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Mon Mar 22
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@darkthought1: Sorry -- did not even occur to me. Did not even occur to Penguin, either, apparently, since they stuck it on the front of a mass-market paperback sold who knows how many years ago.Reply
Just want to put in my two cents' worth to all you who dislike The Big Time and the Wanderer. You're wrong! They're excellent novels. Of course, I could just be on the wrong side of the generation gap. Even so, a lot of you folks discuss older sf from the wrong side of the mirror. Rather than looking at how the given work in question might seem behind the times today, you might want to look instead at how it was ahead of the times when it was written. And frankly, boys and girls, you seem tone deaf to Leiber's exquisite command of the English language. - Art CoverReply
What was your problem with "The Big Time"? I didn't care about the characterizations or the setting, but the ideas and the implications gave me the chills.
I'll take your word "The Wanderer" is pretty damn bad, although I have not read it myself. "The Big Time" is a good, tight story with little wasted space. It's frightening, claustrophobic and tense, while the language is not easy to penetrate at times. If you can't look past the stuff that dates it, how can you review or enjoy anything that isn't contemporary?Reply
@Timothy Neill: Well, you can read my thoughts on The Big Time either by clicking on the link in the post above, or I can make it extra-easy and provide it here: [io9.com]
As I comment to Evil Tortie's Mom below, I did enjoy it, but I'm not surprised it's not better remembered. It does have a compelling plot, and it's definitely economical; but the characters, to my mind, aren't particularly relatable, and I don't think the idea behind it is one that exactly resonates with the Average Reader, either when it was published or today. That doesn't mean it's a bad book, just that there's a reason it's largely forgotten, for a winner of SF lit's biggest award.Reply
Lieber was a good *fantasy* writer--actually, a great one--but a HORRIBLE sci-fi writer. I tried reading this block of waste-paper when I was still a callow youth in highschool, and even *then* I thought it was unbearably stupid. I tried reading it again a few years ago and quit after the first page of amateurish prose and ridiculously-stereotyped characters.Reply
It's a weird book, halfway between the experimental style of the New Wave writers and the gee-gosh-wow approach of postwar American SF. Leiber always excelled at writing short stories and novellas; this was his only stab at a really long book.Reply
@lightninglouie: It really is too bad -- I've enjoyed a lot of his work, and you can almost feel the ambition and effort coming off the pages of this one. And you're exactly right: It's part old school, part new school. But Leiber was over 50 when he wrote it, and (WITH ALL DUE RESPECT TO EVERYONE OVER 50 HERE) the sort of hip tone he's going for just comes off as very Old Guy in the Club.Reply
@Josh Wimmer: Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Philip K. Dick's 1960s novels like Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, where there'd be some really trippy psychedelic sequence followed by some boilerplate genre element like rocket taxis or something, because PKD figured he knew his core audience and had to throw them some red meat. The Wanderer is kind of similar, in that you'll have a passage reminiscent of Dos Passos followed by lines of dialogue straight out of This Island Earth.
It also makes an interesting comparison with John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which came out just a few years later and also won the Hugo. It's another big novel with a large cast of characters, epic scope, and experimental style, but it still holds up (or at least I thought it held up when I read it as a teenager in the late '80s). Of course, Brunner was a generation younger than Leiber, so that's a big factor.Reply
Gonna totally agree with you on this one. The Big Time was also awful, nearly repugnant. Leiber had his good moments (Conjure Wife, and some of the Gray Mouser stories) but his Hugo winners were not among them.
PS The Wanderer was up against 3 other novels barely remembered today: The Whole Man by John Brunner, Davy by Edgar Pangborn,
The Planet Buyer by Cordwainer Smith (the best of the lot).Reply
It's a shame, b/c Leiber was a terrific writer, and a swell person (Unlike you, I love "The Big Time"). I wonder who (didn't) edit this one? What were the other nominees?Reply
@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.: I enjoyed The Big Time enough -- it's well crafted and trim, and I like the atmosphere of the Change War -- but it's kinda slight, and the story itself ("20th-century Earth woman is a hostess in an extradimensional safehouse for time-traveling soldiers in a war to alter history, and the component that will keep her and the rest of the cast from dissipating into nothingness is missing, and also she's dating an abusive Nazi") isn't anywhere near as easily summed up as the better-known Hugo winners from the time ("Catholic monastic order preserves knowledge in postapocalyptic world" or "human raised by Martians uses powers to start revolutionary new religion").
So, I mean, the book is fine, but I understand why it isn't a beloved classic. It's just a bit too complicated to have intercepted with enough of the mainstream, and its other qualities don't compensate sufficiently.
@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.: I hadn't heard of any of them, but I defer to you and the other much more knowledgeable folks here, and join you in wishing one of the other nominees had won.Reply
@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.: The key phrase is "who (didn't) edit this one?" Few SF publishers offered luxuries like editors; the books show it.
I remember a radio interview with Philip K Dick. He said he had editors for only two of his books; can't remember one, but the other was The Man In The High Castle. Which is considered one of his very best.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a bunch of SF, but he fought to stay out of the SF ghetto & become a wealthy & respected author. One of his characters was Kilgore Trout, an excellent writer whose works could only be found in the back rooms of ratty used-book stores. Where we SF fans put in many a dusty hour.
I love Leiber but some of his novels have not aged well. I re-read Gather Darkness recently & put it in the "donate" stack. But much of his short fiction & fantasy are still fine.Reply
The thing is, I never really got into Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser.
Conjure Wife, otoh, is drop-dead brilliant and fricking scary. There's one sentence that nearly made me drop the book (if you've read it, you probably know what I'm talking about.)Reply
@Wookie1972: Oh, I like Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, but it took me a dozen or so attempts before I got used to Leiber's style, which is balanced nicely between the gung-ho action of Robert Howard and the melancholic tendency of Moorcock's existential fantasies. (It also really helps if you read the stories in chronological order.) There's a sort of cartoonish, make it up as you go along quality that's completely the opposite of today's high fantasy, where the writer creates an elaborate geography and rigid backstory and then sketches in a bunch of two-dimensional characters from central casting.Reply
@WookieLifeDay: Oh, now I want to go read that. I mean, when the guy's on, he's on. There are a handful of sentences that are just breathtaking in Wanderer, too (though none that made me almost drop it); unfortunately, there are just several thousand mediocre others intermingled with them.Reply
@Josh Wimmer: I haven't read Our Lady Of Darkness, but I take Evil Tortie's Mom's word for it. COnjure Wife is good, and short. It's old, and the gender roles are a little creaky, but it would be a good companion for Rosemary's Baby.Reply
@Evil Tortie's Mom: R.O.A.C.H.: I spent two hours getting lost on foot in San Francisco about 15 years ago looking for the Corona Heights location that plays such a pivotal role in Our Lady of Darkness. There's a cute little rec center there now.Reply
I think you are missing a main point here. Based on the last two covers, it appears that the Lieber estate can sue James Cameron for plagirizing "Avatar" from this book. After all, both seem to have space cats.Reply
The other night I dreamt of cats, continental
drift divide. Planetoids fly in a line, Fritzy Lieber. Saucer People, boring people and coincides. Interstellar death panel, Earth dies, boom! You
symbiotic, classical story, right? Nahh.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it.
It's the end of the world as we know it and I'm bored...Reply
I read the title first, thinking "I've heard of it, but haven't read it" only to instantly recognize the setting and story described in the first paragraph. Way Station clearly didn't resonate me with some Simak's other work (I reread City every few years) but he is a very good story teller with a quick and simple style. I agree with you that he often gives a pass to greater implications of technology (City being no exception here), but I forgive him these transgressions for the enjoyable and readable stories.Reply
I always thought that Cliff Simek's writing style was an early example of Minnesota Nice. If you look that up, the natives of this area actually have a universally held concept of this. Look up the Wikipedia entry for this, if you haven't encountered it before. I've lived here for 30 years now, and it's alternatively endearing and aggravating.Reply
@Chip Skylark of Space: I think this is definitely the case, and what I was getting at in my comment to Grey_Area. Simak's writing is sweet and gentle and good-natured, and I can certainly see the appeal (I didn't not like reading Way Station) -- but especially if you grow up in this part of the country, it wears thin. And for basically the same reasons that Minnesota nice wears thin: There's a lot to like about the culture here, but the oh-gosh-ya stuff also masks some real emotional handicaps.Reply
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