Baycon Friday

[calimac]

At previous conventions, panels on the topic of "how to judge a book by a random page" have consisted of random pages from covered books being read aloud, while the panelists attempt to judge them. Much hilarity supposedly ensues when they pass thumbs-down on some award-winning novel, but y'know, some award-winning novels deserve thumbs-down.

Nobody was that organized yesterday, and the moderator never showed up. Instead, we talked rather randomly about various ways to judge whether you want to read a novel before you actually read it in full, including 1) by the first page, 2) by the last page (if it says "Continued in Volume Four of the Celts in Space Trilogy," don't), 3) by a random page, 4) by the author, 5) by the publisher, 6) by the cover artist. By numbers, by mirrors, by water. By dots made at random on paper. (Sorry, got a little distracted there.)

I told my favorite cautionary tale of judging a book by a random chunk. In my book of dreams misspent youth (sorry, I'm still feeling distracted), specifically the part spent writing a senior thesis in college, I undertook to find every English-language general-magazine article about science fiction published before the mid-1950s. There weren't many. Occasionally they were written by someone who actually knew something about SF, and that person would be Fletcher Pratt, who had a general literary reputation that gave him access to such outlets. What happened most of the time, though, was that some literatum looking for a subject for next month's column would hear that SF was the bang, so he'd enquire by the impeccable scientific technique of going to the newsstand, buying a few random magazines (and, once they started appearing after WW2, paperback books), and reporting on the contents. Not surprisingly, he'd find a lot of crap that way, and some lone reader would write in giving a few magazine titles like Astounding (or, in later years, Galaxy or F&SF) that might have given better results. The impression of a fastidious anthropologist picking his way through the fetid jungle is emphasized by the fact that the articles never reveal the titles or authors of the stories they're telling about.

It can be challenging tracking down this information, the more so as when you do the stories turn out, unsurprisingly, to be by obscure authors you've never heard of. But there was one exception, an article whose conclusion was not that SF was crappy but that it was so damn depressing.¹ Although the writer gave no author or title, I immediately recognized one of the described stories as "There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury, which certainly enables that conclusion.²

But my cautionary tale is this. The writer dismissed one novel, which again he didn't name, as totally unreadable, and to prove this provided a brief quote from it. I recognized its source immediately, and chuckled, because the novel is considered a classic in the field, and its author had good plot reasons to seem momentarily incomprehensible. In fact, at around the same time, another magazine asked four genuine experts on the field to give basic SF checklists.³ The only book named by all four of them was this very same totally unreadable novel.

So those are your clues: published by 1953-54; charged as incomprehensible and totally unreadable by an outside reader; yet the only book four genuine experts could agree on as tops in the field, and a classic in future years. Care to guess what it was? Let's tell the future. Let's see how it's been done.

1. I didn't keep a copy of this article, and couldn't get hold of it again on short notice, but I cited it in the thesis: A.C.B. Lovell, "A Counterblast to Science Fiction," New Statesman, March 13, 1954, p. 319-21. The reader who wrote the inevitable correcting letter (March 20, p. 358-9) was Robert Conquest.

2. If the title doesn't ring a bell, that's the one consisting of a lyrical description of an automated house-of-the-future, the kind that rings your alarm clock for you and then automatically fixes your breakfast, all the while chatting away with the insane cheerfulness of Eddie Your Friendly Shipboard Computer, doing all this in blissful ignorance of the fact that all the people had been incinerated the previous day, presumably by a neutron bomb.

3. They were Horace Gold, editor of Galaxy; Anthony Boucher, editor of F&SF; Robert Heinlein, who needs no introduction; and Kurt Vonnegut, who hadn't yet decided he wasn't an SF writer. The Nation, May 2, 1953, p. 367.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

if it says "Continued in Volume Four of the Celts in Space Trilogy," don't)

So if Fellowship of the Ring said on the last page "Continued in the next volume of Lord of the Rings, volume two you would advise against reading any of it?

Can't guess what the mystery novel is, though I probably read it near half a century ago.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Was it The Demolished Man? Although I've seen something similar happen with experienced readers in the field, a couple of whom were mocking a passage of Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died because they were unaware that it was a subjective expression of the character's telepathy-induced delirium.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

But sartorias, The Lord of the Rings isn't a trilogy, let alone a four-volume one!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It isn't the fourth book of a trilogy. And it isn't about Celts in Space.

But in general ... specific things that Tolkien did, be wary of later authors who do them too. Not because they're inherently bad, but because they were better the first time.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And it's Mr. fringefaan of Seattle for the win. Congratulations.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I was going to guess The Stars My Destination, but then I checked Wikipedia for dates.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

That makes perfect sense. I had gotten as far as thinking of Bester, but I was wondering about The Stars My Destination, which I read many year's earlier, thanks to Anthony Boucher picking it for A Treasure of Great Science Fiction—and I didn't feel I had the time to check publication dates.

Even so, for a critic to dismiss The Demolished Man for its style and typography makes him a weenie in my eyes. Ulysses had been out for a long time then and was considered a major classic by most critics.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

I thought "There will come soft rains" took place on Venus, with explorers going crazy from the rains, with the lone survivor reaching a solarium house. But maybe I've misapplied one title to another.

I do recall the Bradbury story you're talking about, though, "Tick tock, 7 o'clock, time to get up, time to get up!"

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

But the volumes do split up.

The way I read Calimac's words was, all long stories split up into volumes are automatically not worth reading. Whether they are or are not is up to the reader, but judging and deciding a book is worthless because it continues in another volume seems somewhat arbitrary.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The way I wrote my words was, sloppy fantasy "trilogies" are probably not going to be worth your time. Remember, we're picking what to read in the first place. Any judgment of a book made without reading it first will by necessity be superficial or arbitrary.

And, y'know, I just spent the bulk of the post describing a cautionary tale on the dangers and limits of that very approach.

[scribblerworks.livejournal.com]

And I, however, can smile at the warning and sartorias' caveat. Because it was precisely the three-volume-one story aspect of LOTR that kept me from buying it for many months, back when I was in junior high, and there was nothing like the movies or organizations or the internet to clue me in on what the story was. All I had to go on was the fact that the artwork on the covers was so-so, there were three of them, and they cost twenty cents more than my usually "expensive" paperback books (95 cents over the usual 75 cents -- oh god! I'm old! ;-) )

On the other hand, I actually did once purchase a trilogy on the basis of the beautiful covers. And GREATLY regretted it, as the contents were a (in my opinion) rather poor immitation of Tolkien (volume 2 was in fact a near beat-for-beat copying of the crossing of Moria from LOTR).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I bought LOTR with eagerness because I'd just read The Hobbit and I was still young and innocent and had not yet learned to be wary of sequels.

[lin-mcallister.livejournal.com]

I've been keeping a list of books I've read in the last five years, and I seem to average about 100 a year, including audiobooks. Roughly two a week. Since there are more than two a week published, some criteria are necessary. Celtic fantasy is right out - maybe I'm risking missing something good but I'll take my chances. Fantasies studded with umlauted and apostraphed names. Worlds with the ocean on the left are usually suspect. Books I can't comfortably hold in one hand.