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Still devouring the printed word: see my tongue black with ink...
Despite my best intentions, I was unable to finish J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World. After the first five chapters, I got bored and just skimmed the rest. It was the writing style that defeated me—ironic, because I'd selected it exactly for its Britpulp origins. On some scores it delivered as promised: downbeat ending, quiet desperation, glum stiff-upper-lip-ness, the simultaneous fascination/attraction and repulsion/fear the characters display towards the world-threatening anomaly (there's a thread idea there, about the tradition of the death-wish in British SF). But the prose was never more than merely serviceable, and the of-its-time attitudes were rankling me—e.g., the villainous mulatto, presented as if the fact of miscegenation were in itself a signifier of debasement and depravity. Ballard scores some clever-clever points for naming his minor characters after figures from French Surrealism (Clair, Aragon, Peret, et al)—in keeping with the Max Ernst painting on the dust jacket—but a disappointment overall.
On then to Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, well-regarded by many. Talk about your bummers. My previous exposure to Clarke was another alleged classic, Rendezvous With Rama, which made hay with the hard-science thrills but demonstrated a wretched tin ear for human psychology and interaction: a shame, then, that Childhood's End is a novel of psychosocial speculation. I couldn't believe any of it for a minute.
And it's terribly written, packed with telling-not-showing passages. A typical paragraph begins something like (paraphrasing): "Religion, which was of course already on its last legs before the arrival of the Overlords, quite naturally ceased to be an important factor in public life during the first fifty years of their reign." And there are great whacking strectches of it like that, making the book read, despite Clarke's protests to the contrary, more like a manifesto than, you know, a story. About people.
The only items of interest, ironically enough, are the speculative science bits, particularly when Clarke essentially predicts (a) virtual reality technology, and (b) a surge in the popularity of the animated film as a medium for serious artistic expression, along with an ideological split between proponents of hyper-realistic computer-style animation and more abstract cartooning... in a couple of throwaway lines written in 1953.
Now reading another classic, but one of a different stripe—Octavia Butler's Wild Seed, Afrocentric anthropological SF (not for nothing is Butler one of Carla Speed McNeil's favorite writers), and a heady brew indeed. In Hollywood terms, it's Alex Haley's Roots meets Grant Morrison's New X-Men, and after the Clarke it's so sure-footed and graceful as to make me weep.
Claire and I are up to Book the Fourth in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and I'm pleased to report that the Gorey-esque absurdity level has increased considerably as the series has worn on. (Claire was on a national radio call-in show 'tother day, BTW, bigging up these books: her call is at about the 30-minute mark).
Am also reading a couple of how-to style nonfiction books—one on technical writing, one on selling your writing (focusing on the selling, rather than the writing), and one on the craft and business of oral storytelling: I'm seriously considering a self-reinvention, and am reappraising all of my avocations as potentially profitable: that is, after constantly bemoaning my lack of marketable skills, I am changing my approach, investigating instead the marketability of the various skills I already possess.
Wish me luck. |
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