3 Bookens

Here are three books:  "Sci-fi" or "SF" or "Science Fiction" or "Speculative Fiction" or "3 dogs flying the Tricolor," singing the Marseillaise and brandishing sickles, whilst ballerinas clad in garbage bags recite the phone book of Tampa from 1979:  Aaron, Joseph, xxx-xxxx; Abraham, Jimpernickle Joe, xxx-xxxx; Absalom, Fred P., xxx-xxxx, etc.

This will of course, take hours: for the encore they act out the advertisements; but dig this: they do it in Russian!

So these three books aren't by the titans (Asimov, Clark, Bester, Heinlein) nor the relatively younger Sterling, Gibson, nor especially literary, like Atwood.

Not especially well-known, thus not influential; not mind-blowing unknowns either, not plot-wise, not stylistically, not something one can pin down so easily.  In many ways it's the mood they create, the atmosphere.

I like 'em all to a number. For a character, a scene, a concept, an overall feeling.  It occurs to me there's a relation to my first novella in these choices:  Dissolute narrators, vaguely aristocratic, who find a purpose thrust upon them.  Not explicitly like Gully Foyle, but these characters without strong principle or purpose get hit on the head in some way.  Kismet rings.  Our heroes pretty much call destiny's bluff and each one changes the course of history....for a planet, or the galaxy entire.  For better or for worse.

The Star Virus isn't especially great, but it captured me from scene one. A garish psychedelia, an ennui in the face of the marvelous. Protagonist Rodrone is basically l'Étranger....

I don't know what it is about Emphyrio.  Like my book, it's an odd mix, a pre-industrial society with a lotta "Anchors aweigh, goodbye spaceport!"  Perhaps the somewhat horrifying aspects towards the conclusion stuck with me. These two books, and that which follows, are very similar.  Short novels focused on a "man with a mission."  Treks through foreboding wastes populated by deadly beasts and even deadlier humans.  Grim.  A future of shit.

The Rosetta Codex is about a young man who's jettisoned from, then must reclaim, his title, wealth, power.  It shares a similar kind of hero as our last examples.  What really got me is one scene.  I might pull a Burroughs and steal the image.  If Lautréamont and Houellebecq can do it....I actually am in full favor of appropriation in literature.  Not academic work.  And "stealing up" as opposed to "stealing down." I think it would be fair for me to steal from Dan Brown. But not vice-versa....

In fact that's how I got turned onto Star Virus:  Burroughs took the idea of "deadliners" from it and integrated it into Nova Express.  Fair enough, apparently reading "The" Naked Lunch shook J. Barrington Bayley out of his doldrums and a relatively "non-fecund" period due to his disillusionment with writing.  I won't tell what it is, but the deadliners are eerie, grotesque, their weird dancing and games disturbing.  Existential dread on a cosmic scale.

But in Codex it's a more tangible scene, not so much horrifying as odd and creepy.  A barque in a swamp with a corpse swathed in rags propped up in the bow.  What's not to like?

I know that's not especially profound "lit-crit." Et alors?