These are some weird Science Fction and Fantasy books I like and want to blab about!
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
A young man rasied all his life in a guild of Torturers is exiled when he shows one of his clients mercy. So begin the wanderings of Sevarian through a far-far-far future Earth where the sun is dying in the blood-red sky while the moon shines green in the dark because it has been terraformed, the reality of our time and place exists only in trace fragments that can never be sufficently assembled to tell the truth, lost technology and milliennia of history is strewn in inscrutable formations all about the landscape, magic and science are functionally indistungishable, and the remants of humanity wage war against dark Gods who live in the sea and are served by giant green-skinned razor-teethed women called the Undyne. And that doesn't even scratch the surface of all the insane ideas and smashed-together genres this five volume epic contains. Perhaps the peak of the "Dying Earth" tradition, it is so many things at once: an examination of humanity's capacity to hold good and evil in the same body, a display of how history and myth are passed down palimpsestuously, the truth effaced by time but still there and informing the future all the same, a querying of if or how the universe bends to the wishes of a God (there are space-alien angels) and if that can be reconciled with how much terrible brutality there is in the world, a Science Fantasy Horror Space Opera post-modern novel pulp-inflected action-adventure to boot, and that's not all. I have a hard time reccomending it because it is dense (abundant with antique word-choices designed to estrange the reader and convey a sense of incomprehensible futurity), full of slippages and contradictions that are not easily resolved, and the main character is a terrible person who is especially terrible to women and as the series is narrated in first-person he's impossible to escape. But it changed my life. And for those who struggle to the end of Sevarian's journey, its rewards are many. Check out the other series of The Solar Cycle (The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun) as well.
Light by M John Harrison
Three perspective characters: a theoretical physicist serial killer pursued by a mysterious being with the head of a goatskull and the nude body of a chubby middle-aged cis woman; a girl fused to become one with a space-ship zooming around the universe and killing indiscrimentaly in a misanthropic depressed tailspin; an andrenaline junky adventurer awakening in a VR-sim parody of film noir and being told his time is up by a giant rubber duck. Also featured are obsequiously polite space-ship crews of floating skulls wrapped in lace, planets swallowed up in fractal plagues, a zone of space called the Kefauchi Tract where ontological stability is moot and crazy shit happens and whence no one who has ventured deep has returned, and so much more insanity. Such is the stuff of M John Harrison's Light, a dense, surreal, and ultimately moving revision of the Space Opera. Cutting across time and space like the light of stars beaming through the universe, Light offers to the reader's hands a puzzlebox of dreamlike and exquistely original imagery, hard and real and complex physics troubled by the metaphysical uncertainties that can never be accounted for by the scientific method, and sad, pitiful people who, even as they hurt others and avoid the tough truths that are their very substance, are sometimes gifted tenderness and ways to heal. It is one of the best Science Fiction novels I have ever read, and was my absolute favorite read of last year.
Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany
An amnesiac young man known only as "The Kid" comes to Bellona, a city at the exact geographical center of the United States abandoned by the federal government after an unspecified calamity and collapse. 800-odd pages of strange and dense and often disquieting story material follows. Dhalgren has a reputation as a forbidding, difficult book: a vertitable treasure trove of thematic riches if you're into it, total bullshit and a waste of time if you're not. It is not an easy read. It is designed to contradict itself and never clarifies any answers for its myriad mysteries; depraved and disturbing shit best delineated with trigger warnings abounds; it arguably doesn't have an ending. And yet I love it deeply. It is about what it is to be young and fucked-up and just looking to party when the world is dying; its refusals to lock-down meaning are not to frustrate the reader but to evoke how communication itself is full of slippages and muddyings of meaning that can never be resolved, how our lives are contingent on inexplicable metaphysics and reasons for how and why we came to be we will never know. Samuel R Delany (a current resident of Philadelphia I actually met and had dinner with last year) was gay and Black at a time in Science Fiction where both were rare for a writer, and the book is perhaps most powerfully a portrait of how every person (on the basis of race, class, gender, and sexuality) is placed into rigid boxes made to control and essentialize; how all the marginalized from every quarter of oppression are linked through what being at the edge of the world does to our perceptions. It is also beautifully written. Though it is impossible to understand its every part, it haunts the mind like a nightmare; a nightmare that, though horrifying, allows you to see the world that much more clearly when your eyes finally open.
Ice by Anna Kavan
An unnamed narrator feverishly obsesses over a waifish girl so pale she seems made of glass. A brutal colonel, emblem of an enshadowed totalitarianism, also vies for her. And all the while the world is swallowed in the glaciers of an ice-apocalypse. Ice is difficult to describe. Part dystopian science-fiction, part surrealist parade of indelible images, part more-or-less autofiction, there is no book in the world quite like it. At a brisk less-than 200 pages, Anna Kavan violently channels the importunate desire to possess and mutilate writ large in the social script by power, a world where nothing is certain but nightmares. It is a book where you abandon traditional understanding to let it slice straight to the emotional marrow. Scenes from it play in my head like dreams do when they dance on the floor of your mind: a vision of past Viking violence on an English islet during a tense chase, a vivid parade and party to distract from the end of world, a hallucination of the glass-girl screaming as she is frozen in crystalline facets, the final scenes of too-late reconciliation as the hoarfrost clings to flesh and the gelid spurs loom. Kavan had a very hard life and her stylistically-varying work is a howl of terrible pain. The insane imagery and deleriously deranged first-person perspective show us how cruelty and inability to connect trap the world in ice.
Moderan by David R Bunch
We have been replaced by robots. All our fecund fields and forests are trapped under a sheet of plastic that stretches pole to pole, humanity has abnegated flesh and been cyberized save skin strips that run like tears down our chrome countenance, and, to reify violent social standards and for fun, robot commanders in giant steel strongholds launch missiles and lob bombs at other strongholds for all the duration of their sad steel lives. Welcome to Moderan. A collection of short stories set in the same universe by the obscure, idiosyncratic prose-poet David R Bunch, Moderan is a brutal satire of a culture that exists to fuel forever war and patriarchy. It's funny, and horrifying, and sad, and sometimes even tender, and sadly relevant as a comment on the deranged warmongering animus that is strangling our time. The prose is nuts too. My ex said it read like a Trump tweet and that's the long and short of it; there is so much childish all-caps screaming.
