“You can take it as an axiom: celebrities who travel meet only fools, creeps, panhandlers, and climbers. People they would truly like to meet never have the bad taste to present themselves. The quality that makes them worth meeting automatically determines they will never be met.”



In “New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers “ by Alexei Panshin



I bet you’d never thought of finding a passage like the one above in a SF novel, right?

I discovered this trilogy in the 80s when browsing my local library for some serious SF (i.e., neither with huge sections of bad exposition nor with info dumps). I wrote elsewhere a while back that these 3 novels are an acquired taste SF-wise - but that once you've acquired it, you have it for life. If you're not hooked at first on Villiers adventures, persevere, and you'll be so richly rewarded. There's so much in them, you can read them twenty times and still find something new, a different angle, a fresh insight, a description you hadn't noticed before. These books have been accompanying me throughout my adult life and I return to them over and again and find something new, as well as the intense pleasure already experienced, each time I reread them. The plots are not that gripping (but novels like these are not about plot…) and the writing is exquisite. I can't recommend them highly enough. I was going to rather anally point out (*) that SF like this won’t have any kind of readership nowadays.

Read them and you will be hooked.



NB (*): Not suggesting I pointed with my anus btw.





SF = Speculative Fiction. ( )

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