Arctangential

I’ve probably mentioned this here before, but I maintain a list online of books that I want to buy some day. It has recently come to my attention that this list has dwindled in size to a meagre 33 books. This is totally unacceptable, and must be remedied. So, I am calling upon my Livejournal readership (both of you) to give me some advice. What books should I put on my list? The link above will take you to the current list, and you can also take a look at my list of read books to get an idea of what I like. For starters I’m going to add the following:

• All of Heinlein’s books that I don’t already have. I’ve read basically all of these but all my copies were destroyed in a fire, so I will take this opportunity not only to re-purchase but also to re-read.
• All of the Factoid Press “Big Books” that I don’t have yet. These books are awesome.
• Any of Larry Gonick’s books that I don’t already have.
• More Stephen Gould and some Stephen Jay Gould

Anybody else have any ideas?

I finished Vance’s The Dying Earth just a few minutes ago. It’s of the genre sometimes known as “Science Fantasy”, which is kind of a bad name, but it’s a pretty well-defined genre. The definitive example is Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series. It’s generally set in a far future earth, or on some distant planet, but a sense of decay is very important. Despite the putative science fiction setting, the landscape is populated with typical fantasy tropes: dragons, magicians, demons, etc. However, these things are generally explained in terms of science fiction concepts: mutation, psychic powers or dimensional travel. Another common trait in science fantasy novels is flowery language. For example, near the end of The Dying Earth, we have:

“Why cannot this demon be exhorted hence and the hole abolished?”

But this isn’t just that Vance is a grandiloquent writer; this style of prose really serves to enhance the feeling of the very unique setting which the story takes place.

This book is really more a series of loosely-connected short stories than a novel. Each chapter is about a different character and his or her own story and only chance meetings and shared locales connect the stories. The stories are all about quests, some successful, some failures, and some with unexpected results. This book is a good introduction to the Dying Earth milieu, but I hope that the later books will focus more on single characters instead of ranging so freely about the world he’s created.

I’m about to start Leon Uris’s QB VII. I am apprehensive.