James E. GunnCritiques

1941 noir is notable for how sharp the humor is. It is filled with a cast of really strange characters - a killer who likes to weep - two half-sisters who both sort of love him - a preying psychiatrist - an alcoholic mother and her rapidly evolving daughter - a confused kid sister - the killer's friend - one of the half-sister's intended spouses - the psychiatrist's "Earth Mother" assistant...it goes on and on. Everything moves along at a pretty good pace, with lots of memorable scenes along the way. it never quite seems real, however, since it is all just so strange. Great dialogue throughout, which perhaps explains why 21-year-old novelist Gunn spent the rest of his 46-year lifespan writing screenplays--and never another novel. Well, this is a good one to be semi-remembered by. Definitely recommended. This was the basis for the cult classic movie Born to Kill - which I haven't seen in a very long time, but does away with some of the characters and focuses the story a bit. I'll have to watch it again.

Listen for signals from the stars. It starts slow…but continues with the effort to continue the search, the results of actually getting a signal, the wait for the response to our response…and the need to continue searching. This is a story of bureaucratic tension...and what is more likely to happen if we should find a contact.½

F/SF

The Empire may still exist, at least it does on the fortress orbiting the planet, where the bulk ofthe population toils to preserve the privileges of the few administrators. Cracks are appearing in the administration, and we are left with a few rebels who are working to overthrow the system. I read this paperback in 1963, though it was published in 1951.

I think I'll be an outlier on this book.

The backdrop was interesting, the characters varied and extreme, the plot interesting, and yet it didn't hang together for me at all.

The intro drew me in, then the book just stumbled along for many many pages, and when it finally got interesting, it ended.

The book was described by some as a traveler's tale - a Canterbury Tales sort of thing with aliens. That was what caught my fancy as well as the fact I had never read one of James Gunn's novels (except maybe The Listeners). I had rather low expectations and the book happily exceeded them. It starts a thousand years in the future with a group of assorted aliens just after a peace has been established after a galactic war. We begin at the edge of known space and head off to the unknown with pilgrims, and others, and they seem to be seeking transcendence. This is also an entertaining mystery in space, kind of a locked room, or spaceship...

I really enjoyed the journey and it was a quick and easy read. The ending is clever and leaves the reader with a sort of cliffhanger. Almost 4 stars½

This is a classic 50's space opera with the typical plot of lone, independent (but not really) gunslinger takes on an evil empire and wins. The characters are a bit 2-dimensional and the only female character is quite stereotyped. The plot has a couple of interesting twists and there is lots of action.

1950s SF with the overblown portentiousness and beginning-of-chapter aphorisms of 1950s SF. But if successfully convinces you that it's as racist as 1950s SF often is, and then successfully subverts that assumption it only a little, so it's not wholly predictable.½

Summary: A short book about a bunch of scientists tasked with identifying alien communication against all odds.

Things I liked:

The quotes: used quotes throughout to underline the points. I liked this.

Storytelling: I liked how they used the different ways of communication to contrast and compare the points being made.

Things I thought could be improved:

I didn't notice much.

Highlight: I liked the final line. Up until that point I thought the letter was a message for the aliens.

review of
James Gunn's Breaking Point
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 3, 2015

I spent 4 wks reviewing the Larry Austin and Douglas Kahn edited Source - Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 ( "Re: Source": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/399063-re-source ) & while I was reviewing it & working & otherwise busy I read 5 other bks that went unreviewed at the time I finished them. This was one of them. I finished reading it a mnth ago.

This is a short story collection. I often say I avoid reading short stories, preferring novels. That's true. I also end up liking the short stories much more than I expect to. That's true in this case. This was one of my favorite bks by Gunn. In his introduction, it's written:

"For nearly two hundred years—since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century—science fiction was a part of the spectrum of general literature. It was so much a part of the rest of fiction that there wasn't even a name for it: the man who proved that science fiction could be popular, Jules Verne, called his novels "voyages extraordinaires"; the man who proved that science fiction could be art, H. G. Wells, found his earliest, most successful novels labeled "scientific romances."

"Then in 1926 the German immigrant inventor, science enthusiast, and publishing entrepreneur, Hugo Gernsback, created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He also invented a word to describe the type of stories he was going to publish, "scientifiction"; it wasn't until 1929, when he lost control of Amazing Stories and started a competing publication, Wonder Stories, that he created the phrase "science fiction."" - p 7

All hail Hugo Gernsback! I have an issue of Amazing, Amazing Stories's descendent, from 1967. Close, but no cigar-shaped rocket ship. In the 1st story, "Breaking Point", the one the bk's named after, some astronauts have landed on a new planet & they're welcomed in English by a mysterious voice on their radio:

"A soft, smooth hum filled the room. "Carrier," said Ives.

"Then the words came. They were English words, faultlessly spoken, loud and clear and precise. They were harmless words, pleasant words even.

"They were: "Men of earth! Welcome to our planet.."" - p 15

Unfortunately, the astronauts were Russian & didn't speak a word of English & everyone died. Just Kidding. Later, one of the astronauts using the expression ""If we don't win the fur-lined teacup . . ."" (p 20) Is that reference to Mérit Oppenheim's sculpture, "Object (Le Déjeuner en fourrure)" (1936), or did her sculpture refer to some pre-existing expression that the story is also referring to? Apparently, Oppenheim wins the prize! & now I find a "furlinedteacup" blog online for "san francisco food, film pop culture and music".

But, alas, even a fur-lined teacup won't help these astronauts. they're trapped in their space-ship & the claustrophobia is increasing:

"The Engineer came into the cabin, crossed over to his station, and began opening and closing drawers. "They've moved." From the bottom drawer he pulled out a folded chessboard and a rectangular box. Only then did he look directly at them. "The food's gone."" - p 32

I'm reminded of Stanislav Lem's excellent Solaris. I don't want to give too much of the story away but the Russian astronaut heads turn into pumpkins at midnight. After that, in "A Monster Named Smith", the blob loses control to his host's sex-drive. "Uncontrolled sensations quiver along the nerves inside the body, quiver along the feelers that lie microscopically inside the nerves. Glands are discharging their secretions into the body. The process seems automatic; I can't stop them. The body, too, must have automatic responses. It reaches toward the woman." (p 75) "Cinderella Story" starts off w/ a reasonable enough premise:

"Private enterprise made ET exploration possible. Government could do it, but Government wouldn't. That had been proved. Space was fantastically big, and ET exploration was fantastically expensive. Et exploration was also vital: humanity needed a frontier for the good of its soul; for the good of its body it needed that frontier as far as possible from Earth,

"Laws were drafted to make exploration profitable, and humanity was unleashed upon the galaxy, Jonathan Craddock, Exploiters and Importers, was born—along with one hundred competitors, more or less." - p 78

This reasonable premise is followed up by a description of one of the new technologies:

"Fairfax himself had always insisted that it did no more than satisfy the brain's visual scanning mechanism, the alpha rhythm; it stopped—or interfered with—the scanning sweep, giving the watcher the sense of seeing something without specifying what that something was. From there on, the incredulity factor took over—that habit of the mind which directs it to seek always the simpler explanation. That there are aliens among us is a wild fantasy; it is simpler to assume that what one sees is something ordinary, seen badly.

"But not every mind has an alpha rhythm to iterrupt—for instance, M-types. Some epistemologists doubted that the field affected the mind at all, and photographs supported them: an object inside a Fairfax Field was optically blurred, even to the mindless eye of a camera." - p 82

Interesting, eh? On http://www.theofficialjohncarpenter.com/pages/themovies/tl/tl.html it's written that:

"They influence our decisions without us knowing it. They numb our senses without us feeling it. They control our lives without us realizing it. THEY LIVE.

"A rugged loner (RODDY PIPER) stumbles upon a terrifying discovery: goulish creatures are masquerading as humans while they lull the public into submission through subliminal advertising messages. Only specially made sunglasses make the deadly truth visible."

Many people know & love the movie "THEY LIVE" but, as I recall, it's never explained how the "g[h]oulish creatures" [maybe they mean goulash creatures?] succeed as "masquerading as humans" unless it's all done thru advertising subliminal messages. Gunn explores how one might fool the eye of another creature to make them accept one as one-of-them. I don't remember running across that idea before.

&, yeah, "The Cinderella Story" has tech update:

"Suddenly she said, "Pip! I lost my show!"

""Which shoe?"

""The right shoe. The one with the unit in it!"" - p 89

At least she's probably still got her keys & her cellphone. In "Teddy Bear", Gunn uses his name for one of the characters:

"And then the cold thoughts: Some of us aren't real. And: Somebody slipped.

"But that was a foolish thought. I wasn't prepared to accept the inevitable consequences. It meant—

""Mr. Gunn?"

"I swung around." - p 95

&, yes, they made James Gunn into paperback bks. This one talks to me from time-to-time. It says things like "In such a world of law and order, nothing should be inexplicable. There should be no such mysterious disappearances as those of Ambrose Bierce and Judge Crater. (Had they learned too much?) There should be no mysterious appearances of men who are dead or long lost, who should be gone forever. But Enoch Arden returns—so often that we need an Enoch Arden law to protect the "widow."" (p 102)

"The Enoch Arden doctrine consists of the legal principles involved when a person leaves his or her spouse under such circumstances and for such a period of time as to make the other spouse believe that the first spouse is dead, with the result that the remaining spouse marries another, only to discover later the return of the first spouse. Generally, in most states, it is safer for the remaining spouse to secure a Divorce before marrying again." - http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Enoch Arden Doctrine

If I ever get married, I think I'll change my name to "Enoch", ask my wife to change hers to "Arden" & propose that our last name be "Divarriage". That shd get us off to a good start. Speaking of the future,

"["]Can you fix that thing?"

"The plumber flinched. he said meekly, "What seems to be wrong with it?"

""It—won't—flush."

"Gingerly the red-haired plumber twisted the handle on the water closet. Water gurgled into the bowl and swirled up dangerously close to the edge before it subsided. Slowly the level dropped. "Well," said the plumber. "Well. My suggestion is that you get rid of the whole affair. I can get a crew of men in a few days, rip this thing out, and put in a modern disposerbot—"" - p 122

Car w/ a computer in it anyone? Gunn even gets into what seems to be his literary philosophy:

""Every science that deals with man ignores everything except what it deals with. Medicine deals with the physical man, economics with that simplification known as Economic Man, psychiatry with a fictitious creature in whom it would have no interest if he were 'normal,' and one branch of psychology with I.Q. Man, whose only significant aspect is his ability to solve puzzles.

""Literature is the only thing that deals with the whole complex phenomena at once. If it were to cease to exist, whatever is not considered by one or another of the sciences would no longer be considered at all and would perhaps vanish completely." - p 129

Fair enuf. More philosophizing:

"The most important single gift of science to civilization was freedom from superstition: the idea that order, not caprice, governs the world, that man was capable of understanding it. Beginning with Newton's discovery of the universal sway of the law of gravitation, am felt himself to be in a congenial universe; all things were subject to universal laws.

"But that conviction arose from the narrowness of his horizons. When he extended his range he found that nature was neither understandable nor subject to law. For this we may thank Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg." - p 134

Speaking of scientists, "The Power and the Glory" has this set-up:

""What are you then?"

""Scientists, experimenters. In your language those words might describe us best."

""And we are your experiment."

"The visitor turned around. His face, too, was shadowed.

""Yes."

""And now the experiment is over."

""We have found out what we wished to know. We clean the test tube, sterilize the equipment. You should understand."" - p 140

I like it, the idea of Earth as an experiment, the scientists who created the experiment are done. Imagine if you were experimenting w/ incorporating a plant from yr backyard in a recipe & yr dog ate it & died. Wdn't you throw the food away?

Finally, the last story, "The Listeners", originally published as a short story in September, 1968, is verbatim the 1st chapter of a novel of the same name published in 1972. I've reviewed that bk here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028305.The_Listeners .

Plenty of thoughtful ideas in this one & it was very entertaining too. A Good Read for GoodReads.

review of
James Gunn's The Mind Master
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 15, 2015

There's definitely variety in Gunn's themes: This Fortress World ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6011288-this-fortress-world ) is different from Station in Space is different from The Listeners ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028305.The_Listeners ) is different from The Magicians ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians ).

However, The Mind Master is similar in some respects to The Joy Makers & also to Kampus ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144066.Kampus ). I get the impression that Gunn, as a university professor, has had a somewhat pessimistic vision of the future based on what he perceives as the students' unchecked hedonism & lack of self-discipline for taking c/o serious business.

As the inside jacket blurb of my hard-cover edition of The Joy Makers explains it: "Imagine a world where you can have everything you want, or if you can't have it, you can be psychologically conditioned not to want it. Imagine a world so technologically advanced that happiness and contentment can be achieved without effort, a world where there is no sickness or hunger, no deprivation, no want no striving, no disappointment. Imagine that any experience can be yours and any fantasy or desire reconstructed by machines and fed directly into your cerebral cortex. Imagine all this, and you have the world of James Gunn's The Joy Makers, a nightmare world of indolence, of lost purposes, of the death of civilization."

The Joy Makers was originally published as separate stories in 1954 & 1955 & then published as a bk in 1961. The Mind Master was published in 1980. In it, we, again, have a society in wch constant pleasure & stimulation can be had w/ little or no personal effort. For the most part civilization has evolved to be on auto-pilot. The plot has evolved somewhat: chemical memory, a way for instant learning & for instant deep 'experiences' of secondhand authenticity is now the crux of the matter.

"It had started with chemical memory. Memory, it was discovered, was first encoded in complex protein molecules, later engraved in synaptic pathways. Chemical memory had changed society more than the Industrial Revolution. Schools disappeared. Only the perverse individual learned to read." - p 34

&, yes, thanks to this, civilization is in danger of collapse b/c the Mind Master minding the stores, so to speak, will die eventually & there's no-one to take his place. As I wrote in my review of Kampus:

"It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'."

I can't say I completely disagree w/ Gunn, even tho I'm a bit of a hedonist myself, people who don't balance the pursuit of pleasure w/ some more pragmatic survival skills might die of liver ailments earlier than most, etc..

"Hence the dreamers. hence the beautiful bright children who had nothing to do with their time but pursue pleasure and when pleasure palled, sesnation beyond pleasure: guilt, humiliation, sin, degradation, decadence, sorrow, grief, pain. . . ." - p 34

Then again, I don't think that Gunn's dire warnings of a future world where people will be 'free' to wallow in such titillations is very likely to ever come. A much more likely fate is that fundamentalists will do their best to remove any hedonistic options in favor of slavery to people posing as
representatives of 'god'.

Nonetheless, in The Mind Master there's withdrawal for the poppets, pretty obviously inspired by the drug withdrawals of addicts contemporary to the era in wch the bk was written: "The fourth day she crawled to him and kissed his feet and begged him for one little cap. "I'll do anything," she said. "Just one little cap. You can pick it out. And then we'll be like we were before. I'll be anything you want me to be. I'll stay with you. I'll—"" (p 34)

The "Mnemonist", the guy who's eschewed the more common pleasures of the "poppets" (chemical memory pleasure seekers), is the human interface in the computer system that keeps it all running. The Mnemonist immediately evokes for me A. R. Luria's wonderful bk The Mind of the Mnemonist, a psychologist's account of a man w/ perfect recall. Sure enuf, Gunn references the bk specifically:

"the russian psychologist
alexander luria
described a man
whose memory seemed
to have no limit
a mnemonist whose mind
was so extraordinary
that luria wrote of him
in terms usually reserved
for the mentally oll
he could commit to memory
in a couple of minutes
a table of fifty numbers
which he could recall
in every minute detail
many years later
his greatest difficulty
was in learning
how to forget
the endless trivia
that cluttered his mind" - p 173

& earlier: "these days, with memories available at every console, there was so much to forget. Forgetting was an art. Men can drown in memories, and reality can become as elusive as a dream." (p 68)

Gunn's writing is a tad more experimental than usual in his chapters insofar as he interrupts the plot-driven paragraphs w/ 3 columns of the types of relevant info to the Mnemonist's tube-tied position. If I knew how to create columns on GoodReads (& I'm not sure I can anyway) I'd present sample columns in the bk's position. Instead, I'll present them in sequence:

Column 1:

"courage he said
and pointed
toward the land
this mounting wave
will roll us
homeward soon
in the afternoon
they came unto a land
in which it seemed
always afternoon"

Column 2:

"mcconnell continued
training planarians
at michican
he cut them
in half
and waited
for the pieces
to generate
into
whole worms"

Column 3:

"cultivator
421
is
destroying
plants
pull
it
in
for
overhaul" - p 8

The 1st column is from "The Lotos-Eaters" by Alfred Tennyson. But it's not all from "The Lotos Eaters":

Column 1:

"to die
to sleep
perchance to dream
ay there’s the rub
for in that sleep
of death
what dreams may come
when we have shuffled
off this mortal coil
must give us pause" - p 46

Perhaps most of you will recognize that as from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

The Mnemonist isn't completely unique as a human willing to take on lonely but crucial responsibilities. There're also the Historian & the Volunteers. One of the Volunteers is a surgeon:

"But he was a surgeon in a time when no one was a surgeon anymore, when no one studied the old skills and arts. In this capsule culture maintained by self-repairing machines directed by omniscient computers, everyone did just what he or she wanted to do; people pursued pleasures in their own peculiar ways, and if something had to be done that the computers and their tools could not do, a volunteer would inject a capsule and the synthesized proteins would provide instant memory of how that action could be accomplished and of how the muscles and the nerve endings felt when they were doing it. That was the miracle of chemical learning." - p 67

That interesting premise is developed by Gunn to include: "which brought him a steadily increasing number of patients as new ailments arose among the poppets, ailments whose diagnosis and treatment were not programmed into the computers." (p 67)

Another non-poppet character is Sara: ""I was—am a synthesist," she said. "I don't create anything, but I put things together in new combinations.["] (p 82) I've previously encountered the idea of the synthesist in John Brunner's "The Fourth Power" story (1960) in Out of my Mind - from the Past, Present and Future & in his Stand on Zanzibar (1968) as well as in Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage (1968).

One of the most intriguing paths that the bk pursues is a dreaming of Homeric epic: ""That's good news," she says. "Achilles is a savage. He's as big as a bull and as swift as a deer, and he lives only to fight and kill. Besides, they say that Thetis, his divine mother, made him invulnerable when he was a baby."" (p 118) The one movie that I've seen that features the character of Achilles has him as slender rather than "as big as a bull". My superficial searches for a physical description of him as one or the other in The Iliad & in online discussions of it don't answer the question. The conditions of this dreaming are such that the dreamer becomes a 'God':

"I see Aeneas—son, they say, of Anchises and Aphrodite—defend the corpse of Pandarus from the giant Diomedes. I see Diomedes raise overhead a rock I think no man can lift, and I feel it shatter the hip joint of Aeneas. But he does not fall. He must not die. He must live, I sense, for another purpose, perhaps to save Ilium and me.

Aeneas is destined to survive and to save the House of Dardanus from extinction. The great Aeneas shall be king of Troy and shall be followed by his children's children in the time to come.

"I remove him from the battle as I had removed myself, leaving Diomedes to wonder what god has intervened. I will the hip healed and send a phantom Aeneas to fight upon the plain lest the Trojans be discouraged." - p 131

I recently noted in my review of Rudy Rucker's Postsingular that Rucker, too, explains 'gods' not as divine beings but in scientific terms that revive their interest-level for me:

"One thing I like about Rucker's work is the way he explains fanciful mythology, angels, eg, by using contemporary General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (or ideas from other scientific arenas) - even if he is playing fast & loose w/ them." - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante

All in all, there's alot to like in James Gunn's The Mind Master: the What-If? potentials are solidly explored & I felt stimulated to imagine some that weren't.

review of
James E. Gunn's This Fortress World
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 25, 2014

Somewhat to my surprise, this is the SEVENTH bk I've read by Gunn, the earliest, & my least favorite so far. Of these 7, I've reviewed 4: Future Imperfect ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6256260-future-imperfect ), The Listeners ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1028305.The_Listeners ), The Magicians ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians ), & Kampus ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2144066.Kampus ).

The "PROLOGUE" sets the tone:

"The Second Empire. Say it aloud. Let it inflame the imagination. Let its meaning sink into the soul.

"An empire. Within it the numberless worlds of the inhabited galaxy united, working together, living together, trading together. The name alone tells us that much. But how did it work? How was it held together? How were disputes decided, wars avoided? We don't know. We will never know. Only the name comes down to us. We remember it, and we remember, dimly, a golden time, a time of freedom and peace and plenty, and we weep sometimes for what is gone and will not come again." - p 1

Empire.. a double-edged sword. Don't all empires have centers from wch war is constantly waged to feed these centers? Empires are like robber barons, they have visions, they steal so that they can give back on their own terms. The Roman Empire enforced an international language, Latin. The Roman Empire spread advanced knowledge of sanitation, mining, building.

Robber Barons, like Frick & Carnegie, monopolize industry, depress wages, create museums & libraries & parks. Would the workers have created such a huge steel industry w/o these greedy visionaries? Maybe not. Would the workers have set up museums & libraries & parks? Maybe, maybe not. There are impressive union halls, impressive whole bldgs for unions.

The British Empire renounced slavery long before the USA did & set up anti-slaving blockades off the coast of Africa to try to stop it. But, of course, they built their empire using slaves & conquering - they imposed opium on China. Nonetheless, I'm grateful that English is an international language to the extent that it is - but one shdn't forget that it, & its predecessor Latin, were imposed.

I have little faith in 'human nature' - w/ or w/o empire humans will be cruel & brutal. I don't think that the Taliban left to their own devices are going to create a better society for those around them than the USA World Cop - far from it. Let's hope these aren't the only 2 choices. I'll choose Fair Trade over 'Free' Trade anyday - every little bit helps - but I'm not optimistic or naive enuf to believe in a unified humanity working peacefully together for mutual benefit or in a visionary dictator imposing some facsimile thereof that keeps the more monstrous in check.

The story takes place on an Earth-like planet w/ slight differences: "six hours of study, research, and exercise; evening prayers beside the bed at twenty-five; sleep." (p 13): there are at least 25 hrs in the day.

There's a somewhat amateurish youthfulness to the writing:

""The solution?" I said.

""A simultaneous revolution all over the galaxy," Siller said quietly. "No power will be able to take advantage of the confusion. Afterwards, a confederation of worlds which will gradually develop into full union."" - p 53

This Fortress World was published in 1955. I didn't remember when Gunn was born. It occurred to me that this might've been his 1st novel, maybe even written by a precocious teenager, a young fantasist. Then I researched his birthdate & found it to be July 12, 1923. I was a bit surprised to realize that he wd've been 31 or 32 when this came out, maybe it was written much earlier. Don't get me wrong, I admire most things I cdn't've done myself - I cdn't've written such a novel when I was 31, I cdn't write it now - but that doesn't mean I wasn't doing things much more sophisticated at that age - so the admiration doesn't run that deep. The writing still seems pretty consistently corny & amateur:

""Wait for me," Laurie had said. Wait? Wait here to bring death to you? Wait here like death to draw you close with bony arms and press your face with fleshless lips? Wait? No. Laurie. There may be peace and quiet here, but you are better off back there. Death is peace, too; death is quietness." - p 78

"Riches and poverty, I thought, here they meet in the court of justice where all are equal. And why, I asked myself, are there no nobles here or Peddlers? I remember an old saying, "The law is for the poor; it is the only thing they can afford."" - p 174

OR, as I like to say:

When Money's God
Poor People
are the Human Sacrifices

&

We are all UNEQUAL
under the LAW
& THAT is its PURPOSE

In other words, juvenile or not, I tend to agree w/ some of the sentiments of the bk:

""The basic necessity of the fortress is the ignorance of the people. An intelligent, educated people can't be kept inside a fortress. Knowledge is a physical force which would burst the walls from within. The rulers know that. the first principle of their political philosophy is to keep their subjects weak; the second is to keep them ignorant. One is physical, the other is mental;" - p 193

"["]They never quite starve. They have their free teevee theaters. And we can't reach them. The rulers control every method of communication except one. And they've blocked that very effectively."

""Books?" I asked.

"He nodded gloomily. "there's only one way to stop the people from reading, and they've done it. They've kept them ignorant and illiterate. If the people could read, they would have words and ideas to think with. We could educate them, organize them.["]" - p 53

& I reckon many of us here at GoodReads agree w/ that, eh?!

review of
James Gunn's The Witching Hour
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 5, 2015

When I previously read Gunn's The Magicians, in my review of it ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians ) I remarked that "After spending something like 6 mnths reading Joseph McElroy's Women and Men I've decided to only read short bks for a looooonnnnnggggggg while - bks that I can read in a day or a few days. Every time I reach for something over 300pp long I shrink back. It's time for 'beach reading', 'vacation bks' - but when I was at the beach on 'vacation' I was reading McElroy. The Magicians fit the bill perfectly - even more perfectly than I'd hoped."

NOW, I chose to read 2 Gunn bks while I was in the midst of the somewhat grueling process of spending 4 wks reviewing Source - Music of the Avant-Garde, 1966-1973 ( "Re: Source": https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/399063-re-source ) &, once again, they fit the bill. In the case of The Witching Hour, I'll be able to write this review in no time flat thusly proving that I'm a warlock or something b/c otherwise this review will really take me an hr or 2 to write.

Regarding p 29 I wrote a note to myself: "Influenced by Fort?" about the following:

"You can't just dismiss things, he thought. In any comprehensive scheme of the universe, you must include all valid phenomena. If the accepted scheme of things cannot find a place for it, then the scheme must change." - p 29

Then my note for p 3 says: "Bingo!" so I cashed in my cards & took my money off to buy alcohol:

"Matt thought about Charles Fort and his Book of the Damned, that strange and wonderful book that lists and documents the phenomena that science cannot explain in its own terms and which it therefore relegates to the inferno of the unacceptable." - p 30

In the same story, b/c after all, this IS a collection of short stories (but I didn't tell you that yet), "The Reluctant Witch", it is written:

"Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the sixteenth, one hundred thousand persons had been put to death for witchcraft. How many had come to the rack or the stake ir the drowning pool through the accusations of children? A child saw a hag at her door. The next moment she saw a hare run by and the woman had disappeared. On no more convincing evidence than that, the woman was accused of turning herself into a hare by witchcraft." - p 32

That type of 'evidence' is called "Spectral Evidence". I'm fascinated by its history. If you go to at least one presentation in Salem, Massachusetts, to hear about the girls who caused so much suffering w/ their own spectral evidence you'll be treated to the presenter telling you it was really all the patriarchy's fault, blah, blah.. Those little girls were sociopathic brats, don't make excuses for them. I made a movie called "Spectral Evidence". The trailer for it is here: http://youtu.be/PFtodKMQpXE . Chances are, it won't make a lick of sense to you. It'll make about as much sense as the following quote taken out of context:

"Matt looked up. He strangled, It was Abbie! Abbie's face bending over him! Matt choked and spluttered. Students turned to stare. Matt gazed around the room wildly. the girls—they all looked like Abbie!" - p 74

I reckon one cd say that "The Reluctant Witch" is a romantic comedy. As w/ all romantic comedies, I shd be so lucky as to have a girlfriend like that. "The beautiful brew"? It's another romantic comedy. "Is there anyone will not desert me? Oh, Dion, old friend, why have you deserted me, too? Dion! Is your name short for "Dionysus?"" (p 90) I shd be so lucky as to have a girlfriend made of beer. Then we cd have sex ""Under the table?" Jerry said with great dignity. "Of course not. Half seas over, yes. Also: fuddled, lush, mellow, merry, plastered, primed, sozzled, squiffy, topheavy, tight, oiled, and one over the eight. I am drunk as a piper, a fiddler, a lord, an owl, David's sow, or a wheelbarrow. I feel fine." (p 98)

The last story, "The Magicians", was also a novel of the same name. I didn't read the story here but I did review the novel, as already stated above, here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3033767-the-magicians . So there.

review of
James Gunn's The Magicians
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - November 10, 2011


After spending something like 6 mnths reading Joseph McElroy's Women and Men I've decided to only read short bks for a looooonnnnnggggggg while - bks that I can read in a day or a few days. Every time I reach for something over 300pp long I shrink back. It's time for 'beach reading', 'vacation bks' - but when I was at the beach on 'vacation' I was reading McElroy. The Magicians fit the bill perfectly - even more perfectly than I'd hoped.

The Magicians entertained me in a way similar to a Ron Goulart novel but had a bit more substance. Gunn actually made a reasonable attempt to explain magik in scientific terms as the control of hidden forces w/o the 'necessity' of obfuscating religious/satanic anthropomorphisms. On p 56 he referenced the 'devils' of Loudon (a fascinating subject delved into brilliantly in Ken Russell's film The Devils & elsewhere by Aldous Huxley, Krzysztof Penderecki, etc..). On p 106 he references Senoi dream theory (another subject that fascinates me). & in chapters 8 & 9 he describes the main character's dreams. After I read those descriptions, I went to sleep & dreamt my own dreams wch I then awoke to write about - the 2 events seeming an obviously inter-related sequence (perhaps my dream description will appear here: http://annandaledreamgazetteonline.blogspot.com/). Gunn also references another subject of substantial interest to me, secret names, on p 139.

Gunn's fluid pulp style & humorous & fanciful telling of a story about a private detective being sucked into a world of witchcraft was just what the witch doctor ordered for me. All in all, the imagining of magik as something possible w/ sufficient scientific knowledge is a pleasant daydream that I'd explore further if I weren't already dedicatedly on a different path. It interested me to learn that Gunn lives in Lawrence, KS where William S. Burroughs also lived. I wonder if they knew each other?

This is my favorite Gunn novel yet.. & yet I largely disagree w/ its philosophical thrust. Nonetheless, it seems like the most developed & accomplished novel of his that I've read. This is a picaresque novel - the anti-hero, Gavin, is fairly foolish & stupid but not necessarily any worse than pretty much everyone around him. Gunn places his adventures in what wd've been at the time of writing a near-future society (from our time now a time past) - a dystopia the product of unchecked 'radicalism'.

It's the dystopia, of course, that's the main subject & it functions, as literary dystopias usually do, as a critique of political/social trends of the time of writing. "Kampus" was published in 1977. Gunn envisions a world where militant student 'radicals' have 'won', where there're no longer prisons, where universities are walled-in playpens for 'leftist'-motivated bombings & kidnappings & 'free love'.

The philosophy apparently intended to be that closest to Gunn's own is presented by the Professor thru monologues & dialogs & lectures near the beginning of the bk & thru quotes from the "Professor's notebook" in the rest of it, etc.. I find the Professor's opinions interesting enuf but, as w/ more or less everyone, I agree w/ some of it & disagree w/ some of it.

Gavin's adventures, joined for most of them by Elaine - a more pragmatic & sympathetic character, take him thru various extremes that a "Dionysian" society might offer. Like "Candy" or "Justine" there's more than a little cynicism at work. Interestingly, at one point someone's quoted as having a negative take on Apollinaire's respect for de Sade.

IN the beginning teachers at the university are pleading for students in their classes - mostly resorting to sexual manipulation. An English prof hawks his wares thusly:

""Many works of literature, many exciting - yes, even pornographic - passages have never been translated into visual form. Imagine the delight of reading Fanny Hill in the original or Justine or The Story of O! Even the best of translations leaves much to be desired; you cannot imagine, if you have never experienced it, the exquisite pleasure of summoning up your own images instead of having someone else's ideas thrust upon you.""

I reckon that part of Gunn's humor here is that "Justine", eg, isn't even IN ENGLISH in its original form, etc.. As for not "having someone else's ideas thrust upon you" just b/c it's a bk instead of a movie or whatnot? Nah, I don't really buy it.. I don't even borrow it.

The inside blurb reads: ""New Politics" . . . or Programmed Anarchy?" & what the fuck does that mean exactly? There's plenty of anti-'anarchist' thrust to this bk - written from the usual perspective of someone who appears to have little or no knowledge of actual anarchist theory or praxis. To me, as an anarchist, his use of the words "anarchy" & "anarchist" are sadly ludicrous. Here's an obviously literate man who throws literacy out the window as soon as he pulls his bogeyman out. Too bad. Gunn, you're intelligent, but you're not THAT intelligent.

On p 66 as Gavin's invited to be part of a militant mission he replies "I'm not an anarchist" & the reply is "Who is?". In other words, Gavin's saying he's not an extremist & won't attack the police barracks & the person trying to recruit him is saying that he's not an extremist either. This is a little inconsistent w/ other parts of the novel given that there don't appear to be cops anymore except "Kampus Kops" who don't appear to have much power. The gist here is that 'anarchy' is used as the name for total unleashed violent chaos, as (stupidly) usual, rather than, more accurately, as a referent for a more self-responsible philosophy.

On p 101, the Chancellor tells Gavin: ""After the uneasy quiet of the Apprehensive Decade, [..:] burned out by the riots of the sixties, alarmed by the shortages and inflation and unemployment, the overall trend established in the late sixties resumed its progress toward anarchy".

Gavin gets expelled from school & returns home to his parents only to find himself unwelcome. The "generation gap" that defined so many conflicts between parents & kids in the 1960s & '70s has the parents here as 'radicals' disgusted w/ the 'meaninglessness' of their son's struggles. Gavin's father rants: ""We were the generation of Mario Savio, Mark Rudd, Bernadine Dorn, and Abbie Hoffman - the saints of the revolution.""

On 294, Gunn has students burning bks & has the now-very-changed Gavin (or is he?) thinking: "They were anarchists destroying their human heritage for the sport of it. The Professor would have called them barbarians and despised them." Funny, I don't usually associate anarchists w/ bk-burnings.

As the event that involves the bk-burning 'progresses' we read: "Here order made its last stand; here anarchy presented its final negation to tyranny. Here the world ended, Gavin thought." There's the usual cast of thoughtless clichés: anarchy vs order rather than anarchy as self-ordering; humanity self-destructing as the end of the world. Ho hum.

Gunn's apparent position, as presented thru the Professor, takes an anti-back-to-nature standpoint: "To what more glorious or more natural existence do we look back? Did the neolithic farmers envy the more natural lives of their paleolithic forefathers, and did those savage hunters, in turn, recall nostalgically the carefree careers of their arboreal ancestors?" To wch I reply: Was Gunn forced to work as a child in a factory by a robber baron? I think not - so its easy for him to glorify the industrial 'revolution', as he goes on to do here, b/c he's privileged enuf to not be its direct victim. I, too, am not exactly a 'back-to-nature' type or a so-called 'anarcho-primitivist' but I don't think the arguments for such things can be dismissed as easily as Gunn does. Of course, this review is using expediency & so does Gunn's novel.

Gunn's ultimate position is that of a SF writer: (he's prescient enuf to mention terra-forming on p 273) his role as one-time president of the Science Fiction Writers of America is perhaps most obvious in his most sympathetically presented community's being a thinly-veiled fantasy of what SF writers are: researchers of a technologically induced utopia, reasonable & even-tempered. In the "enchanted mountain" retreat, the Director explains that Science Fiction writers help disseminate the results of the retreat's inhabitants' research.

In the end, Gunn's naivity & limited bourgeois perspective is most clearly revealed when he has the Director say: ""The world is engaged in a dangerous experiment, [..:] a social experiment called freedom. The experiment began on this continent more than two hundred years ago, and spread eventually to the rest of the world."" Sheesh! In other words, the USA is the good old role model for democracy at its finest. It's in ludicrous opinions like these that Gunn's privileged deluded position as a univeristy professor become painfully obvious: since when is the USA anything other than yet-another place where brutality was used to put some in power & to displace & destroy those in-the-way?!

Thru the Professor mouthpiece he says: "slavery was dying before the Civil War; protests may've prolonged the Vietnam war through middle-class resentment of the protesters"! I think not, Gunn, I think not! If Gunn thinks that waiting for slavery to die off gradually wd've been somehow preferable to the Civil War I'd have to disagree; if he thinks that the Vietnam war wd've ended QUICKER w/o such widespread resistance to it at home I strongly disagree: the "middle-class resentment of the protesters" was, 1st & foremost, a resentment of their having the war shown to them at all. As long as it was something that happened over there to anonymous OTHERS they cd ignore it. I don't really believe that many people in the middle-class had anything but the foggiest notion of why to support the war in the 1st place & I don't think that changed as protest grew.

Yet another bk that surprises me. There are, what?, SEVEN editions listed here on GoodReads?! & Gunn was the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America. &, yet, I've only read one other bk by him, wch I liked, & he still seems obscure to me. Thank the Holy Ceiling Light / Astronomical Listening Post / Whatever that there are still SF writers whose work is relatively new to me & interesting. This bk manages to be quite a few things in a somewhat short span: 'human' (ie: w/ characters that're developed), 'epic' (ie: covering a 'long' time span & multiple generations of characters), 'utopian' (ie: in its envisioning of the near future - the widespread use of bicycles, universal living wage, eg) & fairly original (ie: in its take on the search for extra-terrestrial life). There's even a black president (predicted for somewhat later than Obama came). It's unspectacular in the sense that the scientists doing the LISTENING are pretty unglamorous & there aren't any stirring fights or sex w/ extraterrestrials (although the latter is hinted at in a pop-culture reference) & it's spectacular in the sense of there actually being contact & what that contact consists of. All in all, a very well-thought-out bk.

I read The Magicians as a teenager and the mixing of magic with a detective story was amazing to me.

Today it holds up okay. At times it feels like you're getting a lecture on history and it doesn't treat it's female characters well. But still entertaining in the main.

For anyone interested in the history and development of science fiction as a genre, this six-volume series is an absolute must. Gunn, one of the grand old men of science fiction, came of age as a writer in the era of Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke and went on to become one of the most respected voices in the movement to bring science fiction out of the shadow of the "pulp" stigma and into both the mainstream and academic arenas.

I had the great good fortune to take Professor Gunn's science fiction classes at the University of Kansas and can attest that his knowledge of the field was immense and, frankly, amazing. These volumes reflect a lifetime's work, both as an author and a scholar.

Gunn's work does not extend beyond the late twentieth century, but his coverage to that point is detailed, thoughtful, and intelligent. Modern readers will no doubt find that his point of view as a white American male of a certain generation shows clearly in his choice of works and his discussions. Science fiction was (and, to some degree, remains) dominated by male writers, so this bias is partially his own and partially a reflection of the realities of the field he studied.

As a foundational education in the history of science fiction, you won't do better than this series.

Everyone wants to be happy, Right? And if we make everyone else happy, that will help us be happy.

So, this novel starts off happy. A new breed of professionals, called Hedonists, use a combination of folk wisdom and advanced scientific tricks to make people happy. The trouble is, they are so very good at it that eventually a law is passed making it illegal to be unhappy. Unhappy people are arrested and cured; soon they are released as model citizens, very grateful that they were caught. This makes some people so unhappy that they try as hard as they can to look happy ...

I read this back in the 60's and it had a big impact on me then. The final nightmare the book leads up to does not seem quite so far fetched today, so the idea is still very relevant.

First book by Gunn. Good writer but I only like half of his short depictions of our future world. The first couple of time periods were interesting and could have been complete novels. The third and forth periods were not so interesting.

I will try other books by this author.½

This is a collection of 5 novellas that are cobbled together to make a short novel. There is not much in the way of character development nor for that matter plot development. The first Novella predates Carl Sagan's Contact an the book is very similar to the plot in contact. The writing is spare; however, the story is interesting and one that I could not put down.

Being a fanatic sci-fi reading I had never read anything by James Gunn. I was interested in his writing after learning of his death. After reading this book I am definitely going to search out his other books.½

I had been waiting to read this book for years, after some excerpts from it showed up in [b:Gateways|8139064|Gateways|Elizabeth A. Hull|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1298783692s/8139064.jpg|12935483] as "Tales from the Spaceship Geoffrey". I love a sci-fi author who speculates on the different ways that life may evolve in different environments (or similar ones). I liked the story about the Transcendental Machine too - it was a good backdrop over which to hear the aliens stories. I was interested in how it would end but it wasn't too overbearing. There were no characters that particularly stood out for me, but I loved every species' story!

Of all of the Star Trek novels out there, there are none that I look forward to reading more than the ones by authors who also scripted episodes of the show itself, in no small part because they developed the canon upon which the entire series is based. Though Theodore Sturgeon's novel was developed from a plot outline for the series by another author (the under-appreciated James Gunn), to read a work originating from the writer of "Shore Leave" and the Vulcan-defining classic "Amok Time" was an exciting prospect, especially considering its origins as a proposed episode for the series.

The result proved every bit as good as I thought it would be. In it the Enterprise is dispatched to Timshel, a planet that has quarantined itself off from the rest of the Federation. Beaming down, Captain Kirk finds a population that has turned away from intellectual pursuits to a life structured around laboring daily for a nightly dose of stimulation from the Joy Machine a computer created to provide a life of perfect happiness for the people. As Kirk investigates further, he grapples with the moral questions entailed in ending the Joy Machine's rule, as well as the frightening prospect of falling under the machine's control himself.

Sturgeon and Gunn's plot evokes a lot of the tropes that often recurred in the original series, echoing in particular the first season episode "Return of the Archons" in which a computer's rule established a tranquil population by eliminating individual expression. What sets the novel apart from the episode is the extended exploration of the implications of the Joy Machine's rule. Often this takes the form of dialogues between various characters, as the Enterprise crew argues with both the computer and its subjects, who readily and even eagerly accept the computer's programmed regimen and who raise larger questions about the purpose of human lives in the process. In this respect it evokes the moral and ethical dilemmas posed in some of the best episodes of the show, which are explored in greater depth than was ever possible due to the constraints posed by the format. As such Gunn's novel possesses a fidelity to the original series often lacking in other products of the franchise, while at the same time showing just what fresh possibilities exist by exploring its themes using other media.

"Reasons," by Isaac Asimov, 12 pg. (1941): 8
- I've learned to more quickly dismiss the quirks of Golden Age sf from my perturbation engines, and a good thing for "Reason", because Asimov traffics in them up and down. One particular to this story: the hot-headed jerk character, who cannot speak a sentence without including some spastic insult ("Now watch out you metal ignoramus!"). Getting beyond this, though, there's -- and, truly, against my better impulses -- a nice metaphorical turn here in the story.

"Desertion," by Clifford Simak, 14 pg. (1944): 9
- The rare GA story whose writing amplifies a rather cut-and-dry story, rather than the other way around (although, I should keep in mind the era, and the novelty of the bio-tampering for alien environments possibility here).

"Mimsy Were the Borogoves," by Lewis Padgett, 32 pg. (1943): 8.25
- Too cute by half, or whatever the 40s equivalent is, to answer the question no one was asking: i.e. what was up with Jabberwocky? Some nice, early Golden Age, smoothly jocular, wink-winky opening lines however (those being, "I'm not gonna describe 1,000,000 AD, cause it's no use").

"The Million-Year Picnic," by Ray Bradbury (1946): 8
- A story built around a punchline, as much early sf. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

A drippy little meditation on loss, redemption, and loneliness -- shot through with a maudlin overcurrent potentially off-putting if it wasn't so well-matched to the beats themselves. One of the rare GA sf stories in which the writing outpaces the story [see the steady infusion of bits of information bespeaking the varying degrees of crazy our protagonists are going].

This book starts slow with an assassination of a leader by Horn who later leads to a revolution with slaves rising up and overthrowing their masters at Enron. The chinese wiseman and his parrot are interesting and come in/out of the plot.

It is rather dated, 1950.s style of writing but not objectionably so.½