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And so on and so on and so on …
Strange Wine by Harlan Ellison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This 1978 anthology collects 15 stories written by Ellison in the mid-70s – some of them in bookstore windows, on the air in a radio studio where callers suggested ideas, and in a Chinese restaurant during dinner with friends who claimed all the good ghost stories had already been written. Or so says Ellison in his introductions, and given his penchant for building up his own mythology, it’s always possible he’s exaggerating. But no matter – Ellison intros come with the territory, and it’s in character I suppose that some of the intros are longer than some of the stories here.
As usual with Ellison, there’s a mix of horror, sci-fi and urban fantasy, which Ellison ties together (kind of) in his intro with the idea that reading books is like drinking strange wine that fuels our imagination – and without that imagination, we will go the way of the dinosaurs, who had none. Which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose. Anyway, these stories are nothing if not imaginative: literary gremlins, murder victims who don’t stay dead (or in Hell), alien sound contests, black-market transplants, a man who thinks he’s an alien, haunted Nazis, misogynists who receive supernatural poetic justice, and a “chocolate alphabet”, among other things.
A few stories fall a bit flat, but for the most part, this is a pretty solid collection – whatever you think of his personality and ego, Ellison knows how to tell a story. Even when he gets into deliberately provocative territory (i.e. lead-off story “Croatoan, which he claims angered pretty much everyone on either side of the abortion debate), he still delivers a gripping tale. Stephen King has cited Strange Wine as one of the best horror anthologies ever published. He might just be right.
The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Crichton’s 12th novel, but the second writing under his own name rather a pseudonym. This is also one of his more famous novels, not least because of the film version that came out in 1974, although it was less successful than the novel. The premise: Harry Benson is a computer scientist who suffers from "psychomotor epilepsy", which causes him to have seizures in which he becomes dangerously violent and later has no memory of what he did. Doctors at the Neuro-Psychiatric Service (NPS) of University Hospital have a solution: implant computerized electrodes in his brain to control the seizures.
This being a Crichton novel, this does not go well for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that Benson is also psychotic and believes that machines are already taking over humanity. Benson’s psychiatrist, Janet Ross, warns the two doctors performing the operation – John Ellis and Robert Morris – that the procedure will only control the seizures, not cure them, and that this won’t make him less psychotic because that’s unrelated to his epilepsy. Ellis and Morris realize this, but do it anyway. You can more or less guess what happens next.
Like most Crichton novels, it’s a page turner, even when he throws a lot of infodumps and tangents into the narrative, especially as he ruminates on the ethics of well-intentioned mind control, the relationship between man and machine and what happens when machines can outthink us – which is both interesting (to me) and strikingly relevant given the current conversations we’re having about AI and metaverses and whatnot. On the downside, Crichton also throws in a lot of subplots as backstory for the principal characters that go nowhere and don’t add any useful information. And of course, you can see the ending coming a mile away. It’s okay for what it is, but there are other Crichton books I would recommend. (Also, I hear it was Crichton’s least favorite of his works, so there’s that.)
The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1955 novel (originally serialized in 1953) is more of a straightforward SF story rather than the planetary romance stories she wrote with heroes like Eric John Stark. The hook: the wealthy Cochrane family, which has monopolized space travel, launches its first interstellar expedition using a star-drive invented by a man named Ballantyne. The ship successfully makes “the Big Jump” to Barnard’s Star, but returns with only Ballantyne aboard, mad with pain and nearly dead. The log books are missing, and Ballantyne is too far gone to explain what happened.
Enter the protagonist, Arch Comyn, who punches his way into the Cochrane facility on Mars where Ballantyne is being held and arrives in time to hear his dying words, which imply that they encountered alien life forms and the crew may still be alive. This makes Comyn valuable to the Cochranes, who are planning to send a second expedition back to Barnard’s Star to find out what happened and need the information he possesses. Comyn wants in, mainly to find out what happened to his friend Paul Rogers, who was also on the ship (which is why he went to see Ballantyne in the first place). But he gets more than he bargained for – not least because someone is trying to kill him for knowing what he knows.
True to its pulp origins, the “science” is glossed over and the plot and characters are a bit thin, particularly when it comes to the subplot of Comyn’s tryst with Sydna Cochrane. But the tradeoff is a fast-paced story that blends pulp SF with pulp detective fiction (and blends reasonably well, as Brackett was well versed in both genres). Also, the eventual climax on Barnard’s Star brings some unexpected and thought-provoking depth to the story. It’s not as good as The Long Tomorrow, which is the best of the Brackett novels I’ve read so far, but I liked this more than the EJ Stark novels I tried recently, mainly because planetary romance is a difficult genre for me to appreciate.
View all my reviews
Go ahead and jump,
This is dF
Strange Wine by Harlan EllisonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This 1978 anthology collects 15 stories written by Ellison in the mid-70s – some of them in bookstore windows, on the air in a radio studio where callers suggested ideas, and in a Chinese restaurant during dinner with friends who claimed all the good ghost stories had already been written. Or so says Ellison in his introductions, and given his penchant for building up his own mythology, it’s always possible he’s exaggerating. But no matter – Ellison intros come with the territory, and it’s in character I suppose that some of the intros are longer than some of the stories here.
As usual with Ellison, there’s a mix of horror, sci-fi and urban fantasy, which Ellison ties together (kind of) in his intro with the idea that reading books is like drinking strange wine that fuels our imagination – and without that imagination, we will go the way of the dinosaurs, who had none. Which is as good an excuse as any, I suppose. Anyway, these stories are nothing if not imaginative: literary gremlins, murder victims who don’t stay dead (or in Hell), alien sound contests, black-market transplants, a man who thinks he’s an alien, haunted Nazis, misogynists who receive supernatural poetic justice, and a “chocolate alphabet”, among other things.
A few stories fall a bit flat, but for the most part, this is a pretty solid collection – whatever you think of his personality and ego, Ellison knows how to tell a story. Even when he gets into deliberately provocative territory (i.e. lead-off story “Croatoan, which he claims angered pretty much everyone on either side of the abortion debate), he still delivers a gripping tale. Stephen King has cited Strange Wine as one of the best horror anthologies ever published. He might just be right.
The Terminal Man by Michael CrichtonMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is Crichton’s 12th novel, but the second writing under his own name rather a pseudonym. This is also one of his more famous novels, not least because of the film version that came out in 1974, although it was less successful than the novel. The premise: Harry Benson is a computer scientist who suffers from "psychomotor epilepsy", which causes him to have seizures in which he becomes dangerously violent and later has no memory of what he did. Doctors at the Neuro-Psychiatric Service (NPS) of University Hospital have a solution: implant computerized electrodes in his brain to control the seizures.
This being a Crichton novel, this does not go well for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that Benson is also psychotic and believes that machines are already taking over humanity. Benson’s psychiatrist, Janet Ross, warns the two doctors performing the operation – John Ellis and Robert Morris – that the procedure will only control the seizures, not cure them, and that this won’t make him less psychotic because that’s unrelated to his epilepsy. Ellis and Morris realize this, but do it anyway. You can more or less guess what happens next.
Like most Crichton novels, it’s a page turner, even when he throws a lot of infodumps and tangents into the narrative, especially as he ruminates on the ethics of well-intentioned mind control, the relationship between man and machine and what happens when machines can outthink us – which is both interesting (to me) and strikingly relevant given the current conversations we’re having about AI and metaverses and whatnot. On the downside, Crichton also throws in a lot of subplots as backstory for the principal characters that go nowhere and don’t add any useful information. And of course, you can see the ending coming a mile away. It’s okay for what it is, but there are other Crichton books I would recommend. (Also, I hear it was Crichton’s least favorite of his works, so there’s that.)
The Big Jump by Leigh BrackettMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Continuing my exploration of the works of Leigh Brackett, this 1955 novel (originally serialized in 1953) is more of a straightforward SF story rather than the planetary romance stories she wrote with heroes like Eric John Stark. The hook: the wealthy Cochrane family, which has monopolized space travel, launches its first interstellar expedition using a star-drive invented by a man named Ballantyne. The ship successfully makes “the Big Jump” to Barnard’s Star, but returns with only Ballantyne aboard, mad with pain and nearly dead. The log books are missing, and Ballantyne is too far gone to explain what happened.
Enter the protagonist, Arch Comyn, who punches his way into the Cochrane facility on Mars where Ballantyne is being held and arrives in time to hear his dying words, which imply that they encountered alien life forms and the crew may still be alive. This makes Comyn valuable to the Cochranes, who are planning to send a second expedition back to Barnard’s Star to find out what happened and need the information he possesses. Comyn wants in, mainly to find out what happened to his friend Paul Rogers, who was also on the ship (which is why he went to see Ballantyne in the first place). But he gets more than he bargained for – not least because someone is trying to kill him for knowing what he knows.
True to its pulp origins, the “science” is glossed over and the plot and characters are a bit thin, particularly when it comes to the subplot of Comyn’s tryst with Sydna Cochrane. But the tradeoff is a fast-paced story that blends pulp SF with pulp detective fiction (and blends reasonably well, as Brackett was well versed in both genres). Also, the eventual climax on Barnard’s Star brings some unexpected and thought-provoking depth to the story. It’s not as good as The Long Tomorrow, which is the best of the Brackett novels I’ve read so far, but I liked this more than the EJ Stark novels I tried recently, mainly because planetary romance is a difficult genre for me to appreciate.
View all my reviews
Go ahead and jump,
This is dF
