This is an example of an awesome concept screwed up by extremely bad narration and characterisation. Since it's a translated book, I will condone the This is an example of an awesome concept screwed up by extremely bad narration and characterisation. Since it's a translated book, I will condone the writing (maybe a lot got lost in the translation) but not the pasteboard characters.
In a small antique basement coffee shop in Tokyo, a customer can go back in time to meet someone, provided they sit in a particular chair, don't move from it, and come back before the coffee gets cold (if they don't, they become ghosts, doomed to haunt that chair for all eternity). They can't change the past. But then what's the use of time travelling? Well, the four interconnected stories in the book explain that.
This novel was adapted from a play. A perceptive reader will notice it even if no one mentions it: because it reads like a transcript. The setting, the appearance of the characters, and their movements within the cafe are explained in detail while their backstory is filled in through lengthy expository passages. The characters are all pasteboard: the reader does not feel any empathy for them. This is understandable, as they would have originally been written for actors to bring to life on the stage. On the print medium, where the story takes place in the reader's mind, they need a bit more fleshing out. And also, the way the author spends pages and pages explaining the feelings of the characters is enough to put one to sleep.
I won't be reading the remaining four novels in this series. There are much better books out there....more
"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spider-webs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so prett
"Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like spider-webs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look so pretty when you see them under a leaf in the morning dew and in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each." - Mrs. Higgler
Indeed.
And when the stories are told by a spider, who is nothing less than a god, they become even more interesting.
Neil Gaiman is an expert in weaving myth with urban fantasy. His gods walk around suburbia, shop in the malls, down a few quick ones in the local pub, and then go on to work miracles. Or in the case of Anansi the spider-god from Akan folklore of Ghana, he goes on to play tricks.
Trickster gods are common among the folktales of all aboriginal people. Anansi came to the West Indies, and then to the USA, on the slave ships; then settled down comfortably in the new country, his tales melding and morphing as they passed down from generation to generation, until he became part of America. But he comes from far, very far...
There are myth-places. They exist, each in their own way. Some of them are overlaid on the world; others exist beneath the world as it is, like an underpainting.
There are mountains. They are the rocky places you will reach before you come to the cliffs that border the end of the world, and there are caves in those mountains, deep caves that were inhabited long before the first men walked the earth.
They are inhabited still.
***
Fat Charlie Nancy an American settled in England, who has a difficult relationship with is his estranged father, who lives in America. Being the butt of all the practical jokes his dad had played on him in childhood, Charlies has grown up into a diffident young man; his lack of self confidence haunting him in all the aspects of his life, preventing him from getting ahead, whether it be work or romance. So it is with a sigh of relief that he hears the news of his father's passing in the USA; he flies across to settle his affairs and bury his ghosts for once and all. There, he learns that his father was actually a god, and that he has a brother who can be summoned by passing the message on to any random spider. Though sceptical, he does exactly that on a whim; and things take a serious turn for the weird. Because his brother "Spider" who materialises is anything but ordinary.
What we have, from then on, is a roller-coaster ride of a novel involving Spider, Charlie, his fiancee Rosie, her gorgon of a mother Mrs. Noah, the pretty police woman Daisy, the elderly pussies Mrs. Dunwiddy and Mrs. Higgler, the wronged Maeve Livingstone and the unspeakable blackguard Grahame Coats. Not to mention various gods such as the cruel and bloodthirsty Tiger (from whom Anansi stole his stories), the terrifying Bird-Woman, and the dead-yet-not-dead Anansi. While the scene shifts from a familiar, almost Wodehousian England to an archetypal America to a quaint West Indies, the mythical land at the beginning of time (or end of time, depending upon one's direction of approach) shimmers just beneath the surface. Magic weaves in and out, and the phantasmagorical tangos with the mundane.
***
The beauty of myth is that it has no beginning or end. You can enter the story anywhere you want, and exit anywhere you want - it will keep on playing in the background, on an endless loop. It is the lodestone from which all art, poetry and stories spring.
Good writers like Gaiman can tap into it, and then they just have to channel the flow through their pen. They literally sing the world into being.
He sang them the song of a boy who was half a god, and who was broken into two by an old woman with a grudge. He sang of his father, he sang of his mother.
He sang of names and words, of the building blocks beneath the real, the worlds that make worlds, the truths beneath the way things are; he sang of appropriate ends and just conclusions for those who would have hurt him and his.
India was left of centre initially, during the Nehruvian Era. During the Indira years, it became authoritariChe Guevara, for me, was a childhood idol.
India was left of centre initially, during the Nehruvian Era. During the Indira years, it became authoritarian and centrist. Rajiv Gandhi moved it slowly to the right, and during the Narasimha Rao/ Manmohan Singh Era, it became unabashedly right liberal. And with the advent of Modi, the country has moved further to the right; it has also become authoritarian, just one notch down from a certain European country under the regime of a guy with a toothbrush moustache.
But my home state of Kerala, located down at the bottom, has remained staunchly liberal. And secular. And left-wing. In fact, we were the first electorate in the world to democratically elect a communist government to power; and it is the only state where the communists are in power now.
My generation grew up hearing the heroic tales of the October Revolution and the Long March. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro et al were our role models. Our sacred texts were Das Kapital| and The Communist Manifesto. And Che, undoubtedly, was the mythical hero. The revolutionary par excellence, who threw away a lucrative career as a doctor; and eschewed a position as a minister in a newborn socialist country, just to plunge into the battlefield to liberate Latin America from the greedy clutches of Uncle Sam - and to die a martyr, looking into the eyes of the American GI who shot him, saying: "Shoot, coward, you are killing only a man."
As I grew older, I understood that truth was a little more nuanced, and that there were no blacks and whites, only greys - and that revolutionaries and communists were not all that they were cracked up to be. But my fascination with Che remained, even when idealistic youth transformed into disillusioned middle-age and then to the current jaded and cynical sixties. Because, you see, this revolutionary is no longer a man but a symbol.
Every hero undergoes a journey. He enters it as a raw novitiate and after the road of trials and tribulations, emerges as a sage. This trope is a staple of most myths and epics, and also of a lot of popular narratives in novels, TV and film. We rarely see it in real life. Che is one of the rare exceptions.
In December 1951, 23-year-old Ernesto Guevara and his friend Alberto Granado, both medical doctors, set off on an epic journey across South America on the latter's Norton 500 bike, named "La Poderosa II". The journey was ostensibly to visit leper colonies and study the disease: the real intention was just to have a good time: two red-blooded Latinos whooping it up, wining, dining and fornicating. But when it ended 1n August 1952, Ernesto had transformed into a man who was deeply disturbed by the distressing history of his unfortunate continent: twice enslaved, once physically by Europe and then economically by the USA, her riches bled dry to fill foreign coffers while her sons and daughters lived in abject misery.
As we read these memoirs which he kept during the journey, we can feel the change almost physically. The initial notes which are mostly about their mischievous escapades, slowly give way to long, thoughtful passages about the condition of the poor in Latin America, and the proletariat in general. For example, see how he describes a sick woman here:
I went to see an old woman with asthma, a customer at La Gioconda. The poor thing was in a pitiful state, breathing the acrid smell of concentrated sweat and dirty feet that filled her room, mixed with the dust from a couple of armchairs, the only luxury items in her house. On top of her asthma, she had a heart condition. It is at times like this, when a doctor is conscious of his complete powerlessness, that he longs for change: a change to prevent the injustice of a system in which only a month ago this poor woman was still earning her living as a waitress, wheezing and panting but facing life with dignity. In circumstances like this, individuals in poor families who can't pay their way become surrounded by an atmosphere of barely disguised acrimony; they stop being father, mother, sister or brother and become a purely negative factor in the struggle for life and consequently, a source of bitterness for the healthy members of the community who resent their illness as if it were a personal insult to those who have to support them. It is there, in the final moments, for people whose farthest horizon has always been tomorrow, that one comprehends the profound tragedy circumscribing the life of the proletariat the world over. In those dying eyes there is a submissive appeal for forgiveness and also, often, a desperate plea for consolation which is lost to the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of mystery surrounding us.
Or a Chilean couple, who couldn't find a decent job and were forced to live a pitiful existence, because they were members of the banned communist party:
There we made friends with a married couple, Chilean workers who were communists. By the light of the single candle illuminating us, drinking mate and eating a piece of bread and cheese, the man's shrunken figure carried a mysterious, tragic air. In his simple and expressive language he recounted his three months in prison, and told us about his starving wife who stood by him with exemplary loyalty, his children left in the care of a kindly neighbor, his fruitless pilgrimage in search of work and his compañeros, mysteriously disappeared and said to be somewhere at the bottom of the sea.
The couple, numb with cold, huddling against each other in the desert night, were a living representation of the proletariat in any part of the world. They had not one single miserable blanket to cover themselves with, so we gave them one of ours and Alberto and I wrapped the other around us as best we could. It was one of the coldest times in my life, but also one which made me feel a little more brotherly toward this strange, for me anyway, human species.
The starving man is willing to share his frugal meal with the bums because "he, too, is a tramp." As Che says, he probably didn't understand what communism meant: but he could understand the slogan, "bread for the poor"!
By the time they reach Cuzco and Machu Picchu in Peru, Guevara has become acutely conscious of the rich Indian past of the continent, which the Spanish conquistadors destroyed mercilessly. However, he says that the hybrid culture that the mixing of the invaders with the indigenous people created was not like the insular one of North America, with the natives totally segregated and marginalised: Latin America was one nation, one people, even though separated into different countries through arbitrarily drawn boundaries. When Che talks of a defeated people who live on when there is nothing to live for, just because "living has become a habit", we understand the depth of compassion which kindled the fire within.
Read this book to understand the making of a revolutionary....more
India is a beautiful country if you are privileged (read upper-caste, rich and preferably male). Otherwise, it's a sewer pit. The only thing any rightIndia is a beautiful country if you are privileged (read upper-caste, rich and preferably male). Otherwise, it's a sewer pit. The only thing any right-thinking youth (who doesn't belong in the above-mentioned category) will want to do with respect to the country is get out as fast as possible, to one of those "phoren"* paradises like the USA, Canada or Western Europe.
But of course, the prosperity one imagines exists in those countries is also the province of the privileged - something one learns to one's disadvantage after the crossing is made. The grass is always greener on the other side.
This the tale of a handful of young men - two from Punjab and one from Bihar - who reach England, their promised land, only to see their dreams turn into nightmares. It is also the tale of a Sikh girl, a citizen of the UK, whose tale becomes unintentionally entwined with tales of these three runaways.
Tarlochan Kumar (Tochi) is a Chamaar from Bihar - one of the most vilified and victimised castes of India - who has come to England illegally to make money by hook or crook, to offset the disadvantages of birth. His whole family has been murdered by "upper" caste goons. Randeep Sanghera is a callow youth, whose comfortable middle class world has gone up in smoke because of his father's mental illness and an act of sexual indiscretion in college which gets him expelled. He is on a fake marriage visa provided by Narinder Kaur, a pious young Sikh woman who is determined to provide a life to at least one person through this personal sacrifice. And finally, there is Avtar Singh Nijjar, who has sold a kidney and taken money from a loan shark to get to England on a student visa, to earn money and support his family at home as well as carve out a future for himself. He is in love with Randeep's sister.
This is an essentially bleak tale, set in the twilight world of illegal immigrants who, as underpaid workers, support the economy of Britain. There are villains aplenty here in the shape of money-grubbing employers, but no heroes (except for Narinder, whose supremely innocent saccharine-sweet goody-goody nature is sometimes puke-inducing, to tell the truth). These young men fight, cheat and steal to keep body and soul together and to keep their dream of "Vilayat"** alive. But all said and done, they are not totally unlikeable, because in such circumstances, we feel that we would have also done the same.
The story is well-written, and once picked up, the book is hard to put down. But at some point of time, the reader feels that it could all have been condensed into a thinner volume. One does not have to read pages and pages about the hardships of the protagonists to appreciate the inhuman nature of the world out there. And the ending, when it comes, is surprisingly downbeat - it's as though the author said: "Enough! Let me stop this!", put down his pen, attached an epilogue, and send the manuscript on to the publishers.
3.5 stars. ------- * foreign ** archaic Indian term for England...more
There was a time when we lived in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. (The shadow is still there, I must say, though it's a bit faint.) What would happThere was a time when we lived in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust. (The shadow is still there, I must say, though it's a bit faint.) What would happen after a nuclear war was anybody's guess: the only thing everyone pretty much agreed on, was that nothing would be left. The earth would be a radioactive wasteland.
Dystopian film-makers had a field day with the concept. The stunning impact of a thousand suns lighting up at the same time; the images of people getting fried to a crisp; and the slow, lingering death of the "survivors" were too good for Hollywood to pass up, I imagine. And watching it on the screen was a sort of catharsis, because once the lights came on we could go back to our safe, cozy lives.
But what happens when the bomb invades our drawing rooms? That is what Raymond Briggs explores in this graphic novel, through the lives of an old couple in the British countryside, James and Hilda. It is set in the cold war era, when a war was possible any day. James is a conscientious citizen: he has trust in the "powers that be". He is sure that they will take care of everything, including showing the "Russkies" their place. And now with "commuters" handling everything, there is no chance of error.
James creates a "fallout shelter" based on the instructions given in a pamphlet put out by the municipal authorities - a pathetically inadequate one, but then, he doesn't know that - and asks Hilda to crawl into it with him. Hilda is more concerned with the practicalities of their existence, both during and after the bomb, and is constantly bickering with James on the finer things. But they do manage to survive the initial blast, when it comes - but it would have been better if they didn't...
This graphic novel literally hits you with the power of a nuke. Unlike those Hollywood movies which you can tune out once you reach your homes, this brings the disaster right into your drawing rooms. By concentrating on an elderly couple who live away from things, and placing all the violence offstage, it makes you feel the horror even more: the slow destruction and disintegration of the world which you knew, never ever to return. The couple's reminiscences of the Second World War and its aftermath makes it even more poignant, because there is not going to be any return to normalcy ever again.
In a war, there are no winners or losers. Only victims....more
Sorry, Mr. David Walliams, when I want to read Roald Dahl, I will read Roald Dahl. With Quentin Blake's illustrations, Mr. Tony Ross. Imitations are nSorry, Mr. David Walliams, when I want to read Roald Dahl, I will read Roald Dahl. With Quentin Blake's illustrations, Mr. Tony Ross. Imitations are not required....more
This book found me, more than four decades after I purchased it. I was cleaning my library, with a view to getting rid of some unwanted books, and thiThis book found me, more than four decades after I purchased it. I was cleaning my library, with a view to getting rid of some unwanted books, and this tome fell of the shelf, saying: "Hello! I am still unread." It started sidling up to me, in the hope that I will pick it up.
I was initially doubtful. The blurb told me that this was a tale of intrigue in the former Soviet Union, written by an American novelist. Trash, I told myself. American anti-communist propaganda disguised as fiction. I have been off these cold-war thrillers for quite some time now.
But the poor thing looked so forlorn, lying on the floor, so I just didn't have the heart to abandon it. I picked it up, ready to drop it the moment the going got nauseous.
Wonder of wonders, I completed it. I rather liked it, too.
***
Don't get me wrong - I don't consider this a great book. It has its good points and its flaws. But the story pulls you in from page one and keeps you engaged.
Three skaters - two men and one woman - have been murdered in Gorky Park, in the middle of Moscow. Their faces have been cut away, and fingertips removed to prevent identification. For Chief Investigator Arkady Renko, the crime smacks of state intrigue and he is sure that it would be taken away by Major Pribluda of the KGB. He only has to make a show of investigating, and dig up enough evidence to show that state security has been compromised.
But to his surprise, Prosecutor Andrei Iamskoy keeps him on the case. Excellent investigator that he is, Renko starts uncovering foreign involvement, smuggling and international intrigue involving some really important people, and issues which could affect relations between the USSR and the USA: immediately making him persona non grata. Running from the law and the villains at the same time, Arkady further complicates his life by falling in love with Irina Asanova, a dissident. From then on, it's the familiar Hitchcockian tale of a single man against the system.
What I liked about the novel was the way the way the author built up its world and its characters. I don't know how familiar Martin Cruz Smith was with the Soviet Union, but his descriptions are detailed and authoritative. And all his characters are finely rounded and believable, including the unimportant ones.
What I disliked was the way a mini-climax was inserted midway, after which the story slowed down to a crawl, before it built up steam for the final assault. In a thriller, one expects the pace to be maintained.
There is no "aha" moment - the secret comes to light slowly, through painstaking police procedure. But that's one of the attractions of the novel, not a drawback.
I would give it 3.5 stars. Did not quite make it to a 4....more
I had loved the L. Somi Roy's previous book, And That is Why: Manipuri Myths Retold. Here, in collaboration with Dr. Thangjam Hindustani Devi, he is dI had loved the L. Somi Roy's previous book, And That is Why: Manipuri Myths Retold. Here, in collaboration with Dr. Thangjam Hindustani Devi, he is doing the same for Manipuri folktales - though in the case of this mountain kingdom, there is a considerable overlap.
One thing I love about these retellings is the way the authors directly address an imaginary, nameless child sitting in front of them. According to the situation in the story, he/ she is called "My Brave One", "Dear Curious One", etc. as though in response to the child's reaction. It gives the tales a dynamism.
Another thing is how Roy and Devi make the stories contemporary. The king has an army having AK-47s, AR-15s, Leopard tanks and Stinger missiles. The princess refuses her animal groom saying: "Do I have any say here at all? This is the patriarchal nonsense our teacher taught us about!" A feminist princess, indeed.
The third thing is the sheer delightful quality of the prose.
Dear Gassy One, this was the granddaddy of all farts. The earth trembled. It was a thermo-nuclear explosion of a fart. The needle flew off the seismograph at Cape Canaveral. A tsunami rose off the coast of Sumatra. The large earthen pot was shattered to bits. The shards flew off in all directions. Birds dropped from the sky. Squirrels were flattened against the tree trunks. The monkeys were blown up to the treetops in Mahabali Wood where they dangled by their tails, and the little brown monkey was blasted into space.
'That felt good,' the old man said with a satisfied smile.
Have you ever encountered a fart described so poetically?...more
A hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth's population, but a few hundred rebels managed to steal a sp
A hostile civilization from a nearby galaxy has taken control of Earth and enslaved Earth's population, but a few hundred rebels managed to steal a space station and escape. Dr. Eleven and his colleagues slipped Station Eleven through a wormhole and are hiding in the uncharted reaches of deep space. This is all a thousand years in the future.
Station Eleven is the size of Earth's moon and was designed to resemble a planet, but it's a planet that can chart a course through galaxies and requires no sun. The station's artificial sky was damaged in the war, however, so on Station Eleven's surface it is always sunset or twilight or night. There was also damage to a number of vital systems involving Station Eleven's ocean levels, and the only land remaining is a series of islands that once were mountaintops.
There has been a schism. There are people who, after fifteen years of perpetual twilight, long only to go home, to return to Earth and beg for amnesty, to take their chances under alien rule. They live in the Undersea, an interlinked network of vast fallout shelters under Station Eleven's oceans. There are three hundred of them now.
This is not the premise of this novel. It is the premise of a comic book series one of the characters in this novel plan to create. A series which dies on the vine (so to speak), except for a limited edition of ten copies each of two volumes, because the world goes to hell on a handcart unexpectedly due to a pandemic that wipes out 99% of humanity.
But Station Eleven survives as a metaphor.
***
The opening scene of the novel is set in Toronto, where the aging star Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack during the climax of King Lear, in which he is performing the title role. Immediately afterwards, people start dying of a flu emanating out of Georgia: it's insanely contagious and death occurs within 48 hours of anyone contacting it, except for the 1% who is miraculously spared. Civilisation soon unravels, and we have a handful of stragglers wandering across the nightmare dystopian landscape.
All this is pretty old hat. What makes Station Eleven stand out is not the premise or the tale, but how it is told.
From Arthur's death, the book follows four characters: Jeevan Chaudhury, a papparazzo turned paramedic who tried to give CPR to Arthur when he collapses; Kirsten Raymonde, an eight-year-old girl who is part of the play, and who is presented the Dr. Eleven comic book by Arthur; Miranda, Arthur's first wife who is the creator of the comic; and Clark, Arthur's childhood friend. The timeline shifts between the Arthur's past to Arthur's present (when he dies), and jumps twenty years into the future to show Kirsten, moving across a devastated and dangerous USA (menaced by a "prophet" and his cult) as part of a travelling drama troupe, performing Shakespeare's plays. As the perspective shifts from person to person, the story comes together like fragments of a shattered mirror being painstakingly reassembled.
Station Eleven and Shakespeare are the two metaphors that hold this novel together. While the comic book shows us a dystopia set in the future with its gadgets and gizmos, it exists in a world where technology has died a slow, lingering death (its artifacts like dead cellphones and laptops, useless credit cards and defunct passports being preserved in the "Museum of Civilization" by Clark). There is no electricity, no running water and no medicines. People survive by hunting deer with bows and arrows (guns have almost disappeared). To the children born after the pandemic, the dead cars and planes and the blank computer screens are leftovers from a past which never existed for them.
People prefer Shakespeare's plays because of their timeless nature. They are from a distant past which could be an image of the dystopian present. They can be performed anywhere, even without costumes, since the make-believe is so evident. The play happens in the minds of the audience. Even many of the members of the troupe have lost their names - they are known by names like second guitar, third cello etc. "All this world is a stage - and we are all players" - isn't it?
But at the heart of the novel is humanity: how we pull together, even in the time of total despair. About how we are all interconnected, across time and space. How, even in times of utter chaos, there will be a Dr. Eleven to ferry us over the rough waters. And how art and literature will always sustain us....more
"They are styled Birds of Paradise because when discovered various and most extravagant fables were reported concerning them; amongst which, it was lo
"They are styled Birds of Paradise because when discovered various and most extravagant fables were reported concerning them; amongst which, it was long generally believed, that whence they came, or whither they went was unknown; that they lived on celestial dew; that they were perpetually on the wing, taking no rest but in the air; were never taken alive, and consequently could only be obtained when they fell dead upon the earth; so that the vulgar imagining them to drop out of Heaven or Paradise, and being struck with the beauty of their shape and plumage, bestowed on them the singular name by which they are still distinguished.”
- C. Wrey Gardiner, ‘The Flowering Moment’
The ‘Bird of Paradise’ of the above passage is a myth: however, there exists a certain variety of bird by that name in the tropical jungles of Indonesia and New Guinea which boasts of exotic plumage, which is the only correct zoological facet of the legend. Of such fables is our collective race memory composed, which gives us sustenance in this drab, mundane and dispiriting universe.
Paul Scott writes in metaphors. Not only is his prose cloyingly rich with them, but his characters, situations and even whole novels are metaphors for a past which existed only in the imagination of the privileged few who lived through it – the vanished splendour of the British Raj in India. India was a hell-hole of poverty, deprivation and daily violence for the majority of Indians: the brilliant colours of the decadent aristocracy that most colonial gentlemen fondly remember belonged to a miniscule segment of the population. This was the India that Britain was trying to preserve, and this was why they lost.
William Conway, the narrator of this novel, is the son of a former political agent and resident of the British Empire, Sir Robert Conway. William has been forcibly removed from his beloved India at the age of ten and compelled to join his uncle’s business (most probably because his father sensed that his son won’t have a future in India, with the winds changing); an action for which he has not forgiven his father. War cuts short his commercial career, and after a horrendous interval in a Japanese POW camp and a disastrous marriage and a divorce, William sets out to chase his childhood dream – to discover the famed bird of paradise.
For this, he journeys to India, where he had seen the birds first, stuffed and hung lifeless in a cage in the palace of his childhood friend Krishi, the prince of Jundapur. There he meets Krishi and his childhood sweetheart Dora – the threesome that used to be: but now, somehow dead. In the lifeless fossil of his childhood friendships, William also discovers the rotting birds. However, he travels on to the island of Manoba, where we find him, writing his memoirs, still trying to catch a glimpse of the birds of paradise.
Paul Scott’s prose is rich, thick and almost gooey. It sticks to the palate of your intellect and has to be scratched off in multiple attempts. This makes reading him a chore sometimes. Scott stops just short of Virginia Woolf. And like I said before, all of it is metaphor.
I absolutely loved this style in the Raj Quartet. It was perfect for capturing the fading days of the British Raj in India, through the intertwined lives of multiple personalities. But used on such a small canvas as in this novel, it just becomes too rich: too much to digest in a rather short novel of 200+ pages.
Scott’s atmosphere is brilliant: his characterisation, superb: and his prose, delectable. But in this novel, I felt it was all a bit of too much dressing on what is, after all, an eminently forgettable story....more
I love these "Golden Age" SF stories. They had uncomplicated plots and straightforward storytelling - also science reigned supreme in them (though it I love these "Golden Age" SF stories. They had uncomplicated plots and straightforward storytelling - also science reigned supreme in them (though it was never complex). They were mostly set in the future, and almost all stories had space travel. So what if the characterisation was a bit flat, and there were no philosophical questions asked? You could enjoy a thumping good story.
This enchanting collection contains ten tales, all set in the future.
1. The Tinkler by Poul Anderson: A cautionary tale for kids who visit their relatives on an unfamiliar planet. Mildly enjoyable.
2. Superiority by Arthur C. Clarke: The master comes up with a brilliant story on the perils of too much technological sophistication. It resonated with me especially, since I encounter this problem every day as a specialist in Industrial Safety!
3. McIlvaine's Star by August Derleth: A humdrum story about extraterrestrials - till the very end, when the tale takes an unexpected turn. The ambiguous ending is very effectively done.
4. Brother's Beyond the Void by Paul F. Fairman: The perils of taking extraterrestrials lightly. Rather predictable.
5. Beautiful, Beautiful, Beautiful by Stuart Friedman: A tiny philosophical tale which questions the nature of beauty. I felt it was a bit weak.
6. The Dead Planet by Edmond Hamilton: A space exploration story in the classical mould. Predictable towards the end, but enjoyable all the same.
7. Like a Bird, Like a Fish by H. B. Hickey: Mind-bending time travel plus religion in a Mexican village. It might be a bit difficult to wrap your head around the concept, but the tale is so well-written that you can't stop in-between.
8. The Gardener by Margaret St. Clair: I have a hard time deciding whether this is an SF story masquerading as horror or vice-versa. An arrogant man getting his just desserts for the breaking of a taboo is old hat; but the tale is anything but! Chilling.
9. Null-P by William Tenn: A hilarious satire on humanity. I never thought I would see statistics used to such devastating effect in fiction! My favourite in the collection.
10. Strange Harvest by Donald Wandrei: A weird theme about sentient vegetation, weirdly executed. A fun read.
Overall verdict: worth the while of any SF aficionado....more
