2011 books

1) Gloria Lisé, Departing at Dawn, 2005
While reading Nathan Englander's The Ministry of Special Cases in 2009 I wondered if there were other novels about Argentina's 'Dirty War' available in English. Published by the Feminist Press in 2009, Departing at Dawn is clearly seen as a definitive novel of 1976-1983 Argentina, because by decree it's now permanently available to read at every library throughout the country. It tells the story of Berta, who has seen her partner, a trade union organiser, thrown from a window to his death by the government's goon squads, and she flees Tucumán to stay with remote relatives in the Argentine interior, escaping the junta's relentless pursuit and disappearance of anyone even vaguely associated with Leftist politics. Curiously, given the subject matter, this is a novel written in delicate watercolours as opposed to oils, and I was expecting a much more immediate and punchier read. It does also have some strongly written passages such as the long and engaging description of the bleak backwater town of Olpa where Berta ends up, but the tone was set at the beginning with the first half of the novel mostly given over to delicate character studies using Berta's family history as source. I did wonder if or when the novel was ever going to pick up the pace a little, which it thankfully did towards the last quarter of the book, but even that kept the political strife off-screen and instead used it as the background context for Berta's eventual exile. This was a worthy read although it's slow and quietly powerful, and not something I approached in quite the way I perhaps should have done.

Found today, in honour of yesterday

Via politicartoons.

no subject

A Very Happy Fannish Birthday to pigeonhed.

2011 books

   

Peter Weston's Andromeda series of original fiction anthologies – named after Rog Peyton's famous Birmingham SF bookstore – still provides quite a bit of curiousity value from the late 1970s. Starting out strongly, it noticeably declined in consistency and quality by the second volume before PW had to literally call in a few favours for the third, a tactic which thankfully capped it on a stronger note. It was a short-lived series and one that gave PW a fair amount of stress for the duration, but it did have a few highlights still worth reading today that can't be found anywhere else.

2) Peter Weston, ed., Andromeda 1, 1976
Christopher Priest and Harlan Ellison are two names that don't sit comfortably together, but they provide two of the highlights of this first outing. Priest's excellent and haunting story 'An Infinite Summer' – first submitted to Ellison's still unpublished The Last Dangerous Visions and therefore destined to disappear without trace – was pulled from Ellison's clutches and instead given its first appearance here. It was the right move and is by far the best story, followed by (for me) Robert Holdstock's colourfully romantic 'Travellers', then Ellison himself has the typically angry and energetic story 'Seeing', a good one in it's own right but something that doesn't seem to fit alongside most of the other stories here, which is possibly why it was placed at the end as a final flourish. A strong beginning, and Ursula Le Guin reckoned so too.

3) Peter Weston, ed., Andromeda 2, 1977
Andromeda 2 saw the realisation of PW's wider plan for the series which was to include a few stories by completely unknown writers. Possibly prime among them was Tom Allen – actually (and I had to do some research here) Tom Allen Shippey, and one of the two reasons he adopted the pseudonym was to protect his career as an Oxford historian from the tarnish of any association with science fiction – his story 'King, Dragon' was a very confident debut that feels like a Tolkeinian dragon fantasy until its SFnal context comes clear. Another name that first appeared in this volume was William F. Wu, who has since had a long list of short fiction published. This volume also saw the last fiction from the short career of Scott Edelstein, as well as another highlight with the similarly romantic 'A Small Event' from Robert Holdstock. This volume is capped with Richard E. Geis's novella 'One Immortal Man', something that's written competently enough, I suppose, but at the same time feels like it was penned by a hormone-saturated college boy with some very adult fantasies. Okay, Geis has become famous for his soft porn and this was his first sale as a writer of science fiction, but I wonder if there weren't other stories available that might have ended this collection more, shall we say, appropriately – I felt grubby after reading it. Still, this was a decent enough collection for starting the careers of some writers.

4) Peter Weston, ed., Andromeda 3, 1978
In his introduction PW doesn't mind giving away the fact that he was pretty disillusioned by this time, mostly at the quality of the assorted submissions he was receiving, so he was turning elsewhere for the Good Stuff. The end result gave us another strong story by Tom Allen, an easily likeable short story on time dilation and relativity from Darrell Schweitzer, an interestingly baroque and seemingly semi-autobiographical novelette from Fritz Leiber, and 'The Cremation', a lovely Dream Archipelago story from Christopher Priest, probably my favourite in this collection. Another name from that time was the British writer David Redd who, given his glowing introduction, may not have truly prospered as he ought to have done over the subsequent years (I've not yet read anything else by Redd, so recommendations would be welcome). Other better known names here include Dave Langford, Ian Watson and Larry Niven, but others who promised PW some stories, including Fred Pohl and Jack Vance, obviously didn't follow through. This was a good conclusion to a short series that sometimes varied in quality but made up for it handsomely in other areas.