I Am Reading A Novel That Seems To Be Something That Elvis Telecom Would Like

so what was this all about?

shhh, he'll be back soon.

I can't remember anymore exactly, but I think I was referring to this

Yes. I think I was. Right now I'm reading the next book in that series, Greed & Stuff. The conceit is that the main character is a washed-up child actor turned gumshoe who brushes up against supernatural forces. So we get a combination of a Hollywood noir with a story of the occult. And the guy writes in a kind of jokey Robert Sheckley style.

HI DERE

How did I miss this thread before? Anyway, down with ILX Balkanization, up with "Site New Answers"

Also, FWIW I'm currently in the middle of Empire Falls after a string of non-fiction (Refried Elvis, The Ten-Cent Plague, Rats, Architecture Of Diplomacy)

Did you ever read any of those Jay Russell Marty Burns books or just Brown Harvest?

Reviving because I just started started Jake Arnott's The House Of Rumor. It was this section in the LA Review of Books review that sold me

The House of Rumour is a fictional take on Parsons’s crazed story, chronicling the lifestyles of the nerdy and perverted who made up the fringe-science/SF scene in 1940s Southern California. But its ambitions are even wider, offering a vastly complex alternative history in which Parsons and his SoCal circle of mystics, tech nerds, and pulp aficionados come to represent the twinned utopian and dystopian impulses that have inspired and deformed the postwar world. The ingenious, infernally complicated plot — which spurns linear chronology, dizzyingly mixing real personages with fictional characters — is impossible to summarize, but suffice it to say that it features all the major dramatis personae from Pendle’s book, interweaving them with numerous subplots that are mostly drawn from historical events. The story is sparked when British intelligence agent (and future spy novelist) Ian Fleming recruits Crowley to assist in persuading Hitler’s chief lieutenant, Rudolf Hess, to defect to England; by the time the author is done, however, he has roped in everything from the Bloomsbury Group to the 1970s punk scene, from the Apollo 11 moon landing to the People’s Temple mass suicide, from UFOs to the Mariel boatlift to Afrofuturist music, and much more. The twenty-one chapters enact incidents loosely linked to the trump cards in Crowley’s Thoth tarot deck, with these major arcana providing an array of potent images that shadow and thematically amplify the plot. The result is an entertaining farrago whose invention never flags, even when the story threatens to collapse under the weight of its wild ambition and density of allusion.

Haven't read anything by Arnott before, but so far I'm getting a strong DeLillo vibe.

Cool, thanks. Will check it out. That book references Dr. Cyclops which reminds me to ask, are you familiar with Stars Screaming or The Dead Circus by John Kaye?

I'm not. *goes look* ummm I think I should be all over this...

Guy goes to Robert Heinlein's (non-tesseract) house in the first, well, zeroth, chapter, how cool is that?

In any case, come on over to the rolling sf thread and read the Apollo Quartet with me and James M.

i'm just always gonna think that i started this thread when i see it. there's no way around it. hey, what book DID i want him to read? oh, right...

btw, have you read that recent heinlein bio, vol 1? Seems to be in your wheelhouse.

I did and it's maddening because the book stops in 1948 - just as the "Future History" and the kid novels are starting up. I read everything I could get hold of when I was growing up in the 70s but outside of re-reading Stranger In A Strange Land a couple of years ago I haven't felt compelled to revisit any of his books. I'm content hanging onto the memories of reading them and reading the bio feels like flipping through an old photo album. Plenty of "oh yeah, I remember that story" moments and lots of details on what it was like to be a writer in the 30s and 40s.

I still would love to see a book compiling the letters between him and John Campbell. (Campbell's letters have been compiled into several books - worth checking out, even the crazy ones.)

What's Millennium got that isn't already in "Air Raid," apart from cute chapter titles?

I actually haven't read "Air Raid." More to the point, I've always been rather meh about Varley. Punched out of the trilogy somewhere in the middle of Wizard. I think I had the feeling that deep down Varley was a space opera guy and I wasn't going to have any of that. Millennium sure felt like it.

Truth be told, decades ago was a fan of his entertaining fast-moving, familiar folksy style then ultimately ended up finding it a bit slick and glib. Reread some stuff a few years and liked it again for the same reason but then started to have the same misgivings. Come to think of it had the same experience with his hero, RAH.

Agreed. We all probably went through a RAH phase until you get to that WTF point that makes you question everything you just read.

BTW, just finished Kaye's Stars Screaming. I mostly dug it, but wanted to like it more. Good for that paranoiac haze that collected around LA middle-aged burnout culture back then, but vaguely dissatisfied by the resolutions.

How's his other book?

Haven't got around to finishing but it had a similar vibe. Good stuff about Bobby Fuller.

This review of the RAH bio (along with a Cory Doctorow novel) by John Clute is kind of amazing: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20100628/clute-c.shtml

Finally just started reading Sales' Apollo Quartet. ZOWIE. More than makes up for current reading doldrums.

Cool.

Wish I was reading those again for the first time.

The last one of those is out, btw. On a related note, you are wanted over on this thread: DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight.

Hooboy. I'm so far behind on everything... I promise I'll get to that thread. I've been riding the train to work the past couple of weeks and have been blazing through some schlock just to clear it out. I've been in a dark depressive hole lately - been hate-reading Nixon books and Supermob - the Sidney Korshak book that's a must-read for anyone who perceives the utter corruption at the core of American power.

Did read garbage techno-thriller Ghost Fleet on the Metrolink the other day. I don't know what to say other than it felt like distasteful propaganda.

Background on that: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/07/04/ghost-fleet-welcome-world-post-snowden-techno-thrillers/

Reviving thread to go on about how much I'm enjoying Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry For The Future. A spiritual successor to Stand On Zanzibar that's just as annoyingly fractured.

Yeah, that's a good big messy book that actually gave me a glimmer of hope.

Minor thread revival - I'm thanked in the end credits for having helped bring this accursed thing into being

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71dH-Q5HCjL._SL1500_.jpg

Looks pretty cool to me.

There’s an apocryphal story about Kubrick where his assistants and family would constantly hear the sound of novels being hurled at the office walls. One day the sound stopped… and that novel was The Shining.

Anyway, imagine me doing the same until I got to The Twenty Days of Turin - a real read-twice-before-reacting brilliant kind of book

Glad this thread ultimately had a purpose after all.

This review of the RAH bio (along with a Cory Doctorow novel) by John Clute is kind of amazing: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20100628/clute-c.shtml🕸

I actually haven't read "Air Raid." More to the point, I've always been rather meh about Varley. Punched out of the trilogy somewhere in the middle of _Wizard_. I think I had the feeling that deep down Varley was a space opera guy and I wasn't going to have any of that. _Millennium_ sure felt like it.

The novel was definitely first as I can confirm I was one of the tiny handful of people in the USA who saw the movie on opening night because they read the book. Fact-checking all this, the novel was 1983 and the movie 1989. You're right though in that Varley had written a screenplay version of "Air Raid" in 1979 and then wrote Millennium as a novelization of his screenplay.

Outside of this thread, I hadn't thought about Varley in years until a few days ago when a co-worker/new Scavenger's Reign fan asked me about stories (book, movie, comic, whatever) that were similar to it - alien invasion stories where you're the alien invader. Varley's Gaea Trilogy came up and I suppose I should finish it, but the Hippie Heinlein writing has not aged well.

BTW, my recommendation for Scavenger's Reign fans is John Shirley's A Splendid Chaos from 1988. A book so unrelenting in the grotesque that I remember an interview (maybe an essay he wrote?) some years later where Shirley calls himself out for it.

Lol at Hippie Heinlein. I kind of still want to read STEEL BEACH based on Clute’s review of it.

He’s got a story called “Beatnik Bayou” which I’ve always assumed must be a play on Hippie Hollow in Austin.

MILLENNIUM the novel has this gimmick maybe we already discussed of all the chapter titles being the names of very well-known time travel stories. Which doesn’t really make me want to read the novel that much more, instead it just makes me want to reread the table of contents or any one of those stories.

Cory Doctorow recycles well-known titles all the time too. Suspect there's an element of Fair Use hardmanning to the practice. Can't anyone use the titles of shitty time-travel stories?

Been re-reading C Wright Mills' The Power Elite yet again and and sometimes you hit a paragraph that got me wondering if he drank some sort of Water of Life prescience hallucinogen in 1956.

If we are to suppose that modern America ought to be a democratic society, we must look to the intellectual community for knowledge of the power elite and of their decisions. For democracy implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge—not to speak of power—to hold the decision-makers accountable. Everyone must depend upon knowledge provided by others, for no man can know by his own experience more than a small portion of the social worlds that now affect him. Most of our experience is indirect and, as we have seen, subject to much distortion. The opinion-makers of every age have provided images of the elite of their time and place. Like the realities they are supposed to represent, these images change; in our own immediate time, in fact, many old images have been revised and many new ones invented.

Of late, this work has occurred less as an effort to know reality better than to serve a strangely conservative mood that has come to prevail among the image-makers. The images they now offer us are not those of an elite in irresponsible command of unprecedented means of power and manipulation but of a scatter of reasonable men overwhelmed by events and doing their best in a difficult situation. The mood out of which these images have arisen serves less to justify the real power of the real elite, or the intelligence of its decisions, than to sustain their spokesmen. The images we are expected to take most seriously are either irrelevant to the facts of power and of the power elite or they are simply private fantasies serving more as emotional cushions for small coteries of comfortable writers, paid and unpaid, than as a diagram of all those forces which in our time come to such obvious climax in the American power elite.

Yet scholars, knowingly and unknowingly, have been seeking suitable ideas about this elite. They have not found them and they have not managed to create them. What they have found is an absence of mind and of morality in the public life of our times, and what they have managed to create is a mere elaboration of their own conservative mood. It is a mood quite appropriate to men living in a material boom, a nationalist celebration, a political vacuum. At its heart there is a knowledge of powerlessness without poignancy, and a feeling of pseudo-power based on mere smugness. By its softening of the political will, this mood enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage, and to give up the central goal of goal of western humanism, so strongly felt in nineteenth-century American experience: the presumptuous control by reason of man’s fate.”

Yeah, I need to re-read that one, thanks!
Good discussion of Varley incl xp "Beatnik Bayou" on Thread of Wonder (back a ways).