Reviewing is itself a guilt-ridden pastime. Not because you’ve the power to ruin a writer’s reputation…because well, you don’t. At most you’ve the power to connect a few readers with books they might like, but that’s about it. No the guilt is all about keeping up. First you suffer from reading pile guilt, then you get to enjoy un-reviewed-book guilt. Not that I’m complaining. Ok, a little. We’re in it for the access to new books and authors and having to provide some sort of value is totally reasonable. Not only that, but most of us really enjoy writing reviews…it’s just that being naturally lazy, it’s easier to open up/download the next book on the stack and be off in a distant corner of the galaxy/realm/backyard fighting aliens/zombies/corporations/demons because we’re the only one that can save the day. Sigh.
The hard part is getting started. Once you get over that, you’ve got it made. Reviewers are heroic characters, wielding our mightier than the light-saber word processors to exhort the good and vanquish the bad. Or at least to give readers a sense of who might enjoy what, because there are no absolutes in taste, and times change. Here’s a funny thing about style and today’s writing. It’s gone fractal.
What’s good writing mean? There are no doubt still schools out there that will tell you they can tell quality by the structure and style of a piece, and even show some sort of linear progression in writing, but in genre writing, my main area of interest, the influence of classic works, still has impact, while not offering constraint. After a few decades of fusion within genre, we’re now seeing a lot of fusion from without…I’m thinking of the “Jane Austen and Zombies” realm here, though there’s really never been a shortage of genre blending pastiche. Hey, I even tried to write a Rex Stout on the Moon story once, but I’m a reviewer, not a storyteller, and it fell apart after a page or two. I still like the idea though.
Getting off the track there a bit though.
Athony "Buck" Roger first appeared in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. Had Gernsback been able to see into the future, he might have chosen to feature it on the cover, ratehr than the Frank R. Paul illustration for E. E. "Doc" Smith's "The Skylark of Space," his first published story.
Yesterday I was in my storage unit, where most of my books are, at least until we move into a house. I was looking for a copy of “SnowCrash” by Neil Stephenson for a co-worker whose boyfriend has undoubtedly already read “Neuromancer”, which while brilliant, rates below SC. IMNSHO. My fingers pulled out a copy of “Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Nolan Ryan (1928)” which I’m not sure I’d actually read before. You might be more familiar with it by the main character’s name in the serials that came later, Buck Rogers.
“Elsewhere I have set down, for whatever interest they have in this, the 25th Century, my personal recollections of the 20th Century.
Now it occurs to me that my memories of the 25th Century may have an equal interest 500 years from now–particularly in view of that unique perspective from which I have seen the 25th Century, entering it as I did, in one leap across a gap of 492 years.
This statement requires elucidation. There are still many in the world who are not familiar with my unique experience. I should state therefore, that I, Anthony Rogers, am, so far as I know the only man alive whose normal span of life has been spread over a period of 573 years. To be precise, I lived the first twenty-nine years of my life between 1898 and 1927; the rest since 2419. The gap between these two, a period of nearly a five hundred years, I spent in a state of suspended animation, free from the ravages of catabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on my physical or mental faculties.”
From the Prologue: Armageddon 2419 A.D. by Nolan Ryan http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601821h.html
Now, your reaction to that may be that it’s overly formal, self-consciously sciencey, and overly expository. But if you’ve been reading a fair amount of SteamPunk, Jane Austen Crossovers, or Historical Alternate History or Fabulist Fantasy (I’m thinking of Michael Swanwick’s Jack Faust here) you’re probably able to drop yourself into its alternate reading mode without batting an eye.
As the future moves farther and farther along, reading the fantastic become more and more an exercise of putting oneself in the period that the work was written in and looking to see beyond the period voice to the message to discover whether or not it informs our current understanding, which for me, it does.
Human drama remains pretty much the same, whether it’s Homer, Gilbert and Sullivan, Buck Rogers, Raymond Chandler, or Simon Morden. BTW, if you don’t know Simon Morden, prepare yourself for the Petrovich/New Machine Jihad Trilogy, starting in April 2011, which I’m hoping gets the viral push it deserves. Though Morden seems to have the internet thing down pretty well. Check out his anime video (below) which is even funnier after you’ve read the books as you’ll be able to agree with both characters simultaneously.
I may have jumped the track completely by now, but I’ve got to keep going because I’ve got other stuff to do. Actually, I started this post with the intention of listing all the books I’ve read this month with a few lines about each. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Really sad, because I’ve been having a great time eReading both Amazon’s cheaper SF offerings, many of which are wicked good fun, and the aforementioned Morden stuff, courtesy of Jack Womack at Orbit and NetGalley. (Hey Tor, Pyr, Baen…were you waiting for an invitation?).
Ok I’ve posted my reading picks, all of which I’ve enjoyed, in the flash widget at the top. I’ll actually be writing reviews for them. Somewhere. If I can just get them started.