Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

Review: The Last Samurai, by Helen DeWitt

by Rich Horton

Helen DeWitt's first novel was published in 2000, and became something of a sensation, at least in the haut-literary world. I think it sold OK, but for publishing company reasons, it went out of print, and was only republished in 2016 by New Directions. I will confess I had not heard of this book, and I need to thank Naomi Kanakia for bringing it to my attention. It has been named the Best Novel of the 21st Century, which I admit that annoys me, because it was published in the 20th Century, admittedly in its last year. 

And you know what? Maybe it is the best novel of the period 2000-2024! Or, at least it's in the conversation. (I'd offer Piranesi as another candidate.) The Last Samurai is a very funny novel built on a rather desperate, and at time tragic, substrate. It is profoundly clever without sacrificing depth. It's well written, unconventionally punctuated in an effective fashion, constantly readable and engaging, and when it wants to be, profoundly moving.

The novel is told by two characters. Sybilla Newman is an American who came to Oxford for college, got her degree and went on to postgraduate studies, and realized that her research subject is worthless. She needs a job to stay in England -- the thought of return to her family is insupportable -- her father is a motel magnate and her mother a permanently frustrated musician. She manages to get a job at a publishing company, and at a reception for one of their authors she ends up in bed with him, and has a child. And now she's telling us about her efforts to teach her precocious son, who is named Ludovic or Steven or David. Sybilla's experiences with education have convinced her that schools are all terrible, and she is teaching her son in between a job retyping old magazines, and more or less simultaneously watching Kurosawa's classic film Seven Samurai over and over again.

Essentially the book follows Ludo's learning process from the age of 3 or so to about 12. Sybilla's strategy is mostly to teach him languages and let him read anything he wants, and this more or less works except he is always asking questions, which makes it hard for her to do her job. But he is -- or seems to be -- utterly brilliant. By the time he reaches school age he is quite unsuited for conventional instruction and soon drops out ... and then decides he wants to know his father. But Sybilla refuses to tell him anything about the man -- who was a one night stand, after all, and who doesn't know that he has a son. And the rest of the book follows Ludo's search for his father, which morphs after a while to a search for any suitable father. 

But of course that doesn't really say much about the novel. The key is the telling, of course. The voice. Both Sibylla and Ludovic have recognizable and plausible voices. There are typographical tricks, but really not terribly exotic ones. There are many languages, none of which besides English and a tiny amount of French I know -- and that doesn't matter. The day by day events are eccentric to some extent -- constantly riding the Circle Line, sitting in museums to do homework, tracking down potential fathers and spying on them -- but they are also mundane in a sense, and confined to London. There are running jokes -- the chicken places named after a state that is never Kentucky, for example. The depictions of the potential fathers' lives are strange and intriguing -- they are travel writers and crusading journalists, diplomats and avant garde composers, Nobel Prize winnters, fantasists and honest men. 

What is the novel about? Education, of course. Motherhood and fatherhood. Art. Music. Writing. Marriage. What it is to be a good man, or a bad man. Suicide. Language. Boredom. Seven Samurai. There is art criticism: Sybilla has severe tastes. (Lord Leighton (whose Flaming June graces the cover of one of my books) comes in for a lot of derision, as does the man who got her pregnant, and Seven Samurai imitations like The Magnificent Seven.) It all works -- it's laugh out loud funny at times, wry at times, wrenching at times. It's a novel of and about the 20th Century, that still feels ragingly original, and yet in a curious way, despite its experiments, despite its postmodernity, seems as ambitious and comprehensive as the great Victorian novels.

Review: Bird Isle, by Jack Vance

Review: Bird Isle (aka Isle of Peril, aka Bird Island), by Jack Vance

by Rich Horton

Bird Isle is one of the least known of all Jack Vance books. One reason is that it's not science fiction -- it's a crime novel, one of the first two he ever published (in 1957), both under different one-off pseudonyms. Bird Isle was published as Isle of Peril, by "Alan Wade", and the other 1957 crime novel was Take My Face, published  as by "Peter Held". Mystery House, at that time, was an imprint of Thomas Bouregy and Company, formerly Bouregy and Curl. As far as I can tell, Bouregy and Curl was a rather low end house, best known in SF for publishing the first book edition of Charles Harness's The Paradox Men (as Flight Into Yesterday.) (Samuel Curl got his start in publishing working with Alan Hillman, who published Vance's first book, The Dying Earth.) Mystery House had been an imprint of Arcadia House, Samuel Curl's earlier publishing venture, which Curl retained when he joined with Bouregy, and which Bouregy retained when Curl sold out to him in 1956. At any rate, I doubt Isle of Peril earned Vance much money, nor did it likely sell well. Copies of that edition are rare and go for quite high prices.

Bird Isle was reprinted under that name in an Underwood Miller edition in 1988, and then again, along with Take My Face and the 1985 crime novel Strange Notions in the Vance Integral Edition in 2002 -- this time retitled Bird Island. (Take My Face was retitled The Flesh Mask, and Strange Notions was called Strange People, Queer Notions. The VIE was prepared with Jack Vance's approval, and his preferred titles were used throughout. More recently, Spatterlight Press, run by Vance's son, has reprinted most or all of Vance's oeuvre, generally using the VIE titles (and texts) but for some reason reverting to Bird Isle in this case. (I do think Bird Isle is a better title than either of the other two.)

Well, that's a lot about the publication history. (I am generally intrigued by such details, and in this case I was very happy to discover the Spatterlight Press editions, which look nice and often have contemporary introductions (though the introductions don't seem to appear in the ebook editions.) But what about the novel? I have to say that Bird Isle is somewhat disappointing -- it's very definitely one of the weaker Vance novels. I will say that Vance's later crime novels, often published as by "John Holbrook Vance", are viewed as considerably better, and I personally am very fond of the two Sheriff Joe Bain mysteries, The Fox Valley Murders (1966) and The Pleasant Valley Murders (1967).

The novel is set on the title island, which is a short way off the coast near Monterey. There is a rather ramshackle hotel there, and a girls' finishing school, and nothing else. (The choice of the name "Bird Isle" seems partly a nod at the "birds" in the finishing school.) The owner of the hotel, realizing he needs more money to make his hotel more attractive to guests, decides to sell off the real estate he owns on the island, which is everything but the part where the school is. And quite quickly he manages to dispose of the several parcels he subdivides the island into. The buyers include Mortimer Archer, a retiree who dabbles in photography; the Ottenbrights, a lawyer and his wife; Ike McCarthy, a rough-edged Alaskan fisherman, with a plan to farm whales; and Milo Green, a young man who makes his living writing light poetry for newspapers; and Miss Pickett, headmistress of the finishing school, who buys a packet to keep the new neighbors away from her girls.

Things seem to go swimmingly for a bit, as the hotel's business picks up nicely, Milo starts building a house, and also meets Miss Pickett's very lovely niece. One of Miss Pickett's new students kicks up her traces a bit, and looking for for excitement, finds a way to make some money -- a way involving Mortimer Archer's photograpy skills, which not surprisingly are more aimed at women au naturel than at nature per se. There's an Eskimo love potion, too. And there's a rumor that the island was used by the Mob in Prohibition days, so there might be a hidden treasure ...

Much of this is potentially pretty fun. Alas, only some of it actually is. Things like the love potion are both implausible and bit distasteful. The humor is played rather too broadly, and much falls flat. The major crime aspect is a bit too obvious, and resolved a bit too easily. I think were Vance to have addressed this set of ideas a decade later, and with more time to develop the story, and more experience as well, it could have been nice enough. But as it is -- and presumably with Vance not at full motivation, given the pseudonymous nature of the book, and the presumably tiny payment -- the end result doesn't stand anywhere close to prime Jack Vance.

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

Review: The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Haruki Murakami

by Rich Horton

Haruki Murakami is one of the most celebrated contempory Japanese writers, and a large portion of his work is SF or Fantasy or just weird. As such I have been meaning to read him for a long time, but only now have I got around to it. I will note that The City and Its Uncertain Walls may not be the best place to start with him -- or, rather, my reaction to it may be different that that of readers who have read a lot of his work. One reason is that the book reworks some material first published as a novella with which Murakami was unsatisfied, and then revised to form one thread of his 1985 novel Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. I am also told that the protagonist is a somewhat typical Murakami male lead -- lonely, a love a books and music, and somewhat obsessive in his love affairs. Indeed, one book club friend of mine immediately asked if the book features a nerdy solitary man (almost an incel, she suggested, though not really) who at one point falls into a deep hole. And, yes, this novel does!

Outlining the plot of this novel really tells one very little about how it works. So I'll be brief. A nameless narrator tells the story in three parts. The first is written in second person, addressing the girl he fell in love with as a teenage. When he was 17 and she 16, they spent a lot of time together, walking and talking, occasionally kissing, writing long letters to each other, but nothing more. Much of what they talked and wrote about was a strange walled city. The people in the city have no shadows. The girl seems to believe that she is actually the shadow of a girl who lives in the city. Over time it seems that the city is actually an invention of the two -- but an invention that is oddly real. The two are desperatly in love -- then the girl disappears -- or, at least, becomes completely unresponsive to the boy's letters. He goes to college, gets his degree, has brief relationsship with other women, but never forgets the girl. Then, in his mid-40s, he finds himself mysteriously transported to a city -- a walled city. He gains entry at the cost of his shadow, and gets a job as a dream reader at the library -- and the librarian is the girl he had loved as a teenager, still seeming only 16 or so. Over some time he learns to read dreams, and becomes friends with the girl (in a nonsexual way -- and she does not recognize him at all) -- but when he realizes his shadow -- forced to remain outside the city -- is dying, he faces a choice: reunite with his shadow so that it can survive, and then return to the "real" world, or stay in the city.

The next and longest part follows the narrator's life back in the real world. He remembers his time in the city, but not really how it ended. No time sseems to have passed in the "real" world while he was in the city. He has become dicontented with his rather mundane job, and he has enough money (having lived a somewhat spare single life since college) that he can take some time off, and, inspired by some strange dreams, he decides to look for a job in a library. He finds one in a mountain village some distance from Tokyo, and somewhat to his surprise, is hired as head librarian. The situation there is a bit strnage, especially the previous head librarian, who continues to give him advice. But the narrator adjusts, and eventrually forms a tentative relationship with a woman, and then gets involved with a teenaged boy who seems to be on the spectrum, and comes to the library to obsessively read, and eventually tells the narrator that he wants to escape to the walled city -- somehow he learned of the city despite the narrator telling no one but the mysterious former head librarian. Which leads to the events of the third part -- which I'll leave untold.

All this is indeed mysterious, but by itself perhaps thin gruel for a 500 page novel. (And in all honesty the middle part could probably have been cut a bit.) But for me it really worked. The novel casts a real spell. The narrator’s teenage love affair is affecting. The city itself is convincingly strange, with unicorns, clocks without hands, the everchanging walls, the gatekeeper, the old dreams the narrator reads. The mountain town he moves to seems in its isolation to somewhat mirror the otherworldly city. The narrator’s adult relationship with a woman who owns a coffee shop is affecting as well, and more mature than the narrator’s earlier affair. His friendship with his predecessor, Mr. Koyasu, is amusing and involving and at another level, rather sad. Most of all, there is everywhere an air of mystery. There is also a sense of emptiness, and a concomitant loneliness. There are really very few characters of any significance, and one senses that all the characters that matter to us – the narrator, his teenaged girlfriend, Mr. Koyasu, the perhaps autistic boy he meets late in the book, the woman in the coffee shop – are ultimately very lonely, very isolated, and so the importance of the connections we do see them form is enhanced.

As for the prose -- I am of two minds about it. Murakami has an exceptional may with striking and original images. And I was not ever bored, despite his habit of almost obsessive description of mundane things like clothes, and with his almost pedantic rendering of dialogue. All this, in the end, really works. But I did have trouble with some aspects of the writing, that just possibly lie more at the feet of the translator. Occasional phrases in English are outright clichés, and I don’t know if these are direct translations from the original or an example of the translator using an English cliché in place of a perhaps less trite Japanese expression. Some of the phrasing is stilted in a way that suggests possibly a too literal rendering of the structure of the sentences in the Japanese, when a slight reformulation would have read more smoothly. And there are curiously annoying bit such as rendering dimensions in English units in a slightly unnatural way -- something is described as "about 6 and a half feet tall" when the original probably read "two meters", for example, or a square room is described as about 13 feet by 13 when, again, the original likely said 4 meters on a side.

The above quibbles are minor, though. I was enchanted by the novel, at times transported. There are passages of unexpected beauty, of pathos, and of deep mystery. Perhaps  it is not a great novel, but it's a very good one.

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

Review: Alibi, by Sharon Shinn

by Rich Horton

Sharon Shinn's new novel, Alibi, features, as it says right on the cover, "Romance. Teleportation. Murder."  I confess I had thought of Shinn as mostly a fantasy writer. (I've read her novel General Winston's Daughter, which I quite enjoyed, and I have a couple of her Elemental Blessings novels on my TBR pile, and those are all fantasy.) But this book is nearish future science fiction, and quite effectively so. The words above suggests it's at once a romance novel, a murder mystery, and SF -- and that's fair enough, but I think the SF part dominates. (Well, and the character interactions -- not just the love story but an extensive network of family, friends, students, etc.) 

The novel was published in November 2024, by Fairwood Press. I bought my copy at World Fantasy this year, and was able to have Sharon Shinn sign it for me. (Sharon and I both live in St. Louis, and we have known each other for some time, and indeed we both did a writing workshop for philosophers at Saint Louis University a couple of years ago.)

The book is set some decades in the future. The main novum is teleportation -- the whole world seems connected by an enormous network of teleportation booths. Air travel is as far as I can tell nonexistent (perhaps there are cargo flight?) and the airports have become hubs for longer distance teleportation, but the cities are webbed with booths as well, and sufficiently wealthy people might even have booths in their homes. And, very skillfully presented in the background, there is a good deal of subtle speculation about just how this technology changes people's lives.

The first person narrator is Taylor Kendall, a thirty-something native of Chicago who now teaches at a private school in Houston. She lives in Houston and teaches in person there, but because of the teleportation, she can keep in constant touch with her best friend in Atlanta, and her family in Chicago. After a brief prologue establishing that there will be a murder, and that Taylor will be a suspect, we go back a few months, when Taylor is offered a job as a private tutor to the 19 year old son of Duncan Phillips, an extremely rich man who lives in Chicago. Taylor takes the job, and begins to teach Quentin Phillips, and quickly comes to like him. The kicker is that he suffers from a degenerative disease, and isn't expected to live much more than five more years. But he's an eager and engaging boy, and Taylor becomes very invested in his life.

Quentin's father is mostly absent, and so Taylor's interactions are with his staff -- Francis, the steward, Bram, the head of security, and Dennis, Quentin's physical therapist. It is quickly clear that all three men love Quentin and hate his father. Soon Taylor becomes part of sort of a circle of protectors of Quentin -- and when she meets Duncan Phillips, she realizes why the others hate him -- and also realizes that he is particularly dangerous, and creepy, to women. 

The novel then follows Taylor's tutoring of Quentin, her interactions with the three men on Duncan's staff (especially Bram, as sparks quickly fly between he and Taylor -- different people but both wary of relationships after unsuccessful marriages); her professional life as an English teacher (with some crises involving her students,) and her social life, centered on her friend Marika, her brother Jason, and his friend Domenic. All this is in a way mundane, but it's very enjoyable, and all along we get glimpses both of the teleportation-affected society, and of Quentin's prospects and how they are affected by his distant father. There are romances for a few of the characters, and hints of hope for Quentin's future.

And then, surprisingly late in the novel for a murder mystery, the murder happens. And from there things rush towards a conclusion. There is some nice misdirection about the killer, with of course teleportation involved in providing -- or removing -- alibis for the characters; and an exciting (if just slightly convenient) resolution, with a surprising (but not unfair) solution to the mystery.

I really enjoyed Alibi. It's fair to say that the opening is a bit of a slow burn -- but appropriately so -- and before long, even while in a curious way little happens but ordinary (future) life, the novel becomes quite absorbing. We root for the characters, we care about them, and we believe their interactions. And the conclusion is quite satisfying.

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

My picks for the most iconic SF/F novels of the 21st Century so far

by Rich Horton

A few weeks ago Reactor published a list, or several lists, called "The Most Iconic Speculative Fiction Books of the 21st Century", based on a survey they did of their "favorite writers" and their staff. These were in numerous categories -- anthologies, collections, translated work, comics/manga, and then one list for books period. A bit later, Jo Walton (who I assume qualifies as both one of Reactor's favorite writers and part of their staff!) did an essay on her process in selecting her choices, "On Selecting the Top Ten Genre Books of the First Quarter of the Century", also dividing them into categories, in her case Fantasy, SF, Series, YA, and novellas. And I added a brief comment to her post, and she said, well, my don't I just make my own list. So I have.

I must note that I have missed a lot of novels in the past quarter century, partly because I was concentrating so heavily on short fiction. And I'd love to hear from people about novels they think belong there that I missed. I'll add another comment -- a couple of novels on the list are there more for their "iconic" status than their success as novels (though none are bad!) So -- The Ministry for the Future is in my opinion really important -- but it's not fully successful as a novel (though it is always interesting, and brimming with ideas.) Likewise, The Three-Body Problem is interesting and original, though it has diminished in my mind since first reading it, but its status as sort of introducing Chinese SF to the Western world seemed to merit its inclusion. Also, with one exception (Susanna Clarke's two novels, because they are both so very good and quite different from each other) I limited selections to one book per author.

I'm just going to list Sf novels, Fantasy novels, and a few additional outliers and "just missed" books. I already did a very roughly comparable list of short fiction, so I won't touch that. The adjective Reactor used was "Iconic", which I take to mean not exactly the same thing as "Best" -- to, in my interpretation lean a bit towards the most influential, memorable, or important books, however you define that. I'll lean a bit that way, but mostly my list will be the books I thought the best. I'm looking for ten of each, but I couldn't help myself and there are eleven. I'm putting them in chronological order.

Fantasy

2003: Kalpa Imperial, by Angelica Gorodischer

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke

2008: Lavinia, by Ursula K. Le Guin

2009: The City and the City, by China Miéville

2013: A Stranger in Olondria, by Sofia Samatar

2014: The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison

2015: The Fifth Season, by N. K. Jemisin

2017: Spoonbenders, by Daryl Gregory

2017: Ka, by John Crowley

2020: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke

2022: Babel, by R. F. Kuang

Science Fiction

2004: Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell

2005: Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson

2006: Blindsight, by Peter Watts

2006: The Three-Body Problem, by Cixin Liu

2007: The Yiddish Policemen's Union, by Michael Chabon

2014: Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel

2016: Ninefox Gambit, by Yoon Ha Lee

2016: Everfair, by Nisi Shawl

2020: The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

2022: The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler

2023: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey

Others:

I left two of the best novels out because I couldn't quite argue that they were SF or Fantasy. These are Nicola Griffith's Hild, an utterly absorbing historical novel which is surely Fantasy-adjacent; and Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, a searing contemporary novel which is profoundly SF-adjacent. . 

For sheer influence, you can argue for any of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire volumes -- perhaps the most recent, A Dance With Dragons (2011), would be a good exemplar. These have had the greatest penetration into the conciousness of the general public, which in itself makes them influential. On the SF side, Andy Weir's The Martian and James S. A. Covey's Expanse series have had similar exposure. In all three cases, of course, TV or Movie adaptations were very important, though the books in all cases had been very successful too. 

I will note that several of the novels I mention were published in the mainstream, whether by writers from within the genre to some extent (Clarke, Gregory, Crowley, Miéville, Fowler) or by writers who sometimes don't know they're doing SF (Harvey) or who do know that very well even though they made their bones writing contemporary fiction (Chabon, Mitchell.) And, really, the border is ever thinner, as evidenced by a writer like R. F. Kuang making a big splash this year with her contemporary novel Yellowface.

Here are some that just missed:

Among Others, by Jo Walton

Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Annihilation, by Jeff Vandermeer

The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie

Learning the World, by Ken MacLeod

Embassytown and Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville

Brasyl and The Dervish House, by Ian McDonald

Accelerando, by Charles Stross

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson

The Bone Clocks and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, by David Mitchell (the second of those is actually my favorite Mitchell novel, but it's just barely genre)

Bones of the Earth, by Michael Swanwick

The Peripheral, by William Gibson

The Unraveling, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Too Like the Lightning, by Ada Palmer

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

Review: Strange Stars, by Jason Heller

by Rich Horton

Strange Stars is a history of science fiction themed rock music throughout the 1970s. It is Jason Heller's thesis that, with a few outliers in the previous couple of decades, popular music (in this case specifically rock music) with themes and imagery began in 1970. To be more specific, he ties it to the landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969, and to the nearly simultaneous release of David Bowie's song "Space Oddity". To some extent this choice seems personal to Heller -- he admits to being a major fan of David Bowie's work -- but I think it holds up pretty well anyway. The book then goes year by year through the decade, highlighting major and obscure bands and records with songs based in some sense on science fiction. (Heller largely excludes fantasy from his remit.)

There are a few bands and artists that he follows in depth -- considering them prolific, influential, and effective in using science fiction-inspired tropes, characters, and musical styles in their music. David Bowie is one, of course -- and certainly he qualifies in spades, with such albums as Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and Diamond Dogs. Paul Kantner specifically, and his bands Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship as well, are important contributors -- most notably with Kantner's Blows Against the Empire, which was for many years the only musical work to receive a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation. Hawkwind, of course, is treated extensively -- their entire corpus is SF-influenced, from an early album like In Search of Space forward. Their association with Michael Moorcock is highlighted, and, later in the decade, Moorcock's association with Blue Öyster Cult is also treated at length. 

The great jazz musician Sun Ra is given a lot of play, even though most of his work was instrumental, and Heller also emphasizes his influence on Afrofuturism. George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, and their interlinked bands Parliament and Funkadelic are a huge part of Heller's narrative, and their music is certainly explicitly SFnal and very influential. Kraftwerk and the entire "Krautrock" scene are an important thread, including discussion of one of my wife's favorite records, Nektar's Remember the Future. Prog Rock, of course, is featured prominently. Obviously Yes gets a lot of discussion, as well as ELP and Pink Floyd. Alan Parsons Project is briefly mentioned for I Robot. Queen is discussed -- with a lot of emphasis on Brian May's Astrophysics Ph.D. Rush, and especially 2112, is part of the story. Devo is given a major place, slightly to my surprise, but Heller demonstrated that it makes a lot of sense. About the time Star Wars comes out, Heller discusses disco -- there was more SF in disco than I, at least, ever thought. His focus is Domenico Monardo, who, as Meco, made the album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk. Towards the end of the decade there is a discussion of Joy Division -- a band I greatly admire -- though eventually their SFnal contribution seems minor to me, perhaps because of Ian Curtis' tragically early suicide.

There are also, of course, references to a lot of less obvious figures: Mark Bolan and T-Rex, X-Ray Spex, Magma, Arthur Brown's Kingdom Come, Alex Harvey, Amon Düül, Splendor. Major artists who did only a bit of SF-influenced work include Jimi Hendrix (a known SF fan mentioned in the prelude about the 1960s); Elton John; Blondie; Earth, Wind and Fire; Marvin Gaye; the MC5; the Jackson Five; Brian Eno; King Crimson; Steve Miller; Neil Young; and many more get a nod. 

Heller also interleaves the way science fiction was permeating pop culture in other ways, most obviously movies, with Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind getting the most attention, plus the Bowie vehicle The Man Who Fell to Earth. The science fictional imagery on album art is discussed, include the "guitar spaceships" on the covers of Boston albums, which otherwise didn't really have SF content. Heller also namedrops a great many authors who were influences on these musical artists -- often explicitly acknowledged by the artists, sometimes assumed so by Heller: George Orwell, Robert Heinlein, Samuel R. Delany, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, Isaac Asimov, and more. (I had not realized that Delany's Fall of the Towers was part of the genesis of 2112!) The book includes a number of footnotes and a useful discography.

I would just have a few quibbles. Some are personal (I still have a hard time with the term Sci Fi), some are trivial (Philip José Farmer's Night of Light, a novel that Hendrix was reading around the time of composing "Purple Haze", is from 1966, not 1957, though one of the stories that became part of the novel, "The Night of Light", was published in that earlier year), some are matters of interpretation -- I think Heller occasionally reaches a bit in labeling songs science fictional. I admit I did wish that after crediting Paul Kantner for his giving credit to some of his inspirations, he'd have mentioned his failure to credit Mark Clifton after he swiped the "Hide Hide Witch" lyrics for his song "Mau Mau (Amerikon)". His knowledge of the music of the '70 is amazing and deep -- far deeper than mine -- and about the only plausible omission that comes to mind is Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge". But none of these quibbles are at all fatal, and Strange Stars is a convincing portrayal of the growth of rock music featuring science fiction themes in the 1970s -- and I learned a lot about many artists I had no knowledge of. 

Old Bestseller Review: The Belovéd Vagabond, by William J. Locke

Old Bestseller Review: The Belovéd Vagabond, by William J. Locke

by Rich Horton

William J. Locke (1863-1930) was a quite popular writer of the early 20th Century. His first novel appeared in 1894, but his best known novels are all from the 20th Century, and he continued publishing until his death. He was born in British Guiana (now Guyana), moved to Trinidad shortly later, and was sent to England for his education at a very young age. His best known novels are the two I've read: this one, and The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne (reviewed here). (I should add that at least five on his novels were among the top ten bestsellers of the year, according to Publishers' Weekly -- but not those two!)  Many of his stories have been filmed, notably including Stella Maris, a 1918 silent starring Mary Pickford, and Ladies in Lavender, a 2004 movie starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith. The Belovéd Vagabond itself was filmed at least twice, a silent verison in 1923, and a musical in 1936, a somewhat faithful adaptation (but perhaps not very good) starring Maurice Chevalier (Cary Grant having turned down the role) and Margaret Lockwood (proof that one aspect of one character's appearance was entirely altered!)

My copy of this novel is an A. L. Burt edition -- Burt was a reprint publisher, sort of the mass market paperback equivalent of its time. The book was originally published in 1906 by John Lane. (A. L. Burt often used the original plates, acquired from the original publisher. I'm not sure if that's the case here.)

The Belovéd Vagabond is narrated by Asticot Pradel, who was born Augustus Smith to a London washerwoman, but adopted and renamed at the age of 10 or so by a man he calls Paragot. Paragot -- the vagabond of the title -- is a strange man, given to philosophical expostulation, to heavy drinking, and to lots of reading. As the novel opens he is the main attraction at a London drinking establishment, but when that changes hands, he and Asticot head to France, and wander for a while. Asticot has learned that there is a secret tragedy in Paragot's past, involving a beautiful woman named Joanna. 

Eventually Paragot finds himself replacing the suddenly deceased violinist in a duet who played at weddings and suchlike. One of Paragot's hidden talents is for the violin, and as a result, his little group is a success, and he more or less adopts the zither player, a young woman named Blanquette, and along the way also a mongrel dog, while he makes Asticot play the tambourine, though the boy's only real talent is art. But this leads to an engagement in Aix Le Bains, and an unexpected encounter with Joanna, who is now the Comtesse de Verneuil, married to a repulsive French nobleman. Paragot wants no contact with the couple, but Asticot makes Joanna's acquaintance, and in an adolescent way becomes infatuated.

Soon Paragot's ménage proceeds to Paris, with Blanquette acting as housekeeper, Paragot taking up again a position as philosopher-in-residence at a drinking establishment, and Asticot getting some formal training as an artist, and beginning to make a bit of a name for himself. (This is later established as roughly the time of the emergence of Impressionism, the mid-1870s, though Asticot is not an Impressionist. And there was an earlier reference to La Bohème, from the mid-1890s, and also to the 1880 popular song "Funiculì, Funiculà",so perhaps Locke just didn't care about the precise time frame.) And all are fairly happy -- until Asticot encounters Joanna again, and she begs him to have Paragot meet her. There are, of course, secrets about Joanna and Paragot (or Gaston de Nérac, as she knew him) which come clear, and revelations about her husband, and the lives of everyone are again upended. But -- what is really best for all the people involved? The conclusion is honest as to admitting to the real nature of the characters, and what would work for them.

It's an enjoyable novel. For me, after reading this book, and The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne, I'd class Locke as one of those writers of whom one can say one sees why they were popular, and admires them for that, without necessarily believing they need, nor will ever get, a revival of any sort. Locke wrote pretty well, and told engaging stories. Having said that -- the stories are a bit implausible, and the characters are not exactly wholly believable -- they are not two-dimensional, exactly, but more 2.5 dimensional than three. The plot is likewise a tad implausible. But if you see a William J. Locke novel in an antique store or something, and if you like old books -- his books will probably work for you.