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Who's familiar with this story? Written in '67 for Ellison's first "Dangerous Visions" anthology, it won the Hugo award in '68. People raved about it at the time, but these days it's standard to hear the typical knee-jerk criticisms of older sci-fi. I say "sci-fi," but really this short story (more like a novella) really isn't sci-fi at all. No aliens, no space travel, just an over-populized world in which people live in tiered cities, stay indoors and glued to their "fidos" (a merger of television and the internet -- something already becoming more of a reality), and live in a "utopia" in which work has been abolished.
You usually see references to Joyce dropped when this story's mentioned, with the title being the clearest clue. But I say it's just as much Pynchon. It's like a combination of Joyce's puns and Finnegan's Wake-style linguistic anarchism (especially in the opening dream sequence), and Pynchon's paranoia, stunning wordplay, and scatological humor. There's a sequence involving a can of spermicide that could've been lifted out of any of Pynchon's first three novels.
Anyway, I just wanted to see what others think of this. It's too bad Farmer never wrote a novel in this manner, though I know he did write a prequel ("Everyone loves prequels!" -- Homer Simpson) called "The Oogenisis of Bird City" in 1970. It's another short story, but I've never read it. All I know is, it's about how the future society of "Riders" was built.
For those who've been interested in this story, but can't find any of the out-of-print Farmer collections which contain it, or your local bookstore is out of copies of "Dangerous Visions," I present to you something I found via Google. Looks like the link itself is already dead, but using the handy "cache" option, I found THIS. (Not sure how long it'll be live, though.) |
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