Hothouse (1962) by Brian W. Aldiss: 3.5/5

Aldiss' second novel is a "fixup" of five stories published in F&SF in 1961, and is set in a very distant future when the Sun is nearing the end if its life, and plants rule the earth, with only pockets of animal life left. Humans have devolved both mentally and physically to small, green skinned, tree living creatures. The Moon and Earth are now tidally locked, which means one side of the Earth is in perpetual darkness. Plants have taken over the ecological niches of animals, and now giant spider like flora ("traversers") have spun their webs all the way to the Moon which is now habitable.

So the premise of the novel is definitely not hard SF.
The lit side of the Earth should have been a barren wasteland with the sun shining all the time, but instead is covered with one all encompassing banyan tree, with lots of smaller predatory plant life. This part, with the extremely aggressive wildlife, reminds me of Harry Harrison's Deathworld. I think Aldiss and Harrison were bosom buddies, so I wonder how much cross fertilization was going on?

The first of the three parts of the novel, which comprises the first two of the five short stories is easily the best, with the adults of a small group of humans ending up on the moon, and the kids, who now are old enough (maturing very quickly) left to fend for themselves.
So the first story is excellent and the second, where we follow the outcast Gren and his mate, is also good.
But then it turns into a travelogue or odyssey a la Jack Vance's Big Planet. This part, even though we meet lots of weird and wonderful creatures, drags on too long, and the threads are only connected in the very last chapter.

I like the premise, but there too many inconsistencies. It feels a bit rushed, like Aldiss started losing interest half way through, but was determined to write enough for a novel (he still had to cut 8,000 words, so maybe not). The omniscient narrator is a bit jarring, and so is the use of words the characters would not know, like "sandwich".
It's a pity not more of the potential of this exciting premises was realized. And Aldiss never wrote a sequel.

As usual there's an Introduction by some asshole who insists on spoiling the book.

Incidentally, Tolkien was a big fan of this book, even writing two fan letters to Aldiss.

Yup, Aldiss always promised more than actually delivered, but I remember I really liked Hothouse and I enjoyed most of his novels. They're somehow unique and based on great ideas. Probably not perfectly written, though...

I've enjoyed a bit of Brian Aldiss, especially his Helliconia Trilogy. I've never read Hothouse though.

Around the same time I got and read the Helliconia Trilogy, I also bought and read and very much enjoyed Harry Harrison's Eden Trilogy, which are not too dissimilar in some ways.

Another crossover with our tastes. :)

I've read and enjoyed a few James Blish novels, but that was maybe in excess of 3 decades ago.
Around the same time probably, I would have read some A.E. Van Vogt and a bunch of other Scifi authors.

Another one which, I think, represents great idea and rather mediocre writing skills. But, it's worth it. Just for the whole concept and such a great imagination.

Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon. This is the first sequel to Speaks the Nightbird, picking up with Matthew Corbett three years later, back at work in New York, which is not yet a city but still a somewhat dumpy port town that had been a Dutch settlement in living memory. There's a serial killer called the Masker at large and Corbett gets caught up in solving the mystery.

Speaks the Nightbird was a pretty good and relatively restrained work of historical fiction. This is much the same, but you can tell the McCammon was angling to have a regular series about Corbett and pulpier elements start creeping in. The characters are bigger and more eccentric and some of them have funny names like Hudson GREATHOUSE (he's a big tough guy), Professor Fell (evil mastermind), or TYRANTHUS SLAUGHTER (apparently becomes an antagonist in a later book). Corbett gets shifted from his law clerking job into something more like an operative for a private detective agency. It's engaging to read but the plot is a bit fuzzier than the previous book because McCammon is also laying groundwork for stories to come. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger, but there are danglers left to be taken up in sequels. It would be tiresome if a lesser writer was doing this but McCammon is very good and doesn't let things get too out of hand. Corbett is a likable hero but he always feels very vulnerable - like, he gets some basic training on handling a sword but there's never that montage sequence where he suddenly becomes an awesome action hero, and he gets by as much because the villains don't perceive him as a threat or just plain luck as he does because of his abilities. He's smart and quick-thinking and that's about it.

I'm still surprised McCammon's works haven't been adapted into movies or TV shows, but I'm guessing it's because he probably has some standards and doesn't want to sell the rights to any average Hollywood jerkoff, where they would promptly throw everything out and change everything about his stuff. If done faithfully, these Corbett books would make for a good streaming show.

The Blind Owl

This is just sick. Looked when I saw on Goodreads that a friend had read and liked it and the description stating that it’s about a young man drifting into madness after losing his lover and depicting a bleak view of the human condition got me interested, striking close to home. However, it was not what I expected… Not based on that description, at least, because it is what one might well expect after seeing that the author described it as distilled poison.
Maybe I should have given my thoughts a little time to get distilled as well, but that’d probably be unwise, even for one such as me. So I’ll just say that both of those words used by the author are perfectly accurate, The Blind Owl being probably too short to be considered an actual book but highly concentrated, purified, and meant to clutch the reader in a sickening, poisonous grasp on a profound level. That even applies to the first section, but the conclusions one is likely to draw from it will be negated by the stream of consciousness that follows… Not that “consciousness” is in any way the correct term for this depiction of such mental and spiritual destruction.
Admittedly, what got lost in translation is a question, and the translator also stated, in this edition’s rather lengthy foreword that also included some comments which would have been better left for an afterword, that the work is considered nearly untranslateable. But he also states that, after 27 years and 15 versions, he’s finally content that it’s close enough, and I’m thinking that the original would be more confusing and sickening than any translation. As such, perhaps the only valid conclusion would be that it’d be folly and presumptuous to think that you can draw a conclusion, can tell what’s “real” and what’s not and what it means. And, again, it’d probably be unwise to even try.

Rating: 3/5

Little Fuzzy (1962) by H. Beam Piper: 2.5/5

On the planet Zarathustra a new species is discovered by the old miner Jack Halloway, when "Little Fuzzy" adopts "Pappy Jack" and later bring his family along to Jack's house. There are signs that the fuzzies are sapient, which is very bad news for The Company which runs the planet under a Class-III charter, and would lose it's hold on the planet if it was reclassified as a Class-IV inhabited planet.
So naturally The Company can't allow that to happen.

Again a book with a nice premise, that doesn't quite fulfill it.
It never gets very exciting, and things are resolved a bit too easily.
There's lots of characters, but they all kind of blend into each other, and there's lots of people arriving and departing in aircars. I actually felt that more than one of the human characters should have been female, to make them more distinctive.
We don't get to know the characters very well, since the story is told in a rather detached style and we only rarely get inside their heads.
The style is slightly juvenile, it's also slightly funny at times, and slightly cute and fuzzy, but in the end it's not enough of any of these things to make it distinctive, and it ends up as a mildly entertaining, harmless book. I thought Heinlein did the "prove intelligence" theme more entertaining in Jerry Is a Man.

We don't learn much about the Fuzzies either, but the ending strongly signaled the sequel which appeared two years later.

So not for hard core SF fans, but should appeal more to a younger or more inexperienced audience, I think.

One thing that made me LOL was this sentence:

That name! :D

The Dying Earth by Jack Vance. This is a collection short stories within the same setting, occasionally sharing characters. It's set in the far (far, far, far, far, very far) future, when the sun has turned red and people have forgotten science and returned to using sorcery, although some sci-fi elements creep in here and there (e.g., a ghost city with moving sidewalks and anti-gravity elevators). Everyone understands the Earth is in its final years of life, so although they might not know the exact date the end will come, there's a sense of decadence and resignation that has settled over everything. Many of the characters are wizards who occupy themselves with odd experiments such as trying to create life because they're bored or lonely. There are cities, but the landscape is also peppered with ancient ruins that few people seem to know or care about, along with monsters and highwaymen that prey on travelers.

It's a lot of fun. Vance has a witty, almost baroque writing style that makes absorbing all the details fun, and the dialogue is especially amusing. It's good to have a thesaurus handy for some of the words he uses, but he also sometimes just makes up words that sound about right for the context. The overall effect put me in mind of what it might be like if the Coen Brothers wrote fantasy stories. I do find it hard to believe his claims that he never read Clark Ashton Smith. I suppose it's possible that two authors would independently write whimsical, darkly humorous stories about sorcerers at the end of time that involve very aggressive usage of the English language... *shrug*

Hmm...I didn't know Vance hadn't read CAS. This is what I wrote somewhere else five years ago:
"Reading the tales I was most reminded of Clark Ashton Smith, and to a smaller degree Lord Dunsany.
To me the most enjoyable stories were those where the first germs of D&D magic appear, especially Turjan of Miir and Mazirian the Magician. The first one reminded me of CAS's first major story The Last Incantation, with an old magician trying to create young female life, and the second reminds me of The Maze of Maal Dweb, with a ruthless magician having a garden it's not safe for others to walk into.
With the abundance of obscure words, and of course the dying earth setting first (?) used by CAS in his Zothique stories, I think it's safe to say CAS was the major initial influence."

BTW, things like always make me chuckle. First time I encountered the word "thesaurus" I had to consult a dictionary.

I rated The Dying Earth 3.5/5. I think the two last, and longest, stories got too pulpy and were too similar too each other.

I think I mis-remembered that he hadn't read him, because apparently he had read him but was kind of dismissive of his writing talent. IIRC, he was once asked if CAS had influenced Dying Earth and Vance blew it off. One writer that apparently was a big confirmed influence was PG Wodehouse, which in retrospect I can definitely see, particularly in the dialogue and the way characters often clash over culture and manners.

Dark Universe (1961) by Daniel F. Galouye: 3.5/5

A novel I originally skipped, but both Galactic Journey (a very cool concept, but sadly obsessed with the lack of female and "minority" writers) and reliable old P. Schuyler Miller, who for decades reviewed books in Astounding/Analog, raved about it.

The premise of the novel is both derivative and original at the same time. The idea of a small society being isolated and having a very limited view of the universe, and the origin being lost in a haze of religious mumbo jumbo, reminded me strongly of Heinlein's Universe and Aldiss' Non-Stop. And the general post nuclear war setting and coming-of-age story reminded me of Wyndham's The Chrysalids and Leigh Bracket's The Long Tomorrow.
I read a version of the book that was a photographic reprint of the original. It contains the usual highly misplaced Introduction, which will spoil the whole book if not read as an Afterword, but I thought it was interesting that it compares the book to a wholly different set of books, some of them newer.

What sets this novel apart is this idea: what happens if a large group of people becomes totally isolated deep underground and the power fails? How do they cope with the total darkness, and how does this society develop through several generations? I think this was a pretty novel idea at the time, and the execution is quite good. That is, it's mostly convincing and ingenious, with good world building, but Galouye was not quite the wordsmith as the the above mentioned writers were. The book is also slightly juvenile in tone.

It's only about 150 pages, so definitely worth reading. But don't expect hard science or edginess.

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

Just finished reading the Android Chronicles (currently a trilogy) by LANCE ERLICK. And an excellent read it was, all about android robots and AI and hacking and FBI and NSA and military and foreign agents and robots etc, and attempting to prevent androids being too human-like because of the Singularity threat etc etc. It really makes you think and is a great Scifi thriller with plenty of action and technology. I also read the two prequel novellas afterward.

https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/reborn-77

Reading List for 2022