Recently I got one of those Facebook “challenges” where someone nominates me to post covers of books I love over the course of a week. I took the challenge–but then felt frustrated that I could only choose seven (at least according to the rules of that silly challenge). But that got me thinking–that I could keep the process going here by posting a new “book I love” each month. Not as break-neck fast as a week of Facebook posts, but what the hell. So here goes…
PS: In the interests of full disclosure, I’m using Amazon affiliate links on this page, meaning I make a (tiny) commission on any sales resulting from these links.
Richard Matheson, I Am Legend
Richard Matheson’s 1954 vampire-apocalypse classic tells the story of ROBERT NEVILLE, the lone survivor of a pandemic that has wiped out the entire world population and turned its victims into vampires. By night, Neville hides. But by day, he’s a postmodern Van Helsing, hunting the vampires while they sleep, alone in a world that has upended itself and made him the monster.
This thin-volumed masterpiece was viewed at the time as a Cold War parable, and I also considered it a back-handed comment on post-WW2 conformity, masculinity, and the emerging counter-culture. I recently came back to this book and found additional resonances from a post-COVID perspective, especially in its powerful evocation of the loneliness and need for connection born of isolation and the heartbreak born of betrayal and loss.
I Am Legend has been made into three films over the years. I’m not going to get into which adaptation is the better one here (and why it is The Omega Man), but I will say that I continue to hope for a version that finally does justice to the existential bleakness of Matheson’s original. If you like your vampires all sparkly with dewy chanteuses as the objects of their desires, this is not the novel for you.
Greg Bear, Blood Music
A wild inventive “microbe as invader’ tale! Blood Music tells the story of a brilliant geneticist who, after his research is shut down, smuggles his work out of the lab by injecting himself with the product of his experimentation. At first, the intelligent “nanites” seem like a good thing–until they start to see their human host–and the rest of the world–as a repository of molecular building blocks, and begin to form a very alien, and very frightening agenda of their own.
Blood Music was my introduction to the “gray goo” nightmare scenario offered as a worst possible outcome by opponents of nanotechnology. It’s the kind of “what could possibly go wrong,” cautionary sci-fi that can go toe-to-toe with the scariest Michael Crichton thrillers, and Bear’s mysterious, microscopic malefactors clearly anticipate the Expanse‘s protomolecule.
The old trope of the scientist making himself the subject of the experiment has been a favorite of mine, going back at least as far as my first viewing of Altered States as a teenager. It certainly influenced the origin story of the Slagmasters. While I can only hope my own book is a worthy addition to the trope, Blood Music is one of its standard-bearers.
John Scalzi, The Collapsing Empire
Another recent John Scalzi discovery. This guy’s fast turning into one of my favorite writers.
The Collapsing Empire is the first of a trilogy centered around a phenomenon called the Flow–the hyperspatial superhighway connecting all the systems of the Interdependency of planets that comprise human civilization in the galaxy. The Flow makes everything in the Interdependency run–literally. From commerce to politics, without the Flow, humankind would have perished long ago.
For centuries the Flow has been stable, constant, the thread connecting everything. But now the Flow is collapsing–and threatens to leave every planet in the Interdependency isolated, alone, and doomed. Powerful families and financial interests position themselves to benefit from the coming changes. Only a novice empress, a world-weary trade representative, and an amateur physicist understand the full scope of the disaster to come.
This is old-school space opera with a dash of next-gen snark. On a scale worthy of Smith or Heinlein, with power dynamics worthy of Herbert, it’s at once epic and jaunty, absorbing and eminently readable. Book two went straight to the top of my to-read queue.
John Varley, Titan
Remember a few months back when I asked you to ask me about the John Varley book featuring a rampaging 50-foot-tall Marilyn Monroe? Well, I got tired of waiting.
Titan is the first installment in what’s generally referred to as John Varley’s Gaean Trilogy (followed by Wizard and Demon). The book features one of my favorite, and most generally under-recognized, female badass protagonists in the personage of one Cirocco “Rocky” Jones. When Rocky’s ship is on a routine mission in the outer solar system, they veer aside to investigate an anomaly. (Yeah, that trope, but it works!) Her ship is captured, and she and her crew find themselves thrust into a strange artificial world spinning inside a massive toroidal construct populated with bizarre lifeforms (some with even more bizarre reproductive systems), and overseen by a god-like intelligence that may or may not be artificial–but is very definitely alien. Rocky’s quest for answers–and survival–bring her and her companions on a collision course with the being that calls itself “Gaea.” Mind-bending hijinks ensue.
Oh, and that 50-foot Marilyn? You’ll have to exercise patience until the third installment. But the ride will be oh-so worth it!
Alan Moore, Ian Gibson, The Ballad Of Halo Jones
A bit of a departure… no pun intended.
Man. Alan Moore. What else do I need to say? The Ballad of Halo Jones originally ran in the British weekly 2000AD, with striking black-and-white art by Ian Gibson. I fell in love with Halo–the girl who just wanted to get out. And get out she did. Moore’s heroine isn’t a superhero, nor is she a femme fatale–not at first, anyway. At the end of the day, Halo is an everygirl, living a humdrum existence in a soul-stifling futureworld. When she gets her first glimpse of an aging starliner destined for the junkyard, her world is irrevocably changed. Halo’s unassuming humanity drew me in from the get-go, and her desire for escape compelled me to follow, as her circumstances demanded ever-increasingly desperate choices. But even as time and hardship chipped away at Halo’s soft edges, leaving her toughened and cynical, Moore never let us forget just who she was from the very first panel.
There’s been talk of a Halo Jones movie for decades, but I’m increasingly pessimistic that we’ll ever see one. Too bad. But–it’s been reissued several times in graphic novel format. I particularly enjoyed reading it to the music of Slow Children’s Mad About Town… but that part is strictly optional.
Alan Dean Foster, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye
I’ve been thinking about this book for a couple of reasons lately. One good–that it was my first taste of the same underbelly of the Star Wars universe that The Mandalorian has been exploring so incredibly well. The other reason, not so thrilling, in the light of the news that Disney’s been trying to stiff Alan Dean Foster on his royalties from this classic book, as well as on the novelization of A New Hope, which he ghost-wrote for George Lucas. (Boooo!)
Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye is the iconically non-canonical “first” sequel to Episode IV, published in 1978. As the story goes, 20th Century Fox commissioned the story as a fallback–a less expensive sequel in the event that ANH did not do as well as expected at the box office. Fortunately for all of us, it was a smash and we got Empire instead, but for one gleaming moment this spin-off was the only additional glimpse into the Star Wars universe and the ongoing adventures of Luke Skywalker and company.
Splinter tells the story of Luke and Leia who, while on a mission together with their two faithful droids, crash land on the jungle planet of Mimban (a wet and murky place that clearly anticipates Degoba). There, they encounter strange dangers and aliens aplenty as they are drawn into a search for a powerful crystal that super-charges the Force. Hijinks ensue, leading up to an unnerving confrontation with Darth Vader, in which both Luke and Leia must test themselves individually against the dark lord.
This stand-alone was, of course, conceived and executed long before Lucas even hinted to anyone about Luke and Leia’s sibling relationship, so going back and looking at it now might give rise to a few borderline “ewww” moments. But–potential incest aside (or at least thoughts thereof), it’s a rousing adventure, in a grittier back alley of the Star Wars universe, giving us a hint of a different direction the saga might have taken.
Now, if Disney will get their collective head screwed back on straight and pay Foster for his work, I’ll be much happier.
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe Of Heaven
The Lathe Of Heaven was probably my first exposure to “real” science fiction when I was but a lad. It was the 1980 film version on PBS, and it knocked my perceptions for a serious loop. It was not until a few years later that I got around to reading the book.
It’s the story of the ironically named George Orr, whose dreams can change the world–retroactively rewiring reality in line with his nocturnal visions. When a hubristic professor attempts to harness George’s power to bend the world to his ideas of the good, the unintended consequences mushroom into catastrophic dystopianism.
LeGuin actually signed my old, dog-eared paperback copy back in the 90’s. I had gone to see her at a reading, and had a wonderful conversation with her about writing and the effect of the advent of computers on the creative process. She was sharp, thoughtful and a delight, and she left us too soon.
Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat
It is a proud and lonely thing to be a stainless steel rat…
These are the adventures of notorious space rogue, Slippery Jim diGriz, a career criminal with a unique ethical code who, when captured by the galactic authorities is recruited by them to hunt an even more treacherous and elusive villain. He takes the job, and tracks down the target–only to fall madly in love with her…
Here’s another series of which the influence on my own work cannot be overestimated. One of the first works of science fiction to actually make me laugh, it’s something like if the Lensman series and the Hitchhiker’s Guide had a love-child with an attitude and an exploding cigar. Fast-paced and snarky, The Stainless Steel Rat was one one of my major inspirations for the Slagmaster Cycles. I’ve inserted many Easter eggs to Slippery Jim into the books–and have done so proudly!
Dan Simmons, Phases Of Gravity
Most readers familiar with Dan Simmons know him through his sci-fi and horror… but this early gem was one of the first Simmons books I ever encountered.
Phases Of Gravity is not sci-fi–not really. It’s more like The Right Stuff meets Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s the story of an astronaut whose most important journey turns out to be here on Earth. It’s an accidental vision quest, in which a man who has reached the outer limits of human experience and accomplishment must then make the same journey inward to find absolution for himself. A short, but haunting, thematically dense read–one that has stayed with me for the 30 years since I first read it.
Carlos Castaneda, Journey To Ixtlan
This month’s selection is a bit of a shift in tone and substance from my usual “genre” picks, but I would be remiss if I left it off this retrospective.
Journey To Ixtlan is the third volume in Carlos Castaneda’s legendary series, recounting the anthropologist’s tutelage by don Juan into the Yaqui sorcerer’s “path to power.” Back in the Seventies, when I was a young teen, my mother handed me a copy and said I could safely disregard the first two volumes. Those first installments detail Castaneda’s attempts to study the role of psychotropics in the rituals of northern Mexican “medicine men.” His education consisted of actually taking the substances he ostensibly only wanted to study and discovering how don Juan used them to perceive and manipulate reality in different ways. It’s only in this third book, that the old sorcerer tells the young anthropologist that they will continue their reality-bending work–this time without the drugs.
The subsequent narrative left an indelible mark on my psyche, introducing me to a concept called “stopping the world,” (an ultimate expression of the power of mindfulness), the idea that much of what we perceive relies on us to give it shape and substance, and the possibility that the true nature of reality is not just weirder than we imagine–it’s weirder than we can imagine.
I’ve since read the entire series, and have found some installments more useful or compelling than others. But Journey To Ixtlan is the one I still keep on my shelf, the one I occasionally pick up and peruse–whenever I feel the need to wring loose the stiff fascia of reality.
David Brin, The Postman
Like last month’s book, this month’s has a popular perception that’s dogged by a scorchingly, epically and unwatchably bad film adaptation. One that, in this case, crushed its source material under the yoke of a self-important, utterly irony-free Kevin Costner. As horrified as I was by a film I was really hoping would live up to David Brin’s novel, I was incredibly thankful to have discovered the book beforehand–unencumbered by its unpalatable Hollywood regurgitation.
For bringing The Postman to my awareness, I have none other than Harlan Ellison to thank, and a southern California late-night-sci-fi radio show called Hour 25. (I really ought to post more about this show at some point!) Harlan had been a frequent guest and long-time friend of the show. When the host passed away suddenly in 1985, Harlan stepped in to replace him–and helmed the show for several years. During that time he brought on a multitude of new and promising writers, among them, David Brin, who was promoting his new book.
The Postman is set in a post-apocalypse American Northwest, a land so barren and ravaged that it seems to anticipate the punch-in-the-face desolation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In it, a young loner struggling for survival snatches up a ragged jacket for warmth, which happens to bear the emblem of the US Postal Service. He subsequently finds himself the reluctant symbol of a nascent, albeit delusional, America reborn. What follows is a captivating meditation on the transformative power of ideas, the role of the dissemination of information in society, the redemptive potential of self-fulfilling prophecy, and what it means to be human–in contrast with competing visions of superhumanity.
If you haven’t read it, go grab yourself a copy and count yourself lucky. If you haven’t seen the movie, count yourself doubly so.
John Varley, Millennium
The mind of John Varley must be a very interesting place. He has a number of titles that really should be included on this list. If you’ve never encountered his books, remind me to tell you about the one where the heroes wage battle against a 50-foot tall Marilyn Monroe.
This isn’t that. But it’s a shining example of the kind of richly realized and highly snarkified science fiction I can only aspire to.
Millennium is frequently associated with an epically bad film adaptation made about 30 years ago. A classic case of the-book-was-better. Oh. So much better.
Two jet liners collide in the skies over America. Moments before the mid-air crash, time travelers from the distant future extract every passenger, leaving prefabricated bodies for the investigators to find. And on the ground, an NTSB inspector has a chance encounter with an undercover time-traveller, with history-altering, time-shattering consequences for humanity.
It’s a fun read! The nerdiest of readers will likely notice that each chapter title is a reference to a classic time-travel story. Maybe thirty years has been long enough to leave that plane-crash of an adaption behind and give Millennium another flight into popularity!
Stephen King, The Stand
Stephen King’s iconic end-of-the-world novel needs little introduction, and even less fawning praise from me. But damn, I love this book. And since we’re enduring a global pandemic at the moment, it should come as no surprise that I’ve been thinking about the various plague novels I’ve read.
In King’s version of the apocalypse, a man-made super-flu escapes a government lab and wipes out 99-point-something-percent of the human population. The few survivors wander the dangerous remnants of north America, finding one another, forming alliances and rivalries, all the while haunted by dreams that beckon them to line up on one side or the other of an ultimate confrontation between good and evil.
I read this when it was first released in 1979. I was a high school senior. I sat up for several late nights, with a library copy and Led Zeppelin on the stereo. Many people associate The Stand with Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” but for me “Stairway To Heaven” will always be the theme song of the version of this book that lives in my head.
The Stand marked me for life, with its all-American wasteland rendered mythic by its very desolation, with its larger-than-life villain who’s part anti-christ and part carnival con-man, with its cast of real and flawed survivors struggling to make their lives count for something.
If America had a mythology uniquely its own, The Stand would be its Book of Revelation.
I’m giving you a two-fer this month!
From Greg Bear–one of the most imaginative and mind-bending takes of the multiverse I’ve ever encountered!
In Eon, a time-traveling asteroid enters Earth orbit, containing within its hollow core, the remains of a highly advanced civilization, as well as the entrance to “The Way” — an awe-inspiring meta-space of twisted mathematics that gives way to an infinitude of parallel universes. And, as the human explorers soon learn, the Way is inhabited–and dangerous.
Eternity picks up the narrative and pushes it even further mind-bending proportions, humans attempt to grapple with the Way’s tortured physics in a desperate attempt to save the planet. And on a parallel world, a young princess seeks an Earth that that never encountered the Way…
To say more would verge on spoilers…
I think of these two as a single story. There is also a prequel titled Legacy, which while a perfectly good sci-fi novel, doesn’t feel to me like a part of this series.
If you’re looking for a though-provoking and transporting read while you’re hunkering down at home, Eon and Eternity will do the trick!
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, Lucifer’s Hammer
Growing up on Lost In Space and Star Trek may have turned me into a science fiction fan, but it was (along with Dune) Lucifer’s Hammer that turned me into a science fiction reader.
This sprawling post-apocalypse novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle revolves around the impact of a large comet with the Earth–decades before Armageddon and Deep Impact would turn the idea mainstream.
Unlike those films, however, Niven and Pournelle’s story give us a comet that actually hits its target–and follows a large cast of characters through the immersive and harrowing wasteland that results. As an added bonus, you also get to witness two of SF’s biggest brains geek out over the physics of such an event.
The novel is marred in places by some wince-worthy racist and sexist tropes that one could argue were endemic of the period in which it was written.
That aside, Lucifer’s Hammer delivers a grand-scale, extremely plausible post-apoc epic–one that engendered my love of a good end-of-the-world story.
Spider Robinson, Mindkiller
Before I had ever read my first William Gibson book, before I really knew about Philip K. Dick (other than his name being attached to Blade Runner), before I even knew there was a thing called cyberpunk, there was Mindkiller by Spider Robinson. Mindkiller is set in a near-future north America (through the lens of the late 70s) in which “wireheads” are able to plug their brains into machinery that zaps the pleasure center into high gear–with addictive and potentially deadly results. Robinson’s fusion of grim, edgy and funny has, in some small way I’m sure, informed the style and style and the worldview of the Slagmaster books. This book is the first in a trilogy of novels that take place in the same near-future, but are standalone stories.
Robinson in recent years is better known for his Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon series, which also has it’s Slagmaster vibe, given its narrative involving a bar whose patrons are time-travelers and universe-hoppers.
It saddened me to find that Mindkiller and its sequels appear to be out of print and not even available as e-books today. Hopefully that will change–because this book, like all good sci-fi, is as relevant today, if not more so, as it was when it was published. Do yourself a favor and grab a used copy if you ever find one.
Stephen R. Donaldson, Lord Foul’s Bane
Before I opened my first Tolkien book, Lord Foul’s Bane introduced me to epic fantasy. And boy-howdy–what an introduction.
Thomas Covenant, an embittered and physically ravaged outcast from the “real world” is freakishly transported to an alternate reality known as the Land. In this strange and wondrous place, Covenant is thrust into the role of savior as the people of the Land face off against the ancient evil they name Lord Foul. But one of Covenant’s biggest problems (and he has many–oh so many) is that he thinks he’s dreaming, and has no interest in saving a world he doesn’t believe really exists.
Lord Foul’s Bane is the first in the 10-part Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series. It’s a deeply divisive series–readers either love it (as I do), or they loathe it. The reasons on each side are plenty, and where you come down may depend on what you want/expect, not just from your epic fantasy, but from your epic hero as well.
David Koepp, Cold Storage
Here’s somebody who hardly needs a plug from me, but I really dug this book. Koepp is better known as the screenwriter of such little-known trifles like… oh, Jurassic Park. Spider-Man. War Of The Worlds… minor works most people never heard of. Seriously though–this is his first novel and it’s crazy good. Told mostly over the course of a single evening, it tells the story of three very unlikely heroes, trying the save all life on Earth from extinction at the metaphorical hands of an extremely agressive and mutagenic super-microbe. It debuted at #1 in my category, humorous sci-fi, which was why I checked it out. I did the audiobook and it’s one of the few audiobooks I’ve listened to straight through–twice. A deft fusion of science fiction, horror, and comedy, it reads somewhat like if The Andromeda Strain had been directed by Kevin Smith. It also gets serious props for making the microbe itself a point-of-view character–and an engaging but frightening one at that. Read it. Seriously.
Roger Zelazny, Nine Princes In Amber
Nine Princes In Amber is acting here as a proxy for the whole ten-book Amber series. Man-oh-man, do I love these books, and clearly set me up as a young reader to favor multiversal worlds in my genre fiction. Amber is the one true world, with all other worlds, including our own, being but shadows of Amber’s more fundamental reality. This is the story of Corwin, member of Amber’s sprawling royal family (and later, the story of his son, Merlin), as he navigates an epic struggle for power over Amber–and over all reality. Zelazny’s prose is at turns snarky and poetic and each of these books is a quick but richly satisfying read. The Amber series is arguably the one fantasy series that has most influenced my conception the Slagmaster books.
John Scalzi, Redshirts
I recently made time to start looking at reading material that readers have started to compare me to but whom I’ve never read. The most noteworthy among these luminaries is John Scalzi. I’ve been hearing about him for years, heard him interviewed on dozens of podcasts, but had never read his work. I put an end to that by reading Redshirts–in two sittings. I LOVED IT. Snarky and funny in the way I like my SF to be, and balancing that snark with genuinely accomplished storytelling. This is just the kind of balance I’d been hoping to achieve with my book. To have my readers compare me to this guy…? Wow. I’ve got the Old Man’s War and Collapsing Empire series next on my Kindle queue, and I look forward to delving deeper into Scalzi’s work over the next months.