Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1981

Obligatory "not including this but check out the cover":

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/29/Project_Pope%2C_novel_by_Clifford_Simak%2C_1st_edition_cover.jpg

Two main 80's trends I identified going through this: a fascination with Japan (in addition to the very serious Obasan, abt Japanese internment camps in Canada, we have Jessica Amanda Salmonson's Tomoe Gozen, set in an alternate universe resembling feudal Japan, and Robert Shea's historical novel Shike); and satanic panic involving RPGs - this is the year of Mazes & Monsters, but also John Coyne's Hobgoblin and, more tangentially, Fred Saberhagen's Octagon, about someone killing his opponents in the science fiction play-by-mail game Starweb.

I have read exactly 0 of these

Imho 1970-1985 stands out for its theory and poetry more so than its novels, but I have my biases.

Have read 3.3 of these (the .3 being Lanark, which I really should finish some day), but Valis is way ahead of the rest. PKD's finest moment for me.

Imho 1970-1985 stands out for its theory and poetry more so than its novels, but I have my biases.

Yes. This lull in great novels ended in 1985, as I was born and authors decided that, now that there was someone worthy of reading them, they needed to up their game.

Couldn't have said it better myself! ;)

just Cujo and The Comfort Of Strangers here. and i appear to have confused the latter with another of his books.

I love the Borrible novels and realise I must have missed the first one so am tempted to vote for ...Go For Broke. I don't mind admitting I was dazzled by Rushdie once but dipped back into Midnight's Children a few years ago and found it exhausting. Hello America is weak Ballard and as much as I love Lanark I found sections of it a slog.

All of which is to say, I think it's Brookner.

Lanark.

Probably

I read Lanark and thought it was a very impressive work that I never wanted to read again. Conversely I'm looking forward to rereading Little, Big, which as I said on the Crowley thread more effectively captures a childhood sense of wonder than anything else I've read. Also read The Comfort of Strangers and maybe Midnight's Children.

Got Starship & Haiku in the mail yesterday. It wasn't that popular was it?

I second VALIS: PKD at top of his games, as artist, entertainer, and vision-dogged crackpot/researcher, juggling and balancing all sectors ov brane as well as he can, maybe as well as anybody can (recently thought of this again while struggling through Melville's struggle with Pierre, Or, The Ambiguities).

Also vaguely remember really enjoying The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas. Still want to read Little, Big and Tar Baby.

This is the kind of passage that makes me wonder why the hell it is that people think PKD can't write a sentence:

Fat was convinced that Stephanie would wind up in jail; he expected her to be arrested any day. All Fat's friends expected him to be arrested any day. We worried about that and about his slow decline into depression and psychosis and isolation. Fat worried about Stephanie. Stephanie worried about the price of hash. More so, she worried about the price of cocaine. We used to imagine her suddenly sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night and exclaiming, "Coke has gone up to a hundred dollars a gram!" She worried about the price of dope the way normal women worry about the price of coffee.

_Lanark_.

xpost Great quote; thanks, Lily. My take seems to fit, as precursor, with this discussion, which I just now cam across in Wikipedia, of The Owl By Daylight, his unfinished novel in the VALIS Trilogy or Quartet:
The Selected Letters of Philip K Dick Volume 6: 1980 -1982, where one can read Dick's own description of the story and what he wanted to do with it. The plot was to express what he believed was an evolutionary step in humanity, using an interpretation of Joachim de Fiore, where he believed that one age of humanity used the left side of the brain, another the right, and the future would combine the two leading to a greater understanding of what is real. Moreover, the use of Dante was to demonstrate how hell, purgatory and heaven can all be experiences of life, showing how the world is experienced according to the left, right and whole of the brain.

Sorry: The Owl *In* Daylight. There's a lot more in the Wiki---this bit seems promising/a bit 2001, but customized:
A scientist creates a theme park that is related to the events of his youth, whereupon a sentient artificial intelligence imprisons him within it, as a youth. He has to travel through Dantean realities (and artist, political activist and gay social networks in the Berkeley of the 1940s and 1950s) to return home and resume his life as an old man.

One aspect of Dick's earlier work is that he chucked it out at a rate of knots and didn't seem to care much for revision, or maybe just couldn't afford to. The later novels had a lot more care taken over them and it showed. Still a tragedy he died so young, I think he had a few more classics in him.

Lanark and Vali are the only two I've read. Going for the former.

Valis

• read other boyds and liked them
• wasn't into valis when i read it 25 years ago
• stopped reading downbelow station
• loved little, big when i read it 25 years ago
• friends i trust love 'midnight's children' but i once read the opening chapter and hated it
• thx to daniel for not including piers anthony
• anyway, lanark

Write-in for The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

Most of Lanark blew me away. I really got bogged down at the end though.

The Owl In Daylight sounds fascinating. I thought PKD was fixed in his belief that we were all perpetually stuck in that one bible verse. I didn’t realize he had developed such complex theories about social evolution. That one really has some merit imo.

How about Tar Baby? I haven’t read it but I’d like to.

Write-in for The Affirmation by Christopher Priest

pvmic!

Ha!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

contrary to my usual glasgow-jingoism i don't like lanark! and not because the, autobiographical, protagonist is an incel who murders a girl who friendzones him

but that is kinda o_0

I'm almost afraid to ask, but---if *that* didn't make you dislike it, what did?

Oh the content is definitely unpalatable but you can have good books about awful people. Just didn't really thrill me. Last third or so is a big of a slog. Didn't really appreciate the Unthank sections.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1982