Bookpost 21

Bookpost Index

The Author of the Acacia Leaves, Ursula K LeGuin

LeGuin writes about ant language for a few pages. It’s good, unsuprisingly.

Enchantress of Venus, Leigh Brackett

DNF 63%

Same series as Black Amazon of Mars, same issues. Prose and descriptions are decent, plot and characters are not. This is actually the second in the series, with Black Amazon being the third and last, so I'm reading them backwards. This doesn’t actually matter, because she was definitely phoning these in and their structures are identical: boring man bumbles around, encounters modestly more interesting woman who actually has a motivation and a plot, boring man helps out modestly more interesting woman.

Stark is a nothing character (picaresque novels are often in danger of this, but it’s especially present here) whose main trait seems to be randomly kissing women he has just met prior to any indication on the woman’s part that she was amenable to being kissed by him at that time. Only have 2 data points at the moment, but it’s happened twice. Sword-and-sorcery/planet authors write a male lead whose hobby isn’t serial assault challenge (impossible).

If you took the two female leads of the two Stark stories I've read and combined them, you’d have a solid main character. Doubtlessly the woman in the story that I haven’t read yet would round out the triad. Part of me wants to try and complete the experiment, but wanting to try’s never meant it’s a worthwhile effort and it would mean forcing myself through these.

The descriptions of sword-and-planet Venus are great, though. Oceans of red clouds thick enough to sail on but still gaseous enough to breathe in. 

Queen of the Martian Catacombs, Leigh Brackett

DNF 48%

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a man with minimal personality meets a modestly more interesting woman with an actual motivation. He gets dragged along in some scheme or another because he’s useful. Along the way the boring dude meets a teenage(?) girl who helps him and it’s the same story, it’s all the same goddamn story!  

Since this is the first of the trilogy, it’s got a little more setup and a slight bit more meat on the narrative (local warlord causing issues, Stark is brought on by the interplanetary peacekeeping forces to infiltrate warlord’s inner circle before he turns Mars into a generation-long bloodbath). But also we get the reveal that there’s yet another layer to the “Stark totally isn’t black, you guys!” thing - he was raised by aliens, you see.

Oof.

There is a good description of how the inhabited part of ancient city migrated down the crater as the water dried up. That'll stick with me.

The Book of the Law, Aleister Crowley

If I judge it purely as a work of fiction, I think it’s an evocative bit of mythopoeic word-salad. Crowley knew his way around a sentence, and he was unsurprisingly skilled at writing in the voice of a bloviating wizard of yore high on his own ecstatic farts whilst pondering his orb and plotting to cause problems on purpose. Neat to know this is where "The ending of the words is..." is from, hilarious that it's fucking abracadabra. This is the extent of the good things I have to say about it.

Under normal circumstances I could shrug off the odious philosophy and laughably charlatanistic premise with "yeah, that's 1904 for you", but the Book of the Law was written as a magical-religious text, rather than fiction in imitation of one. That extra context raises my hackles and unheimlichs my stomach, which is not helped that the odious philosophy element is "Aleister Crowley was a fascist". Or a sparkling authoritarian, if you prefer. A man who wouldn't be averse to having his boots spit-shined. A true blue prototype for the modern adolescent-edgelord-slash-upper-class-twit-of-the-year-to-reactionary-violence pipeline. By about a quarter of the way through chapter 2 I was rolling my eyes and thinking "oh fuck off mate we've got the Scarlet King at home." He's not particularly subtle about how his ideal arrangement of the universe involves the brutal oppression of the many by the few, he just swaps out the nation-state for re-seasoned Greco-Egyptian mystery religion and appropriated kabbalah.

Normally I would segue into "and here's how I have turned all of this on its head" at this part, since the man's long dead and this along with a lot of his other stuff is in the public domain - but unlike the polyvocalic mess of a long-established religious tradition the reader is left with few fruitful avenues of wiggling their way out of the mess by taking advantage of internal contradictions, and unlike your average pulp story there's no real narrative to transform or characters to shift focus to: there's just Crowley here, echoing in an empty room.

Mirrikh; or, a Woman from Mars, Francis Worcester Doughty
DNF chap 5/30

The story starts enjoyable enough; there’s a psychic man from Mars visiting Cambodia (as one does, as a psychic man from Mars) and a somewhat overly-leisurely unraveling of why (I'm certain that "he just wanted to visit Angkor Wat" is not the actual answer, unfortunately, but it’s nice to imagine. I'd visit Angkor Wat if I was a psychic man from Mars). It’s basic 1890s orientalism, though in the chapters I read the main problems were all the old spellings of city names (Panompin instead of Phnom Penh) and a section of “my guy you’ve spent how many years living here how are you still this wrong about Buddhism.” It’s tolerable up to that point.

Then all that comes to a screeching halt complete with fire and shattered glass because our narrator (who is not a psychic man from Mars) decides he’s just fallen head over heels in love with a young woman who has just been stripped half-naked and whipped by an angry mob of racist stereotypes. A woman he does not exchange a single word with, whose name he does not know, who is at best half his age, and whose age is a concerning string of question marks because she’s only ever described as “a girl”.

This character, mind you, introduces himself and the story by griping about how his wife left him and how that caused him to swear off women and romance for good.

Motherfucker your wife left you because you’re in the fucking emails. You went to the fucking island. Jesus fucking Christ. 

Armageddon 2419 A.D. Philip Francis Nowlan

The first Buck Rogers story. I was expecting it to be racist, but I was definitely not expecting it to be so racist that you could quite literally pull the twist of “they were actually Martians and the whole ‘Han’ thing is a psychic disguise where the observer’s fears and prejudices were reflected back at them” and it wouldn’t contradict anything. The story is so unwilling to humanize its antagonists that they’re physically on-screen for maybe 3, 4 pages max. Everything else is just the airships. You could replace them with automated drones and only lose the racism.

It’s also astoundingly boring. Barely 80 pages long and most of that is clunky exposition padding out the space between incidents of action. Any moment that might be given to internality or character relationships is skipped right over. This would be more tolerable if the action scenes were fun, but they’re boring too! There’s no tension: a threat emerges, and then it is immediately defeated with no lasting damage or consequences. What would normally be the climactic heist of the enemy citadel is actually the leadup to the actual climax, which is the total massacre of a heretofore unseen and barely-mentioned faction. And then it just ends. The whole thing reads like a parody of itself, and this is the first installment.

Good god I need to read something written this century.

The Blind Spot, Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

But not before I do one more PD book for the road. Significantly better than the previous two on the grounds that its greatest flaw is being structurally frustrating.

The material components are good: house with some sort of interdimensional portal in it, a magic ring that drains the life of its wearer, competing supernatural entities who are after it. That’s all good, it’s got the fun conceptual freedom that comes with writing sci-fi before the genre expectations are codified. I could turn the premise into a middling-to-decent SCP article with little effort and into a good one with only a little more.

The problem is that the stakes of the plot aren’t established until more or less the midpoint, which is also when we toss out basically everything that had come in the first half to focus on a character we have barely met up to this point, who then interrupts the flow of events to provide us with a story-within-a-story of his time on the other side of the portal for the next 45% of the book. And this happens right when things are ramping up and characters are becoming more active and finding more clues, and the new plot of the back half feels disjointed and loose, with the new material feeling unconnected even to itself. Stakes and actions and motivations don’t make sense under scrutiny: questions are asked that don’t really need to be, questions that should be asked aren’t asked, answers that could easily clear up what’s going on are brushed off with “I can’t tell you, you wouldn’t understand”. There’s a lot of wheel-spinning when it comes to how information is dealt out, lots of “what is the Blind Spot?” without any meaningful investigation (and a lot of wasting time asking the question) until the sudden burst of productivity at the midway point.. The ending is abrupt, and multiple threads and characters are abandoned, or just confusingly written to the point where I'm not sure what their point in the narrative was. 

Being written in 1921, it’s fully in the mode of scientific spiritualism, which I felt mostly neutral on. It’s just a different kind of technobabble, end of the day, though one I don't find very interesting. 

Added bonus: all of the main male characters save one have a name beginning with H, which makes it damn near impossible to differentiate between them, which is a problem when the first half jumps between multiple POVs.

I wouldn’t recommend it outside of historical curiosity, but I’m glad that I read it.