Wrapped Up in Books, Or Two Writers Newly Known to Me: Harry Crews and Alan Warner

I was listening to one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite albums on the drive home from work today, Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Wrapped Up in Books’ from their Dear Catastrophe Waitress album. The central line of the song is “Our aspirations/are wrapped up in books” and I was thinking that it might be true for them, but it must be doubly true for me. The feeling I get when reading a new author I especially like, as has been the case so far with Harry Crews and Alan Warner, is ecstatic. Reading A Feast of Snakes the other day, I had to read several pages or passages a second time, not because I had lost the thread of the narrative, but because the writing was so good that I wanted to relive the experience of reading it. I don’t think I get that sense of exhilaration for any other activity, which I suppose is a strange thing to say about reading, but it’s true for me. I love reading even more than I love writing, and although I do read in part to learn from other writers, my major reason for reading is in the pleasure of it. But I’m such a picky reader that I rarely get that feeling now. I get it from Harry Crews and Alan Warner, which is why I did a stupid thing today: I ordered a few books by these authors from fishpond.com.au on my credit card, even though I’m basically broke at the moment. You know you’re addicted to something when you have to have it, even when you can’t afford it. I’m addicted to reading.

And I’m especially addicted to finding new authors. Not necessarily new new authors, but authors that are new to me. Harry Crews’ first novel was first published in 1968, but I hadn’t heard of him until a few days ago. Alan Warner is more contemporary, but he still started publishing his novels in the mid-nineties. Take a look at these suckers:

Harry Crews:

Alan Warner:

Warner looks fairly normal to me, but Crews? My God, look at that man’s face. I mean this respectfully: he’s a fearsome sight. The books I’ve ordered are Classic Crews (a compilation of two novels and one autobiography), Morvern Callar (prequel to These Demented Lands, already reviewed) and The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven. I can’t wait to read them.

Writers of interest – Simon Haynes

Simon Haynes is an up-and-coming SF writer whom, like myself, was born in the U.K. but has lived in this fair land for many years. He is the author of the “Hal Spacejock” novels, published by Fremantle Press. Titles in the series are #1 – Hal Spacejock, #2 – Hal Spacejock: Second Course, #3 – Hal Spacejock: Just Desserts, and the soon-to-be-released #4 – Hal Spacejock: No Free Lunch. All of these titles are in-print, and can be obtained from various retailers in Perth and across Australia (#4 will be released on the 2nd of June). You can find a comprehensive list of places to buy Hal Spacejock on Simon Haynes’ website:

http://www.spacejock.com.au/Hal1Shops.html

In fact, Haynes’ website is exceedingly useful, not only in terms of the Hal Spacejock series, but also as a resource for would-be and could-be writers. www.spacejock.com.au contains a number of useful articles on the practice and business of writing. Haynes addresses the perennial questions of how to get a novel published, how to find an agent, as well as technical matters such as how to plot a novel. This is highly recommended reading for anyone wanting to acclimatise themselves to the business of writing fiction.

As I said in my review of #2 – Hal Spacejock: Second Course, Haynes’ story is an inspiring one. And readers and booksellers alike are catching on. Hal #1 recently figured in Fantastic Planet’s Top 10 Bestsellers for March 2008. Who said science fiction was dead? Long live SF.

Writers of interest – James Tiptree, Jr.

It occurred to me last night that all the writers I’ve written about on this blog so far are men! Here I am, a so-called egalitarian thinker, but 90% of my favourite authors are male. I wonder why this is? One of my favourite female authors, Alice Sheldon, used to be a man. Erm, kinda. If you don’t know who James Tiptree Jr aka Alice Sheldon is, it’s not hard to find out. The best place to learn about Sheldon’s life is in the biography James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Philips. Check out some reviews of this outstanding book, including one by yours truly.

This is the best biography I’ve ever read. If you’ve read some of Tiptree’s stories and appreciated them, you need to read this biography. If you’ve never read Tiptree, trust me, you can’t go wrong with this. You don’t even need to be interested in SF to get into this book. For some reason, Amazon have slashed the price of this book to $6.99, and that’s for the hardcover. This is literally the best $7 you can spend!

OK, so that’s the biography of a life, but what about the work itself? It turns out that there is just ONE essential volume of stories that everyone interested in Tiptree/Sheldon needs to own. It’s called Her Smoke Rose Up Forever and it was re-issued by Tachyon a few years ago. The first edition came out in 1990 or so, but it’s out of print now.

I’ve just realised that you can get both of these books for $US17.84 plus postage. I’m not kidding – you can’t go wrong with this. Just to prove I didn’t make this up, if you look at my PKD bookshelf at the top of the page, you can see Tiptree on the end. I’ve got the biography, as well as the original edition of Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Tiptree published several volumes of short stories and a couple of undistinguished novels, but the cream is in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Read “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” and “A Momentary Taste of Being” and then get back to me.

Writers of interest – Barry N. Malzberg

Philip K. Dick is famous these days. So are William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard. But there are plenty of other writers who have produced work of a similar calibre – perhaps not as consistently or for so long a period – work that is well worth reading. One of these writers is Barry N. Malzberg.

Malzberg (born 1939) hasn’t really written SF for a couple of decades now, but in the 70s he was extremely prolific. He once won the John W. Campbell award for Best SF novel (in 1974 I think). Unfortunately, most of Malzberg’s books are out of print now. I’ve read something like 25-30 Malzberg novels. These are the best of them, in my opinion:

The Men Inside

The Falling Astronauts

Beyond Apollo

Galaxies

The Cross of Fire

Underlay (not SF – it’s about horse racing)

The Remaking of Sigmund Freud

Any of those are worth reading, but you’ll have to look in second-hand bookstores to find them. I can recommend abebooks.com for this. In actual fact, however, there are only about 3 Malzberg books that I know are currently in print. The first is the most important, a collection of short stories called In the Stone House. Now, I always thought of Malzberg as a good writer, but this collection of stories, published by Arkham House (of H. P. Lovecraft fame), is a great collection. You can get this from Amazon or from direct from the publisher at http://www.arkhamhouse.com/ If you want to read Malzberg, then I would recommend In the Stone House above all else.

The second Malzberg book that I know is in print is a collection of three novels, published by ibooks under the title of On a Planet Alien. This is actually a collection of three novels: not only On a Planet Alien, but In the Enclosure and Scop. Unfortunately, none of these novels are among Malzberg’s best, at least to my way of thinking.

The third Malzberg book in print is actually non-fiction, published by Baen Books in 2007 as Breakfast in the Ruins. Breakfast is actually an expanded version of a book of essays called Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties, which was published in 1982 or thereabouts. Malzberg has a unique and interesting perspective on the history of science fiction. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of the genre. Many of the essays in Breakfast in the Ruins have been written in more recent years, although I will say that that the earlier essays are generally of a higher quality.

And that’s it, as far as I know. It’s a pretty sad state of affairs, because Malzberg is an interesting writer who will probably appeal to readers of Philip K. Dick. If you know of any other Malzberg titles in print, I’d love to hear about them.

Writers of interest – Ma Jian

While I procrastinate about producing essays on my favourite ten novels, I thought I’d start a series of short pieces about some writers you might not have read or even heard about. These are writers who I consider, for one reason or another, to be less famous than they deserve to be. The first such writer is Ma Jian. Born in Qingdao (Tsingtao, as in the beer), China, Ma was a self-proclaimed free-thinker and dissident who attracted the ire of the Communist authorities during the 1980s. He wrote an account of his travels around China entitled “Red Dust: A Path through China.” This fascinating book is basically a travel narrative of Ma’s journey through China in the 1980s. I can highly recommend it to anyone wanting to catch a glimpse of the ‘real’ China, as opposed to the veneer of propaganda you are likely to receive from the Communist authorities, especially in the lead up to the Beijing Olympics. “Red Dust” was first published in English in 2001, but Vintage Books put out a new edition in 2006 as part of their Vintage East series. This series, which also includes gems by important Chinese writers such as Xinran and Ha Jin, should be widely available and modestly priced at around Aus $14.95

Ma Jian has also published a couple of other books in English, but at the moment they seem to be less widely available than “Red Dust.” Ma’s first novel, “The Noodle Maker,” was originally published in Hong Kong in 1991, but was only released in English in 2004. Incidentally, the translator of Ma Jian’s works is his partner Flora Drew, whom he apparently now lives with in Britain. There have been a couple of editions of “The Noodle Maker,” both in the US and UK. “The Noodle Maker” can in fact only loosely be termed a novel; it reads more like a collection of thematically linked short stories. Ma is a realist; he has expressed a desire to write about the lives of people he sees around him. As these stories are set in China in the late 1980s, Ma Jian’s realism is highly appreciated, as they offer an insight into the trials of everyday people in China at that time. I suspect that “The Noodle Maker” isn’t for everyone, as the stories within are harrowing in the extreme, but the book does offer a fascinating insight into the generation of Chinese affected by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Ma Jian’s only other book in English at this time is “Stick Out Your Tongue,” a slender collection of stories set in Tibet. I am yet to read this book, except for the first chapter which can be read on Amazon.com. However, I did notice that there seems to be some overlap between the final section of “Red Dust” and the first chapter of “Stick Out Your Tongue.” It appears that the latter volume picks up pretty much where the former ends.

I am eagerly awaiting the release of Ma’s new novel, “Beijing Coma”, which is due to be released later this year. From the brief snippet I’ve read about it, “Beijing Coma” appears to be about a man who goes into a coma in the 1980s and wakes up in the 2000s to find that the world is more brutal than the world of his dreams. I can’t wait to read it.