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Hey, Look What I Found! (May Reading)
Jun. 24th, 2007 09:17 pm6xH: Six Stories by Robert H. Heinlein (Robert A. Heinlein): 1961 collection of "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag", "The Man Who Traveled in Elephants", "All You Zombies", "They", "Our Fair City", and finally, "And He Built a Crooked House".
( Cut for length and one Unpleasant Profession spoiler. )
I think the unifying theme of the collection (other than, "hey! We have the rights to six random Heinlein stories!") is the all-consuming Idea, the single sense-of-wonder moment when your mind expands a bit to contemplate a new perspective. Most contemporary SF fails at this, possibly because we've come to emphasize other writing components: character, plot, elaborate worldbuilding, meta. Instead of the writing building to that vertiginous Moment of Cool, we get the more considered Novel of Interesting, and occasionally very interesting genre conversation. But I came for the cool, for the morning of the world, and its afternoon sometimes fades compared to the remembered joy of the Idea.
Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen): Autobiographical vignettes of a year as a mental health resident. This could have been a downer, this could have been emo, this could have been just terrible. However, Kaysen sticks to her strengths - pithy, sharp turns of phrase - which forces the reader to pay attention to snapshots of life in the ward as they come. I will not say that it rewards close attention, though people paying more attention than me might find something to say about the psychology and biochemistry mental illness; life in the United States, 1967 - 1969; or health care in the same time and place, and now; but I do think the prose is astonishing. If Diana Wynne Jones' prose is a very workmanlike basket for holding story, if Lois Bujold's is a yellow brick road of practicality and flippant whimsy, then Kaysen's is a lens or a prism, catching the light and forcing your eye to follow it where the lens-creator intended.
Related link: Girl Interrupted in her Music, a painting by Vermeer. There is a connection between the book and the painting.
The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy): This is not a fixer-upper novel. It's an expanded novella! I think expanding previous works is the worst idea ever, and submit for consideration Asimov's "Nightfall", Card's "Ender's Game", and Kress's "Beggars in Spain", as well as "Once Upon a Matter Crushed", which was expanded for this novel. ( After you get past that, it's pretty fun. )
I also reread great swaths of the graphic novel version of Stardust, a pretty little fairy tale written in Neil Gaiman's comptetent fashion and brought to life by Charles Vess's illustrations. I think the words-only version is much inferior, and strongly urge you to hold out for the graphic novel for many reasons, including the Vess panel on the very last page, which works magnificently with the concluding written paragraphs.
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): A 208 page political polemic I managed to miss in my feckless teen years. Papa Heinlein, educate us all on how life as the infantry is the best way to train hot-blooded men to value their electoral franchise.
( I thought I didn't have much left to say about this, but apparently not! )
Polio: An American Story (David M. Oshinsky): Entertaining account of the creation of the polio vaccines. Oshinsky juggles the glut of characters and their agendas very nicely. This is more a book about the social side than the science side; I was hoping for tangents into the biochemistry of polio, but this is more about the whos and whys than the science. But what a story. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis very conciously manipulated the public to wring donations "for the children" from them, through tactics like the March of Dimes and FDR's involvement. It's disturbing to read a level-voiced account of fundraising, but that may be a personal quirk. Three cheers for heavily footnoted histories!
I could do a knee-jerk reaction to Dr. Isabel Morgan's contributions to polio research, and how they came to a screeching halt when she married and Dr. Morgan got sidelined by Mrs. Mountain, but if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the story of women's careers getting shafted by their gender and marriage.
( Cut for length and one Unpleasant Profession spoiler. )
I think the unifying theme of the collection (other than, "hey! We have the rights to six random Heinlein stories!") is the all-consuming Idea, the single sense-of-wonder moment when your mind expands a bit to contemplate a new perspective. Most contemporary SF fails at this, possibly because we've come to emphasize other writing components: character, plot, elaborate worldbuilding, meta. Instead of the writing building to that vertiginous Moment of Cool, we get the more considered Novel of Interesting, and occasionally very interesting genre conversation. But I came for the cool, for the morning of the world, and its afternoon sometimes fades compared to the remembered joy of the Idea.
Girl, Interrupted (Susanna Kaysen): Autobiographical vignettes of a year as a mental health resident. This could have been a downer, this could have been emo, this could have been just terrible. However, Kaysen sticks to her strengths - pithy, sharp turns of phrase - which forces the reader to pay attention to snapshots of life in the ward as they come. I will not say that it rewards close attention, though people paying more attention than me might find something to say about the psychology and biochemistry mental illness; life in the United States, 1967 - 1969; or health care in the same time and place, and now; but I do think the prose is astonishing. If Diana Wynne Jones' prose is a very workmanlike basket for holding story, if Lois Bujold's is a yellow brick road of practicality and flippant whimsy, then Kaysen's is a lens or a prism, catching the light and forcing your eye to follow it where the lens-creator intended.
Related link: Girl Interrupted in her Music, a painting by Vermeer. There is a connection between the book and the painting.
The Collapsium (Wil McCarthy): This is not a fixer-upper novel. It's an expanded novella! I think expanding previous works is the worst idea ever, and submit for consideration Asimov's "Nightfall", Card's "Ender's Game", and Kress's "Beggars in Spain", as well as "Once Upon a Matter Crushed", which was expanded for this novel. ( After you get past that, it's pretty fun. )
I also reread great swaths of the graphic novel version of Stardust, a pretty little fairy tale written in Neil Gaiman's comptetent fashion and brought to life by Charles Vess's illustrations. I think the words-only version is much inferior, and strongly urge you to hold out for the graphic novel for many reasons, including the Vess panel on the very last page, which works magnificently with the concluding written paragraphs.
Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein): A 208 page political polemic I managed to miss in my feckless teen years. Papa Heinlein, educate us all on how life as the infantry is the best way to train hot-blooded men to value their electoral franchise.
( I thought I didn't have much left to say about this, but apparently not! )
Polio: An American Story (David M. Oshinsky): Entertaining account of the creation of the polio vaccines. Oshinsky juggles the glut of characters and their agendas very nicely. This is more a book about the social side than the science side; I was hoping for tangents into the biochemistry of polio, but this is more about the whos and whys than the science. But what a story. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis very conciously manipulated the public to wring donations "for the children" from them, through tactics like the March of Dimes and FDR's involvement. It's disturbing to read a level-voiced account of fundraising, but that may be a personal quirk. Three cheers for heavily footnoted histories!
I could do a knee-jerk reaction to Dr. Isabel Morgan's contributions to polio research, and how they came to a screeching halt when she married and Dr. Morgan got sidelined by Mrs. Mountain, but if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with the story of women's careers getting shafted by their gender and marriage.