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Sibyl Sue Blue, by Rosel George Brown (1966)

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Sibyl Sue Blue is an undercover cop who wears chartreuse mini-skirts, rouges her knees, smokes cigars, and knows how to take the wind out of an obstreperous Centaurian with a quick sledge-hammer swing of her handbag. Nearing forty, she’s passing as the girlfriend of a high schooler, thanks to a wig, cheek pieces and an occasional dab of skin-tightening cream. Though she carries a torch for her husband Kenneth, who was lost on a failed expedition to the planet Radix some years ago, she’s ready to go after the right man, if she finds him attractive. She reads Thucydides in original Greek while grabbing a quick sandwich for lunch. And she’s a single mother trying to raise a high schooler herself while keeping the streets clear of benzale dealers.

Sibyl Sue Blue can be sold as a long-forgotten cross between Barbarella and Modesty Blaise. It’s fast, violent, sexy, and adventurous, the sort of thing that could easily be translated into a camp but savvy film. There are fights and plenty of them — Sibyl is a walking poster girl for proactive self-defense. There’s a wild ride through a spooky night, with Sibyl and a cohort clinging onto the roof rack of a speeding car. There is an underclass of aliens, a precursor of the “prawns” of District 9. There’s a space ship trip to Radix, during which Sibyl falls in and out of love with its billionaire playboy captain. And there is a relatively effective attempt to depict a planet-encircling organic intelligence, something Stanislaw Lem had already done in his as-yet (in 1966) untranslated masterpiece, Solaris.

In some ways, there is way too much scope to fit into a tight thriller. Brown rushes to bring her story to an end in under 200 pages, so there are a few rough narrative cuts and a few threads left dangling. It’s a book where I often wished the writer had been willing to take a detour, rather than charging on to make the next light. But it was also a consequence of the conventions of the time. How many SF writers of the 1960s had the nerve to break through the 200-page limit? Samuel Delany. John Brunner. Anyone else? On the positive side, I guess it’s rare when a book’s chief fault is not being long enough.

Rosel George Brown, 1965
Rosel George Brown, 1965
Sibyl Sue Blue was Rosel George Brown’s first novel and was originally published as part of Doubleday’s science fiction series. At the time, Brown was living in New Orleans with her husband, Tulane history professor W. Burlie Brown, and their two boys. The couple had met while Rosel was studying Greek as an undergraduate at Sophie Newcomb College, which was associated with Tulane.

Brown began writing short stories in the late 1950s, publishing her first, “From an Unseen Censor,” in Galaxy magazine in 1958, and went on to publish nearly two dozen in similar SF magazines over the next six years. A selection of these were collected in A Handful of Time in 1963. She collaborated with Keith Laumer on Earthblood (1966), and followed soon after with her own Sibyl Sue Blue. Unfortunately, she died less than a year later of lymphoma. Her husband assembled material for a second Sibyl Sue Blue she had been working on prior to her death and sold it to Doubleday, which published it as The Waters Of Centaurus in 1970. One of Brown’s early short stories, “Step IV,” is available online at Project Gutenberg (link).


Sibyl Sue Blue (later reissued as Galatic Sibyl Sue Blue), by Rosel George Brown
Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1966

They, by Marya Mannes (1968)

Cover of first US edition of 'They'Around the middle of Marya Mannes’ 1968 quasi-sci-fi novel They, a conversation about what is considered “dirty” goes off on several different tangents. After pages and pages that mention everything from Shakespeare to the nature of clams, the pompous conductor Lev says, “It is very hard to keep on the track with this group. No discipline.”

Unfortunately, this is how one feels reading Mannes’ misguided vision of dystopia. Despite an intriguing premise – a world in which people over 50 are segregated from the rest of society for 15 years until they’re finally killed off – Mannes doesn’t really give us a story to match it.

The story is narrated by Kate, who lives with Lev and three other people along with their pets in an old beach house. They’re all between the ages of 50 and 65, torn away from their families and preparing for imminent death. They’re only allowed to leave the beach house at designated times for restocking on food or going for medical checkups. During these checkups, any patient with a serious illness would be put to death immediately. This is because “They” (always capitalized) declared that people over the age of 50 were no longer able to contribute to society, and so needed to be exiled.

How did They come to this determination? Well, Kate provides a rather convoluted explanation. It seems to have started with young people’s love of late-1960s pop culture, which ultimately led to a youth-obsessed society that rejected not only the past but any kind of human feeling.

We kept looking for meaning, for standards, for order…and we were told they were no longer relevant….

We were told daily that mind (logic, reason) meant nothing and that only sensation counted.

Words were of no importance, except to the intellectual arbiters who used them to tell us this.

And the man who told us writing was dead could not write.

Yet, after spending many pages attacking the youth and their lack of standards, Kate writes, “For you see, it wasn’t only Their doing, although perhaps I should have made it more clear that They applies not only to the young. The machines were part of the takeover, for they had invaded every function of daily life.” It gets worse: “For what really brought the sense of crisis that followed the chill was not merely domination by the young or by the machine but the brief return to political power of a reactionary coalition under a conservative President.” This government then started a war with China. Talk about slippery slopes!

So what do the residents do? Do they try to rally against the system? Do they attempt an escape into a world where they can live without restrictions? No, they just spend a lot of time talking about Them and their interests. And because of her experience as a writer and editor, Kate gets chosen by the rest of the group to be the chronicler. Yet her purpose for writing (like everything else in this book) is unclear, since “writing is dead,” even though the book begins with a preface written by Kate’s son, identified only as “6B8953A-411-Y.”

In all fairness, the residents do make some attempts to live on their own terms. One of the things they do besides arguing is to schedule days in which they deprive themselves of one of their senses. For example, they have “Blind Day,” where they are not allowed to use sight. The residents believe that by practicing such things, they can heighten their other senses in case they lose one in real life.

And, at the end of the book, the residents do create an incident that gets Their attention. But Mannes spends too much time on observations and arguments about what society has become and not enough time building up the story to its climax. (It doesn’t help that she mentions the climactic incident at the novel’s beginning.)

Much later in the story, a young mute enters the lives of the residents. Despite his youth and his inability to talk, he actually gets along with the residents, who name him Michael since they cannot determine his real name. The problem with Michael is he’s not really a character. When he first appears, he serves as a temporary distraction from all of the bickering about culture and politics. Then Mannes – rather blatantly – turns him into a device foreshadowing the incident at the end. This wouldn’t be a bad thing if Mannes had used him more in the story and given him more human characteristics.

In conclusion, Mannes’ novel serves neither as a warning about the dangers of technology nor an example of the human spirit overcoming adversity. And They has little to offer in the way of literary value or entertainment. Perhaps readers who are interested in social criticism from the late 1960s may appreciate this novel, but those who are looking for a great dystopian novel similar to 1984—or even one on a par with an average SF book—will be disappointed.

Written by Christopher Iacono
http://goodcoffeebookblog.tumblr.com
Twitter: @ciacono1973

Plus, by Joseph McElroy

Cover of first U.S. edition of 'Plus'

Joseph McElroy’s 1977 novel, Plus, is, without a doubt, my most neglected neglected book. I actually bought the Knopf paperback edition (one of the earliest examples of a simultaneous release in hardback and trade paperback) when I saw it on the shelves of the University Bookstore in Seattle back in early 1977. I had finished a wonderful English course during which our professor took the class through Ulysses, giving us just enough in the way of reading tools that I felt ready to take on the most daunting of texts. I was also just discovering experimental fiction, reveling in Queneau and Steve Katz and Harry Mathews, and I was sure that Plus was going to be of the same ilk.

And then I started to read it:

He found it all around. It opened and was close. He felt it was himself, but felt it was more.

It nipped open from outside in and from inside out. Imp Plus found it all around. He was Imp Plus, and this was not the start.

I struggled for several pages, then gave up. I felt like I was trying to scale El Capitan with my bare hands.

I set Plus aside, and there it has stayed for thirty-five years and a dozen moves.

When I started this site seven years ago, I always knew that I would have to return to the challenge. Facing a long flight from Amsterdam to Minneapolis a few weeks ago, I saw the opportunity to hunker down and make amends for my neglect.

Joseph McElroy is, perhaps and simultaneously, America’s most neglected and highly regarded living novelist. Neglected based on the simple fact that, as Scott Bryan Wilson writes on the Constant Conversation, “there’s probably never been a time in his career when all of his books have been in print [at] once.” You will not find one of his books at Barnes & Noble. One in a hundred people who know the names of Philip Roth, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison will recognize McElroy’s or be able to name any of his books.

At the same time, however, many of those who have read him consider McElroy one of the masters of contemporary American fiction. Each of his major novels–A Smuggler’s Bible (1966); Hind’s Kidnap (1969); Lookout Cartridge. (1974); and Women and Men (1987)–received glowing reviews from some of the most sophisticated reviewers in the business. Women and Men, in fact, has been called “the most important American novel since Gravity’s Rainbow.” His work has been the focus of an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the Golden Handcuffs Review, along with numerous pieces in academic journals. Even Plus has its own Wikipedia entry (link). But as Garth Risk Hallberg wrote in the L.A. Times’ “Jacket Copy” blog, “McElroy’s work recalls William Gaddis’ description of a composer’s corpus in The Recognitions: ‘It is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.'”

Why the neglect? I think the reason is very simple: he writes difficult prose. As one Amazon reviewer of Women and Men wrote, “If you haven’t read McElroy, don’t jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers.” McElroy writes for grown-ups. By that I mean, he does not take the reader by the hand and guide him through the story like a crossing guard assisting a group of school kids. He expects the reader to discover the story–and more than that, the narrative perspective–by having the guts to take a deep breath and dive into the writing.

I like the way Mike Heppner describes it in his article, “The Courage of Joseph McElroy,” in the Golden Handcuffs Review (link):

It takes courage to write a sentence like the one quoted above [from Women and Men]; to risk ugliness, arrhythmia, tonal irregularities: those moments of dissonance and rubato that cause us to doubt our own ears. (Or, as Carl Ruggles defended Charles Ives to a quivering concertgoer who’d come expecting Brahms: “Why can’t you stand up before fine strong music like this and use your ears like a man?”)

To be pedantic, the quote was by Ives, at a concert of his music and Ruggles (“When you hear strong masculine music like this, sit up and USE YOUR EARS LIKE A MAN!”). I’ve long thought this quote, despite its latent chauvinism, should apply to encounters with challenging art in any form.

And so I summoned my readerly courage and dove into Plus once I’d settled into my seat.

The actual story in Plus is explained right on the cover:

Plus is the meditation–the experience–of a disembodied human brain, once the brain of an individual with a wife and a child, but now orbiting the Earth in a capsule.

The brain’s function, as part of a solar energy project, is to observe growth inside the capsule and to transmit information along the Concentration Loop to the scientists on Earth, whom it knows only by sound: the Good Voice, and Acrid Voice.

The capsule is IMP: the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform. Imp Plus is the brain, the CPU of the IMP satellite–or at least, of one of its key payloads.

But the story is not really the point of Plus. Instead, what McElroy undertakes is something that makes all previous attempts at the stream of consciousness seem child’s play. The real drama in Plus is that of a consciousness constructing its own means of understanding.

In this case, the consciousness has the added challenge of working without any of its senses. Imp Plus is a brain in a jar, so to speak, and the jar is in orbit around the Earth. While it carries out its various monitoring tasks, it grapples to establish an awareness of its new world through an extremely limited set of inputs. It has no skin to feel with, no tongue to taste with, no ears to hear with. Although the inputs from Ground Control are referred to as voices, I see them more as command line messages: “IMP PLUS WE READ NO DROP IN POWER FROM ACCUMULATOR.”

In another article from the Golden Handcuffs Review, “Sensation in Joseph McElroy’s Plus” (link) Yves Abrioux argues that McElroy “regularly deploys synesthesia … to insist on both perception and cellular biology as sensation.” I think this is illustrated by the way in which Imp Plus associates the command line transmissions with voices:

Between which the dim echo now must come transmitting correct velocities. But were they correct? And Imp Plus did not know if the transmission was to Ground or him. He seemed to be transmitting within himself. DIM ECHO. ACRID VOICE. GOOD VOICE.

He must heed the cavings-in, he must heed the cavings-out, and the shapes around whether they heeded him or not.

There was more all around, and the more all around was joining itself to Imp Plus.

He approaches sight in much the same way:

Imp Plus knew he had no eyes. Yet Imp Plus saw. Or persisted in seeing.

With sprouts, maybe.

But there is another input which Imp Plus cannot associate with a sense, even if it comprises a collection of sensations: memory. As the cover blurb says, Imp Plus was a man with a wife and child before his brain was taken out and transferred into its capsule. Early on in the book, the brain is aware that not all of its consciousness is tied to its spacecraft inputs:

What came to Imp Plus amid the brightness was that some of him was left.

So some of the gradients were Imp Plus.

There are not many remnants of his past life. One he returns to frequently relates to a camping trip taken to a Mexican beach not long before the operation. The man seems to have had some terminal illness. He may have been associated with the space program, or at least to have agreed to allow his brain to be used in the capsule. There are fragments of conversations.

From these limited resources, along with the growth of biological matter–the narration refers to chlorella–in the capsule, Imp Plus assembles its understanding. The picture develops piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle, but without the top of the box to guide it. So the pieces don’t always seem to relate to a coherent whole. Only over time, over the course of the book, can one finally–along with Imp Plus–gain the sense of a complete self.

To do so requires considerable patience from the reader, but enormous forethought and restraint on McElroy’s part. It would have been so easy to skip over a difficult step in the construction of Imp Plus’ consciousness with a fast bit of simple explanatory prose, as software programmers call external routines or scripts as shortcuts. But the task he sets himself in Plus is profoundly daunting. As David Auerbach wrote recently in an excellent piece on his site, waggish.org, “McElroy’s ambition is to take the language used by embodied creatures and try to show how it might be applied in a situation where one’s interface with the world has completely broken down and been wholly altered: senses removed and replaced by new kinds of neural inputs.”

To help isolate myself while reading Plus, I put in my earphone and listened–several times–to Philip Glass’ epic four-hour work, “Music in Twleve Parts”. I think there is a certain commonality between the two works, in that each uses elements that are, in themselves, simple, but then creates, through repetition and subtle variations and aggregations, a new type of complexity and beauty.

Of course, Philip Glass’ music is not everyone’s cup of tea. Nor is Joseph McElroy’s fiction. But after finishing Plus and thinking about it over the last two weeks, I found myself contemplating an assault on his magnum opus, Women and Men. Weighing in at 1.5 times the length of War and Peace and rated by the book editors of The Millions as one of the world’s “top 10 most difficult books,” it’s truly an El Capitan assault of reading. But then I found a copy for $15–it’s out of print and goes for three times that–at Shakespeare and Company in Missoula, so I think the Fates have spoken.


Plus, by Joseph McElroy
New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977

Recent Reader Recommendations

I’ve received a bumper crop of recommendations in the last month, including a few titles that are new to me (an increasingly rare treat). So I want to offer a consolidated list with some commentary from the submitters and others, in hopes that others will seek out this forgotten gems.

The Trees of Zharka, by Nancy MackenrothCover of 'The Trees of Zharka'

Allison Kassig wrote to recommend two books well off the SF mainstream that she came across in an odd lot of paperbacks she’d bought. I’ll quote from her own Amazon.com review, which appears to be one of the very few–professional or amateur–that this intriguing book has ever received:

I intended to try to locate the author, Nancy Mackenroth, after I finished reading her book for the first time. I thought she’d like to know that her book was still being read, and if I found more books by her I’d put them on my “To Read” list. Unfortunately she died of ALS less than a year ago. But her work lives on, and is worth reading. The Trees of Zharka is a fast read: that alone is a relief from the bloated over-long books so often published today. I don’t read much sci-fi, especially novels, but decided to start working my way through a box lot I bought years ago. (The second one I’ve read from there was also well worth reading). The book easily escaped being outdated by new technologies because technology isn’t very relevant: this is book about characters, human nature, right and wrong, and ideas. Two mysteries compelled me. One is the mystery the main character is driven to solve, although that knowledge is both forgotten and forbidden. The other was what would have put this idea in the author’s mind. Why would she think to write about a Puritanical society ruled by priests who maintain a grove of sacred trees? In the end I knew the answer: Mackenroth may have started with the ending. The people of Zharka are the descendants of emigrants from Earth. What happened seemed dated at first, but we’re not that much advanced from the world of 1975. I could easily imagine this story as a Twilight Zone episode (hour long). I started to say that The Trees of Zharka deserves not only to be remembered, but to be read. But I don’t really look at it that way. I’m glad I had the opportunity to read a provocative story about redemption.

The Eskimo Invasion, by Hayden HowardCover of 'The Eskimo Invasion'

From what I can gather about this book, which like Mackenroth’s, appears to have been the author’s only published novel, it’s a tongue-in-cheek satire of conspiracy theorists and the kind of “they’re after us” paranoia that inspired the Red Scare, McCarthy’s witchhunts, Nixon’s enemies lists, and George W. Bush’s world view. Allison’s Amazon review provides a good overview:

Despite its almost 400 pages this 44-year-old sci fi novel is a fascinating page-turner. I’ve forgotten more books than most people ever read, but this one has two (at least) unforgettable scenes. I’ll leave one for you to discover for yourself, but you shouldn’t miss an incredible description of the history of the world as read in the fossil record–from the bottom up. Start digging more than a half-mile down in the Earth, and take the trip upward from the dinosaurs on. Very well written, full of provocative ideas, and answers a question no one else ever asked: Are the Esks Eskimos, or are they not even human at all? This is a good-humored read with scenes of terror. If that seems contradictory, it’s because Howard takes us on a wild trip (it’s 1967, remember?) from Canada to Berkeley to China, from the CIA to the latest in penology, from cryogenics to mind control, with a poignant look at the law of unintended consequences. True to the era, bureaucracy is skewered, and political correctness takes a prescient beating. This one sat in a box lot of old sci fi paperbacks in my garage for years, until I had the good sense to give it a try. And found I couldn’t put it down. How many other great books are out there to be discovered? If you want to join me in finding out, you won’t go wrong with trying this one.

Salt of the Earth, by Jozef Wittlin

Writing from Sweden, Bengt Broström recommed the anti-war novel “Sol ziemi” (1936), which was published in English as Salt of the Earth in 1939, by the
Polish author Jozef Wittlin (1896-1976): “With its mixture of irony, sarcasm, parody and the grotesque it is simple brilliant, It is not in print but used copies are can be bought online.” At the time of the book’s first publication in English, Charles Neider wrote of it in the Virginia Quarterly Review,

Peter Neviadomski is a wonderful person, someone never to be forgotten. A railway porter in a little Galician town, the most he wants of life is an official railway cap (to permit him to salute people), a cottage with a mouse-trap and cheese and a bride with a dowry.

Wittlin’s irony is Biblical as compared with Thomas Mann’s, for example, which is musical. His irony and quiet fury are those of the idealistic ascetic steeped in the Old Testament and the Odyssey. His compassion for the ignorant and lowly of the earth, breathed into his work, imparts to it a glowing poetic quality and a sublimity of soul that may well be treasured in these troubled times. This first volume takes Peter Neviadomski through the ordeals of mobilization and preparation for the front. It is a volume to be read again and again. It has the satisfying quality of good music.

Salt of the Earth was to have been the first of a series of novels to be known as “The Saga of the Patient Footsoldier,” but Wittlin abandoned the effort during World War Two and never published another work of fiction.

In This Sign, by Joanne Greenberg

Poet Greg Baysans wrote in to recommend a book that’s in print but that’s been mentioned more than a few times as a life-long favorite by others who’ve contacted me. As Greg puts it, “Written by Joanne Greenberg (whose “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden” I had read previously, perhaps as an 8th or 9th grader, and which is more well-known; she also has published under the nom de plume Hannah Green), the book is In This Sign. The story of two deaf parents and their children, it takes place just before, during and after the Great Depression. I am impressed again by Greenberg’s ability to take the reader into these character’s world and get a real sense of what it must be like to have to learn language without the sense of hearing. While not particularly deep or philosophical, it is very well written and compelling, not saccharine at all. I’m anxious to finish it again, all these years later.”

Equal Distance, by Brad Leithauser

Andrew Kozelka wrote to suggest Brad Leithauser’s first novel, Equal Distance, which amazingly has been out of print for over twenty years. As Andrew write, Leithauser’s “still alive and has written a half-dozen novels since; this is the only one I’ve read so far. I have to say it’s the best novel I’ve found in the sub-genre of ‘westerners in Japan’—as someone who has lived there I can attest that he gets everything right—but it’s also just a great read and a very fine novel. The reviews at the time were enthusiastic. I really feel it is more than worthy to be brought back into print. Unfortunately, these days publishers won’t do that unless a later novel becomes a top seller or, perhaps, there’s reader demand.”

The Devil’s Lieutenant, by M. FagyasCover of 'The Devil's Lieutenant'

Writing from Los Angeles, Karen forwarded some information on “a book I have admired for years”: The Devil’s Lieutenant, by M. Fagyas. “This lurid cover is misleading because the book is not pulp fiction.I bought it at a library sale and since bought all books by this author (unfortunately, there weren’t many). You may be interested in its (few) Amazon reviews which are all 5 stars.”

At the time of its first publication, The Devil’s Lieutenant received not one but two separate and enthusiastic reviews in the New York Times. W.G. Rogers wrote that Fagyas had “packed her novel with strain, tension, suspense–and, to boot, a wealth of political and historical relevance.” Thomas Lask called it, “a top-drawer psychological thriller that unrolls like a whodunit, so artfully constructed, so smoothly readable that you will find yourself devouring it at a single sitting.”

M. Fagyas was the pen name of Marika Bush-Fekete, who came to the U.S. with her husband, Ladislasz Bush-Fekete, a Jewish Hungarian playwright who’d collaborated with Franz Werfel and had success with his own plays in Budapest and Vienna. She began writing in the earlier 1960s to try to earn a living. Her first novel, The Fifth Woman, published in 1963, earned an Edgar Award, although it was–as were all of hers–a mix of historical fiction and mystery. In the case of the The Devil’s Lieutenant, the mystery is why ten members of an elite Austro-Hungarian Army unit had died from swallowing cyanide capsules. To quote another reader’s Amazon review,

The “detective” in the novel is Captain Kunze, a judge advocate, who investigates the case.

You get a fine view of Austria and especially Vienna in 1909. War is in the air, and there is an appetite for the army to invade the Balkans. What is particularly interesting is the portrayal of social life in the Kaiserlich und Koniglich officer corps, and that the case is handled by the military rather than the civilian police. Emperor Franz Josef is not anti-semetic and does not want war: his son, Archduke Ferdinand is the opposite. Both want the case handled so it doesn’t reflect bady on the army. Kunze finds a suspect, who was 18th in the class and thus not promoted and given a position in the General Staff. But in military cases, circumstantial evidence is not sufficient for a death sentence, unlike a civilian case. Better evidence or a confession is needed, or, preferably, the suspect is put in a room with a loaded revolver with the suggestion about doing the honorable thing.

In another Fagyas novel, The Widowmaker, veterans of the First World War returning to their home village come to bad ends as their wives try to preserve the independence and social status they attained during the long years of the husbands’ absences at the front. Reading through a variety of reviews of all of Fagyas’ six novels while preparing this post, I ended up adding at least three of her titles to my Wish List.

Sweepings, by Lester Cohen

Eric Stott wrote in with great enthusiasm for Lester Cohen’s first Sweepings, a book he’s stumbled across and was still reading at the time of his note:

This 1926 book was a huge critical and popular success. It was made into an excellent film in the 1930’s–a King Lear-like story of a man who builds up a department store only to find his children have no interest: they sell off their shares and the faithful (but long suffering) store manager secretly buys them and saves the store from ruin. Sounds simple and heartwarming–right?

Well, the book is another thing. It’s a sprawling example of the realist novel as spawned by Dreiser with a lot of psychological touches that Hollywood wouldn’t have been able to deal with at the period. There’s a woman who’s had repeated abortions until her doctor refuses to perform another. When she does get pregnant her mind seems to unhinge. She idly cuts herself and dabs spots of blood on her face and clothing. The eldest son is a Good Old Boy type who idles through life, cheating on his wife with a series of prostitutes- one of whom wants him to hit her hard before sex. He does fall in love (after a fashion) with one girl (who he likens to a whipped cream confection) and when confronted by his father declares “She’s as good a woman as my wife!” (“she probably is” thinks the father, who doesn’t like his daughter in law much). When the son breaks off the relationship the girl fires a shot at him which goes wild and kills his best friend. He escapes recognition but develops an eating disorder in an effort to block out the memories.

But he never could forget. The thing would come back and come back. Violet, the whipped cream woman; his smashing her; the fury that drove her to shoot; the form of his friend that had fallen like a punctured balloon. These things would force themselves to his lips Like one who downs a specter rising out of a grave by throwing another shovelful of sod over it, he ate another steak. For hours he would feel gorged and drowsy. Then those fancies would fight their way back through the fog of food. He would feel his lips atremble. Then controlling himself he would trundle into the nearest restaurant.

The book as a whole seems a bit overwritten (it was the author’s first novel and feels like one) but at times it comes vividly to life like a vignette of Christmas sales at the store:

Above the stamping and surging of the bargain hunting mobs sounded the groans of the sales machine. There was a frantic clamoring for “Cashgirl! Cashgirl!” Clerks at counters in the same departments were appealing, threatening, shouting for shoppers to buy. Each clerk had a quota that night. If the quota were not met–… Each clerk shuddered at the thought, pulled at the arm of a bargain hunter, cried “Buy it here! Here ya are! A doll for the baby. Was ninety-nine cents. Take her home for a dime!”

This may not be a neglected classic, but so far it’s worth reading.

Religion and the Decline of Magic, by Keith Thomas

Last but not least is one that comes not from a reader’s email but from a recent listing in The Week magazine’s regular feature in which noted authors are asked to name a half-dozen or so favorite books. A few weeks ago, English novelist Penelope Lively named, among her other titles, which are usually fairly well known and widely available in print, . Of it, she said, “I read a lot of history, and this 40-year-old work is the kind I’d been waiting for without knowing it—history that examines how people behaved in the past and why. Focused on England, it brought the 16th and 17th centuries alive for me.”

Religion and the Decline of Magic is a massive tome, nearly 900 pages, devoted to the efforts of the Church of England to stamp out all aspects of folk myths and rituals in the 16th and 17th centuries. Commenting on the book ten years after its first publication in 1971, Paul Slack wrote “History Today”: “Few historians have that ability to surprise and convince with unfailing regularity, to say something absolutely original and make it seem self-evident. That is why Religion and the Decline of Magic remains a commanding work, one of the three or four outstanding pieces of historical writing to have appeared in the last thirty years.”

Jo Walton Stirs Up a Hefty List of Neglected SF/Fantasy Authors and Books

Source: “Neglected Books: the list,” at http://www.tor.com.vhost.zerolag.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58654

SF novelist Jo Walton put out a call for recommendations of “authors that should be getting the sales and the attention and yet remain obscure” on the SF/fantasy website, Tor. It generated a tremendous number of responses, which she’s compiled into a list organized into four categories:

  • Books and authors Jo’s reviewed elsewhere on Tor (with links to her reviews)
  • Books and authors she’s read but not reviewed
  • Books and authors she hasn’t read
  • Books and authors that are well known and shouldn’t be on this list

Cover of early U.S. paperback edition of 'Children of the Atom'The last shows that Walton’s kept a discriminating filter on her list. Of Steig Larson’s novels, which someone nominated, she writes, “These are a stupendously successful non-genre best sellers. The opposite of obscure.” I’ve seen them on the end caps of airport bookstores in Belgium, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. in the last two months: definitely NOT neglected.

On the other hand, she notes, “Other times I was surprised to find an author I’d never even vaguely heard of who published several books. I read a lot, and I’ve spent a lot of time online and in conventions hanging out talking about books.” Two authors in particular she cites are Wilmar Shiras and Wilhemina Baird.

Shiras’ short story, “In Hiding,” is considered one of the best SF short stories of the 20th century. She later incorporated it into her 1953 novel, Children of the Atom. Children, which was something of a precursor to the X-Men series, is back in print in a fine facsimile edition from Red Jacket Press, although cheaper copies of several different paperback editions can be found on Amazon.

Baird is the pen name of Joyce Carstairs Hutchinson, a Scottish woman who quickly turned out four “cyberpunk” novels in the mid-1990s and then stopped–at least for the moment–publishing. Her first book, Crashcourse anticipated the rise of reality TV.

The Winds from Nowhere, by J. G. Ballard

Here in northern Europe, we’ve been battered by record high winds over the last 48 hours (see BCC story). These and the growing number of climate change disasters being reported bring to mind The Wind from Nowhere, the first of J. G. Ballard’s novels and the first of a series of four, each of which dealt with a world experiencing (or coping with the aftermath of) a global climate change:

  • The Wind from Nowhere (1961) is the most conventional of all Ballard’s novels and one he now dismisses the work as forgettable. High winds flatten the earth and survivors live in pits dug out in the remnants of ruined cities.

  • The Drowned World (1962) foretells global warning and describes a world where London and New York are largely submerged and much of the planet is a series of large and strikingly beautiful tropical lagoons.

  • The Drought (1964) (also published in the U.S. as The Burning World describes another man-made ecological disaster, in which the dumping of radioactive waste causes a shell to form over the seas, turning water into man’s rarest and most precious commodity.

  • The Crystal World, the least overtly about climate change, is generally considered the finest of these novels. The story, about a British doctor journeying a leper colony, encountering a deep African forest to that progressively turns into crystalline forms, has obvious parallels with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and marks Ballard’s own transition into more abstract and experimental worlds such as The Atrocity Exhibition

Only The Crystal World is in print in the U.S., but you can find The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Crystal World in print in the U.K..

You can view artist Richard Power’s covers for these and other of Ballard’s works at Rich McGrath’s treasure trove of Ballard artifacts and criticism, http://www.rickmcgrath.com/jgb.html.