Standalone sci-if and fantasy – Recommendations

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Last week I published a list of fantasy and sci-fi series that I recommend. This post follows that one up with set of recommendations of standalone (or near-standalone) books.

First and Last Men, Olaf Stapledon

Both this and the next recommendation are the work of a British professor of Medieval Philosophy writing in the 1920s and 1930s, who decided to eschew academic publications and instead write books designed to bring these philosophies to a wider audience. First and Last Men is the ultimate longue durée history of the human race, covering ten thousand years. Humans advance from their present form and adapt until they are wholly unrecognizable, with societies developing in conjunction with the available resources and environmental needs.

Starmaker, Olaf Stapledon

Stapledon’s other novel is an interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy and Visions of Piers Plowman, where a man, on a walk after fighting with his significant other, has a out of body experience that takes him to a series of alien civilizations and to ever higher planes of consciousness until reaching divine revelation. Reviewed here.

Snowcrash, Neal Stephenson

One of my favorite near-future dystopian novels. The United States has been broken down into a landscape where every corporation, church, and gated neighborhood functions as its own country, there is an digital universe built with megachurch money that can be tapped into, and there is a conspiracy that wants to use an archeological find to enslave humans. Hyperinflation is rampant and pizza delivery is operated by the mafia, and if your pizza doesn’t arrive in 20 minutes, you are allowed to kill the driver and take his stuff. Law and order are enforced at the point of a sword. Enter our hero, Hiro Protagonist, delivery driver, elite hacker, and expert swordsman…who lives in a storage unit. The world is a mess and he must save it, all the while trying to protect the teenage girl Y.T. and to stop Raven, a nuclear-armed Aleutian harpooner with a grudge against the United States.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaimon

In his middle years the narrator returns to his childhood home for a funeral and finds himself drawn to the Hempstock farm, where, in a flash, he remembers something that happened there when he was seven. This particular story tugs at the nostalgia strings about how one remembers childhood and about things that children know that adults don’t, begs the question of not whether, but how people change as they age, and how worth is adjudged. There is whimsy, there is sadness, and there is pettiness.

Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimon

The Antichrist has been born and the end is nigh! But the angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley [formerly Crawley] have come to quite like their lives on earth in a way that their otherworldly brethren just can’t appreciate. Crowley, for instance, can’t make them understand that jamming the London freeway or killing the phone lines causes greater mayhem in the world than the corruption of a single priest. As a result they agree to keep an eye on the little guy and prevent him from choosing between good and evil. However, a mixup in the birthing ward means that the real Antichrist is on the lam. All of this has been foreseen by Agnes Nutter, but her prophecies are of little use. Bedlam and hilarity ensue.

American Gods, Neil Gaimon

America is multi-cultural. A place where cultures from around the world–and their deities–have come and made a home. A not-so-chance encounter upon his release from prison after the death of his wife launches Shadow into this world as the bodyguard to Mr. Wednesday. Once there he discovers that there is a war brewing between the old gods and the new gods of television and pop culture, but it is unclear whether the old gods will form a common front to preserve their way of life.

Throne of the Crescent Moon, Saladin Ahmed

The hero is supposed to be young, fit, and still learning about himself. Ahmed inverts this, so our protagonist is Dr. Adoulla Makhslood, a retired ghoul hunter who likes drinking cardamum tea. Along with some old friends and young assistants Adoulla tries to combat the increasingly frequent ghoul outbreaks and thus is drawn into a political revolution brewing in the palace over control of the Throne of the Crescent Moon–or its earlier association with serpents. Some of the tropes are familiar, but the setting is not just flavor, as the story is much more influenced by Middle Eastern stories known to Western Audiences from, for instance, Arabian Knights, rather than the knightly tales of Western Europe.

The Grace of Kings, Ken Liu

Reviewed here, this is a fantasy constructed along the lines of traditional Chinese epic. It is beautifully formal and weaves a conservative culture and style with a progressive narrative to create something that is new in a genre that is so steeped in tropes. The result was a breath of fresh air. Technically, The Grace of Kings is the first in a series, but it can absolutely be read as a standalone work.

The Redemption of Althalus, David and Leigh Eddings

Unlike the last two on this list, Redemption is in a lot of ways old-school fantasy, an epic showdown between sibling deities, one of whom upholds life and one that seeks to consume it. Each side has its champions and paragons who square off against their opposite number. Neither the story nor the characters are particularly brilliant, but the book is fun and riddled with clever or entertaining set pieces and has the grace to condense the equivalent of an entire epic fantasy series in a single thick book.

The Postmortal, Drew Magary

Another near-future dystopian novel, Magary asks what would happen if there was a cure found that stops the aging process at the point it is received. Diseases still happen and a violent death is possible, but aging stops. What happens to marriages if “til death do you part” starts to look like an eternity? Will the cure be legal? Will it be regulated? Will it be given to children? Will there be a violent backlash? Will the social contracts that keeps society together stay in place? Probably not.

April Reading Recap

Posted on by Josh Nudell

April is always a busy month in the academic calendar and the first few weeks of May ramp up, if anything. And yet this is the best time of year for sitting in the outside and reading. I only finished three books this month, but summer is coming.

The Professor and the Siren, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
My first foray into Lampedusa’s work, this slim volume contains three short pieces–the eponymous story, a parable called “Joy and the Law,” and “The Blind Kittens,” which was originally conceived of as the opening chapter to a novel that he never completed. My favorite of these three of was “The Blind Kittens,” which just sets the stage for a story about familial land competition in Sicily. “The Professor and the Siren” was interesting, but at its core was a tale about how the impetus for great scholarship (or art) is the combination of a blaze of eroticism in youth (as though to prove vitality) and monastic deprivation thereafter. There is more to this story than that bare narrative, but I don’t like the basic trope.

The Postmortal, Drew Magary
An epistolary what-if novel. What scientists discovered a cure for aging? Not a cure for diseases (including cancer) or against a violent death or to reverse aging that has already happened, but one that freezes the process of aging exactly where it is when the injection takes place. What would the public debate around legalizing such a thing look like? Would there be death cultists who launch campaigns of terror against the postmortals? People who deliberately maim these people who will live for a very, very long time? What happens to marriages that now run the risk of permanently binding people together? Will some deranged mothers give the cure for aging to their infants to keep their babies forever? Will some world governments ban the cure? Will the government eventually introduce euthanasia programs? Will there be a collapse?

These are many of the questions that Magary asks in this clever novel. Magary has a recognizable voice as an author, honed through years of writing things like a long series of “Hater’s Guide to xxx,” but while aspects of it come across as goofy commentary or twists, the medium is supposed to be unpublished blog posts, curated by unnamed individuals sometime after the narrator ceased writing. The form works and many of the ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek, satirical developments are frighteningly plausible.

Desert, J.M.G. Le Clézio
Reviewed here, a sprawling story about the interaction between North African children and the Western Civilization that seeks to oppress them. It is possible to debate the “children” tag, since the common reading seems to link North African freedom and servitude of colonialism, but I find it notable that both narrators are children. This changes the reading in a couple of ways, but the fact that there are multiple adult characters leads me to believe that it is not simply an equation of the colonial subjects with children, as was a part of colonial propaganda.

The Postmortal was my favorite from last month. I’m now working through Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, which is a grotesque comedy about Naples after it was liberated by the allies during World War 2.