More July book arrivals

More July 2012 book arrivals, including what promises to be a major new novel from M. John Harrison and significant new single-author collections of short fiction from Kathleen Ann Goonan and Jonathan Carroll.

"No point is more central than this, that empty space is not empty. It is the seat of the most violent physics," John A. Wheeler, is the lead epigraph in the new novel, Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison. I expect it will be one of the important science fiction novels of 2012. This is the third in a loosely related series. The earlier books were the landmark novel Light (2002), winner of the James Tiptree Jr Award, and Nova Swing (2006), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Harrison is one of the major literary talents in the science fiction genre, mostly unknown in the United States.

The Song of Synth and Absinth, two novels by Sebastien Doubinsky, presented back-to-back, each with its own cover, like the old Ace Double paperbacks. This is a high-quality hardback from PS Publishing. There are introductions for each novel: one by Lucius Shepard, one by Paul Witcover.

Black Wings II: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror edited by S. T. Joshi contains stories by John Shirley, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Nick Mamatas, and Brian Evenson, just to name a few.

Eat Jellied Eels and Think Distant Thoughts, or The Conspirocrats by Kris Saknussemm. Saknussemm is the author of Zanesville and Enigmatic Pilot.

The Lonely Hunter by John Grant. Grant won a non-fiction Hugo Award and a World Fantasy Award  as co-editor with John Clute of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997).

The Wurms of Blearmouth: A Tale of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach by Steven Erikson is the latest in a series of stories featuring two characters from his enormous Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

Angels and You Dogs by Kathleen Ann Goonan is the first collection of the author's short fiction. Goonan has created a significant body of excellent work, both in novels and short fiction. Her first novel, Queen City Jazz (1994), began her Nanotech Quartet. Her sixth novel, In War Times (2007), won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. It was followed by a sequel, This Shared Dream, which your humble blog correspondent thinks is one of the best SF novels of 2011.

I've been an admirer of Jonathan Carroll's short fiction since reading "Friend's Best Man" in the January 1987 issue of F&SF. It's a pleasure to receive this generous-sized collection of 38 of his stories, The Woman Who Married a Cloud: Collected Stories by Jonathan Carroll. His novels are worth your attention, too.

The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis is the second in his Milkweed series. The first book was Bitter Seeds (2010).

The new fiftieth anniversary edition of The Drowned World by J. G. Ballard, the author's second novel. This edition includes an introduction by Martin Amis.

Links to thinks

Neil Gaiman writes about Gene Wolfe
"... Gene Wolfe remains a hero to me. He's just turned 80, looks after his wife Rosemary, and is still writing deep, complex, brilliant fiction that slips between genres. ... He's the finest living male American writer of SF and fantasy – possibly the finest living American writer. Most people haven't heard of him. And that doesn't bother Gene in the slightest." Read the article.

SF Signal Mind Meld: Which challenging SF/F stories are worth the effort to read?
Some wonderful recommendations, including works by Gene Wolfe, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Neal Stephenson, Cordwainer Smith. As Cat Rambo writes in the comments, add Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, John Crowley, Justina Robson, and Peter Watts. Who would you add? Read the article.

Ursula K. LeGuin reviews Embassytown by China Miéville
"If Miéville has been known to set up a novel on a marvelous metaphor and then not know quite where to take it, he's outgrown that, and his dependence on violence is much diminished. In Embassytown, his metaphor ... works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigor and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being." Read the article.

Rob Latham on J.G. Ballard
"I believe that, with the possible exception of Philip K. Dick, postwar SF has produced no finer writer, and certainly none more attuned to the perplexities and pitfalls of the modern technoscientific world." Read the article. (Edited: link updated.)

Notes on rereading Dhalgren during the Summer of 2010

A guest-post and photo-illustration from Monkeyblake, a simian friend of ours:

Unreal City. Moscow. Set off by a historic heatwave acrid smog from the fires burning across the forests outside the city is seeping into apartments, offices and even the underground  Moscow metro, forcing many Russians to abandon the city. All over Russia, the worst heatwave in memory has blanketed the region in 110 degree or more heat, triggering wildfires, igniting peat bogs in central Russia, and choking Moscow with dense unbreathable smog for days on end. Plumes of smoke have gone as far away as Finland. At the same time, a heatwave has descended on the Eastern Coast and parts of the Great Plains of the United States this August. On the the radio reports of flash floods across Pakistan, thousands killed,  many others swept away and marooned, 600,000 homes destroyed, the worst flooding in 80 years...

"Unreal City," Eliot repeats like a refrain in The Waste Land (1922).  "A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many," He quotes Dante in hell: "I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet..." like cars bumper to bumper fleeing New Orleans during Katrina.

Unreal City. Suburban wasteland. Nameless. I live where the heat usually goes above 110 even into the 120s during summer.  This summer is unusually mild. Rarely above 90. I am reading Dhalgren again this summer. I was a boy of 15 the summer it came out, the summer I read it, lured by the image of the giant sun on the cover and the thickness of the paperback that to my 15 year-old-mind meant quality, meant serious, Russian-serious. The paper I remember smelled quite  good, though it has since browned quite badly. The summer of 1975. 

When the book came out cities were not like Bellona, the city that is Dhalgren -- cities were not abandoned, off the grid, emptied of most of their populace... Describing such a place was Science Fiction: Dhalgren, Stalker.

No longer. Unreal cities are no longer rare. When I read the book in ‘75 no American city had been abandoned like New Orleans to disaster and its own fate. Not in living memory anyway. Not like Europe or elsewhere. Abandoned. Ruined. Emptied, the fleeing, the fled.  Some survivors and hold-outs trapped or lost.  Standing on roofs to keep from drowning. Shitting in stadium corners. A hole ripped in the man-made dome. Unreal New Orleans. 

Dhalgren was my first Unreal City. It helped me -- withstand the shocks of the later ones I became exposed to, Dresden, Hiroshima, Detroit. A homeopathic post-apocalyptic gem or germ. A shot in the arm for a 15 year old.

Why am I rereading it now? Harder to answer -- and more personal -- the kind of ruins you see around you at 50. A booster shot maybe. That and Samuel R. Delany was suppose to come and visit where I live to receive a prestigious Science Fiction award. We waited for weeks foolishly hopeful after the award was announced that he just might come. He declined. This place, nameless, too much of a wasteland even for Delany.*

As a genre descended from the Gothic, science fiction has many ruined landscapes to roam around in.  Post-apocalyptic novels are made from them. The gritty winds blasting the streets brownstone tenements of 1984. J.G. Ballard's divine books, The Drought and The Drowned World are alike post-apocalyptic and set in ruins. 

Some are even as beautiful as Dhalgren. Though they have plot. Things they say, mean. Things happen in Dhalgren, sure, but really, Dhalgren feels more like a place than a story. A landscape that is coextensive. Not a narrative, an unfolding. As a place, it is one of the most vivid places in letters you can roam in. Roam like the Kidd. You don't care if things happen or don’t happen, don’t care where you go or don’t go, you are happy to forget yourself for a while, keep reading, keep roaming, all 879 pages and then read again.

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*Though the guy who is getting the same prestigious award, the Eaton, the guy with a big mouth who must scream, is coming (though few I know can reread him, though we try, no longer 15). He hated Dhalgren by the way.

Linky Establishment

Kim Stanley Robinson profile in the Los Angeles Times:

Some of the highlights are quotes from colleagues.

Terry Bisson: "He's sort of a high-modernist bohemian. But he's pretty middle-class about it too."

Karen Joy Fowler: "He believes that problems can be solved, and he sees the first step as imagining ways they might be solved. He is not interested in councils of despair."

Robinson, referencing his new novel Galileo's Dream (Spectra, 2009): Climate-change rejecters and free-market ideologues "have done just what the Catholic Church did with Galileo. They've made the wrong choice and are going to have to crawl away from it, but the damage will have been done." (read the Los Angeles Time article)

China Miéville on The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard:
"In Ballard . . . the passive voice is part of an invocation of paranoid totality and helps create a baleful world stripped of human agency in which things occur and are done to things."

"Ballard's cool distance does not end at the bedroom door: if anything, what goes on behind that door seems to be dreamlike and abstract fucking, and it spills back out and affects everything else. Investigations of the pornographizing drive as much as an expression of it, this porn is all metaporn."

"Ballard's ambivalence is one of the reasons he is a diagnostician, not a dystopian, and a brilliant one."

(Read the article in The Nation. Be prepared to click through four times to read the whole thing due to irritating website design.)

Best SF and Fantasy of 2009:
Jeff VanderMeer expanded his earlier best of the year list (here) and added commentary: Expanded list. 

International SF and Fantasy:

Jeff VanderMeer compiled a much-needed best of the year overview of international science fiction.

Best Books of the Decade:

Both Jeff VanderMeer and Matthew Cheney have done a brave thing and compiled their lists of the best books they've read over the past decade. These are fascinating and reward close attention.

Jeff VanderMeer's decade and Matthew Cheney's decade.

These Links are not Baroque

Lord of Light
Here’s a Guardian article by Sam Jordison that finds a connection between a failed attempt to make a feature film out of Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) and the so-called Canadian Caper that spirited embassy workers out of Iran in 1979-80. By the way, it’s a review of Lord of Light, which asks the question, “Is this book profound, or daft – or both?” SF Strangelove votes for both.

A New Gormenghast novel
Mervyn Peake’s wife and long-time collaborator, Maeve, wrote a fourth book in the Gormenghast series (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, Titus Alone) shortly after his death in 1968, according to the Telegraph. The manuscript was discovered recently by a granddaughter in the attic of her south London home.

John Clute on Galileo’s Dream
In John Clute’s first column at his new venue, Strange Horizons, he essays Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Galileo’s Dream. “Galileo is a stunning creation, a histrion utterly real to the eye, a porridge of sensation who turns on a dime into icon.”

Christopher Hitchens on J.G. Ballard
Calling him “our great specialist in catastrophe,” Hitchens, in an Atlantic article, celebrates Ballard’s bleak deadpan humor, his readiness to imagine a future without human survival.

A Collection of Links

Huffington Post has launched a new Books section, with a lead-off column by section editor Amy Hertz, prompting discussion in the science fiction community by Adrienne Martini at Locus Rountable and Niall Harrison at Torque Control.

Charles Stross on “Why I hate Star Trek.” Scripts using “tech the tech” confirm my worst fears about how Star Trek: The Next Generation was written. Stross says, “It's the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel” and he’s just getting started.

A pair of interesting articles online from the Los Angeles Times:

            The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard. Amusingly, the review dances around the title of the memorable Ballard story about Ronald Reagan, an utterly caustic and painfully prescient little masterpiece. Ballard is sadly underappreciated here in America. This collection is essential for any science fiction aficionado.
      Surprised author Tim Powers finds himself setting sail with “Pirates of the Caribbean.” Apparently the next movie in the Pirates series will be based, at least in part, on Powers’ novel On Stranger Tides (Ace, 1987). The article, by Geoff Boucher, now includes a correction and acknowledgement to yours truly, SF Strangelove, for his one line description of Powers’ novel Declare (William Morrow, 2001).


     Edit:

     At Sci Fi Wire, John Clute weighs in with a review of The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard: 
     "(H)is genius could almost be defined as a kind of preternatural alertness . . . Ballard seemed almost superhumanly awake to the flavor of the disaster of the world . . . Ballard is the great poet of the belatedness of the uncanny . . . The world is amnesia . . . "
     The nonpareil critic of science fiction, Clute has found a subject to match his wit.