Tue 4 May 2010

20 Responses to “Four Archived Science Fiction Reviews: JACK WILLIAMSON, JOHN BRUNNER, E. HOFFMAN PRICE, AVRAM DAVIDSON.”

1. David Vineyard Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 8:48 pm

   I liked Davidson’s fantasy better than his sf for the reasons you mention. Brunner did much better than this, and for an excellent sf noir thriller try his SQUARES OF THE CITY, also QUICKSAND and his major novels THE SHEEP LOOK UP and STAND ON ZANZIBAR. His Ace doubles are all a mixed bag. he’s never a smooth writer, but his ideas can overcome that in later works. It’s hard to compare the early Brunner to the more careful and thoughtful writer who later emerged.

   The Williamson is one of his best, and also a poetic work. I’m a huge fan of Williamson who started back with Gernzback as a teen and only died recently — still writing. He literally went from a covered wagon to the stars and along the way wrote one of the true classics of modern sf and fantasy, DARKER THAN YOU THINK. He’s the only writer who managed to go from a early fan of A. Merritt to a mainstay of the Cambellian revolution, and then stay a major voice in sf long after Heinlein, Asimov, and the others were gone.

   Price, well I prefer to remember him from his grand pulp days.

   As for space opera it remains my sf staple other than the sf thriller, and luckily there has been a major revival in recent years with the Brits making great leaps in the genre with writers like Iain M. Banks, Paul McAuley, Peter Hamilton, and Alistair Reynolds.

   Nothing against the American contingent either, but the Brits are combining everything from noir and the adventure thriller to the baroque with space opera to great effect.

2. Todd Mason Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:02 pm

   Wow. Not only is MASTERS OF THE MAZE not space opera, and largely steampunk well before the term was invented, but also a fine and funny novel meant to be taken as a work of art…not a bubblegum frippery to speedread on the bus. It is both ambitious and frankly rather easy reading if one doesn’t try to cram it into some sort of round hole of SKYLARKS OF ISHER…rather like trying to read a Ross Macdonald as a Dan Turner story with an odd relative paucity of jokes and outlandish slang. And its very comparable to his better fantasy novels, only one doesn’t get the sense, as with those, that he grew increasing tired of the work as he progressed (Grania Davis’s collaborative novel with him, and Ward Moore’s, at either end of his career, also escape this tendency).

3. Todd Mason Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:03 pm

   And that’s Chulpex, and they aren’t swarming across the galaxy so much as attempting to enter through the labyrinth. It’s not altogether un-Borgesian, that way.

4. Todd Mason Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:06 pm

   The aspects of what it’s like to write for the Men’s Sweat magazines of the early ’60s dealt with in the novel, since the protagonist does just that for a good chunk of his bread, given the Retro-Infra Dig-Hipness of those rags these days, gives this novel a new currency. Wow.

5. Todd Mason Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:14 pm

   Gerald Page published a fine Price original novelet in his fifth volume of THE YEAR’S BEST HORROR STORIES (1977)…despite it being a lot more COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO than horror story, I didn’t mind a bit. I can believe the novel’s tired…but he still had it in him in his ’70s. Assuming that wasn’t a trunk story. A damned fine one if it was.

6. Steve Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:31 pm

   Hi Todd

   You read me wrong. I said that MASTERS OF THE MAZE sounds like space opera, not that it is. You’re quite right. It sure isn’t.

   As I understand the story behind the book, Pyramid came up with the title and Davidson wrote the book to go with it, and to the surprise of Pyramid, they didn’t get what they expected.

   Another book that falls in the same category, and I hope I’m remembering this correctly, is THE ZAP GUN by Philip K. Dick. A title that sounds like space opera, but which isn’t.

   I think there was another title in the “series,” but if there was, neither the title nor the author is coming to me now.

   I wish that could enjoy Davidson’s work, but I’ve tried and I don’t. He’s one of those authors, I think, that you either understand him at his level or you miss what he’s saying altogether.

   As I said in my mini-review, in his case, and given his reputation, I’m perfectly willing to say it’s me.

   May I ask, given your reference to SKYLARKS OF ISHER, whether your own taste in SF is seldom space opera, of which, of course, there is both good and bad? (E. E. Smith, Ph.D., never appealed to me, but somehow the early A. E. van Vogt did.)

   — Steve

7. Steve Says:
   May 4th, 2010 at 11:48 pm

   David

   That list of British SF writers in your next to last paragraph are the same ones that I’ve recently discovered also.

   What I like is that not only do they incorporate the Sense of Wonder of the 30s and 40s, but they’re well written, too.

   Jack Williamson didn’t start out as an especially polished writer, but he certainly became one over the years. One of the best.

   Edmond Hamilton and Clifford Simak also started in the old pulp magazines, but over the years they also steadily improved as writers, especially Simak, who’s one of my all-time favorites, even more so than Isaac Asimov but maybe not the early Heinlein.

   John Brunner I’ve always found to be uneven. I took one of his early Ace books on a flight to Michigan last year, and I left it in the seat pocket in front of me, unable to finish it. But ZANZIBAR came along, and he was a brand new author.

   I wish I’d said something more complimentary about E. Hoffman Price. As a pulpster, he was beyond compare. FAR LANDS, OTHER DAYS is a marvelous collection.

   — Steve

8. David Vineyard Says:
   May 5th, 2010 at 2:25 am

   Steve

   I like Davidson a bit more than you, but while I admire his best work, I don’t think anyone would call him an easy writer. But he was almost always his own writer, and it’s s tribute he managed that and a successful career.

   I like Doc Smith, but only because, to quote Brian Aldiss, he “put the injuns among the stars.” The only decent thing in Heinlien’s NUMBER OF THE BEAST is the scene where his heroes pass through the Lens universe and worry their stash of pot will get them arrested by a Lensman. But that said, you have to discover Smith at about fourteen to truly appreciate him. Any later and your critical faculties may get in the way of some of the fun. I can’t imagine throwing him or Van Vogt out, but I can’t see comparing their space opera to Jack Vance or some others either.

   Luckily for me I was always able to go from Sexton Blake to Umberto Eco without getting a mental hernia and able to do the same thing in sf. There is nothing wrong with a corny dog so long as you don’t imagine it is filet mignon.

   Van Vogt can be maddening, but some of his work has tremendous power. Like many who came out of the pulps literary skill takes a back seat to energy and imagination.

   Williamson had a fairly long gestation period, but once he began to mature his work often surpassed his betters. He is one of the few greats whose late works are not only readable, but actually damn good. Unlike some he never became cranky or forgot the skills needed to tell a compelling story. Even some of his books published in the 21rst Century are well written and worth reading.

   Even Brunner was fairly dismissive of his early stuff, and as you say, uneven, but at his best he was damn good. You just have to be sure it’s one of his best you are reading.

   As for that new lot of Brit space opera writers the combination of imagination, science, and writing ability is stunning. Again, I’m not knocking the American writers in the field, but they aren’t stretching themselves or the genre the way the Brits are for the most part. Some of them are the first science fiction to excite me in years. They seem willing to go places, take risks, and play with ideas in ways that shake space opera to its roots. And some like Paul McAuley and Iain Banks have written notable books outside of space opera such as McAuley’s thriller WHITE DEVILS or Banks novels THE WASP FACTORY, THE BRIDGE, CANAL DREAMS, or THE BUSINESS.

   Todd

   I bow to no one in my admiration for Davidson, but he can be difficult. I think he is well worth the effort most of the time, but there are other times when his brilliance seems to peter out before the end of the book or as you suggest he just got tired. But you have to admire a writer in the midst of all the pseudo Conan’s and rehashed hobbit’s who would undertake to write about the adventures of the poet Virgil in a popular format. With Davidson you always knew you were in the presence of a quirky and first class intelligence. But like caviar, I did find him an acquired taste.

9. Todd Mason Says:
   May 5th, 2010 at 9:59 am

   Sorry, Steve, I did take your the wrong way indeed (I’ll choose to plead the lateness of the hour)…but there are various sorts of Davidson work: the relatively straightforward Davidson of, say, “The Golem” or “Or All the Seas with Oysters” or “The Montevarde Camera,” which work is very easy reading indeed…the more personal and baroque work such as THE PHOENIX AND THE MIRROR, where even there the necessities of finishing the longer work often took a visible toll, much less in such less ambitious longer works as THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY, and such polished, brilliant shorter work as “The Lord of Central Park”…and the utter caviar of “Hark! Was That the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?” or “Selectra Six-Ten,” which is brilliant, discursive, digressive, hilarious, and not what I’d necessarily start the casual or impatient reader with. The Doctor Esterhazy stories, particularly those in the first collection, are perhaps the best expression of Davidson working in full engagement and at the top of his abilities, with plenty of other examples throughout his works (the Limekiller stories, such one-offs as “Naples”…even his first work in a fantasy magazine, the cheerfully offhanded “My Boyfriend’s Name is Jello”).

   I like good space opera as much as anyone…PLANET STORIES in the ’50s, the last five years of its run, was as good a magazine issue by issue as ASTOUNDING (gasp at the heresy from the Old School), with brilliant Leigh Brackett and Poul Anderson and Ray Bradbury stories, the Andesons not All That much different from those in ASTOUNDING, soon to become ANALOG. Sporadically pleased by van Vogt’s better work, and can take Doc Smith in small doses, but Brackett, Anderson, Jack Vance (as David mentions), and others did that kind of thing so much better. Charles Harness, when he was in that mood. Banks’s THE WASP FACTORY is a very sore point with me, being an example of what I tend to think of as British Stupid…a well-written novel that wants the reader to placidly accept an utterly and pointlessly ridiculous plot element which cannot be accepted, nor revealed without spoiling the utter cheat surprise the author hopes to spring upon us. Priest’s THE PRESTIGE similarly, if even there less blatantly. Not quite Harry Stephen Keeler-level irresponsibility, but too close, and with such better writers, no real excuse.

10. Walter Albert Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    I enjoyed your take on some SF novels and the controversy it generated.

    I was reading detective fiction before I discovered SF, largely because my mother would take me to the library with her and her preference was for mysteries.

    Later, when I was buying comic books at a neighborhood drug store (remember those?), I discovered pulp magazines and I was then hooked on those until the digest era, which I largely ignored.

    Lately, I’ve been alternating mysteries with some science fiction (Brackett and Kuttner are among my favorites), and just now I’m reading some fiction by Geoff St. Reynard. He was, course, Robert Krepps, originally from Pittsburgh and a friend of a good friend of mine. I read all of Krepps’ African novels several years ago, and friend Jack kept telling me that I would enjoy his pulp fiction, published under the St. Reynard nom de plume. I just finished his “Beware, the Usurpers,” a short novel published inthe November 1951 issue of “Imagination.” It shows evidence of hasty, sometimes even careless writing, and is substantially padded at the end, but it’s still an entertaining story in the “I’ve met the aliens and they are us” mode. I have a box of pulps with St. Reynard stories my brother sent me, destined for our friend Jack Daley (who published some science fiction stories in the 1950s), that I may dip into before I deliver the box. I don’t think that I’ll want to read all of them, but they’re a good antidote for some of the often faceless prose that I find in some of my reading, and Jack tells me that what distinguishes Krepps’ pulp fiction is that he doesn’t restrict himself to one style. His first pulp story was accepted by “Unknown,” but was published in “Astounding” when “Unknown” went under before the story could be published.

11. Todd Mason Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 12:58 pm

    Always glad to have evidence of the people behind the often mysterious pseudonyms used at Ziff-Davis! The “St. Reynard” name was attached to a number of not Too shabby stories in what I recently referred to on my blog as the usually agreeable and occasionally impressive FANTASTIC ADVENTURES magazine…which began its life as a vehicle for late ER Burroughs fiction, and ended it as the launching pad for the initially plush FANTASTIC magazine of Howard Browne’s, with FA running such major work as Fritz Leiber’s YOU’RE ALL ALONE, Theodore Sturgeon’s THE DREAMING JEWELS, and Robert Bloch’s fine “The Dead Don’t Die”…along with some genuinely surreal William McGivern stories and other good work.

12. David Vineyard Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 4:34 pm

    Todd

    I take your point, though happen to love both Banks THE WASP FACTORY and Priest’s THE PRESTIGE. I guess it falls into the what makes horse races category. Banks non sf work is really meant to be mainstream. Whenever he drops the middle initial M. he is writing less genre fiction than literary and mainstream, though there are themes and ideas that crossover. His mainstream work is closer to some of Alisdair Gray, J.G. Ballard, and Brian Moore at times than strictly genre fiction.

    As for Brackett and Kuttner and their spouses Hamilton and Moore they are among my favorites. Brackett, Kuttner, and Moore in particular had a poetic almost sensual style that still holds me today. And as for Harness, his THE PARADOX MAN may be the greatest space opera novel ever written.

    Space opera used to be a term of insult, but when it disappeared for a few years from sf everyone started to recognize how sorely it was missed. When I think of a Sense of Wonder, it’s most often space opera that comes to mind, those vast concepts and broad vistas of imagination that fired my adolescent imagination.

    I mostly know Krepps from his later film novelization work, but his COURT OF THE MORNING is among my favorite African adventure novels. I didn’t know about his sf tie, but will look some of them up.

13. Todd Mason Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 6:51 pm

    Not really a matter of what audience Banks, or Priest, were addressing, just an unfortunate willingness to work a daft premise and pretend it was valid; Aldiss has done a (happily) few short stories this way, which are also similarly irksome.

    Adventure sf, which “space opera” has often been used as a synonym for (though some of my listmates on certain lists hasten to note that “planetary romance” is the more correct term when the gravity of the circumstances is natural rather than artifice), never really left us…(WORLDS OF) IF magazine became its home in the 1960s, under Frederik Pohl’s editorship, and it was that IF which became the first magazine, with the exception of one instance in a British Worldcon where the UK’s NEW WORLDS shared the prize in a tie, to take the annual Hugo Award away from the three default US “prestige” magazines in the field…IF and then stablemate GALAXY would resurge in circulation with a not dissimilar policy under James Baen in the 1970s, and Baen took that lesson onto his paperback editing and publishing career.

    Brackett’s space opera and other adventure fiction had a heft to it, an emotional and character depth, that few of her peers even attempted. I think it was Blish who referred to her also as a “glabrously smooth writer.”

14. Steve Says:
    May 5th, 2010 at 9:07 pm

    Only someone with the critical skills of a James Blish would use the word like “glabrously” to describe an author’s writing, but in Leigh Brackett’s case, he’s as right as he can be.

    — Steve

15. Richard R. Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 12:43 pm

    Well Steve I agree with you. Avram Davidson is an enigma for me too. I’ve tried his fiction of – supposedly – both the SF and mystery genres and found both to be of almost unreadable. It’s me, I guess, since there is much critical praise for his writing, but I’m not willing to force myself to read something only because someone else considers it worthy of being read.

    I believe that’s a Kelly Freas cover on INTO THE SLAVE NEBULA, am I right?

    Of the four books, I’d pick the Williamson to take home and read.

16. Steve Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 12:55 pm

    Rick

    Some of Davidson’s short stories and novelettes that Todd mentions in Comment #9 are brilliant, which is why I’ve always been so frustrated with his novels. Maybe I should keep trying — Todd makes a good case for it — but all in all, I probably won’t.

    You’re correct about the cover of the Brunner book. It’s Kelly Freas, whose work was always colorful and distinctive as this one.

    I’m pretty sure Jack Gaughan did the Williamson, and John Schoenherr was the artist for MASTERS OF THE MAZE.

    — Steve

17. Todd Mason Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 6:12 pm

    Well, if you want to try a Davidson novel again and want one that doesn’t peter out and is relatively straightforward (though I think an adult reading MASTERS OF THE MAZE might have more fun with it than a kid might who was looking for straightforward adventure fiction), then do try the collaborative novels, JOYLEG with Ward Moore and MARCO POLO AND THE SLEEPING BEAUTY with Grania Davis, particularly the latter.

18. Steve Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 8:29 pm

    Hi Todd

    While I don’t suppose you have any way of knowing how old I was then, I was over 50 when I read MASTERS OF THE MAZE and wrote these reviews. So I probably qualified for adult status even then, but I’m sure you’re right, I was looking for one thing and got another.

    Thanks for trying to convince me, but I think Davidson and I are just out of sync, and there’s not much that either you or I can do about it.

    — Steve

19. Todd Mason Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 10:36 pm

    Ah…I thought you were reminiscing about your youthful experience of MAZE.

20. Steve Says:
    May 7th, 2010 at 11:09 pm

    When you start pushing 70, Todd, 50 begins to feel youthful.

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