Let's check out stories from 1979 by writers I have some familiarity with: John Varley, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, Tanith Lee, and Joanna Russ.  The stories we'll read today were selected by Donald Wollheim for inclusion in DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  My copy of the anthology features a front cover by Jack Gaughan (is that the Death Star?) and a back cover blurb from The Cincinnati Post (The Post went out of business in 2007), and was previously owned by a Shelia K. Wise (if I am reading her name rightly), who dated it "May, 1980."

Fellow SF fan Shelia K. Wise, we salute you!

Wollheim's intro to the volume includes a fun little mystery.  Wollheim tells us that he recently "spent an evening with a well-known science fiction writer and his wife whose hobby is world travel."  Another couple "with the same itching foot" was also there.  Wollheim doesn't name the couples, but I am going to put forward as my guess that he is talking about the Vances and/or the Andersons.  (Check out other SF mysteries I have hoped to solve here.)

These couples described to Wollheim visits to "primitive communities," and Wollheim reports that he told them that he thinks visiting primitive people would get pretty boring after a while, one bunch of primitives being much like another. (Microaggression!)  Then he switches gears and warns us readers that if we don't accelerate our development of nuclear and solar energy we will all be living "in mud huts" when the oil runs out.  Wollheim predicts that nuclear power plants on the moon and "solar power accumulator satellites" will arise to keep us all from reverting to primitivism; either that or it's "back to the jungle."  (How does the energy get to Earth from Luna or those satellites?  Wollheim doesn't say.  Let the boffins suss out the details!)

"Options" by John Varley

I read Varley's novel Titan shortly before I started this here blog; I enjoyed it as a sort of Rendezvous with Rama hard SF thing with added sex and violence, but I didn't enjoy it so much that I have ever felt the desire to read the sequels. "Options" is (according to isfdb) set in the same universe as "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and Ophiuchi Hotline, both of which I also read before starting this blog and thought were not bad.

"Options," which first appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 9, is about topics we regularly see discussed in the news in 2016: sex changes, body modification, gender roles, homosexuality, women and mothers in the workplace.  It is set on the moon, a moon that has been colonized for over a century but still has a strong kind of pioneer spirit where everybody is expected to pull together as a unified community, perhaps because Luna is in some kind of cold war with the Earth government.  Everyone on Luna is required to work, so there is no slack in the labor pool to take up babysitting duties, so mothers bring their young children into the office with them, which causes some disruption in the workplace. The 28-page story follows a middle-class family of smarties (Cleopatra King, an architect who is currently managing the construction of a food factory, and her husband Jules La Rhin don't watch TV, instead spending their free time reading books) with several kids as they grapple with a rough spot in their relationship.

Sex changes have been available on the bustling moon colony for decades, but few people of Cleo and Jules' generation have taken advantage of this wonder of modern science; 99% of people are content to stick with the sex they were born into, even though the means of changing your sex is safe, easy and reversible.  In Varley's tale sex change doesn't involve surgically reshaping your genitals or pumping you full of chemicals; instead, a brainless clone body of you is grown, a clone with the X or Y chromosomes altered so that the clone body is like a twin of the opposite sex.  They can pop your brain into this clone body and you can explore life as a different sex while your original body waits in storage; if you find you don't care for life as the opposite sex, they can just put your brain back into its original vessel.

While Cleo and Jules' generation has essentially rejected this opportunity, the younger demographic is beginning to embrace it (a newspaper which apparently did not suffer the fate of The Cincinnati Post reports that 33% of people under 20 have experimented with sex changes.)  Cleo becomes intrigued by the idea of she and Jules both switching sexes; as the story progresses it becomes clear that Cleo is at least a little dissatisfied with the traditional female role she plays in the marriage--she does most of the child rearing (including breastfeeding) and she usually is on the bottom when she and Jules have sex, to cite some examples.  She gets breast reduction surgery (symbolically becoming less feminine and more masculine), experiments with lesbianism, and has a male clone body grown for her, a process which takes six months.  Jules resents and resists these changes, and they struggle to keep their marriage alive after Cleo has her brain put in that male body and changes her name to Leo.

"Options" is well-written and well-structured, and reasonably interesting and entertaining.  A story on these topics could have been a horror story that focused on the "eternal battle of the sexes" and the natural fear of radical social and physical change (and, with the character of Jules, Varley does address this angle); instead "Options" is an optimistic piece that embraces all those liberal pieties you heard in college: gender roles are largely socially constructed, change is good, you should broaden your mind and look at things from a new perspective, etc.  Varley asserts that people who have experienced life as both sexes are superior to "one sexers," so I guess the story fits more or less comfortably in the current (2016) zeitgeist, over 35 years after it appeared.

"The Locusts" by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes  

I really liked the last Niven story I read, "Fourth Profession," and I thought all the famous Niven novels, with or without Pournelle (Ringworld, Integral Trees, Mote in God's Eye, Footfall) I read in my youth had cool science ideas and cool settings, but when I reread them as an adult they seemed a little light when it came to the literary virtues, like style, plot and character.  Let's see what's up with "The Locusts," which first was published in Analog.

An overcrowded Earth makes its first efforts to colonize extrasolar planets! A small group of Earthlings lands on barren but habitable Tau Ceti IV, their ship full of frozen bacteria, seeds, and animal embryos with which they will create an Earth-like ecology on the rocky desolate world.  All goes well for two years: grass, trees, fish, and other Earth life spreads across the landscape.  But when the colonists try to create their own families disaster strikes--their kids are stupid hairy apemen!  Heartbroken, parents begin committing suicide in dramatic ways, including blowing up their orbiting space ship!  When the kids (who can only learn like a dozen words of English and are too dim to make their own beds) become sexually mature at age nine and start having sex, the colony is shaken by a violent dispute over whether the children should be allowed to breed, or should be sterilized.

I feel like I am always pointing out how elitist and anti-democratic classic SF is on this blog, and here is another chance for me to do so.  The colonists hold a meeting, and the mass of them favors having the kids sterilized, but the most educated person among the colonists (everybody calls him "Doc") refuses to let this decision stand, taking matters into his own hands and doing the right thing. Doc steals the colony's aircraft and flees with the children to an inaccessible part of the planet, where, to figure out if the kids are truly human, he has sex with one of them and raises a big family.  (Classic SF also has its share of outre sex!)

Larry Niven is a hard science guy; here's the speculative science he and Barnes are serving up for us.  Doc's research in the microfiche library suggests the colonists' children are Pithicanthropus erectus--why are all the kids born on Tau Ceti IV these "small-brained Pleistocene primates?"  Were the colonists infected by a germ from Earth which mutated due to exposure to space radiation on the long trip from Earth, or a germ native to Tau Ceti IV?  Did the planet's greater-than-Earth gravity or longer -than-Earth day cause the change?  In the end of the story a laser message with the news from the Earth of six or seven years ago explodes all these theories--all the babies now being born on Earth also resemble Pithicanthropus erectus!

Doc points out that when grasshoppers have used up the resources in their current environs they give birth to a generation of locusts, a form more adept at colonizing new territory, and opines that the human race, having used up the Earth, has gone through a similar transformation!  Clever and aggressive homo sapiens, with its risky wars and environment-threatening technology, is perhaps less suited to colonizing new worlds than simple-minded, quick-breeding, unaggressive Pithicanthropus erectus!

This story is alright.  The ideas are good, but Niven and Barnes fail to make the characters engaging--they are just names without any personality--or to generate any emotion in the reader, even as the characters experience all kinds of deep primal emotions (the desire to have children, the desire to protect children) and extreme psychological problems (suicide, being disgusted with your own children, knowing you have wasted your life on a doomed mission.)  Moderate recommendation.    

"The Thaw" by Tanith Lee

Regular readers of this here blog will know I am a big fan of Lee's short stories, and "The Thaw" does not disappoint!

"The Thaw," which first appeared in Asimov's, is a first person narrative, written by an insecure young woman, Tacey Brice, a failed artist living in the socialistic future of 2193, when everything from housing to water to clothing is rationed and people who aren't very productive, like our narrator, live more or less comfortably on the dole. Lee writes in a smooth, unpretentious, colloquial style imbued with Tacey's anxiety and lack of confidence; Lee succeeds in making Tacey seem like a real person.

"The Institute" has contacted Tacey: for the last two centuries people of means suffering from incurable diseases have had themselves cryogenically frozen, and the government has decided to revive them. The first test case will be an ancestor of Tacey's from the late 20th century, Carla Brice, "my great-great-great-great-great grandmother.  Give or take a great."  The Institute will provide Tacey a grant if she will serve as a kind of liaison between Carla and the world of 2193, and there is also the possibility of making easy money off the publicity, so Tacey agrees.  (It is significant that Tacey agrees to participate in this project not out of a love of her family, curiosity about the past, to gather inspiration for her art or to further the cause of science, but out of a selfish desire for easy money.)

At the clinic where Carla is revived Tacey meets a young black doctor ("black as space and as beautiful as the stars therein"), with whom she falls in love (though she never tells us his name.)  The "medic" only has eyes for tall, beautiful and confident Carla.  Tacey finds Carla intimidating, and when Carla moves into Tacey's little apartment, Tacey is psychologically dominated by her ancestor--Carla makes a servant of her, and Tacey does all the cooking, cleaning, running of errands, etc, for the 20th-century beauty.  I felt like Lee was suggesting parallels between Carla and some of our traditional ideas about vampires or witches; for example, near the end of the story Carla seduces the black medic, at which point Tacey applies to him the nickname "The Prince of Darkness."

We learn the almost unbelievable truth about what is going on at the end of the story, after Tacey discovers that Carla has murdered and eaten the black doctor. Early in the story, the medic had told Tacey that religious people of the past had worried about what would happen to the human soul during cryogenic storage, but of course 22nd-century people have abandoned such silly beliefs. Well, maybe such beliefs were not so silly! Evil noncorporeal space aliens have found that they are unable to take over the bodies of living humans, but that during cryogenic storage something (the soul, perhaps?) leaves the body, making room for an alien tenant. "Carla" is the vanguard of the alien invasion force!

Full page ad for Tanith Lee novels from my copy of 1980 Annual World's Best SF

Now that Carla has been given a clean bill of health, the rest of the cryogenically frozen people, over 4,000 of them, will be revived!  Each is inhabited by an alien, and since each alien, when ensconced in a human body, can hypnotize hundreds of humans in the way "Carla" hypnotized Tacey and the black doctor, the E.T.s will be able to enslave the entire human race!

Very good; "The Thaw" is a horror story founded on the very real feelings many of us have around people who are taller, more attractive, smarter, or otherwise superior to us--feelings of insecurity and inadequacy--and on our knowledge that all too often such superior people use their superiority to manipulate and dominate us. As well as Lee's fine writing style, I enjoyed the SF ideas and the religious overtones. I seem to recall that Lee's novel Don't Bite the Sun also depicted an atheistic and decadent future (though that future was one of plenty while "The Thaw's" is one of scarcity) in which a female protagonist discovered hints that the forgotten religions of the past told valuable truths. Another interesting aspect of "The Thaw" is the possibility that Tacey is an unreliable narrator trying to manipulate the reader. In the last few pages of the story it becomes apparent that part of Tacey's project in writing this narrative is to assuage her survivor guilt (the aliens kill humans on a whim, but Carla has promised to protect Tacey, her pet human) and to beg forgiveness from mankind for being a tool of, practically a collaborator with, the alien invaders (continuing the religious theme, Tacey twice suggests that the human race considers her a "Judas.")  Could Tacey, who goes on and on about her shortcomings, be trying to win our sympathy, and diminish her own responsibility for the catastrophe the human race has suffered, by exaggerating her faults?

Highly recommended.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" by Joanna Russ

As you can see, Russ's story got the cover of the issue, an homage to Magritte by Ron Walotsky

I'm sure we all remember Joanna Russ, the socialist feminist lesbian college professor. Even though I'm one of those people who think that humanities and social science professors comprise a hypocritical and parasitic priestly overclass which brainwashes students in hopes of constructing a North American Soviet Union in which they will be the commissars, I can't deny that Russ is an able writer and that I have enjoyed some of her stories. Maybe "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" will be a good one.

In his intro to the story Wollheim laments that, while Jules Verne's 150th birthday in 1978 was celebrated enthusiastically (among other things, there was issued "a set of commemorative dishes"!) in Europe, Americans did nothing to mark this momentous date. Russ was the exception; "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" was written in 1978 on the occasion of the anniversary, and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the dedication, "Hommage a Jules Verne" in 1979.

I have to admit that I have little direct familiarity with Verne's work (embarrassing, I know), though I have seen the various movies based on Verne's books showcasing the talents of James Mason, Vincent Price, Kirk Douglas, and Ray Harryhausen, and so have a vague idea of the plots and themes of some of his writing.  Presumably I will be missing all kinds of allusions and references to Verne's oeuvre as I read Russ's story.

I feel like it is likely I missed something, because "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" feels like a pretty pedestrian tale.  Our narrator is a Frenchman in the 1920s.  Walking through a passageway that links different sides of a train station, he has a bizarre vision of a jungle.  A woman snatches his arm and tells him that at a certain time of day (this very time!) if one enters the passage he or she will be transported to one of many other, alternate, realities.  The woman, the Amelie Bertrand of the title, describes briefly her various trips to a dozen or so other universes, where she spends years having adventures, only to return to this train station at the same moment she left, unaged.  The narrator determines to go on just such adventures himself.  The End.

This is a very ordinary story--while not bad, it is slight; there have been a million "doorway to other universes" stories, and this one doesn't describe the adventures in those other universes, just devotes a few lines to describing each of the other worlds.  Does Russ bring anything new to this shopworn genre?

Well, there are "meta" elements.  These include a direct reference to Around the World in Eighty Days and an oblique reference to George Orwell (it is suggested that "Airstrip One" may be one of Mrs. Bertrand's otherworldly destinations.)  The Airstrip One reference made me wonder if Russ was suggesting that Bertrand was travelling to worlds that were based on famous books, an idea used by Robert Heinlein in Number of the Beast and A. Bertram Chandler in at least one of the later Grimes stories.  I also wondered if the "real" world of the narrator and Bertrand might be a fictional world and not our own.

The story has some feminist and diversity politics overtones.  Bertrand has exciting adventures (e.g., working as supercargo on a whaler in the Pacific for two years) in the alternate universes, adventures she, as a middle-class woman, can't have in the "real" world.  She also shows no regrets about leaving her husband for years at a time.  It is also perhaps significant that Russ's narrator describes the heroine as "plump" and "by no means pretty," a contrast to most SF heroines.  One of the most extensively described alternate universes, a moon colony in 2089, is a sort of identity politics utopia--the finest mathematician of the time is a woman, and her colleague, a black man, is a leading physicist.

Acceptable, but no big deal.  Verne experts and Russ's devoted fans will probably get more out of it than I did.

**********

While the Russ is leaving me a little cold, super-editor Wollheim made good choices with the other three tales.  The Lee has the most literary and entertainment value--style, character, human feeling, and a wild surprise ending--but the stories by Varley and Niven and Barnes both have solid speculations about science and make an effort to explore the psychological and sociological ramifications of those ideas and present human drama.  And all four of these stories are ripe for some kind of gender analysis, each touching directly on women's relationships with their families and/or with society.  

In our next episode more stories from DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF; this time by writers with whose work I am not very familiar.

"We have a very small number of adults trying to raise a very large number of you into a culture that we just made up, one we don't have any emotional attachment to ourselves."

On the cover of my 1992 paperback edition of John Barnes' 1991 novel Orbital Resonance, Orson Scott Card compares Barnes to Heinlein, and on the back cover Poul Anderson compares Barnes to Heinlen.  Inside, on the "Praise for" pages, various SF periodicals do the same.  Well, I like Heinlein, so I thought I'd give Orbital Resonance a chance.

The year is 2024 and the Earth has been totally effed up by biological warfare, climate change and AIDS!  The only people to survive the catastrophes were those willing to do anything to survive.  Once these ruthless survivor types were in charge they came up with a scheme to save the Earth--space stations made from asteroids where things can be manufactured without damaging the Earth's environment, and where a new society of social-minded humans can be developed!

Our narrator is Melpomene Murray, thirteen-year-old daughter of a psychologist on the council ("CPB") who has played a major role in developing the new generation of communitarian people.  They live in Flying Dutchman, an asteroid in an orbit between Earth and Mars.  Melpomene is writing the book we are reading after having been enlisted by the CPB to produce propaganda that will help Earthers understand what life is like in space and convince them to think well of the space people.

The comparisons to Heinlein are quite apt--much of Orbital Resonance reads like a pastiche of "Menace from Earth" and the various juveniles, with a teenage girl as first-person narrator, describing her life in a space colony (we've got no room, no privacy, variable gravity, and we like it!) and teenage relationship dramas (a bully is mean to the new kid from Earth, girls worry about their figures and about boys liking them, Melpomene's brother is broken hearted because he is bad at computer programming class, there is a rift between Melpomene and her best friend Miriam because Miriam is paying attention to a boy, etc.)  The story also addresses philosophical issues that Heinlein often wrote about, like the tension between individualism and duty to society, when it is appropriate to obey authority and when it is appropriate to rebel, and the forms family and erotic relationships will take in the future.

Kids on the asteroid station are conditioned and hypnotized (Melpomene's father uses words like "designed" and "programmed") to fear breaking rules, to fear leaving Flying Dutchman, and to enjoy working in teams.  A math test, for example, is like a team sport; each student is given different problems, and the good students take time out to help the poor students because each student's score is affected by everybody else's score ("In Pyramid Math, your score is half your own plus one quarter the average of you and your partner, plus one eighth the average of your foursome,  and so forth....") If there is a fight in class every student gets punished.

Basically, the kids have been programmed to be a bunch of commies (Dad says "Individualism is dead because it didn't work,") but over the course of the book we see signs the programming is starting to break down.  The aforementioned bullying wasn't supposed to happen, for example, and an immigrant from Earth who cracks cruel jokes, Theophilus, starts everybody speaking their minds in antisocial ways ("'I've always thought things like that.  I bet other people have too.  We just never used to say them until Theophilus came up.'")  And when Melpomene realizes that so many of her attitudes and emotions, which feel totally natural, may be the result of tampering with her mind, she rebels.

Her rebellion, which occurs in the last seventy or so pages of the book, consists of hacking into CPB computer files with her boyfriend and eavesdropping on Dad.  She learns that she is, without her knowledge, being groomed to be ruler of the asteroid! Her brother is being manipulated into being an artist!  (He isn't really a bad computer programmer, the teachers just give him impossible problems so he will turn to his art. They also sabotage his sports career!)  Melpomene's boyfriend is being groomed to be the Flying Dutchman's captain!  The CPB also plan to outlaw labor unions and abolish elections soon.

Melpomene stops all the individualistic nastiness started by Theophilus (Winston Smith style, in the end Theophilus cheerfully joins the collective--he was just reenacting the cruelty he learned on Earth and now sees the error of his ways.) Melpomene also convinces the CPB to abandon all their manipulations of the kids as well as their plans of getting rid of unions and elections.  In fact, the adults who were born on Earth agree to leave the asteroid and move to Mars (which is in the process of being terraformed.)  Life on Earth with its violence and individualism has made the adults unfit to rule, so like Moses who lead his people to the promised land but could not enter it, they are leaving the space-born teenagers they programmed to run The Flying Dutchman without them!  

I wanted to like this book more than I did; its milieu is interesting and Barnes has interesting ideas, but Orbital Resonance is just too long (218 pages) and repetitive. The little Stakhanovs play sports all the time, so we get many long detailed scenes in which various low gee sports are explained to us; these are followed by long detailed scenes in which we follow the course of a match. I never watch sports if I can avoid it, and I don't read about sports either, and my eyes glazed over a bit during the sports scenes, and these scenes are legion.  (I should have kept track; I swear a third of the novel takes place in gyms and race tracks.)  I didn't care who won when I had to watch my wife's nieces and nephews play soccer, so I'm not likely to care if high school kids who aren't even real win or lose at sports that aren't even real.

(Jack Vance in his Alastor books and Demon Princes books has speculative sports scenes, but in the former the sport, hussade, has bizarre erotic overtones, and in the latter the sport, hadaul, is a blood sport, and in both series the sports directly serve the plot and are played for high stakes.  The sports are boring and the stakes are low in the sports scenes in Orbital Resonance.)

The scenes of relationship drama can also get repetitive.  There are numerous sexual relationships, teenage friendships, and parent-child relationships depicted in Orbital Resonance.  The kids on the Flying Dutchman, I guess thanks to their "programming," are really into expressing their feelings, and so all these relationships involve lots of hand holding, hugging, and crying.  I should have kept count; I swear somebody cries or gets a hug every five pages--usually both.

I like the kind of tragic love stories we read in Somerset Maugham and Marcel Proust, and I liked the teenage relationship drama in Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover, but the soap opera suds in Barnes's novel didn't interest me.  As with the sports stuff, I think this is partly because the stakes are low.  In Maugham and Proust people's amorous relationships result in lives being ruined; scenes of twelve-year-olds having crushes and pawing each other in a dark corridor or arguing with their parents have little emotional impact because we know even if they are crying today over a slight or a rejection they'll be over it tomorrow.

Another weakness of Barnes's novel, at least when comparing him to Vance, Maugham, and Lee as I just have, is the style.  Barnes's style is not bad, but it is bland. The novel inspires very little feeling.  One reason Lee's teenage relationship shenanigans pull at the heart strings while Barnes's just sit there is because Lee has a compelling, affecting style, and Barnes does not.  


I'm scoring Orbital Resonance as marginally positive/acceptable: I certainly don't like it as much as Card, Anderson, or the many other people who did their part providing the novel with over three pages of ecstatic blurbs.  What do they like so much about it?  Maybe after two decades of the New Wave some were happy to see an old-fashioned semi-realistic "life on a space station" story.  Maybe some approved Barnes's criticisms of our individualistic society (we don't hug and cry enough and we aren't doing enough about climate change and AIDS.)  Maybe some liked the stuff about teenagers groping each other and masturbating.  Orbital Resonance has virtues, but for me it is hobbled by a bland style and excessive length; my lack of interest in sports and computer hacking, and my devotion to the cult of the individual, also didn't help.

Here we have Part 2 of my look at Half Price Book's list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy novels, covering selections 26 to 50.  This idiosyncratic list was selected by 3,000 bibliomaniacs, or so says the Half Price Books website.


26) Eye of the World by Robert Jordan
I read the first volume of this series when it was new, and enjoyed it, but didn't pick up the second volume when it came out.  Perhaps for the best.

27) The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I'm not really into alternate history or any of that, and I think stuff like the I Ching is ridiculous.  Still, if I was living in an alternate universe in which I had to read a Dick novel, it would probably be this one, as it is so highly regarded.  Also, the title is good poetry.

28) Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov
Is this the detective one in which the shock ending is that a woman had sex with a robot?  I read this as a kid, and was disappointed that there wasn't something more to it.

29) Elantris by Brandon Sanderson
What?

30) I Will Fear No Evil by Robert Heinlein
I'm a little surprised to see this on the list instead of Starship Troopers, which is so famous and controversial and includes the awesome and influential opening chapter in which the heavily armored human marine fights aliens with a hand flamer.

I read I Will Fear No Evil as a kid, and, looking back, I am surprised I finished it.  Presumably I was charmed by the idea of a friend in my head to keep me company, and I guess there must have been some sex in the book.  I do want to reread this one; I think Heinlein has a good writing style, and there is no way it could be as bad as Number of the Beast.

31) Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind 
This is the Objectivist fantasy epic, right?  I'm sympathetic to Ayn Rand's individualistic philosophy, but I don't want to spend time reading a long book about it.  I haven't read any Ayn Rand's own novels, and I'm not going to read any of this guy's novels.  Those two page articles in Reason magazine about Rand are enough for me to get the gist of her thought and move on.

32) A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs    
This is one of my favorite books.  I love everything about it; Burroughs comes up with a very exciting, even beautiful, version of Mars, and his writing really brings it to life.  The fact that the book is so old, and written in an old-fashioned style, and espouses old-fashioned values (it is basically an apologia for 19th-century imperialism, isn't it?) makes it even more alien and perhaps paradoxically even more believable.  At the same time it is an over the top wish fulfillment fantasy: John Carter is immortal, the best swordsman in the solar system, and also scrupulously honest and decent.  He doesn't use his superior fighting ability to rob people and sleep around like Conan; he is faithful to his wife and tries to teach the people of Mars how to behave.  Somehow Burroughs makes it work and people like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Wolfe have been singing Burroughs' praises ever since.

33) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
I read the four Hitchhiker books as a kid, and I enjoyed them, but I remember little now.  I might read these again.

34) Dragonsinger by Anne McCaffery
I read a bunch of these Pern books as a kid; I liked the idea of having a little friend dragon that would keep me company all the time.  Also, the idea of the Thread attacking the planet every century or whatever is exciting.  As an adult I tried to read Dragonflight, which I think is the first of these Pern books, and thought it was horrible and wrote a scathing review on Amazon. 

35) The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
I loved the Elfstones of Shannara as a kid; it was like 300 pages of guys running around, fighting with swords and bows and magic fire.  I imagined that the Elfstones were like my light blue plastic D&D dice.  Then I read The Sword of Shannara, and I liked it, but I found the end disappointing, anti-climactic.  It was trying to teach you a lesson about telling the truth or something, which I found condescending.  I can still remember sitting in the car, riding home from Nana's in my Dad's car, reading by the dashboard light, finishing the book and thinking, "Is this really how it ends?  This is like a book for kids."  I got the Wishsong of Shannara as a gift, and started it, but the magical artifact wasn't as cool as the Ellfstones, I was older, and the story seemed repetitive, so I abandoned it.

I've been thinking of reading Elfstones again, but I'm afraid the same thing might happen as happened when I tried to read Dragonflight.

36) The Once and Future King by T. H. White
My mother gave me a paperback copy of this and it sat on my bookshelf for twenty odd years.  I don't know where it is now; maybe my brother has it.

37) Brave New World by Aldous Hiuxley
This is pretty good.

38) Foundation by Isaac Asimov  
I tried to read this as an adult; I read the first two or three stories, and then abandoned it.  Asimov's writing style was feeble.  Even worse was the plot: besides being outlandish (a guy can predict exactly what will happen hundreds of years in the future?) it is terrible drama.  (A guy teleporting to Mars and sword fighting everybody is outlandish but good drama.)  The stories consist of a guy sitting in a room, watching a movie of a dead guy telling him what to do; then he does it, all goes perfectly, the end.  There is no humanity, no feeling, no tension, it's as exciting as watching a guy order a burger at McDonalds' drive thru; wow, look, he ordered a quarter pounder and... he receives a quarter pounder! 

What is the ethic, the ideology of these stories?  That an elite of smart guys should manipulate the rest of us behind the scenes?  Sickening. Who does this appeal to?  Smart guys who want to manipulate other people?  I've heard that Paul Krugman and Newt Gingrich love Asimov's Foundation books, that they were inspired by the idea of using math to bend history and society in the direction they want it to go.  Horrible.

I remember, as a kid, reading an essay by Isaac Asimov.  I'd like to read it again, but of course I can't recall the title or where I saw it.  It must have been in an SF anthology or something.  Asimov was decrying stories in which a barbarian defeats a wizard.  Presumably he was referring to Conan.  I had never read such stories, they not being at the local library, and I remember thinking it odd that Asimov, who had like a dozen books at the local library, was attacking writers whose work I had never seen as if they were a ubiquitous plague.  Asimov thought it bad that the smart guy in the story was the villain, and the strong guy the hero, that this would teach people the wrong values or something.

Obviously, in the Foundation stories we see Asimov doing the opposite, giving us a story in which a smart guy tricks the strong guy.  In one of the stories I read in the first volume of the Foundation series the heroes win by selling to the villains a space battleship that they have sabotaged.  The villains are so stupid they don't realize the ship has been sabotaged and try to use it to conquer some planet or other, and of course are humiliated when their weapons don't work.  Maybe this is the wish fulfillment fantasy of a smart but weak kid, but to me, this is not drama.

Maybe it was not obvious to Asimov, but it seems obvious to me why stories of strong guys fighting hand to hand with enemies and monsters is appealing -- it is an allegory for our lives, which are a long lonely struggle which we are doomed to lose.  And it is obvious why people like the story of the ordinary man who defeats the smart man who has specialized knowledge.  In our everyday lives we are all at the mercy of people who are smarter than we are, or have knowledge we lack: lawyers, politicians, doctors, bankers, car mechanics, etc.  These people could use their specialized knowledge to take advantage of us, and sometimes they do.  And of course many people envy the wealth that clever people in our modern society can accumulate.  So of course people like the idea of the barbarian overcoming the crafty wizard.  Who would identify with a guy who sells another guy defective merchandise, a guy who wins by lying, by trickery? A lot of people, apparently, because we see Foundation on these lists all the time, but I don't get it.  

39) Northern Lights by Phillip Pullman
This is the guy who hates religion, right?  I'm an atheist already, so what would be the point of me reading this book?  Religion in the West has been in decline for centuries; is it fun to kick a man when he is already down? 

My brother read some of these His Dark Materials books, and said the early ones were good, but they got worse as more and more anti-religious stuff took over the page count.

40) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
This is the basis of the film Blade Runner, I believe.  I thought that movie was OK, but apparently it is common for people to praise it extravagantly.  Once I was sitting with two college professors, and one of them told the other that Blade Runner was the movie that best portrayed "the urban space," or some jargon like that.  I think they were talking about the movie Children of Men, which he had just seen and thought was Blade Runner's only competition for top spot in depicting what city life was all about.  I haven't seen Children of Men, and I haven't read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and I don't need to use the I Ching to tell me I am probably not going to do either.

41) Anathem by Neal Stephenson
This guy has a good reputation, but somehow his books always look like a slog, like a project, and self-consciously educational. Forbidding.

42) The Black Company by Glen Cook
I have read all ten of the Black Company books, and enjoyed and recommend the first four.  The first one, or maybe the "spin off," The Silver Spike, are the best.  As the series ground on it became slower paced and eventually tedious, but out of curiosity I read them all.

The Black Company are a bunch of ruthless jerk offs, a mercenary unit in a world dominated by warring evil wizards. In the first episode of the book the Black Company betrays and murders the people who have hired them because they realize they are on the losing side of a war. The cool thing about the first book is that Cook conceives of ten bizarre evil wizards, each one with a cool name, like The Hanged Man or Nightcrawler or The Howler, and each one has a weird deformity, strange mannerisms, and special powers.  I would have loved reading about these wizards and their insane adventures trying to conquer the world and each other.  Unfortunately, these wizards all get killed pretty quickly.

The books in the Black Company series are the record of the Company's career, written by the unit's annalist.  Early in the first book the Black Company is hired by a female wizard known as The Lady, the most ruthless, evil and powerful wizard in the world.  In a bizarre piece of foreshadowing, the annalist entertains the Black Company's troops by writing and reciting pornographic stories about his imaginary love affair with The Lady!  (This pornography is not reproduced in the book.  You can decide on your own if this makes the books more attractive or less attractive.)  Then, to my dismay, the Lady is overthrown and joins the Black Company and turns out not to be a bad person after all and the Black Company starts being the good guys.  With the Black Company now the good guys, the series loses much of what made it distinctive. 

The Silver Spike is a sort of noirish story of criminals who mess with an undead wizard or something like that; there are lots of plot twists and double crosses and so forth.  I liked it.

43 & 44) The Dragon Prince by Melanie Rawn and The Magic of Recluce by L.E. Modesitt Jr.
I saw these, but I didn't touch them.

45) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll      
I haven't read this.  My wife read it some years ago.  I may read it someday. 

46) Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes
It took three guys to write this?

I read this when it was new, a million years ago.  As I remember, some guys try to explore or colonize a planet, and some monster attacks them.  This novel is an homage to "Beowulf;" the monster is called "a grendel."  I'm not exactly a fan of the whole "I'm going to rewrite Romeo and Juliet and put it in a New York slum," or "I'm going to write Moby Dick, but in outer space," or "I'm going to write a feminist version of the Trojan War," school of literature.  I guess everybody thinks they can do this because James Joyce did it.

I did like when Gilligan and the Professor put on their own production of Hamlet, though.

I guess I liked Legacy of Heorot, but was disappointed that there weren't more monsters or something else going on with the plot.  Or maybe Niven's, Pournelle's and/or Barnes's writing style wasn't doing it for me.  Still, I'd consider reading this again.

Niven and Pournelle aren't exactly master wordsmiths, but they seem like smart guys and Niven definitely has good ideas when it comes to setting.  I liked the setting of the two Integral Trees books, and Ringworld was alright, and Mote in God's Eye was pretty good.  I'm a little surprised Legacy of Heorot is here and not Mote.  I'd bet a million dollars Mote is more famous and sold more copies.

My rule of thumb, based on my career working at book stores and in academia, is that when more than one author is listed, the last person listed probably actually wrote the book.  So I'm guessing Steven Barnes did most of the work on Legacy of Heorot.  [UPDATE AUGUST 19, 2022:  As a helpful commenter pointed out, I mixed up John and Steven Barnes here.  Doh!]  I have two John Barnes books on my shelf, but I haven't read them yet.  I bought them because Orson Scott Card and Poul Anderson both compare Barnes to Heinlein.  I should make an effort to read them.

47) Dark is the Sun by Phillip Jose Farmer
I am surprised this is on here instead of To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  I have mixed feelings about Farmer, who tries to do adventure stories like, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, but tries to make them more "modern" or sexy.  I've read several of Farmer's books, with To Your Scattered Bodies Go being good, Maker of Universes bad, and Dayworld and Dare average.  I might read Dark is the Sun if I stumble on it for a few dollars or at a library.  The cover looks like that of a solid adventure story, and my man Tarbandu at PorPor Books Blog praises it.


48) Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber
I've considered reading Weber, but never actually done it.  I am interested in military history (I have big piles of books about WWII tanks and planes and ships, books about Horatio Nelson and the Duke of Wellington, a stack of those Osprey books about medieval knights and WWII infantry tactics, etc.) and like the idea of space navies fighting vast wars, but the few times I've tried to read "military SF" I've been disappointed.  Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Haldeman's Forever War, and the Aubrey/Maturin books by Patrick O'Brian are good fiction about guys participating in wars because Heinlein, Haldeman and O'Brian are good writers, and their books are about more than just fighting, they are about politics, society, human relationships, etc.  I guess I'm worried that Weber's books will just be page after page of people shooting it out, and I have no idea if Weber is a good writer.  Perhaps I am doing him a disservice.

49) Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg
This is, in my opinion, Silverberg's best book, and the book of his I'd expect to see on a list like this, a book that is quite like a modern mainstream literary novel, about a smart guy living in a big city, trying to face life and its challenges and changes.  I think this is the kind of book a person who reads Nabokov and Saul Bellow, but looks down at science fiction, could enjoy.

50) Watch on the Rhine by John Ringo and Tom Kratman
Most of what I say about David Weber above could probably go for John Ringo.  This book, according to the synopsis on Wikipedia, seems kind of crazy, like it was deliberately written to piss people off.  Aliens attack the Earth, so the Earth raises the Waffen SS from the dead to fight them?  Cripes!   

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Tomorrow the saga of Half Price Books' list of 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy books will continue.