2008 books

[peteryoung]

25) Henry Kuttner, Fury, 1947
The anti-hero Sam Reed, born as Sam Harker, an elite Immortal without knowing it and reduced to living the life of a hustler in the underwater cities of Venus, sets himself on a course that will ultimately lift humanity back onto the surface of the planet and then onward to the stars. In many ways Fury often feels like a small-scale Jack Vance planetary romance, such is the way that Kuttner's ocean-and-jungle Venus influences the direction of the story. Sam Reed is memorable, filled with rage and comparable to Alfred Bester's Gully Foyle, until the impressive character development just plateaus out a third of the way through. Still, a fine and defining book in Golden Age SF, though it really should have the name C.L. Moore on the cover aswell.

Comments

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

One of the first SF novels I read - really must get round to reading it again some time, I still have a copy.

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

It's one of those books I wish I'd read 30 years ago. I picked up a reasonably good first edition at Orbital for £25 from Bob Wardzinski, though I imagine a perfect copy would go for a hell of a lot more.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

It definitely should have Moore's name in the byline. A paperback copy I have includes an intro she wrote in which she reminisces about how they took turns writing the novel, alternating at the typewriter and taking up wherever the other had left off in the middle of a page. I remember when I read the novel that I got the feeling many times that one would introduce a new story element and then the other would be forced to retcon it with a flashback. It seemed very uneven, but with a very interesting world. I still have never read the related novella, "Clash by Night".

[peteyoung.livejournal.com]

'Clash by Night'... thanks for that, not heard of it!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I just found a blog that reproduces the C.L. Moore intro I mentioned, and of course I misremembered what she said. The composition process I remembered was their *usual* process, but in the case of Fury: "In FURY, which is a good example of this process, I wrote comparatively little of the copy. The idea was basically Hank's and I didn't identify very strongly with it. I didn't identify with Sam Reed, the lead character. But what I did contribute I can recognize instantly, after all these years, by the passages in which color-images pre-dominate, and in which my dramatically gloomy theme appears." Elsewhere she writes, "FURY was written by about one and an eighth persons." Perhaps that's why he gets the sole credit now. (It was originally published under their Lawrence O'Donnell pseudonym.)