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| A little break from Saturday grant writing |
It's been an unusual summer in many ways. My Muse hasn't entirely left me, but she's been recharging. The early summer was all about reading the planetary romance short stories of Leigh Brackett: 500 pages or more worth of stories, and well worth the time investment. The late summer has been all about rereading many early works of my favorite SF author, Samuel R. Delany. In the last two months, I read Nova and Babel-17 for the first time in 30+ years, reread the Einstein Intersection (which I first read about 8-10 years ago), and Fall of the Towers trilogy.
Many times in the past I tried to read the Fall of the Towers, but had never made any headway. This time I was able to get far enough into the first book for the entire trilogy to click. I read it in a week. My friend Bruce Baugh shared a wonderful insight into this trilogy, describing it as a Green Lantern Corps comic series in novel form. But less violent. I think the comparison is apt.
It is worth pointing out that this trilogy does have a rape scene which drives future elements of the story. In fact, one member of the Second Foundation reading group - one of the three or four other hardcore Delany fans I have met in Minnesota - stated that she had no interest in reading the book again because of a horrific scene that she still remembers. I think it has to be this one.
Like Octavia Butler, Delany does not shy away from depicting brutality; still I am glad that rape is not a recurrent theme or plot driver in most of his work.
It's also striking how fresh Delany's 1960s work feels upon (re)reading them today; they have aged very well.
Going forward into September, there are a few things I am reading. The Second Foundation will be discussing the works of Joan Slonczewski, so I am going to try to read at least one of her novels (either A Door Into Ocean or The Wall Around Eden). I've met Slonczewski; she's a biologist with the gift of bio-gab.) The Empire Reading Group will take on China Mieville's latest short story collection, Three Moments of an Explosion. This is an exciting and potentially dangerous moment for the latter group; we have been reading together for something like 12 years or so, but everything we have read heretofore has been non-fiction: books like Tony Negri's Empire (after which the group is named), radical and/or feminist science studies, feminist and LGBTQ theory, and history.
However I am also reading a few other things and have a bit more energy at the moment around those projects:
- Rereading Samuel R. Delany's Tales of Neveryon
- Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem
- Greg Stafford and Jeff Richard's revised edition of King of Sartar
*Thanks to my friend Scott Martin for dropping this title in a thread in G+.
Stay tuned next week for an exciting new project here at FATE SF!
