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Post by EdoBosnar on May 1, 2022 13:39:37 GMT -5
MindswapRobert Sheckley, 1966  Sometime in the future (maybe a century from now, it’s not made very clear), a young man named Marvin Flynn, bored with life in upstate New York, decides he wants to travel – not just the boring touristy stuff on the actual planet of Earth, but somewhere farther afield. Space travel is way too expensive for ordinary people, so one way to accomplish this is to do a mindswap – which means trading consciousness for a fixed time, like a few weeks, with someone from another planet anywhere in the galaxy. Marvin makes the arrangement through an agency to swap minds with a gentleman from Mars, but once the swap is complete he learns that he’s been swindled. The guy who took his body on Earth is an unscrupulous criminal who immediately absconds off planet. Marvin, meanwhile, learns that the body he assumed on Mars was already contracted to another individual earlier, so he has to vacate it. And thus his troubles start, as he goes mind-hoping far and wide and getting into all kinds of misadventures while a Martian private decective tries to track down his body. Mixed feelings about this one: the premise is certainly intriguing, and initially it’s a pretty entertaining story, but then Sheckley took some narrative detours about halfway through the book that made the story kind of drag. Mainly it’s because Marvin at that point falls victim to ‘metaphoric deformation’, which means his mind starts to alter his perceptions to something more familiar in drastically alien environments. Effectively this means he initially sees everything and everyone as a town in the American Southwest close to the Mexican border and its denizens then later he goes into a sort of Three Musketeers fantasy. It gets a little too clever for its own good and actually becomes tiresome. Also, there’s a lot of dialogue rendered in a horribly stereotypical phonetically spelled Mexican accent, as well as occasional use of several anti-gay and racist slurs. Don’t think I’ll be rushing to read any more of Sheckley’s novels (although I may give more of his short stories a chance, as liked a number of those from the book I reviewed above).
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Post by Roquefort Raider on May 3, 2022 14:18:31 GMT -5
An inadvertently hilarious line found its way in Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. In it, a scientist says something like "the universe came into being around 14 billion years before the current era".
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 4, 2022 9:00:04 GMT -5
War of the Wing-Men by Poul Anderson  I haven't been much of a fan of Anderson in the past.. but this one has a really cool cover (and in fact, depicts the actual first scene from the book) and seemed like a pretty straight 'Sword and Planet' adventure. Turns out to be FAR better than that... while it looks like the standard 50s set up.. action hero, girl in distress, old mentor type... it breaks the mold quite a bit. Nicholas van Rijn is a fantastic character, and sneaks up on you as the hero. The world is much more complicated than most as well. Unlike Big Planet, where the different peoples and races meant where just thrown together and meant to be small obstacles, here we have to developed rival cultures at war, with neither clearly good or evil. It can be amazing what some of the old masters can do in a small number of pages... good world building doesn't have to be epic it seems to be thorough and effective. Highly Recommended.
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Post by berkley on May 4, 2022 13:19:40 GMT -5
War of the Wing-Men by Poul Anderson I haven't been much of a fan of Anderson in the past.. but this one has a really cool cover (and in fact, depicts the actual first scene from the book) and seemed like a pretty straight 'Sword and Planet' adventure. Turns out to be FAR better than that... while it looks like the standard 50s set up.. action hero, girl in distress, old mentor type... it breaks the mold quite a bit. Nicholas van Rijn is a fantastic character, and sneaks up on you as the hero. The world is much more complicated than most as well. Unlike Big Planet, where the different peoples and races meant where just thrown together and meant to be small obstacles, here we have to developed rival cultures at war, with neither clearly good or evil. It can be amazing what some of the old masters can do in a small number of pages... good world building doesn't have to be epic it seems to be thorough and effective. Highly Recommended.
What's the other novel in this Ace Double, out of curiosity?
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 4, 2022 21:19:19 GMT -5
I'm not sure what the deal is there... the one I have is a later edition with the same cover. (has a higher price on it), and it doesn't say it's a double.. BUT... the page count on this according to good reads is the same as the one I have. Wikipedia says the other book should be another story by Anderson... Snows of Ganymede. If you look THAT up, it shows the D-303 code with a different cover.
That would make me think perhaps this shows the back cover, but it's the wrong way around. So I wonder if it started as a double, then they split it up?
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Post by berkley on May 4, 2022 22:30:45 GMT -5
I'm not sure what the deal is there... the one I have is a later edition with the same cover. (has a higher price on it), and it doesn't say it's a double.. BUT... the page count on this according to good reads is the same as the one I have. Wikipedia says the other book should be another story by Anderson... Snows of Ganymede. If you look THAT up, it shows the D-303 code with a different cover. That would make me think perhaps this shows the back cover, but it's the wrong way around. So I wonder if it started as a double, then they split it up?
Goodreads might have made a mistake on the page count, or just given the count of the individual novel instead of the two combined. Looking at the first Ace Double near to hand on my shelves, it has the same number, F-133, on both covers, A. Bertram Chandler's The Rim of Space and John Brunner's Secret Agent of Terra. The covers and text to each novel are upside down to one another, so there's no real back and front, just two "front" covers.
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Post by wildfire2099 on May 6, 2022 22:59:22 GMT -5
Kaiju Preservation Society
by John Scalzi
This book really surprised me. I expected it to be in the vein of Redshirts, only for Kaiju. A fund spoof/homage that makes you laugh.
It definitely made me laugh a couple times, but, shockingly, it's actually very old school sci fi. The plot and set up could have easily been written in the 60s.. I've, in fact, read books with a similar framework, but with aliens instead of kaiju.
There's also some science.. Scalzi actually tries to come up with science on HOW they can exist. I didn't expect that at all.
In fact, I would have been very happy reading several hundred pages of the KPS just going about their days and researching stuff. I know, I usually hate that sort of thing.. I guess I just really like Scalzi's style. Sure, every character is the same, but it's a fun character, so I'll allow it.
To be honest, the action part of the story at the end? I could have done without it. Things didn't have to go wrong and get fixed... it was definitely my least favorite (but fastest to read through) part of the book. I guess if you write a book about kaiju they have to stomp a little something, after all.
The back of the book talks about how this book was basically a 'pop song' to get him out of a COVID-funk, and I can totally see that. It's a darn fun book. He's got a bit of current event-ish politics in there, but he's on my team so I'm good with it.
Based on the story of how the book came to be, I doubt it'll happen, but I sure would love a sequel!
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 7, 2022 3:01:34 GMT -5
Scalzi is a really good writer; I pretty much inhaled the entire Old Man's War series a number of years ago. I keep meaning to read more of his stuff, but never get around to it (mainly just because all of the other books I've got piled up).
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Confessor
CCF Mod Squad
Not Bucky O'Hare!
Posts: 10,145 
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Post by Confessor on May 7, 2022 9:49:11 GMT -5
How the English Establishment Framed Stephen Ward by Caroline Kennedy and Phillip Knightley.  I'm not sure how well known the Profumo Affair is in the United States, but over here in Britain it is still a very famous moral and national security scandal from the early '60s, which was one of the defining events of the decade. To give you a short summing up of what happened, 19-year-old London model/show girl/call girl Christine Keeler began an affair with the married Secretary of State for War Jack Profumo at the same time as she was sleeping with a Soviet naval attaché, Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, thus creating a Cold War national security concern. Keeler met both Profumo and Ivanov through her friendship with Stephen Ward, a society osteopath with connections to the political and civilian establishment – and even the British royal family! – who had a penchant for procuring gorgeous young ladies for the entertainment of his powerful friends. Profumo lied to the House of Commons about his relationship with Keeler, but he got found out, and the story exploded into a national scandal in the press in 1963, which resulted in Ward ending up in court on trumped up charges of living off of immoral earnings (essentially pimping). As the title of this book suggests, Ward was ostracised by his high-powered society friends, hounded by corrupt police officers, and demonised in the press – in short, he was sacrificed by an establishment that needed someone to blame the whole sordid affair on (at this point, the fact that Ward was wrongly convicted and fitted up by the government and police is beyond any doubt). As his trial came to a close, Ward took his own life before the verdict was announced. The scandal ruined Profomo, turned Keeler into a figure of notoriety and disdain, and damaged Prime Minister Harold MacMillan's credibility, contributing to his resignation in late 1963 and the defeat of the Conservative government in the 1964 general election. Given how famous the story is in Britain, along with its status as one of the pivotal moments of the Swingin' Sixties, there is a paucity of decent books on the subject. Certainly, both of Keeler's own autobiographies are filled with factual errors and often contradict each other on key events. Kennedy and Knightley's book (which was originally published under the title An Affair of State: The Profumo Case and the Framing of Stephen Ward, though this edition has been updated and expanded) is widely regarded as the best all round examination of the case and it's certainly an entertaining and often fascinating read. Although the authors are clearly on "Team Ward", they give a very balanced account of the whole affair for the most part. Certainly, they don't shy away from pointing out what a strange person Ward was or speculating on what peculiar kicks he got out of procuring beautiful young girls for his rich and influential friends. That said, the authors seem reluctant to even entertain the idea that Ward himself might have bent the truth during his trial about certain aspects of his relationship with Keeler, or the goings on between her and the many important establishment figures who frequented his Wimpole Mews flat or his lodgings at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire. I mean, Keeler, Profumo, Mandy Rice-Davies, the police, the various prostitute witnesses, the aristocrats, and the politicians all lied, so why not Ward too? He certainly had a motive to, if for no other reasons than to protect his reputation and business, and to potentially keep himself out of jail. Nevertheless, even when this book does turn a bit of a blind eye to the veracity of some of Ward's statements in court, it's still pretty unbiased overall. The authors are certainly sympathetic to all the major players and treat them all very even-handedly, even when they are being rather dispicable. In short, this was a fascinating book about a very famous British scandal that is a must read if you want an in-depth examination of the subject.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 8, 2022 5:47:37 GMT -5
The ChrysalidsJohn Wyndham, 1955  This a kind-of/sort-of coming of age story set in a post-apocalyptic future, apparently many centuries after a worldwide nuclear disaster that left large swaths of the planet scorched and uninhabitable. Other stretches are untamed areas filled with weirdly mutated plants and animals – and also humans suffering from a number of physical deformities. There are, however, pockets inhabited by what are more or less ‘normal’ people. The setting is one such community in what the reader eventually learns is Labrador, Canada. The people live at a level of technology is slightly better than medieval, as they have crude firearms, but no machinery. Their society is guided by a strict religious dogma, which places a high premium on perfection and abhors any genetic mutations – in their crops, livestock or even people. All receive harsh treatment (burning of the crops, ritual slaughter of the animals, while the best-case scenarios for human mutants is banishment to the wilderness, called the ‘Fringes’). The book’s first person narrator is a young man in this community named David, who recounts events from his early youth as a preteen to his early twenties. Initially he recounts a time in his early childhood when he encountered a young girl named Sophie, who – as he accidentally learns – has six toes. Her parents closely guard this secret, and David agrees not to report them. Even so, when someone else finds out, the family flees. This is a formative experience for David. And as the story progresses, David reveals that he and a handful of others roughly his own age are able to communicate with each other by mental telepathy – an ‘invisible’ deviation that could lead to serious consequences if it is found out. The latter does happen eventually and it forces David to flee with a distant cousin (also a telepath and the girl he loves) and his younger sister, who’s perhaps the most powerful telepath ever. As they flee, they also learn that far, far away, there is actually a pocket of humanity that retained the high technology of the pre-disaster civilization and where telepathic ability is highly prized. The first two thirds of this book are far better than the last section. Without giving anything away, I can say that the ending can be seen as either happy or a bit ambiguous or even sinister, depending on how you look at it (it’s uncertain what point Wyndham was ultimately trying to make on the matter of genetic mutations). Ultimately, I found this book vaguely unsatisfying, even though it’s quite well written and, initially at least, very engrossing.
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Post by berkley on May 8, 2022 10:23:52 GMT -5
Personally, I didn't find the last third of The Chrysalids inferior to the earlier sections, but that's just me. I've read or re-read four or five of Wyndham's best-known SF novels over the last couple of years or so and they've been some of the most enjoyable books I've read during that time, along with two other British SF novels of the fifties: John Christopher's No Blade of Grass and Nevil Shute's On the Beach.
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 10, 2022 4:15:03 GMT -5
A Far SunsetEdmund Cooper, 1967  Another one that has been reviewed here before (by wildfire2099) a number of years ago, so I’ll dispense with a summary since he did a pretty good job of it by highlighting all of the important points. I’ll just say that I guess I didn’t enjoy this as much as he did. I found it really hard to get past the basically racist way the planet’s natives were portrayed. There’s also the problematic aspect of the English guy going native to some degree while also serving as a sort of white savior who is destined to lift the dark primitives up from their simple, superstitious ways. To be fair, that aspect is tempered as the story progresses and certain things are revealed near the end of the story, which I won’t spoil here. However, the horrible way any female characters are treated persists through most of the book (I looked Cooper up about halfway through the book and learned, to no surprise, that he was apparently something of a raging misogynist). All that said, I didn’t hate this book. The story is pretty well written, and Marlowe, although I found him rather unlikable, has a pretty plausible story arc/character development. Cooper also throws in enough interesting (albeit not very original) SF concepts to keep you interested.
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Post by Rob Allen on May 10, 2022 9:29:53 GMT -5
The Chrysalids is included in volume 1 of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, which was one of the books I chose when I joined the Science Fiction Book Club. I remember the story very clearly but had completely forgotten the title and author. Thanks for the memory jog!
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Post by EdoBosnar on May 10, 2022 11:19:48 GMT -5
(...) Thanks for the memory jog! I'm here to serve. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on May 10, 2022 12:58:29 GMT -5
The ChrysalidsJohn Wyndham, 1955 I keep meaning to read this, but never get around to it. The only Wyndham I've read is Day of the Triffids, which I've read at least 3-4 times. |
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