My sister, Hillary (I need to make up a fantasy name for her. Dad called her Mint. Actually, Mint was just short for a much, much longer name, which could be embarassing, so I won’t write it here. My nickname was Scrub. I guess he saw me on my hands and knees scrubbing floors or kitchen sinks, which were some of my chores when I was a kid. Vallerie was Weeds, and Jennifer was G-g-g-g-Ginger. Kinda straying from the point… but it’s weird we all had botanical nicknames. From now on I’ll refer to my sisters by their nicknames, to preserve the fragile anonymity that this very post ruins.)
Anyway. Hillary Mint invited me to join a group of her friends in uncovering the Secrets of the Alchemist Dar. This supposed children’s book is, like Michael Stadther’s previous book, A Treasure’s Trove, really a collection of riddles that, when figured out, leads you to a unique treasure — in this case, one of a hundred valuable rings.
These kinds of books rely more on inductive than deductive reasoning, and I’m usually better at the latter than the former. But heck, it’ll be fun. Amazon will ship it to me in a couple of days.
I can’t go to a brick-and-mortar bookstore and walk out with just one thing, and neither can I do that in Amazon. I’ve been meaning to get Iain M. Banks’ The Algebraist for awhile, but it hasn’t shown up at any of my local bookstores. Banks has this amazing sense of decadence and wonder. While I was looking at Banks’ page, I also ordered a new copy of his The Bridge, the story of a man who is dying from an car crash, and is slipping into delirium, remembering the events leading to it, a strange society living on the bridge he was crossing, and the recurring, disturbing image of a man laying comatose in a hospital bed. It’s chilling. One of my favorite books — I lent it to someone a long time ago and, of course, it never came back.
Peter S. Beagle (author of The Last Unicorn, a great book Rankin/Bass turned into a pretty faithful animated movie) has a collection I didn’t know about, The Line Between, which includes a short sequel to Unicorn, as well as a bunch of other stories. I’ve read almost everything he’s written, never failed to enjoy my time in his worlds. That made it into the cart.
Working my way through the rest of my “automatic read” list (Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Gene Wolfe, John Varley… oh, a new John Varley. SciFi sparked by the events of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina in “Red Lightning”, sequel to the Heinlein-esque “Red Thunder”. Heinlein, like Beagle, live(d)(s) in the Santa Cruz area. Always felt SF was better at predicting than reacting…).
Thought I’d look into what Jack L. Chalker was doing lately. He was a “one hit wonder” writer who burst onto the SF scene with some strong short stories and the novel “Midnight at the Well of Souls”. He followed that up with some decent sequels full of adventure and cliffhangers and all that stuff. I loved his imagination and storytelling, but he never had another hit like “Well of Souls”, and eventually his star faded away. But he was a storyteller and nothing could take that away. He died late last year.
I met him at San Jose’s Baycon a decade or two ago. I get starstruck; I couldn’t say anything to him (same thing happened when I met Howard Tayler at this year’s ComiCon). But he was nice, friendly, signed my British edition of “Well of Souls” for me, answered a couple of emails I wrote him on Compuserve. (73317,54 — that was my CIS address, or pretty close).
He died last year. If I’d been a better fan I’d have known earlier, but his fiction had taken a turn to straight SF adventure stories, and I felt his ‘transformation’ theme was just taking the premise of ‘Well of Souls’ way further than it needed to go. Nonetheless, he was a storyteller, and the world always needs stories.
Read on BoingBoing that John M. Ford died the other day. I loved his ingenuity and humor wherever I found him. He’d been sick for awhile… writing takes you out of your sick body, brings you to a new place, a healthy place… like MMOs, really. His story reminded me of the life and death of George Alec Effinger, an author I enjoyed beyond all reason a decade or so ago. He was sick for a long time, died and is missed.
Well, this post took a morose turn. I wonder, though, how many writers write to leave something of their real selves behind. I wonder if I blog for the same reason. I wish my mom, or my grandparents, or my great-grandparents, had left more behind than old undated photographs.
