Commentary

Year in review

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

I read 94 books in 2024. 

Not what I was shooting for, but not by any means unsatisfying. Upon retirement, I imagined myself spending at least two or three hours a day poring over all the books and devouring the things I’ve always intended to.

Well. That didn’t happen.

But as things get more settled, I might exceed my goal of 100 a year. (The highest number I ever reached was my senior year of high school. I had taken a speed reading course the year before, I was cruising through texts at an average of 2000 words a minute, and I cut class most of my senior year. I spent most of those days at the local library—seriously—and got to where I was doing a book a day. I plowed through many of the so-called classics that way and I might have read 300 books that year. Now, I can’t read that fast anymore and I’m much happier for it, because what I read at the more modest pace of maybe 150 to 200 words a minute means more, has more impact, and stays in my memory. Lately I’ve been revisiting some of those classics I read back then and it’s like reading them for the first time. I remember I read them, but not much else, with a few exceptions.) That would be a respectable number, I think. 

I did a lot of filling in this past year. Books I’ve owned for decades and never got around to, some works of SF that are important if not seminal works that I simply passed up. To that end, I read several of the original Ace Specials, edited in the late 60s-early 70s by Terry Carr. While a couple of them did not quite pass the test of time, I was pleasantly surprised by the D.G.Compton’s—Chronocules, Steel Crocodile, The Silent Multitude, and Synthajoy. I found them very mature works, dealing with human interaction in ways much more sophisticated than a lot of popular SF at the time, with premises that, while certainly science fictional, did not dazzle with hi-tech glitz, but supplied a satisfying substrate for the real action, which is how we treat each other. Compton, I believe, holds the record for the most titles published in the Ace Special line. As well, I read a couple of Bob Shaw’s, a writer who has unfortunately been largely forgotten today. The Two-Timers and The Palace of Eternity are sophisticated stories of seemingly minor shifts in the given tapestry of our lives with outsized effects. 

I also filled a couple of Michael Moorcock gaps with The Ice Schooner, The Black Corridor, The Distant Stars, and The Warlord of the Air. Moorcock can be uneven, but he possesses a singular approach to science fiction that, when effective, elevates his work to a remarkable degree. 

I also tackled a lot of Robert Silverberg. There is a lot of Silverberg. He is one of the most prolific writers, in any genre, and he crossed genres significantly. In his early career, he wrote a great deal of popular SF, potboilers really, and some of it has not aged well. When Silverberg is firing on all cylinders, he can be brilliant. But the volume of work…well, not all of it rose to such vaunted heights, and we shouldn’t expect it to. But in some ways, work which was once seen as cutting-edge and groundbreaking, especially socially, has worn poorly. But among those I read this year that I think remain remarkable I would put Downward To The Earth. It’s a riff on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Silverberg has claimed Conrad as one of his favorites, so it’s not surprising that he would take a page from him from time to time, and this one is rather well done. Another worthy tale is Sailing To Byzantium. It’s elegant and picturesque and in the end poignant. 

There are novels one should read at the right age or, really, when they first appear if possible. I read several older works that, for a variety of reasons, simply have not held up well, despite clever ideas. Sad, really, because I can see in many cases where I would—at age 15 or 16 or 26—have been utterly enthralled by them. Some of this has to do with the natural changes of style that come with the passing of time. We’ve learned how to write this stuff better. Some of it has to do with the priority given to aspects of certain stories we know were they done today would be differently deployed. Times have changed, tastes have evolved, and for better or worse I am someone who has a difficult time Going Back. I can’t read a lot of older work that I know I loved when I first encountered it, because, well, it doesn’t flow anymore. Expectations have mutated, grown, what have you. (I have this problem with period novels. I know people who can happily get lost in the works of Trollope or Galsworthy, but I trip over the prose and stumble. Oh, there are writers from those periods I can read, there are exceptions, but a great deal of popular work from previous eras just doesn’t work for me and it’s not the fault of the work itself.) I will confess here that there is one type of novel I simply grind to a halt with and that is the broad satire. I attempted to read John Sladek’s Mechasm (another of the original Ace Specials) and it’s Vonnegut-esque, which would be a recommendation for many people. But it’s…well, smart-alecky. Tongues visibly in cheeks, caricatures, and just…clever ideas packaged as a series of absurdities. I’m willing to cop to tone-deafness on my part, but too often I’ve been in the middle of work like this before realizing I’m trying to read smart-ass prose as if they were deadly serious. I’m working on that.

Then there are writers whose approach to subject—their strategies, if you will—fails to engage. I have blindspots about this. I read things others tell me are just marvelous and I find them clunky and all but inaccessible. But so many people extoll the virtues of these writers so much that I suspect many of us who are simply not impressed say nothing for fear of spoiling the party. 

One classic, so called, that was surprising in many ways? I finally read The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit. Sloan Wilson’s first novel and  cultural touchstone of sorts. My review is here, so I won’t go into it. I read a few books that in their day were heralded as important. Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, which I found clever if not altogether revelatory. And then there was The Futurological Congress by Stanislaw Lem. I understood something about Lem after this one that I hadn’t quite realized before. Lem did not like mot science fiction, especially American SF, and this novel offered a clue as to why that may have been. Lem, I believe, didn’t think humans were…improvable. That we might develop amazing technologies, even make major breakthroughs in science, but we ourselves? Hopeless. I think he may have reacted negatively to the kind of Higher Frontier cheerleading a lot of SF indulges. 

I continue to be impressed with the tor.com series. I’ve read a number of great books from them and not yet encountered a bad one. This year continues with the latest entry in the Murderbot seriea, System Collapse. A Season of Monstrous Conceptions by Lina Rather pushed the boundaries of Steampunk in interesting directions, although I’m beginning to feel that category ought to be retired, at least in many instances. Just because a story is set in a more or less Victorian milieu it should not automatically be regarded as steampunk. Sometimes it’s just alternate history. More often, it seems, it’s an example of horror. Be that as it may, another fine work from tor.com is Aliette de Bodard’s Navigational Entanglements, a very satisfying kind of space opera. Top of the list from that publisher, though, is Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction, a sobering contemplation on the economics and sociometrics of poaching and the costs of solutions.

Continuing my desultory attempt to catch up on what may have been my Golden Age, I read a couple more Clifford Simak novels—Cemetery World, in particular—and James Blish novels. Blish is another mixed bag. Some of his books have aged poorly, while some are surprisingly still very good. Titan’s Daughter is a mixed bag novel reminiscent of Wells’ Food of the Gods. A thriller of sorts. And Mission To The Heart Stars would seem to be a response to Heinlein’s Have Space Suit, Will Travel, both dealing in different ways with the idea of humanity having to pass muster before a galactic civilization that holds our fate in its grasp. 

Two of the most surprisingly pleasurable reads (for completely different reasons) this year were C.S.E. Cooney’s World Fantasy Award winner  Saint Death’s Daughter and the Booker Prize winner Orbital by Samantha Harvey. The first because normally I would never have picked it up, but it’s a title in my book group’s roster (this month actually), the second because…well, an SF novel written by literary writer that, being SF, won one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet.

Saint Death’s Daughter is a sprawling bit of world-building that, despite its excellent background construction and detail, is very focused on its characters, who are wide-ranging and unique. Despite some touchpoints that suggest this world is some past (or future) iteration of our own, it quickly becomes irrelevant to the plot, which is twisty and engaging and in certain ways compellingly perverse. It deals with necromancy, includes ghosts, resurrection, and an original take on magic which, by the end of the novel, left me wondering if this were fantasy at all. The world is not Earth, not in any traceable way, and I began to see the traces of a nanotech explanation for much of the so-called magic. But it is written in the manner of a fantasy. It appears to be a fantasy and, as such, is not something I would normally pick up. But it more than paid off the investment in a 640 page novel. 

Orbital on the other hand is exactly the sort of thing I would pick up, as much out of a desire to see how well it was done as for its content. I should be used to finding well-done SF written by otherwise non-SF writers by now. These are artists who have come of age steeped in the brew of science fiction that has soaked contemporary culture. It’s not like the “slumming” that one used to find from mainstream authors who attempted the form that they might otherwise have felt a subspecies of Good Writing. It has become much more acceptable for someone like Kazuo Ishiguro or Emily St. John Mandel or Mat Johnson to produce a work of unapologetic science fiction (even though some publicists still balk at embracing it), but I’m still cautious and surprised when one is done well. In fact, very well. To be sure, Orbital is easily read as mainstream literary, the SFnal elements smoothly entwined with all the rest to make it feel contemporary. But if one of the chief values of science fiction is how is elucidates the human changes wrought by science and technology which are themselves game-changers—paradigm-shifters, if you will—in anticipatory modes, then Orbital qualifies, and it is the respectful flower of internalizing SF as a valid literary form with significant implications.

This past year I’ve read more SF than the last several. Largely, this was a consequence of having to devote myself to more research, but also because my nonfiction-for-pleasure has increased, and in that regard some of the highlights of 2024 have been: 

Christendom by Peter Heather; Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson; The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell; The Second Sex by Simone de Bouvoir; White Holes by Carlo Rovelli; Plato At The Googleplex by Rebecca Goldberger Goldstein; Orientalism by Edward Said; The Witches by Stacy Schaff. Again, some catching up going on there, books I should have read but never got to.

So, 94 books. I may tally fewer this coming year as I have several on my pile of epic proportions. That and I don’t know yet how my next couple of projects will distort my strategies. But all in all, I’m pleased with this last one. I have not mentioned several others, many of which were quite good but other than noting that I read them would add little to this summary. One of these years I may start linking to a spreadsheet so everyone can keep track.

I’ll end by pointing out that the last few years have seen declines in reading rates across several demographics. This saddens me. I know the pressures of daily life can make reading seem like a luxury—or a chore—that one cannot afford, but given the state of, well, everything these last several years, I think it is a necessary survival habit. The level of ignorance—specifically, the degree to which people simply do not know things—demonstrated quite publicly by too many people is having a corrosive effect on life itself. Regardless how bad one’s school experience my have been, reading is one of the most civilizing skills available to us. Not just the casual cruising of an internet feed but the kind of reading that stretches the imagination. Take a book, turn off the feeds, sit down, and dig in reading. It seems more and more that we’re going to let the world burn because we just don’t know any better.

Have a better 2025.

Formative Times and Moving Forward

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

It is true, the music that first inspired you tends to be the touchstone for the rest of your aesthetic life. Those songs encountered when the hormones begin their rampage through your limbic system and set all your neurons dancing form the core of what you seek and appreciate going forward. For perhaps five years, what you listen to will anchor you. Five years between, say, 13 and 18. Or 15 and 20? Give or take, that half a decade will be the source you return to till senescence sets in.

If one is very lucky, that music will be excellent. I suspect the difference between someone who keeps listening to those pieces over and over for the next 50 years and someone who goes on to find new music, expanding from that initial thrill, is entirely dependent on the quality of that initial exposure.

Yes, I’m going to indulge in a bit of snobbery now. Sorry. I believe there really is a difference between forms, performers, and examples. I’ve known people who, over the course of thirty or more years, always—ALWAYS—opt for that old Bob Seeger album over and above anything else and seem impervious to everything else. For them, the nostalgia—and the ritual—is everything.

Recently I filled my CD changer with a selection of older albums. Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing At Baxter’s, the first Jefferson Starship album, Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin’s Love Devotion and Surrender, Emerson Lake & Palmer’s first album, and Live Cream Volume II. All these albums I first encountered during that particular phase when I was discovering MUSIC. 

With the exception of one track, nothing on any of them made the Top 40 of the day.

All of them are complex, unpredictable, indeed unusual by the popular standards of the day. The Santana-McLaughlin was one of those records I played over and over again. The intricacies of construction, the use of key changes and tempo modulations, the inherent expectation that the listener was going to do nothing else but listen…

This was the sort of music that set my taste for life. But it was still a starting point. From there I found my way in jazz, into classical, into electronic, into the variations of rock, into some forms that defy categorization. What seemed to me an obvious trajectory was to keep looking for newer works (meaning new to me) that teased those same responses to the tonal pageant on offer. 

Which of course initially meant following those musicians where they led, but along the way trying related artists, then stepping out of that stream altogether into new waters. Admittedly, without ELP and Yes I might not have discovered either Stravinsky or Sibelius. But once discovered, the library doors were opened, and the treasure of centuries lay before me.

But I confess, there is something about those works heard then that hold a deep fascination for me still. Those anchors still hold. It may be bias (and if it is, fine, I welcome it) but when I listen to those albums from back then, parts of my aesthetic are triggered in ways no other music manages. Even those works I no longer listen to very much if at all, when I hear them, a part of my spirit wakes up. I have no doubt this is as much a kind of imprinting as any other emotional attachment may claim. The question I have is, why do so many people remain locked in those periods, and others…don’t?

I suppose one could ask the same question of books and films. I suspect it has to do with the kinds of questions posed by those initial encounters. They leave one attuned to the next thing—or not.

As in other areas, I was always out of step with my peers. I tried to get enthused about the songs they seemed so turned on by, but for the most part the Top 40 model left me unsatisfied. On their part, they lacked the patience for what I preferred. And then there’s the whole cultural mode of music as background, as if its only function was as wallpaper, a room in which to carry on conversations or drink (or smoke), and for too many people the notion that one should shut up and listen was just odd. (You do that with classical stuff, don’t you? Yes, that’s why I don’t listen to it.)

We went to a club once because of the band playing that night, one of our favorites, and it was annoying that here were these superb musicians, doing amazing things, and yet the hubbub of ongoing chatter was constant and dismaying. They were missing something marvelous, and yet it seemed more important to talk about what-all even in the presence of brilliance.

I’ve always wanted to share my enthusiasms. It takes a while to sink in that in some instances, no one cares. Not that way, at least, and by pushing the issue you just seem weird.

But nostalgia, whatever it is, has its place. It is useful and pleasurable and I wanted to talk about it a bit. For me, it’s a special place, but was always just a starting point. All that I have heard since those first few years of being immersed in so much beauty has given me the standards…perhaps that’s too definite a word…the basis, then, to continue to find more beauty. 

Thank you for indulging me. 

An Observation: The Personal and the Proetic

/ Mark W. Tiedemann / Leave a comment

Formative influences can be doggedly resistant to reassessment. There’s some accuracy in suggesting that they should be left alone. But once the idea occurs, leaving it alone can become a species of stubbornness rather than any kind of self-nurture. 

Still, care is required, especially in an age in which so much information, much of only marginal relevance to the main subject, is available and forms the basis of a kind of revisionism that too often only serves to widen the gulf between beginnings and the present. Analyzing a body of work in the light of personal revelations is tricky. Certainly there’s a connection, but how and with what effect is a subtler question than the ready dismissals of previously seminal work in the light of a creator’s shortcomings allow. 

On those rare occasions my opinion about this is solicited, I say that “If you find someone whose work you really like, then go read it all, see it all, hear it all before you find out one personal detail about them. What you later learn about the artist may alter everything, but you should give the work a fair encounter.” Obviously there are exceptions, but few I’ve found that cannot be deduced from the work itself. Deciding in advance that X is a bigot of some sort may be accurate and fair, but even a catastrophe of a human being is capable of producing worthwhile art. (Ezra Pound is still regarded as a poetic genius despite the fact that he was an apologist for fascists. I assume the fascism does not manifest in the work in any deleterious way—I wouldn’t know, I’m simply basing this on the reputation, both of the man and the work.)

On the other hand, I always found something off-putting in D.H. Lawrence in his treatment of women. In its day, perhaps, it seemed radical and somewhat enlightened, but despite the beauty of much of his writing, it somehow struck an off note. Later, when I learned about his life, some of this made sense. But had I known about him beforehand, I might never have read the work. Worse, I may have dismissed it as not worthwhile in a more general sense. As it is, my understanding of the work is enriched by the later knowledge in a way that does not bleed the work of its artistic value.

We can go down the list. Great artists with personal characters problematic at best who nonetheless produced amazing work the world would be less for ignoring because…

The quasi-academic practice of reanalyzing such works in light of current standards of behavior only to relegate such artists to a suspect file can do damage in a different way. Among the various problems is the conclusion that an artist cannot be more than his or her personal limitations. That, somehow, a given artist cannot be “trusted” once such personal scandals are revealed.

Trusted how?

This can be particularly difficult in our own personal relation to, say, first influences.

I credit Isaac Asimov with the work that set me on a path to being a writer. Of late, his personal tendencies to be a, hmm, “dirty old man” have cast a pall over his reputation. Fair enough. He wasn’t an exemplary human being. His habit of forcing himself—publicly—on unwilling women with uninvited kisses is cringe-worthy. This is the hallmark of someone who in many ways was still an adolescent, albeit one with a sense of privilege born of reputation.

But what does that have to do with the Foundation Trilogy?

I read Foundation and Empire when I was 13. Because of the nature of where I got my books then (Luekens Drug Store, from a spinner rack just inside the door), I got what was available. I had no idea about ordering or anything, I just perused the rack and bought what looked cool. (This was the same place I got my comics.) So the second book in the series was the first one I saw. It surprises me now that I fell into it so easily, but then when later I learned that these three books are really just compilations of short stories and novelettes, it made sense. I didn’t have to read them in order, though that helped.

There was something vast and impressive on the page, the scope he conveyed in a few paragraphs, and the epic importance of what was happening. This connected with my young imagination in ways that are difficult to convey, other than by pointing out that first encounters that become touchstones seem to carry with them a universal sense of vitality and significance against which everything else is diminished. (I find the same issue when discussing with anyone under, say, 45 the impact that the original Star Trek had on us.) All I remember afterward was how badly I felt the urge to create something that did the same thing. Later I realized that this meant writing.

Soon after, I discovered I, Robot and then the rest of Asimov’s novels and short stories.

His treatment of women was, in retrospect, prepubescent. Virtually blank slates. There were women. Sometimes men married them. (He managed Arkady as well as he did by sticking to her youth sans sexuality. Which made her like Nancy Drew or a Bobsey Twin. Unsatisfying for a more mature reader, but nothing terrible.) The closest he came to maturity in fiction was in The Gods Themselves, but that is a curious case, and nothing much is actually there. It might be argued that his lack of female characters as characters who are women is pathetic, but I see it as someone who knew virtually nothing about women avoiding the topic lest he make a fool of himself. (He did anyway, as in The Stars Like Dust, but this is a matter of complete cluelessness, not a manifestation of hidden perversity.)  Much of science fiction published in the 1940s and 50s is like this. Many factors played a role, not least of which was editorial expectation. The general expectation of women’s “place” was pervasive and retrograde and awaited the social revolutions yet to come before people raised to not notice would become aware. Two magazines were launched partly on the grounds of writers feeling constrained by such innate prudery,  The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy, but even in these examples of what we might consider responsible views of women and relationships were the exceptions. Mostly, it was a vast unexplored sea that awaited writers with the chops to deal with the subject more fully. And a publishing environment that allowed for it.

My point being, his later personal proclivities, unpleasant as they were, seem to imbue his fiction not at all except by an absence. 

There are many writers (and painters and musicians and actors, etc) who I doubtless would dislike personally and some of whom I would have serious problems with, whose work I nonetheless have enjoyed and value. I do not believe we are reduceable to single traits. When engaged in an act of creation, my past certainly comes into play, but the requirements of the work put me in a mode outside of my daily tactics. I give the work authority over my private foibles. It may not always work, but I hope (and believe) that the result defies analysis by biographical specificity.

In other words, the work is a thing unto itself. It may be flawed, it may fail, and certainly some of those failures may be traceable to personal aspects of the way I see the world, but the work remains its own thing, to be judged by its own content. This is a standard of apprehension that, for me, is only fair, and seeks to avoid a priori condemnation based on similar personal aspects of a given viewer/reader/listener. The work is the work. 

Exposure to honest work done by flawed people is one way to learn to recognize propaganda, which is dishonest work done for flawed reasons. If we do not learn the difference, then art has failed us.