The Sheep Look Up

Got about 30% of the way through the John Brunner book by audiobook, but rain has prevented the daily yardwork and my enthusiasm for runs vs Nordictracking inside (which needs video or music). Also, the disjointed structure from various sources makes it more interesting but is hard to follow in audio (unless laying down or something allowing total focus). 

I'm going to have to switch to paper, as it's not on ebook format that I can find yet. And the copy I have is really tiny print. After a trip to Uncle Hugo's, I hope to have a better edition...

It's actually better than I thought from trying the first five pages several times. It takes some getting past archaic cultural schtuff - particularly the parodic yet normal sexism and racism of characters and their chit chat - and getting into the to-me old fashioned style (though newish and zippy at the time, of course). 

The themes are timely. Some of the humor is quite funny still. I can think of many ways Brunner and peers may have influenced Johanna Sinisalo, which I'm always looking for. Especially the collage kaleidoscope style of storytelling.

It's in a way hard to take at this particular cultural moment, and yet also strangely comforting. Like Disch's dystopic novels.

 

More later. I'm trying to push gaily forward into a new draft of a thing I've been working on a long time, that is feeling more solid than it has been. Getting the genre mix and characters' tone right has been a struggle. I need to get my resume together and deal with home repair before deep winter junk, too. This leaves less time for reading outside of audio. (Got a mystery for that now. Killingly by Katharine Buetner, to fit my mood. Good blurbs.)

Working Up to the New Wave

I've been reading through an anthology of essays about the New Wave, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1850-1885, by Andrew Better and Iain McIntyre, trying to get a better overview of what was going on at the time. Some of the essays were really interesting, especially about the changes in the publishing industry and legal battles over censorship that were a piece of that.

It sent me back to reading more some of the big influences, and the kind of stories that were developing into the New Wave. There was so much stuff that I've only ever barely dented the surface though I have dipped in again and again over time.

I also happened to listen to a Halloween reading of a Fritz Leiber story, The Black Gondoliers, and a collection of Asimov short stories, mainly "Nightfall." Mainly because these were available and I was bored by podcasts for the lunch walk and yardwork, but it was good to get a sense of the flavor of older SF again.

I started listening to John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up this morning, cutting raspberry canes back. I had to rewind due to not paying full attention at first, but it's picking up. This was highly recommended several times by a friend in the past, and I've tried before in print but I never got into it due to the tiny faded print in the old paperback and the slow start. 

In print, I'm still working on Disch's On Wings of Song, but haven't had a lot of time thanks to Halloween, yardwork before the snow season, and other stuff. One of the essays on Dangerous Visions talked some about him. I read some more biographical stuff, obituaries and tributes and people's comments on them. I still don't really have a good sense of where his novels fit into the eras, how groundbreaking certain things were. 

Unlike, say, Delany, Le Guin, Tiptree, or Russ. There was more about them in Dangerous Visions, and I ended up buying a couple books about and by Russ that I've never gotten around to. Getting ready for winter reading.

Meanwhile, I've been watching a bunch of classic horror movies over the last couple years. Rewatched some Stephen Kings and Halloween, and finally got around to ones that I was afraid would be too much nightmare fodder, like Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and some more recent stuff. I had that same sense that it's so hard now to see what was groundbreaking and a "first" back when the stuff came out. Kids today have no idea...

But even we who were around at the time forget. I've been trying to write something set in the 1980s and 90s, and it's go hard to really get back into the right mentality and cultural milieu. So much junk has been overlaid over it now - depictions that only capture certain parts of the culture, history accounts focused on things people didn't focus on then, remakes and revivals with a current sensibility. It's helpful to go to the primary sourced, but even then, hard to really immerse. Like learning second + languages. The more you become an insider the more you realize how much of an outsider you'll always be, and how much more really basic stuff there is to learn.

Just gonna keep digging around this winter, and try to understand the 50s-80s in SFF more, and the influences on the people who have influenced me as a writer and thinker about books and movies. And who came before I somehow missed - I had a very spotty sff education until middle adulthood. I kept reading a lot of current stuff trying to keep up, but never dug back very much. Seems like a good time.