The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1984 (third quarter)

[james_davis_nicoll]

List courtesy of Andrew Wheeler.

Contents from Contento.



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snip dead links
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This will a briefer than usual set of comments because I missed almost all of these.


July THE WARS OF VIS (2-in-1 of THE STORM LORD and ANACKIRE) by Tanith Lee

I missed this.


STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK by Vonda N. McIntyre

And this.

(Although I always heard good things about her Trek novelizations)


THE HARPER HALL OF PERN (3-in-1 of DRAGONSONG, DRAGONSINGER and DRAGONDRUMS) by Anne McCaffrey (Alternate)

And I missed all of these.

'WARE HAWK by Andre Norton (Alternate)

And although I read this, no memory of it remains.

[Witchworld. Is this the one where they have to do the thing with that thing and the hand of the author can be seen firmly planted between the protagonists's shoulder-blades pushing them plotwards?]


August THE NONBORN KING & THE ADVERSARY by Julian May

I missed this.


THE 1984 ANNUAL WORLD'S BEST SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim

I can't find a contents list for this on contento. I could have
sworn '83 was the last Wollheim-Saha annual...

[• Introduction (The 1984 Annual World's Best SF) • essay by Donald A. Wollheim
10 • Blood Music • (1983) • novelette by Greg Bear
33 • Potential • (1983) • shortstory by Isaac Asimov
41 • Knight of Shallows • (1983) • novelette by Rand B. Lee
74 • Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair • (1983) • shortstory by Frederik Pohl
84 • In the Face of My Enemy • (1983) • novella by Joseph H. Delaney
132 • The Nanny • (1983) • novelette by Thomas Wylde
156 • The Leaves of October • (1983) • novelette by Don Sakers
178 • As Time Goes By • (1983) • shortstory by Tanith Lee
193 • The Harvest of Wolves • (1983) • shortstory by Mary Gentle
202 • Homefaring • (1983) • novella by Robert Silverberg

I think the only one I read was the Bear, which was better than the novel]


THE CONGLOMEROID COCKTAIL PARTY by Robert Silverberg (Alternate)

No idea what this is.

[It was a collection:


11 • Introduction (The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party) • essay by Robert Silverberg
15 • The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve • (1982) • novelette by Robert Silverberg
35 • The Pope of the Chimps • (1982) • novelette by Robert Silverberg
55 • The Changeling • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
76 • The Man Who Floated in Time • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
87 • The Palace at Midnight • (1981) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
103 • A Thousand Paces Along the Via Dolorosa • (1981) • novelette by Robert Silverberg
127 • At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
136 • Our Lady of the Sauropods • (1980) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
152 • Gianni • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
171 • The Trouble with Sempoanga • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
181 • How They Pass the Time in Pelpel • (1981) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
196 • Waiting for the Earthquake • (1981) • novelette by Robert Silverberg
220 • Not Our Brother • (1982) • novelette by Robert Silverberg
240 • The Regulars • (1981) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
250 • Jennifer's Lover • (1982) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg
267 • Needle in a Timestack • (1983) • shortstory by Robert Silverberg


ON A PALE HORSE by Piers Anthony (Alternate)

Part one of a series, in this book a young man gets saddled with the job of Death. I liked it at the time, although I don't know if I would now. The sequels went downhill more rapidly than was usual for an Anthony series.



September DEMON by John Varley

The third and final book of a trilogy that I thought started with some promise. Humans pay dearly for having discovered Gaia, the intelligent habitat orbiting Saturn and as does Gaia herself.

[Everything sucks and get off my lawn]


THE 1984 ANNUAL WORLD'S BEST SF edited by Donald A. Wollheim

Hmmm. Was this solicited twice?


THE ELRIC SAGA, PART TWO (3-in-1 of THE VANISHING TOWER, BANE OF THE BLACK SWORD and STORMBRINGER) (Alternate)


More tales of Elric. See previous review.

Comments

[oh6]

"Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair" is yet another direct solution to a received population crisis, which works out to paying for E-tickets by playing Russian roulette with more barrels.

I completely missed the romance subplot in The Adversary on first reading and was rather confused when I re-read it decades later after or in the midst of reading the Galactic Milieu series. I'd skipped the latter because there was a two-book linking novel in between.

I recall flipping through On a Pale Horse at the book store and being put off by some aspects of the setting.

[dsgood]

I remember reading three of the stories in the 1983 Annual Best SF. The Don Sakers story was worth reading.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party has a bunch of rather worthwhile short stories. I think ``Needle in the Timestack'' is a rather haunting one about a husband and wife who realize that a creepy stalker type is altering history in the hopes of breaking them up (or at least keeping them from ever meeting) so that he gets to marry the woman instead. The story's haunting, but obviously, the exact title slipped my mind.

``At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party'' is set in a protean world where the people who'd be hipsters if the story were written today are trying to out-do one another in body imagination. One of them has a perfectly Johnathan Lethem-esque concept of wearing a brand-new body that's as close as possible to the old-fashioned ordinary human form. That's not the hook of the story, it's just establishing the personality of one of the key players in it.

``The Pope of the Chimps'' takes off on the idea of teaching chimpanzees language and creates, well, a religion among them. It's more the story of a research project gone astray, which is darned interesting on its own.

All of these are pretty well-written, as you might expect because Silverberg. I would have to go up and find the book to describe all the various stories, but, it's one of the short story collections I've kept for myself instead of sending off to the friend I normally send my used books to.

[(Anonymous)]

The Nonborn King and The Adversary are the last two books of Julian May's Pliocene Exile tetralogy. They are better than the first two books and much, much better than the books that came after them.

May had real strengths: high concept (the whole Pliocene Exile notion is a *great* high concept), plots of hundreds, Wagnerian climaxes. There is a great deal of fannishness and Celtolatry in the first two books. Well, in these two, too, but starting about halfway through Book Two she starts killing characters off with GRR Martin levels of energy and enthusiasm, and somehow that makes it somewhat better.


Doug M.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

I will compare the Pliocene series to LOTR in this sense:

Both had material from an earlier unpublished work that made its way into the plot and almost took it over. When the earlier work finally did get published, it proved to be not as good.

Also, leaving Tolkien aside, Marc is Magneto from X-Men.

Magneto

[(Anonymous)]

that's a nice catch! Magneto with an extra dose of Byronic antihero.

Yeah, the prequel tetralogy was very disappointing at best, and parts of it were simply dire.


Doug M.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I have fond memories of the Harper Hall trilogy, probably because I was a preteen girl involved in classical music. The first two are about a teenaged girl who's a musical prodigy and adopts a large herd of flying cats fire lizards more or less by accident. The third is about a boy soprano who loses his voice with puberty and has Adventures.

I don't think you have to be a thirteen year old girl who loves music and fantasy to enjoy these books, but it probably helps a great deal.

Spoilers for Future Pern:

Menolly never became a Master? How is this possible? She should at least have become Composition Master after Domick.

[martin-wisse.livejournal.com]

I just read all three of them this year, liked them and I'm certainly not a 13 year old girl. But they are clearly wish fullfillment fantasies, especially the first one.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

The third one struck me as a riff on Kipling's Kim.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair has a fairly brutal ending. I haven't read it in 20 years, but remembered it instantly.

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

This Elric collection is mixed: one book of The Bad Stuff ("Vanishing Tower") and two of The Good Stuff (original Elric).

(But I dare say "Stormbringer" is The Great Stuff, even; Moorcock's best S&S. He only blows up the universe once in it.)

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

I remember STIII: The Search For Spock: The Book Of the Movie as being at least medium-good, yes. If your to-be-read-for-not-work pile were not already visible from space I'd say add it to it just because.

Yeah, Witch World novels often have a Long-Ago Series Of Questgivers And Inexplicably Functioning Plot Token Dispensers With Arrows To The Next One involved. I guess it's to be preferred to The Protagonist Wanders All The Hell Over Azeroth Without Finding Out What She's Supposed To Do Next; Meanwhile, Evil Triumphs Half A Continent Away... (MMORPGs are set up precisely so this doesn't happen - the action starts, animatronic-like, RIGHT when the player(s) get there, however long they've spent canoodling around with the auction house in the meantime.)

On A Pale Horse was the first book of Incarnations of Immortality, which went first to five (Death, Time, Fate, War, Nature), then to seven (Evil, Good), and finally to eight (Night). And had the usual "stop when you feel creeped out because they don't get less creepy" Anthony thing going, though I actually liked them all up through Good.
Night, _Under A Velvet Cloak_, turns out to have so much underage sex in it (not just talking about it like the Xanth series) that he had to go to an independent publisher for it. (Plz don't ask how I know this. sob.) But all of the first five had some fairly interesting fantasy-meets-magitech stuff going on in them, and all of the first seven are, dare I use the word, incestuously intertwined in their family trees for the protagonists, so you keep seeing glimpses of the Other Plots in each book...

--Dave