December, 2025 Reading: "So what if my feathers are burning/I never asked for flight." (Ocean Vuong)

Just finishing a short story collection by one of my faves, looking at a stack of thick history tomes and poetry from a Nobel Prize winner.

Hmmm...

...as previously mentioned, wrapped up Adam Johnson's collection of tales EMPORIUM.

Johnson's brilliance is on display throughout--this is an earlier work, not as polished and precise as his latest stuff, but still packing a punch, particularly several stories which feature people enduring aggressive cancers and responding in VERY different ways.

(BTW: I bought my used copy on-line and when it arrived noticed it had been signed by the author. What a wonderful surprise.)

I've been re-reading some of the novels of the Irish SF writer Bob Shaw, and I've just finished his "slow glass" novel, Other Days, Other Eyes. I read a lot of Bob's work in my student days, and in returning to his early novels after possibly forty years, I've found that I probably then was distracted by the ideas and situations, and didn't notice the quality of his prose (though I suspect I may have absorbed it subliminally).

This book was a novel constructed around his 1966 short story Light of Other Days, which remains a classic of the genre. The same cannot be said for the novel, alas.

Ian McEwan's WHAT WE CAN KNOW.

I haven't read much McEwan in the past decade, though I loved both BLACK DOGS and ON CHESIL BEACH.

In this latest book, McEwan incorporates speculative fiction elements: the U.K. 100 years from now has been flooded because of climate change and a nuclear explosion, which caused a massive tidal wave, sweeping across the western Atlantic.

The story centers around a famous gathering in 2014 when a Seamus Heaney-level poet reads what everyone believes is his magnum opus to a gathering of friends. The poem is lost and a century later a dedicated scholar attempts to seek it out.

Very well written, the characters brilliantly described...one of the best novels I've read this year.

Recommended.

November readings:

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain: Childish. Funny. Pretentious. Sad. Some context or even a timeline would have been useful. Entertaining read though. This one had been on my TBR pile for years and years.

Looking at Giacometti by David Sylvester: Too smart for me but I do like Sylvester.
“Giacometti's standing figures suggest objects long buried underground and now unearthed to stand out in the light. Fossils perhaps, but also columns or caryatids - caryatids indeed, with their compact, frontal stance, except that they seem too tenuous to be that. But they are not ethereal: they have a density which calls to mind the shrunken heads that cannibals preserve. They are figures without 'physical super fluousness', like Starbuck in Moby Dick, their thinness a 'condensation’.”

Historia abreviada de la literatura portátil by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated in English as A Brief History of Portable Literature: Absurdist intellectual humor. Like Monty Python you need to be in the right mood to enjoy it. I wasn’t.

D.V. by Diana Vreeland: Very entertaining stories. Some of them could even be true. What an interesting life and what a likeable personality. Vreeland seems to have deep insecurities that she tries to hide with a theatrical personality. It looks like they just transcribed tapes so it is a bit rambling. It was fun though.

El volumen del tiempo I by Solvej Balle, translated in English as On the Calculation of Volume: Groundhog Day for adults. I’m very intrigued by this project. I was left with doubts and questions about this fictional universe, how the characters react, and the decisions they take, but I liked this first volume. Some very poetic moments. I think it’s got potential.

The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge

I’d heard good things about Hardinge’s fiction for several years, but I’d never bothered checking them out because, well… fantasy… YA… Not my usual, or preferred, choice of reading. But The Lie Tree popped up for 99p on Kindle, and I thought it worth seeing what all the fuss was about.

And I’m glad I did.

Faith’s father, a reverend, is a celebrated palaeontologist in the 1860s, but he’s been accused of faking the fossils he’s discovered, so he and his family flee to the invented Channel Island of Vane to join a dig there. But all is not as it seems. The invitation was a ruse because the reverend is in possession of something that others want.

On the one hand, the title of the novel is a hint to the central element of its plot, which is not revealed until at least halfway in; on the other, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoilers. The spoiler-free version would go: Faith defends her father, uncovers a conspiracy against him, then tries to solve his murder and so learns his secret, the reason why he was invited to Vane, and uses it to take revenge on his killers.

However, a major part of the novel - although it doesn’t really kick in until around a third of the way in - is that Faith is clever, but because she is a girl it means nothing. She wants to be a scientist but her gender bars her from it. This is a novel about women as property, about chattel slavery of half of the human race, and about the means and methods open to women of the time to arrange a future for themselves and then safeguard it. Faith is a teen, and knows her much younger, and not very bright, brother, whom she loves nonetheless, is accounted more valuable than her. Even though she has the intelligence, the aptitude and the interest to follow in her father’s interests.

And it’s this element of the novel which lifts it above others of its ilk. Faith thought her father valued her because of her intelligence, but he was just using her - much as he used others to further his aims. Faith meets a woman - two, in fact, but one more so than that other- who have found a way to be intellectual without overturning Victorian society - I am for some reason reminded of JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, an excellent novel - but it doesn’t end well. And now I’m reminded of Jeanette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun, which presents as a fantasy set in Victorian times but is actually a brilliant commentary on Victorian fiction by women, missionary colonialism and women’s rights.

The Lie Tree is really good, and I should definitely read more by Hardinge.

E.E Cummings: A Life by Susan Cheever.

Cummings has never been my kinda poet but after reading this account of his life, I might give him another shot.

A very angry man, a rebel in his personal life and his work. Had difficulty with women until he found his life mate (and even then there were bumps in the road, infidelities, etc.). Never made a decent living from his verse and toured high schools and colleges giving readings to support himself and his third wife.

There are other excellent bios of Cummings but I thought Cheever was fair and honest with both his virtues and his many failings.

Recommended.

Corporation Wars 1: Dissidence, Ken MacLeod

This was a reread - I read it back in 2017 - but never got the chance to read the two sequels before I put the books in storage when I moved. Earlier this year I bought an omnibus edition of the trilogy, intending to finally finish all three.

I actually wrote a review of Dissidence on my blog back then. For some reason. I wrote that it took place on a moon of Jupiter, which was complete rubbish - the author even called me out on my mistake. I’ve no idea why I wrote that. The terms exoplanet and exomoon are used throughout the novel, and it states several times that it takes place in a planetary system 25 light years from Earth. So sorry, Ken: I’ve no idea why I wrote that and I’d like to make it clear the novel is set in another planetary system.

Anyway. Two companies are exploring the mineral wealth of an exomoon using robots. One of the robots, through a sequence of events, becomes self-aware. And so causes other robots, in both mining companies, to become self-aware. They rebel. So the AIs which run the mining companies unöeash their legal AIs on the “freebots”. Everything in the planetary system is run by AIs, based on a mission profile set from Earth at sunlight speeds.

Carlos the Terrorist was responsible for killing the thousands in Docklands during the undeclared war between the Accelerationists (left-wing, basically) and the Reaction (right-wing, basically). He finds himself reincarnated in a simulation running on an AI in the same system as the aforementioned freebots. He is there to fight those freebots on behalf of the legal AI which represents the mining company the robots one belonged to.

Except, it’s slightly more complicated than that. Is the simulation Carlos and his team experience really a simulation? Why does the legal AI representing one of the mining companies break off relations and start a war?

The story is surprisingly fast-paced, given all the ontological discussions, but MacLeod keeps the focus tight on Seba, the first robot to gain self-awareness, and Carlos. There’s a few bait-and-switches before the novel finally reveals its plot, but it’s the first of a trilogy. There are few authors I’d trust with political science fiction, but MacLeod is definitely one of them. True, I have more in common with him politically than most sf authors (especially US ones, past and present), but also because he writes sf to his politics, not despite them.

I’d happily recommend any novel by Ken MacLeod. Some are better than others. If you read them all, there may be a few disappointments, but on the whole you’ll be impressed. The Corporation Wars trilogy, based on just this first novel, seems to be somewhere near the middle, so definitely worth reading.

Oka Rel 1: The Courtesan Prince, Lynda Williams

I bought a copy of this book back in 2009 but never got around to reading it. I don’t even remember why I bought it. I’ve a vague memory of corresponding with the author, but that may be confabulation. I was interested in writing space opera, and had been for a number of years, and The Courtesan Prince is the first in a ten-book space opera series, so it may have been no more than that.

It could be argued that space opera, more so than any other branch of science fiction, succeeds or fails more on its world-building than its story. They all pretty much use the same story, anyway. Oka Rel starts from a future history and a, mostly, hard-ish sf universe, but by the time this first novel opens, Earth is lost and there are two mostly antagonistic human polities, which lost touch 200 years earlier. The Oka Rel universe plays off on the difference between the two polities - the Reetions are technological and progressive, the Gelacks are a semi-feudal empire ruled by the descendants of genetically-engineered humans.

After two centuries of separation, and all the two groups know of each other is legend and rumour, they finally meet up at a neutral space station. Von is a courtesan and dancer ordered to impersonate a member of the aristocracy during the first Gelack meeting with the Reetions. Ann is a hot-headed Reetion pilot who falls for Von, and then becomes involved in Gelack politics. Because Von is really a long-lost son of the emperor, although he doesn’t know it.

The Courtesan Prince tries hard with its world-building, but doesn’t quite make the grade. Possibly because the two groups are too much the opposite of each other. It’s all a bit too binary. It doesn’t help that Von is simply far too good a character to be entirely credible, despite the violence inflicted on him. Some of the sensibilities haven’t aged particularly well in the last twenty years but, to be fair, there is worse being published even now. It all feels, in many respects, a bit like Cherryh, but the details seem harder to visualise. In fact, now I think about it, there’s a lot of Cherryh in there. Which is no bad thing, of course. I’m a big fan of Cherryh’s fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll continue with the series, although I’m a sucker for a series. I’ll read anything if it comes in three or more books with a single over-arching story. But, as I said earlier, space operas succeed or fail on their world-building more than their story, and I’m not all that taken with the Oka Rel universe, to be honest.

>9 iansales: I don't know about you, but I do get a bit irritated when lazy sf writers pick character names seemingly at random out of a dictionary of a foreign language. In this case, I think I'd be rapidly assuming that Von was one of the four Preposition brothers, with his siblings An, Zu and Mit.

THE APOCALYPSE NOW BOOK by Peter Cowie.

"Apocalypse Now" is, to this cinema fan, the greatest movie ever made. So I was delighted to pick up Cowie's book, which dishes the dirt on a troubled production and tormented central figure (Francis Ford Coppola). Most of the stories I'd heard before but it's fun to be a fly on the wall as Coppola is dealing with the likes of Dennis Hopper and Marlon Brando.

BELIEVE NOTHING UNTIL IT IS OFFICIALLY DENIED by Patrick Cockburn.

Claud Cockburn was a "guerrilla journalist", a stubbornly independent reporter who managed to enrage figures on the Left and Right of the political spectrum. MI5 had a file on him and he was denounced by everyone from cabinet ministers to Joachim von Ribbentrop.

But Patrick, his son, has written a biography that's quite dull and bloodless and despite a few revealing episodes I didn't feel I got an idea of what drove the man to leave safe, well-paid jobs to pursue his own autonomy or what really made him tick.

I expected better.

>10 RobertDay: the made-up words in the book are pretty cack-handed, to be honest. Reetion? Gelack? Sevolite? There are also lots of apostrophes in names, something which science fiction and fantasy really need to stop doing.

Gráinne, Keith Roberts

Winner of the BSFA Award in 1988. There doesn’t appear to have been any shortlist that year, so I’ve no idea how it was chosen. The Eastercon in 1988 took place in Liverpool and was three years before my first Eastercon.

Gráinne is the name of a princess from Irish mythology, who at their betrothal party dumped the man she had been promised to and ran off with Diarmuid instead. In Roberts’s novel, it’s the name of a young woman the narrator, Alistair Bevan, meets, has a mostly platonic relationship with, and who then leaves him… and several years later appears on television as the presenter of a documentary series on the brand new Channel 5. By this point, Bevan works for an advertising agency, which Gráinne hires to promote a series of “clinics” to empower women.

This narrative is framed by, and interspersed with, short scenes of an old man in a hospital bed, explicitly telling the story of his life to a doctor and nurse. I’ve no idea if the resemblance was intentional, but there’s a lot in these sections that reminded me of John Fowles’s Mantissa.

Most descriptions of the novel classify it as semi-autobiographical, and while I’ve read a lot of Roberts’s fiction, I know little of his life – but perhaps enough to for the classification to ring true. (His careers in illustration and advertising, for example.) Other aspects, especially the gender politics and attitude to women evidenced in the novel, are definitely the same as in Roberts’s other writings (cf ‘The Natural History of the P.H.’).

Roberts’s main thesis seems to be feminism and women’s lib are a waste of time because women should not be trying to fight for equality with men but simply fighting for their own variety of rights. Which sort of ignores the fact of the patriarchy, a concept Robert never appears to have taken onboard. And it does render the central element of Gráinne’s plot, the empowerment centres, somewhat moot. On the other hand, they do make Gráinne something of a messianic, or a Valentine Michael Smith-type, figure.

Of course, it all ends badly. It always does for such figures. The narrative hints at unsavoury backers who helped Gráinne financially, perhaps hoping for the social and economic disruption she eventually causes in the UK, but it doesn’t go any further. The final section also implies a post-apocalyptic Earth, perhaps after a nuclear war, but it’s only a single sentence and ambiguous.

The reviews of Gráinne I’ve read online seem mostly to have missed the point of the story. It’s not a fantasy about a Celtic goddess who has a love affair with a human man. Gráinne may be more than human, but that’s from Bevan’s point of view. Her later influence is a mixture of clever television (much cleverer than Channel 5 ever proved to be, or indeed the bulk of British tv in the mid-1980s), deep pockets and a mishmash of Eastern religions. Even then, her empowerment centres proved more disruptive than intended.

Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land follows a similar story although, given it’s American, it reads like a carnival novel, and its central protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, is a thinly-disguised carnival freak. Roberts’s novel, however, uses Irish mythology rather than US carnival folklore, and focuses on female empowerment and not free love. Heinlein wrote prose that was extremely readable and smooth, but Roberts’s style is more literary. British sf produced a number of excellent prose stylists in the 1970s, not part of the New Wave but almost certainly adjacent to it, such as Coney, Cowper, Compton, Lee, Saxton, Watson…

I’ve no idea why Gráinne, published by small press Kerosina Books, was given the BSFA Award. Other notable sf novels published in the UK in 1987 include Banks’s Consider Phlebas, Mann’s The Fall of the Families, Wolfe’s The Urth of the New Sun, and even Haldeman’s Tool of the Trade. Certainly, a shortlist could have been drawn up. Perhaps it was.

CHASING THE DARK: A 140-Year Investigation of Paranormal Activity by Ben Machell.

I'm a skeptic but I love books that deal with the uncanny, fiction or otherwise. One of the many contradictions I must live with.

Machell's book is not without interest. It focusses on one investigator in particular, Tony Cornell, but they're all here: Sidgewick and Myers, the SPR...

The final portion of the book has some speculations on subjective reality and the limits of our senses which I found persuasive.

Fun book.

A Choice of Destinies, Melissa Scott

Scott has written a number of excellent science fiction novels, although career-wise I suppose she’s a fairly common example of a US female mid-list genre author. Which happens to be a space where a lot of my favourite genre writers live. Mostly, however, I find her books variable. Shadow Man is pretty good, as is The Kindly Ones. The Silence Leigh trilogy is fun. Mighty Good Road is enjoyable if a little forgettable. I’ve not read all of her oeuvre, so there’s plenty left to explore.

A Choice of Destinies is straight-up alternate history. What if Alexander the Great had turned west instead east? In our world, he conquered land as far as the Indus, and his empire fell apart after his death at the age of 32. In Scott’s novel, the rebellion of the Greek League cities brought him back west, and then down to Naples, before eventually onto Rome, with whom he signed a treaty. He then fights Carthage, and defeats it.

The thing about alternate history is that its story rests on its difference to real history, and if the reader doesn’t know that real history then the difference is meaningless. There was a sf story, I forget who wrote it, in which Fidel Castro was a baseball player and not the president of Cuba. Apparently, he did at one time play for a baseball team in the US, but the writer had to explain this in an afternote for the story to make sense. Scott does something similar, interspersing her main narrative of Alexander’s life with sections set 1800 years later in a world in which Europe, north Africa and west Asia are part of an Alexandrian empire. The novel ends in a section set on Alexandria-in-orbit, a space station, in 1591 CE. I very much doubt Alexander’s empire would last nearly 2000 years - no other did, after all - nor that it would lead to space flight some 350 years earlier than real history.

A Choice of Destinies starts off well enough, but soon becomes little more than blow-by-blow accounts of Alexander’s battles, both actual and political. Those interested in Alexander the Great’s life will find more to enjoy here than the average reader of science fiction or alternative history. It’s a smoothly-written piece, and I’m going to trust Scott on her presentation of history, but it definitely begins to flag around halfway in. Despite which, the final scene, the siege of Carthage, seems rushed and incomplete. It’s as if Scott wanted to write a much longer novel, or perhaps even a series, but was contractually constrained to a single novel. One for fans.

>14 CliffBurns: I'll have to check that one out! That genre is also a guilty pleasure of mine.

My best books of 2025, both genre and non-genre: https://medium.com/@ian-93054/best-books-of-2025-49fcd119344d

SLIPPAGE: Previously Uncollected, Precariously Poised Stories by Harlan Ellison.

One of Harlan's last major collections, notable for tales like "The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore" and "Mephisto in Onyx".

I found the whole effect rather forced, the writing lacking focus, the wording frequently odd (and overblown).

Very much a lesser effort.

>18 CliffBurns: My Christmas stocking included The Last Dangerous Visions.

I shall be tackling this after finishing my current book. I'm interested to read the introduction by J. Michael Straczynski which promises to explain as much of the delay to the publication of LDV as possible. It might reflect on the quality of the content of the collection you've just read.

>19 RobertDay: I'm curious about that one, Robert.

I thought the original anthology was more than a tad over-rated.

I always felt some sympathy for Harlan: afflicted by chronic fatigue syndrome in his latter years, the great productivity he once displayed dwindling to almost nothing.

That would be a killer.

Highest rated books in 2025 at the Mejix manor. Podcast and merch coming soon.

5 stars
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
Corazón tan blanco by Javier Marías
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson
Stay True by Hua Hsu

4 stars
One the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle
D.V. by Diana Vreeland
Looking at Giacometti by David Sylvester
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil
Paseos por Londres by Virginia Woolf
A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid
Good-Bye to All That by Robert Graves
The Emigrants W.G. Sebald
Sculptor's Daughter by Tove Jansson
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir by Griffin Dunne
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong
All Fours by Miranda July
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life by Steve Martin
The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut
Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
Las batallas en el desierto by José Emilio Pacheco
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux
My Death by Lisa Tuttle
The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson
A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Mundo cruel by Luis Negrón
How to Focus by Thich Nhat Hanh
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker
The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists by Naomi Klein
The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History by Isaiah Berlin
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue
The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger

Honorable mentions:
The Roulette Player by Mircea Cărtărescu
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Invisible Ink by Patrick Modiano- Just finished reading. Not sure how I feel about this one. Intriguing though.

The Ringworld Engineers, Larry Niven

This was a reread, although I don’t recall when I previously read the book. Some time in the 1980s, I suspect. Everyone knows Ringworld, it was even No. 60 in the SF Masterworks series. Niven admits he had never intended to write a sequel, but he’d received so much correspondence about the novel - a lot of it pointing out where he’d got things wrong. Earth famously rotates the wrong way in the opening chapter of the novel (updated in later editions), but the chief complaint was that the ringworld was unstable. It needed attitude jets to keep it in orbit. So Niven decided to write The Ringworld Engineers, which is all about the attitude jets. Mostly.

Twenty-three years after the events of Ringworld, Louis Wu is a wirehead. He and his kzinti companion on that trip, Speaker-to-Animals, now called Chmeee, are kidnapped by a Pierson’s Puppeteer. Who is actually the mate of the Pierson’s Puppeteer from Ringworld, and was the leader of the race, the Hindmost. He was ousted and now plans to win back his position by fetching a “treasure” from the ringworld, a transmutation device.

Which doesn’t exist and never existed. But that proves irrelevant because the ringworld has been knocked from its orbit and will impact the sun in a year or so. The City Builders, the most powerful race on the ringworld, had removed the attitude jets from the ringworld’s rim, the jets that kept it in orbit, in order to power their spaceships. Hence the current situation.

Wu decides there must be a Repair Centre, a sort of central control complex for the ringworld. If he can find it, then he can prevent the ringworld from being destroyed. But first he has to find it.

The humanoid races on the ringworld have created, and maintained, treaties and coalitions through “rishathra”, which is sex between people of different hominid races. Niven obviously likes writing about sex, or rather the easy availability of it to males, but this is commercial science fiction so it’s either alluded to or entirely off the page. It leaves a bad taste.

The other problem is the distances - the ringworld is huge. Absolutely fucking enormous. With a surface area equivalent to three million Earths. Most of the action in The Ringworld Engineers takes place around the Great Ocean, an ocean so large it features archipelagos which are full-size maps of various planets in Known Space (including Earth, Mars and Kzin), and which are hundreds of thousands of miles apart. After a while, the distance gets wearying, it’s almost like some sort of scale fatigue sets in. It becomes meaningless, just words. Niven uses the right words, but there’s no sense of wonder attached to the vast scale of it all.

The Ringworld Engineers fixes the issue with the ringworld’s unstable orbit, and even identifies its builders - linking back to an earlier novel by Niven. He returned to the ringworld seventeen years later with The Ringworld Throne, and then again eight years after that with Ringworld’s Children. Five prequel novels, the Fleet of Worlds series, then followed.

The ringworld is a great creation, one of science fiction's most memorable. The plot of the novel which introduced it doesn't really matter. Same for its sequels. Dune had great world-building, but its plot helped bring it to life. The plot of Ringworld is irrelevant, the Big Dumb Object exists in spite of it. And so it is for The Ringworld Engineers. Which presents a disappointing, and unconvincing, explanation as the answer to the question of who built it, and never really manages to really evoke the scale of it all.

THE ARRIVAL by Shaun Tan.

Lovely book, a gift from my wife. Graphic novels are sort of hit and miss for me, but this timely and affecting tale of a new immigrant struck a chord within me. I was especially moved by moments when the new arrival receives help from locals and passersby, emphasizing the importance of human community and compassion.

Recommended.

>20 CliffBurns: I've now read the extended introduction to The Last Dangerous Visions.

It turns out that Harlan was a long-time sufferer from bipolar disorder. The self-imposed Grand Project of TLDV was too much for him to be able to cope with. Joe Straczynski recounts a tale of inertia overtaking his friend in ways that are at times harrowing.

The bottom line is that the book now finally published isn't the Last Dangerous Visions we might have had in the late 1970s or 1980s. Harlan kept accepting new stories as time went on, often to replace those withdrawn by their authors because of the continuing non-appearance of the collection. And as time went by, the times changed and what might have been considered edgy and dangerous in the 1970s was less so in the 1990s or the new century.

Perhaps this is what made your reaction to Slippage what it was. The uncollected and late stories were most likely those not written at the height of his powers. I, too, never had the sort of enthusiasm for Harlan Ellison the writer that others did (but see below).

JMS makes an interesting point about his relationship with Harlan. Straczynski was a self-confessed fan, and that was because he came from a similar background to Harlan; was told he would never amount to anything; but took inspiration from a feted writer who, like him, was from the wrong side of the tracks. We get told to "write for your audience": are some of us not blown away by Harlan's writing because we're not his audience, either in background or expectation?

And you can never step into the same river twice. Over the past few months, I've been re-reading the novels of Bob Shaw, especially those from his earlier years, which I read and re-read a lot in my student years. What I've been noticing is the quality of his prose. What I remember of his novels from fifty or more years ago were the ideas, the plot devices and the stories; some of the prose lodged in my mind but I never thought of it in terms of style. But I must have absorbed it at some sort of cellular level. And in this re-read, the quality has leapt out at me, possibly because prose stylists are, alas, thinner on the ground than they used to be (present company excepted, of course). In a recent re-read, I went from one of Bob's early novels to an original fiction anthology from the late 1990s, and the first story was from a noted contemporary British SF author known for his big, BIG novels and his use of a post global warming eastern England affected by rising sea levels. (No names, no pack drill, as we used to say.) The contrast between Bob Shaw and this later novelist was stark. The more recent writer had no prose style at all; his clever story with a striking setting and adequate characterisation was nonetheless as stylish as the steel frame of an unfinished building. Perhaps, like those who found Harlan Ellison's work at a time when they needed him as an example, those of us for whom he did not play that role aren't drawn to the writing or the man.

(Joe Straczynski was no stranger to this sort of thing. Michael O'Hare, who played space station commander Jeffrey Sinclair in the first season of Babylon 5, dropped out early from the show his character was supposed to be written out mid-way through season three, ostensibly because he had an offer lined up for after B5 that the producers brought forward, and JMS was content to let him go. Only twenty years later, and after O'Hare's early death, did JMS reveal that O'Hare was suffering from severe depression at the time and JMS was not going to hold him to a contract that he had little chance of fulfilling.)

>24 RobertDay: Thanks for that bit of detail, Robert.

As big a pain in the ass as Harlan could be--and I know numerous people who ended up burned by him--at least he had a personality and over-sized passion to go with it. I had a couple of brushes with him and because I responded to his orneriness with humor, he warmed to me.

Today's SF writers seem bland by comparison and, of course, everyone is afraid of uttering words that could be construed as offensive or hateful as opposed to, y'know, edgy and satirical. The personalities are dull, the feuds are boring, the writing portentous and humorless.

A dash or two of Harlan in your soup always livened up the broth.

I rather miss the old fart.

>25 CliffBurns: JMS also makes the comment that a fair proportion of the stories originally slated for TLDV probably couldn't be published in the current social climate, whilst the whole roll-call of original authors would today look far too male, pale and stale.

Over Christmas, we watched a few old British tv ghost stories (beyond the BBC staple Ghost Stories for Christmas). One in particular that we unearthed from the depths of the internet was scripted by a notable British screenwriter, John Bowen. Titled A Woman Sobbing, it was a 1970s drama about a married woman haunted by the sounds of a sobbing woman from an upstairs room that only she can hear. In the course of the play, her husband casts doubt on her sanity, and the whole piece presents a cavalcade of 1970s attitudes towards sex, relationships, mental health and its treatment, sexism, racism, alcohol use, and child abuse, all served up with generous lashings of mansplaining.

Yet we realised (both of us being of An Age) that the writer and director probably thought, in those days of liberated attitudes, that they were taking a frank and open position on discussing matters that up until then had been taboo subjects for discussion in polite - or any - society. That it now looked at best dreadfully dated, and at worst completely unshowable, is probably just the way things go.

Fashions change. So do opinions. In all of the creative arts, for every work of greatness from the past that we universally revere, there are probably hundreds, or even thousands, that are forgotten because later generations - and not just our own - found them irrelevant, trite, misled or just plain wrong (for any given value of 'wrong'). You and I have had this discussion before, of course: you responded to my review of Alex Ross' book on Wagner (Wagnerism) with some thoughts. I shall merely quote Ross' closing words in that book, which I think are worth remembering: “When we look at Wagner, we are gazing into a magnifying mirror of the soul of the human species. What we hate in it, we hate in ourselves; what we love in it, we love in ourselves also.” Perhaps this is true for any true creative artist who chooses to bare their soul through the medium of their work, and sometimes through their publicly-displayed lives as well.

>26 RobertDay: Unfortunately, artists' lives are too "publicly displayed" these days, which distracts from or dilutes the power and passion of their work.

Shakespeare never had to endure contemporary biographers and Jesus Christ didn't have the tabloid press following him around, hacking his phone, calling out statements and off-the-cuff comments from years or decades past, citing them without context (or misquoting him).

I personally don't give a good goddamn about the politics or personal lives and predilections of any given artist--it's the song, not the singer.

The excerpt from the Wagner bio you offer is brilliant and I couldn't agree more.

What we claim to despise in others is frequently present in our own psyche, which makes our rejection of them all the more vociferous (and hypocritical).

Last book, the 96th I've read, of 2025, CAMELOT'S COURT: Inside the Kennedy White House by Robert Dallek.

Insider's view of the Kennedy years, a young president struggling to find his feet in the early going, then coming into his own during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy swiftly learned to mistrust most of his advisors, especially from the military, but his decisions often had to take in political realities, the limits confronting any democratic leader. Sometimes he was right but quite frequently wrong.

Would he have learned from his mistakes and become a better president during his second term? We'll never know, but Dallek suspects he might have...I'm not so sure.

A whole mythology has been built around JFK but Seymour Hersh's book THE DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT is still, to me, the most intimate and damning portrait of the man and the one that seems most reliable (and credible).

>26 RobertDay: Veering off from the larger discussion here, I binged on the old Ghost Stories for Christmas this past week, moving up into the first episode of the reboot in the 2000s (but still most devoted to Whistle My Lad). I'll have to write later about The Ice House, which seemed like an upper-class Brit version of the Hotel California mixed with Fantasy Island, with all the half-disguised aristocratic snideness making me wonder why anyone would've wanted to go there in the first place. And still, I loved the near-purposelessness of the production, as if someone in charge had shrugged and actually given writers some room to see if an idea would work.

>29 KatrinkaV: They are very bingeable.

Can I recommend another BBC supernatural drama, Schalken the painter (based on the Sheridan le Fanu story that the touchstone points to). It was made within the BBC's Omnibus arts strand rather than as a Christmas ghost story, but it has many of the key features of the classic seasonal ghost stories, as well as being an exquisite production in its own right.

I believe it's on YouTube, as well as being available as a British Film Institute DVD.

>29 KatrinkaV: >30 RobertDay: I think ghost stories at Christmas is a GREAT tradition.

Each year I love to watch Peter Cook doing his "Twelve Days of Christmas"--have you seen it? Genius.

Also available on YouTube.

>31 CliffBurns: Here, it's a tradition at Christmas to watch Kalle Anka (Donald Duck in Swedish). It's the same cartoons every year pretty much. On New Year's, they watch Dinner for One, an old English play https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLjOoteWZ1U

>30 RobertDay: Brilliant, many thanks! I was growing sad at the thought that I'd soon run out of this particular brand of creepiness to enjoy. Hurrah!

>31 CliffBurns: Oh, so much goodness in recommendations from both of you! I'm off to check out Peter Cook as well.