but was very careful to allow enough time for each galley so Campbell wouldn’t know I was faking. He looked very shrewd and observant to me. After a sufficient time I stacked the galleys neatly and returned them to Campbell’s desk.

“Well?” he demanded. “Will Hubbard win the peace prize?”

“It’s difficult to say. Dianetics is a most original and imaginative idea, but I’ve only been able to read through the piece once. If I could take a set of galleys home and—”

“No,” Campbell said. “There is only this one set. I’m rescheduling and pushing the article into the very next issue. It’s that important.” He handed the galleys to Miss Tarrant. “You’re blocking it,” he told me. “That’s all right. Most people do that when a new idea threatens to overturn their thinking.”

“That may well be,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s true of myself. I’m a hyperthyroid, an intellectual monkey, curious about everything.”

“No,” Campbell said, with the assurance of a diagnostician, “You’re a hyp-O-thyroid. But it’s not a question of intellect, it’s one of emotion. We conceal our emotional history from ourselves although dianetics can trace our history all the way back to the womb.”

“To the womb!”

“Yes. The foetus remembers. Come and have lunch.”

Remember, I was fresh from Madison Avenue and expense-account luncheons. We didn’t go to the Jersey equivalent of Sardi’s, “21,” or even P.J. Clark’s. He led me downstairs and we entered a tacky little lunchroom crowded with printers and file clerks; an interior room with blank walls that made every sound reverberate. I got myself a liverwurst on white, no mustard, and a coke. I can’t remember what Campbell ate.

We sat down at a small table while he continued to discourse on dianetics, the greatest salvation of the future when the world would at last be cleared of its emotional wounds. Suddenly he stood up and towered over me. “You can drive your memory back to the womb,” he said. “You can do it if you release every block, clear yourself and remember. Try it.”

“Now?”

“Now. Think. Think back. Clear yourself. Remember! You can remember when your mother tried to abort you with a button hook. You’ve never stopped hating her for it.”

Around me there were cries of “BLT down, hold the mayo. Eighty-six on the English. Combo rye, relish. Coffee shake, pick up.” And here was this grim tackle standing over me, practicing dianetics without a license. The scene was so lunatic that I began to tremble with suppressed laughter. I prayed. “Help me out of this, please. Don’t let me laugh in his face. Show me a way out.” God showed me. I looked up at Campbell and said, “You’re absolutely right, Mr. Campbell, but the emotional wounds are too much to bear. I can’t go on with this.”

He was completely satisfied. “Yes, I could see you were shaking.” He sat down again and we finished our lunch and returned to his office. It developed that the only changes he wanted in my story was the removal of all Freudian terms which dianetics had now made obsolete. I agreed, of course; they were minor and it was a great honor to appear in Astounding no matter what the price. I escaped at last and returned to civilization where I had three double gibsons and don’t be stingy with the onions.

That was my one and only meeting with John Campbell and certainly my only story conference with him. I’ve had some wild ones in the entertainment business but nothing to equal that. It reinforced my private opinion that a majority of the science fiction crowd, despite their brilliance, were missing their marbles. Perhaps that’s the price that must be paid for brilliance.

Hmm. Maybe we should listen to The Space Merchants: A Radio Play. Maybe even “The Tunnel Under the World” as well.

Audio links all are messed up :(

Listening to THE SPACE MERCHANTS: A RADIO PLAY sounds good to me!

One place I found it is here:
https://archive.org/details/OTRR_CBS_Radio_Workshop_Singles

Or even
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUhDcp20Rck

Vasily Grossman - Life and Fate. Finished this vast novel set during WWII, at around the battle of Stalingrad. Sometimes there is very little to say about a thing, and this is one of those times.

Mediocre : the dangerous legacy of white male power Ijeoma Oluo
book on the problems with the white patriarchy mainly in the US. Starts with Buffalo bill, goes into a pair of male feminists from the early 20th century and goes on looking at problems with representation of such things as the ideal man and pseudo allies and things. Pretty coherent and I'm only in the 2nd chapter but looking forward to reading more.
Still want to read her other book So You Want to Talk About Race but they only have it as an e-book on the library system so looking for a physical book.

Soldaten
book based on the transcriptions of recordings made of German POWs in WWII without their knowledge. So shows their epistemology etc,
HOw compliant with Nazi policy etc they were.
Currently on a bit about fighting to the last bullet , how willing a soldier would be to die for the Reich and so on.

Harvey Mandel Miles, Ornette, Cecil Jazz Beyond Jazz
Jazz critic talks about the avant garde using the examples of 3 pivotal figures. Possibly inserts himself a bit much, possibly needs to do so to show perspective.
Interesting anyway and I think I need to read more about these last 2 figures. Mandel shows how they communicated while speaking which i wasn't very familiar with. Seems to be more holistic or zen like or something than the man in the street. I would love to know what is in the record collection he refers to Cecil Taylor having.
THink I have another couple of book sin the library system I will be ordering that cover these artists and a few others.

Never Come Morning nelson Algren
1942 dirty realist novel about a Polish community in Chicago. Quite good, I should have read it faster I think.
Have enjoyed what I have read by him. Though that was mainly a few decades ago.

Read some smaller things, also finished Liz Waldner’s Trust, I think the least of her poetry collections I have read— not strange enough, relying more and more on an empty-feeling alliterative wordplay.

Been reading Lisa Robertson’s Boat in the mornings with breakfast and coffee, and never want it to end. No one can do what Lisa does— it’s extravagant and coarse, fulsome and spare, fabulist but grounded in her own subjectivity. Incredible book.

Kingsley Amis' The Alteration, which doesn't populate this alternative non-Reformation universe as adeptly as critics led me to believe but still works as a droll, sometimes harrowing exploration of the terrors of emasculation.

I've started No Fond Return of Love, Barbara Pym. So far no vicars have appeared in it. Fingers crossed.

Are you hoping for vicars or no vicars?

I've already explored with Pym the many facets of the vicarage, its problems and discontents, and now rest content that I need no further education in that direction.

It's worrying when there are no vicars at all; like maybe they're massing for an attack.

I loooove Less Than Angels.

^ her best novel (and noticeably vicar-uninfested)

Having the vicar for tea

read THEY WILL DROWN IN THEIR MOTHERS' TEARS by johannes anyuru, a swedish muslim, which explores the possible ramifications of a terrorist attack on a bookstore

there's a lot of sudden bouncing around -- it can be difficult at times to tell whose point of view we are sharing. i found it vaguely reminiscent of marge piercy's WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, which is a good thing

Has the ilxor poster known as a vicar disappeared or does the poster go by a new name?

he did resurface for a while as "the new dirty vicar" but it didn't seem to take

I don't think that poster is on ILX now. Could be wrong. I know that he still lives in Dublin.

THE WAY THE FUTURE WAS is so good. 1960s and FP is now editor of GALAXY! A job he loves, following some very welcome pages on Horace Gold. I was so glad to get that part of the SF scene. FP has also become expert in 'number theory' and claims to know as much about science as Asimov.

The tone of this extremely readable book is generous, thoughtful, also down to earth and droll.

i irl-met (n)DV for the first and only time at a friend's wedding a couple of years back -- he is intermittently active on twitter and possibly FB also

tho not as any kind of vicar

Thanks. I am nearing the end of Copenhagen Trilogy and find it painful to read. I hate reading about victimization and loss of agency.

I was supposed to be reading a different book, but I needed a smaller book to bring with me on a short trip, and I had Patrick Modiano's Paris Nocturne out from the library, so I brought that and finished it. I sensed that it's the kind of book you want to read quickly, because it conjures an ethereal, dreamlike mood, which could dissipate if left too long on the shelf. Not that its surreal in any way - it tells a story that could come from real life, but in such a way that it makes you reflect on how real life is often quite strange. The atmosphere is reminiscent of a noir detective story, but with a seemingly random accident instead of a crime at the center.

Finished George V Higgins Kennedy for the Defense, which got better as it went along, then just stops when the plot runs out.

I ended with the general impression that he's a better sentence writer than Elmore Leonard, but a worse book writer. There's a welcome humanism in Leonard that was lacking here -- if anything Higgins reminded more of Joseph Wambaugh: the claustraphobia, the saltiness, the sleaze.

(Overall v. impressed though. Now starting on Howard's End.)