2008 books

77) Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, 1938  ( RE-READ )
Sometimes your most honest appraisal of a story can be found in the first words you say to yourself when you finish it: in this case mine were "That was, again, a fantastic book." I last read this in 1975 for my English Lit. 'O' Level, and remember thinking I would like to read it once more, but next time not for study. Greene doesn't put a foot wrong in his story of the downfall of Pinkie, a teenage gangster on the streets of 1930s Brighton, after he commits one murder too many. Greene's getting under the skin of Pinkie is a truly class act in characterisation, equally so his nemesis, the formidably convincing Ida Arnold, who gets to the root of things with the small help of a ouija board and plenty of female intuition. There's something quintessentially British about it all, with everyone trapped in their own circumstantial worlds and their lives intersecting in ways that can't help but point back to their own individual loneliness. How Greene does this I'm not so sure, and in fact to analyse that some more would take away much of the pleasure: Greene can dazzle you with his writing here, if you let him. Brighton Rock is also a very catholic novel about life, with Pinkie being a defiant exception to whatever rules life may have, his come-uppance conveyed in his refusal to countenance that 'there's always room between the stirrup and the ground', even when time is at its most short. A benchmark of a novel, not least in my own reading life, and one that still makes a particularly hard-hitting impression.

2008 books

     

It turned out to be a pretty good idea to read Harry Harrison's four Nova anthologies of original SF in reverse order, as this way the overall quality generally increases. It's a series that kicked off rather well in 1970 but over subsequent years mostly declined in quality, and it's fairly evident that someone along the way, either editor or publisher, probably lost the will to continue. Harrison made some selections that were often pleasantly surprising and unexpected given his own writing style, though it's a shame that of all the fifty-one original stories published so few were ground-breaking or even particularly memorable. Every collection has its highlights but even when depending on one's personal taste, Sturgeon's Law always applies.

81) Harry Harrison, ed., Nova One, 1970
Nova One put the series on a good footing by offered a strong and mostly cohesive variety of stories, though the UK edition didn't appear until 1975 after Harrison had already done the fourth volume. It's also the most difficult of the four to comment constructively on, as there are so few outstanding or wildly original stories that might put the Nova series on a par with, say, Damon Knight's earlier long-running Orbit anthologies. The best for sheer chutzpa is Brian Aldiss's 'Swastika!', which has Hitler living his quiet retirement years in Belgium under the name Geoffrey Bunglevester. Two other stories are quietly memorable: Gordon R. Dickson's convincing (if also rather depressing) tale 'Jean Duprès' of a dangerous alien entanglement on a colony world, and James Sallis's impressive early story 'Faces & Hands' which displays a dexterity with language that recalls early-period Delany and even reminds me contextually of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand.

80) Harry Harrison, ed., Nova 2, 1972
The highlight here is of course Robert Sheckley's 'Zirn Left Unguarded, The Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead', a sudden, quick knife to the heart of space opera that left it, if not quite dead, then at least in suspended animation for a long time. It bears frequent re-reading and I believe ought to be considered as something of a core SF text, if it isn't already. The best of the remainder are extrapolative warnings such as Poul Anderson's plausible 'I Tell You, It's True', about mass mind control, and Frank M. Robinson's environmentally-driven 'East Wind, West Wind', but particularly memorable are Robert Silverberg's 'Now + n, Now – n' and James Tiptree Jr.'s lovely 'And I Have Come Upon This Place By Lost Ways', a reminder that science may not have the answers to everything, and included here (as Harrison's introduction indicates) still under the belief that Tiptree was a guy. The best and most cohesive of the four collections by a long stretch.

79) Harry Harrison, ed., Nova 3, 1973
There's a grim political edge to some of the selections for Nova 3, chosen, Harrison makes fairly clear, as his own response to the then-recent Vietnam War. In retrospect I'm not sure that was the right editorial decision, as it added a gravitas to the series that it didn't really need and dissipated the momentum it had accumulated with the varied strengths of Nova 2. To illustrate, Hank Dempsey's 'The Defensive Bomber' is speculative but certainly not SF, and expresses unreserved sympathies for the North Vietnamese – worthy, but not really a story that takes the reader where he or she may wish (or expect) to be taken in a science fiction anthology. Similarly, Mack Reynolds's 'The Cold War... Continued' is just as speculative as a spy thriller, pitting America against the undeveloped Third World that intends to withhold its natural resources from the West, and the only thing properly science fictional about it is that Reynolds has the antagonists firing lasers at each other as opposed to more commonplace weapons. Sheckley's contribution, 'Welcome to the Standard Nightmare', seems to unsuccessfully try to do for First Contact stories what 'Zirn Left Unguarded...' brilliantly did for space opera, but in a far more straightforward way: it's entertaining, but ultimately falls short. The best was kept for last, however, with Philip José Farmer's darkly compelling 'Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind', which extrapolates what would happen in the event of a worldwide memory loss. Pray it never happens.

78) Harry Harrison, ed., Nova 4, 1974
Harrison included six stories here from previously unknown authors, but in truth too often they feel like experimental work of significantly lesser quality, occupying space which Harrison may have preferred to fill with a few more better-known names. However there is some useful stuff: Sheckley's 'Slaves of Time' deliberately goes up its own time-travelling posterieur rather well, Naomi Mitchison's dolphin-friendly 'Out of the Waters' is quietly priceless, Jeff Duntemann's 'Our Lady of the Endless Sky' is a memorable piece of Christian SF, and Alfred Bester's 'My Affair with Science Fiction', culled from Harrison & Brian Aldiss's Hell's Cartographers, is a good primer for those who want to know more about the elusive Bester or still haven't read The Demolished Man or The Stars My Destination. Somehow it seems as if Nova 4 is too diverse, as if Harrison just threw together between these covers whatever he could get or was given, regardless of any cohesion beyond the order in which they appeared. But the UK edition does have one of my favourite Peter Elson covers, so that's OK by me.