Mr Eagle, you are not a realized man. That is your weakness and also your power. Before one realizes oneself one has the optimism of ignorance. It can be the saving of one’s life. Once realized, one faces the terror of knowing what it is you are and have done… the realized man can have a profound effect on the world around him, he must bear the consequences and guilt of that as well…

—Salman Rushdie, Grimus

Path is like a snake, it curls around the whole of Little Belaire with its head in the middle and the tip of its tail by Buckle cord’s door, but only someone who knows Little Belaire can see where it runs. To someone else, it would seem to run off in all directions. So when you run along Path, and here is something that looks to be Path, but you find it is only rooms interlocking in a little maze that has no exits but back to Path—that’s a snake’s-hand. It runs off the snake of Path like a set of little fingers. It’s also called a snake’s-hand because a snake has no hands, and likewise there is only one Path. But a snake’s-hand is also more: my story is a Path, too, I hope; and so it must have its snake’s-hands. Sometimes the snake’s-hands in a story are the best part, if the story is a long one.

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

The first thing to say about J.G. Ballard is not that he is among our finest writers of science fiction but that he is among our finest writers of fiction tout court period. Ballard himself might retort that, granted the first claim, the second is redundant, since the only important fiction being produced today is science fiction (or the fiction of the untrammeled imagination, or of hypothesis, or of the metaphysical pushing to the limit of scientific datum: unsatisfactorily as it is, we always end up with science fiction).

— Anthony Burgess, from his introduction to The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard

Jessica saw the shrug, thought, This is the age of the shrug. [...] Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

— Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

The Tourist is the first Park story I read. I found it online before I went to Clarion, and enjoyed it; though, like most of Park’s work, the story made me sad for the broken world and the sympathetic sad people who live in it. In this story, Park plays with time travel and personal loss; he asks, “What if cosmological time ran backward to our personal sense of it?” and “Will you forgive me, Suzanne?” Narrated in his characteristically soft-spoken, at times melancholy and self-referential, one-off first person.

He often casts this doppelganger voice, though the character differs from story to story&mdashthe various Paul Parks, who aren’t the physical writer, but who are sometimes also writers on their own, sometimes referring to fictional versions of the physical Paul Park’s other stories, sometimes reimagining their alternate universe spouses having conflicts in a once more removed universe. This could be confusing, but in the end I don’t think the myriad Paul Parks should distress anyone: in an interview with The SF Site, Park says: “It’s just that we all share the same name—a vexing coincidence, of course, but ultimately trivial.” And of course the other Paul Parks are Paul Park, but no more significantly than any other character he writes is Paul Park.

There was no story in this collection I disliked, which is a feat; the stories I liked and remember best are: If Lions Could Speak, The Breakthrough, Tachycardia, The Lost Sepulcher of Huascar Capac.

When you undertake to make a work of art—a novel or a clay pot—you’re not competing against anybody, except yourself and God. Can I do it better this time?

– Ursula K Le Guin, from her essay The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen, collected in The Language of the Night.

Butler’s style is trim without feeling spare. She writes the way I would like to, with few, well-placed modifiers, so it doesn’t feel like sterile reporting. Her characters speak well enough on their own, so she doesn’t have to constantly pepper every conversation with “he said, she said, he said, she said.”

She writes about grief and otherness in a particularly beautiful way. The way Lilith, the main character, is dramatically repulsed by her first interactions with the aliens reveals much about her character and, more importantly, the human heart. Because we aren’t likely to face a planet crippling holocaust followed by an alien invasion, but we are likely to hate our neighbor, whether because he’s different, or because he has things we want. I don’t buy the “we only hate what we don’t understand” doctrine; we hate what infringes on our ability to acquire what we desire. Which helps the planet-crippling-holocaust scenario along, but [unfortunately|fortunately] doesn’t do anything for the intrusive aliens.

Here’s an example of a particularly well written section, albeit one which breaks from her usual smoothness, rhythm, and flow. I like it too much not to include it. I’ll try not to give too much away, but an important, deeply sympathetic character has just brutally died. “It,” in the first sentence, is Nikanj, an alien who has grown close to Lilith.  Also, I didn’t add the ellipses; they’re in the text.

It gave her . . . a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or . . . tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.

Extinguished.

A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

Broken.

Gone.

Dead.

and later, comparing her feelings to the alien’s:

Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

Butler transmutes human pain, and lets us see it through alien eyes. It’s the same pain. As uncomfortably “other” as these creatures are, they still maintain a sympathetic human core, which enables Butler to bring the reader along with Lilith as she changes to understand them better. Lilith loves specific people, as everyone does, while maintaining a general mistrust toward the aliens as a species. That, of everything else in the novel, is profoundly insightful.

That’s enough for tonight. I’ll save reading the next book in the trilogy, Adulthood Rites, for another day.

Frost and Fire is a collection of short stories, two of which won the Hugo. It also includes two essays on writing: one contrasting science fiction and fantasy, and another on his creative process while he was writing Eye of Cat, which I haven’t read, but now probably will.

In most of his books, Zelazny translates and bends various brands of mythology to his purposes, and he certainly does that in Frost and Fire, though it’s more subdued. He deals with gods and planets personally; he examines their flaws and triumphs like a watchmaker, and translates his observations through beautifully poetic language. The main stories of this collection, Permafrost and 24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai both examine lovers’ conflicts and bitterness and resolve in tragedy. They’re both in present tense, which I usually hate when it’s used in fiction, but I barely noticed it in either case. Maybe I’m getting used to it, I don’t know. These stories were wonderful, though, which probably helped me bypass my stylistic hangups.

I have, through some horrible, enduring oversight on my part, never read his Amber books, though I read the first one or two. I have the omnibus, but it’s sitting on my shelf (and not the floor, so you know know I’ve had it a while) where it will wait, unread, for a while yet. I’m still reading through webs of mainstream. My strategy: take one writer and jump to his influences, then to that one’s students, to this one’s mentor, and so on. That’s not a bad way to get a lot of books, considering how it’s potentially exponential and all.

So, naturally, I didn’t understand some of The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, but the rest—especially Five Thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty Words, an essay on language & sf, and the chapter of excerpts from his journal—proved inspiring, both in terms of story material and a desire to think better about the world around me.

Harlan Ellison once said, all a writer needs to know he can learn from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes: pay attention. Notice the small things. This book had me stopping every few pages to write something down in my pocket notebook—which, due to its long residence in a certain pocket has taken on the shape of certain curved, pocketed body parts.

A notebook is essential to any writer, especially one with a memory as poor as mine. I keep it on me at all times, and interesting snippets of conversation, spontaneous lines of (admittedly terrible) poetry, short story ideas, the interesting way the light hits a patch of ice or the way a leaf skitters, spider-like, across the hood of a car—all of these go into the book, which is in its eighth iteration. I bought a stack from a certain Machiavellian superstore when I couldn’t find them elsewhere. I use 99 cent, stitch-bound mini-marble composition books (though if I had more class I’d use Moleskines or something. I do have a fountain pen, so sweater-vest crisis averted), but anything the writer will use works, so long as he uses it regularly.

Delany spoke of language as a breathing entity. Each word carries with it a picture, and each subsequent word modifies the picture created by the previous.  So then, he says,

A novel is a picture modified forty-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine times.

His essays are full of such quotable sound-bytes, such as:

A story is a maneuvering of myriad micro-memories into a new order.

Stew on that for a minute. He’s saying a story is a way for the writer to get people to remember events or perceptions his way, structured his way, to mean what the writer wants them to mean. Redacting history—personal or communal—for effect. Memory shuffling. Reading is getting more like dreaming all the time.

Throughout the book, Delany, like Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison, gives me plenty of new writers to search out. One such is Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote ‘A Rebours, a book Delany cites as an example of using expertise in a range of subjects to lend your characters verisimilitude. I’ll have to get that particular book from ILL, as it’s too obscure for our public library, which is usually excellent.

In one of his essays, he wrote that Wilde’s Salome is linked to Edgar Allen Poe’s Politian, that Wilde “took cadences and repetitions in the dialogue” from Poe. I’ll need to read Politian to further illuminate the significance of the rhythms I noticed, but that’s a good example of the insights Delany casually throws away.

Another chapter I particularly enjoyed was his criticism of The Dispossessed, one of my favorite books by Ursula Le Guin, who is one of my favorite authors. Delany ends his essay—which ripped through flaws in the book I hadn’t noticed; flaws which stem from Le Guin not fully realizing certain facets of the characters—by praising The Dispossessed, and saying it was worthy of its awards, but if she had fixed those few problems, it could have been “one of the greatest books of the last three hundred years.”

That’s the standard and the spur. Write as best you can; dig deeper into your characters; fix the problems, never take the easy out. Above all, understand what you’re doing, and why. Leave nothing to chance.

He was a poet, a short story and novel writer, and critic; he won several major awards, and was nominated for many others. He wrote the novella The Brave Little Toaster, on which the movie of the same name was based.

I was walking by my bookcase and I’m not sure why this particular book caught my eye, but it did. I have a few hundred books in stacks and piles and domino lines across my room, most of them double-stacked in my tallest bookcase, so for any one book to jump out, and for me to pick it out and look at it is fairly odd, especially since my to-read stack of library and friend-borrowed books is 25 high. I rarely browse anymore.  But I noticed quark/#1, a quarterly of short speculative fiction edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker, picked it up, saw Disch’s name alongside Le Guin and Lafferty, and, because his name has been floating around lately, read the story.

My first thought was, This is the only story I’ve read by Disch, and it’s set in a cemetery.

Let Us Quickly Hasten to the Gate of Ivory is well-crafted; Disch’s characterization is full-orbed, and his description serves its purpose, though it’s fairly mundane and staid for sf.  I think the sedate feel fits well with the sleepy golf course ambiance of the cemetery, and makes the ensuing struggle to find a way out of the graveyard menacing. But it’s not primarily about death or labyrinthine menace; it’s about family, and love, and the fragile, complicated relationships we weave around ourselves like clothing.

It’s a comforting story, in a way.  His characters love each other in deep, complex ways, the way real people do, and we see hints of full relationships throughout. I didn’t get a sense of a malign universe, just an uncaring, complex one that makes us huddle together, our backs against the dark. We have solace in each other when the universe around us is twists into dark shapes or simply exists beyond our ken, as it does here.

And I’m sad a man who wrote a story like this would kill himself in the end.