the night has a thousand saxaphones

Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger

Well, that was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be, wasn’t it?  Glad I finally got around to it.  The bit of me that loves unreliable narrators had a blast, at least.

The writing here is thoroughly mediocre.  The premise is perfectly good SF.  A technological singularity, when humankind simply cannot assimilate the rate of change in their culture (especially when brought on my nano-technology style stuff) is a perfectly respectable premise.  The slightly surreal, dadaish feel of the later chapters is a bit of a high.  Mostly I just adore his juxtaposition of Leninist revolutionaries, trying to bring about a change that is absolutely small beans, really, and completely unable to wrap their heads around the thing that they are part of now.  Cute little book.

Dancers at the Edge of Time (#1, An Alien Heat), Michael Moorcock

This is one of the all-time pioneers of the Dying Earth far-future genre, which I have adored in some of its later manifestations (Songs of Distant Earth, stuff in Hyperion, etc).  Our naïve childlike narrator is okay, and the actual time travel hijinks are relatively entertaining, but it’s a short book that reads more like a thought experiment than a developed novel of substance, and far future humanity is too foreign to be sympathetic or understandable without far better development, without letting us into their society and heads far better than he does. 

Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman may be following in the Neil Stephenson path of “got too famous and now his editors are afraid of him.”  Fragile Things has some incredible, vibrant, creepy, ingenious, imaginative stories that only Neil Gaiman could have written.  The Lovecraftian ones are especially welcome, as Gaimon writes Lovecraft-style oblique horror a lot better than Lovecraft ever did.  The Sherlock Holmes/Lovecraft crossover (yes, I’m serious) is exactly the sort of crazy crossover done perfectly that one expects from really good fanfic.  I love those moments when published sci-fi authors reveal themselves to be just big fanboys like us, you know?  Anyway, that’s some of them.  But there are also a LOT of stories in this collection that read like a draft (or worse yet, just a sketch of an idea) that he found in a shoebox in his attic, old stories he couldn’t publish then, but he can NOW, because now he’s famous and no editor will tell him to dump them.  I don’t know, maybe that’s partly my bias against poetry talking, but even aside from the poetry there were stories in here that just shouldn’t have seen the light of day.  I know Gaiman is capable of much tighter and more polished work than a lot of them, and I just wished this collection had a little more discipline.