Well, I’ve done it. I’ve finished The Book of the Short Sun and, with it, Gene Wolfe’s “Solar Cycle”. It was worth it. The rest of this post will assume that you have read or are at least familiar with The Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Short Sun tells the story of a man who strives to fulfill a great vow, perhaps taken too lightly, and changes greatly because of it.
Assuming one has read The Book of the New Sun, I hope to convince you to read the rest of the Solar Cycle.
Worried about pervasive surveillance? About how much ammunition your 7th-grade MySpace posts and AIM logs will provide to the opposition when you run for office, or interview for a job? Check out the highly underrated The Light of Other Days, joint venture of science fiction giants Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.
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I’m not into military science fiction. Hammer’s Slammers? I’ve heard of it. Honor Harrington? Never read it. Some guy named Marko Kloos got into some sort of spat. A distaste for open-ended series accounts for more than a bit of my aversion, though, so if I’m going to dip my toe into the subgenre, it’s through standalone books. The three milSF books that everyone should read, so I’m told, are Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Armor by John Steakley.
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Jack Vance published Araminta Station in 1988, 38 years after his first major work, the massively influential Dying Earth. Araminta Station, the first part of the Cadwal Chronicles trilogy, narrates the adventures of Glawen Clattuc, a young man of the local gentry on a wilderness-preserve planet — Cadwal — in a distant future where mankind has settled most of the galaxy in a loosely-governed “Gaean Reach”. Vance writes in his characteristic style with the assurance and deliberation of a well-earned maturity. Do I recommend it? Absolutely, although it’s not a good place to start with the author and doesn’t quite rise to the level of Vance’s immediately preceding work, Lyonesse.
Now that I’m done pontificating about the Divine Comedy, I’ll take it down a notch and look at James Blish’s modern-day occult fantasy novel Black Easter. Most reprintings collect Black Easter with its sequel, The Day After Judgment, as one work under the title The Devil’s Day. Given Black Easter’s abrupt ending — I hesitate even to call it a cliffhanger — the Devil’s Day format is the best package. Although the tale goes a little flat in the second half, if “modern-day occult fantasy” sounds like something you would be interested in, you will like this book.
Cover of the combined version. Fairly tame by the standards of Baen.
You shouldn’t read the Inferno without reading the Purgatorio, at least. Should English-speaking students be required to read the entire Divine Comedy as do their Italian counterparts? No, if they have to read an entire epic, it should be Paradise Lost instead, although the current-day focus on Shakespeare is fine.
Dante is important to Western culture broadly, but he’s far more important to Italy in particular. From what I can tell, Dante is far more important to the modern Italian language than Shakespeare is to modern English. Milton himself wrote in English of course, and while admittedly the language of Paradise Lost is more difficult in general than Shakespeare, it’s not impenetrable to a bright student, nor does it require an antiquarian bent to appreciate as does Spenser. I can’t read Italian, but translations of Dante don’t have the same touch as Milton’s English.
As a high school student I was assigned Dante’s Inferno. Well, selections from, although being an overachiever I did read the whole thing. Unfortunately, this is no way to go about doing things, although in hindsight I oughtn’t be surprised that our glorious public education system prefers to teach children about Satan, or to dwell on sin without repentance or redemption.
Pictured: Divine Retribution. Not Pictured: Divine Mercy.
Plenty of people knew Harlan Ellison personally, I don’t have anything to add. Here’s one anecdote, courtesy of Cirsova. I’ll recommend some of his short stories to read in memoria, however.
I read the first two books of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos (Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion). I have been roundly advised not to continue with series, and I am not, especially after reading the end of Fall. Overall these two books deserve their relatively high reputation.
Hyperion was the stronger book, I suspect because of its episodic nature. Both are around 500 pages long, but the density of the narrative in Fall is much higher since most of the space in Hyperion is taken up by the pilgrims’ loosely connected stories. Fall was good on its own (though you’re about to hear me complain about it some more), but just didn’t maintain the same high standard of quality. Any reader who likes Hyperion will find it very difficult not to pick up Fall to resolve the cliffhanger, anyway.
I finally got around to watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Solaris. I enjoy “deliberate” movies — Barry Lyndon is one of my favorites — so I was not bothered by the slow pace, but most viewers will be. The only part of the movie I’d ever specifically heard of — a digressive scene of Tokyo traffic which length Tarkovsky may have intended solely to justify the Motherland’s expenses in sending his crew to Japan — was a little awkward but the rest of the movie was sublime. Lem’s complaints about the adaptation are unwarranted; the director simply had a different vision in a different medium. Imagine Clarke griping about Kubrick’s film (although Lem’s novel is superior to Clarke’s 2001).
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