Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1979

Stalker by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Isn't this Roadside Picnic and it came out in 1972, or was there a movie adaptation in Alan Dean Foster style?

Stalker (novel)
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Stalker (Russian: Машина желаний, lit. "The Wish Machine") is a novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky based on an early draft screenplay for the movie Stalker that in turn is based on a part of their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic, published in Avrora nos 7-9.

But yeah Roadside Picnic is the better known version so I might've omitted this.

That's probably my favourite Ballard novel; I like the Ghost Writer, the Kundera and Calvino but I think it's VS Naipaul for me.

When I reread the Naipaul few years ago, it felt too steeped in Conradian juices.

My runners-up: Calvino, Roth, Butler, Le Carré.

I have had my Douglas Adams phase as a youth but I've kind of revisited some of it lately and tbh he's mostly bad

Not that I was planning on it, but maybe I'll never revisit and keep my illusions intact.

I should read more Penelope Fitzgerald.

Engine Summer has the slightly unsettled dreamlike quality of Crowley's best works. Kindred is very good. Calvino I found irritating when I read it circa age 20.

HHGTTG is perfect in its original form as a radio series - the book, TV series and film are all inferior copies. The books only get good once he stops recycling radio stuff.

It's possible with Adams that observations that read trite and reactionary now were fresher in the early 80s tbfttl

But yeah radio show was enough

When I reread the Naipaul few years ago, it felt too steeped in Conradian juices.

Yeah, it's been a while since I read it and given Naipaul's more, ah, conservative predilections I can well imagine it'd rub me up the wrong way now.

I tried to re-read Adams a few years back and it felt like slow death by whimsy.

God, that Stalker/Roadside Picnic thing is really confusing (and I'm sure RP did very well in its original year, too).

This is definitely Calvino for me, with the caveat that I do need to read more Butler and she is on my list. I read both The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being very close together and they sort of blended into one in my mind without many distinguishing characteristics (I am sorry that these threads so often turn into me talking about not remembering things, it's not meant to be a fun affectation, I actually hate that my memory is so poor).

Never really had a desire to revisit the Hitch-hiker's stuff after childhood, though I will highly recommend the text adventure.

It's easy to remember, the woman in Unbearable Lightness of Being has a hat

Have read flowers in the attic, dead zone, unlimited dream co, if on a winters night & sleepless nights; that is good king but this is not the year to vote for king just yet. Might be recency bias (ie yep the one I still remember much about) but it’s sleepless nights for me

I've read Hitchhiker's Guide (I worshipped this when I was younger, though "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" was my favorite of the trilogy), Sleepless Nights, Kindred, and If On A Winter's Night a Traveler. Voting Calvino.

I do need to read more Butler and she is on my list

Kindred is the best place to start imo, especially for people who aren't nec super into science fiction—if you are, then maybe best to know that Kindred isn't really that, though I still think it's the ideal first read

I have gone back to a reasonable amount of horror/sci-fi genre fiction these days as a comforting area to read in, and they're particularly good for podcast fiction, but I've always preferred "philosophical and weird" to "monsters and space-ships" (I hate the "hard" and "soft" terms and refuse to use them). Kindred is def the Butler I've heard most people rave about so would probably start there anyway, though I have read at least one of her short stories before so I'm not completely in the dark. Thanks for the rec, though!

Butler again for me, and yeah this one's a great gateway. Lots of things on here I still hope to read, really need to get started on Portis.

Kindred is maybe not as great a gateway (and maybe doesn't want to be: it's intentionally v slippery). as say, Wild Seed. origin story of the Patternist series (but it's hard to pick one from that). The short story "Bloodchild" seems ideal, the power dynamic/ontological-biological-ecological crux of her whole thing.

I haven't read "Bloodchild" but I pretty strongly disagree with starting with Wild Seed. That individual book is excellent, def one of her best, but then you're faced with the dilemma of whether to continue with the other three Patternist books, none of which are as good. This is assuming you've already decided to read them in narrative chronology not publishing order, which is what I did and is probably wisest. But you get very sudden diminishing returns with Mind of My Mind, where the two characters you've just spent a whole, very rich book with are suddenly thinly drawn and just kind of different. I enjoyed the whole series, but I constantly second-guessed the reading order decision and it was distracting to have it in the back of my mind.

Kindred is the least genre-y of her books that I've read (if it came out today it likely wouldn't even be considered genre fiction now that "literary" books are allowed to play with genre tropes), so I suppose it's something of an outlier in her oeuvre, but it's the one I wouldn't hesitate to recommend to literally any kind of reader.

That said, I'm not sure you could really go wrong starting anywhere! The Parable books, Lilith's Brood, they're all great

I had a hard time getting into Kindred because I found the characterization weirdly flat, but I'd like to give her another try. Maybe I'll try Wild Seed.

Kindred impressed me when I read it in April.

This is a good survey, as I mentioned on the current rolling speculative fiction etc.:

an astute take on the work of Octavia Butler in March, guess the rest is behind paywall (I happened to see the print edition), but here's the opening: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-octavia-e-butler-reimagines-sex-and-survival

― dow, Wednesday, May 19, 2021 7:03 PM (three days ago)
The link hots it up, no prob but be it known the print is more precise:
Stranger Communities
Octavia E. Butler's vision of struggle and symbiosis
By Julian Lucas
Will have to find some more by Lucas.

― dow, Saturday, May 22, 2021

Incl. references to the recent Library of America collection.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Engine Summer by a mile, lots of books I like on here but only one I love

I'm halfway through Offshore. Not quite enjoying yet it as much as The Bookshop but there's lot's to like, the children are great and the writing is absolutely first class. Loved this bit about the methodically minded Richard, when he starts expecting something to happen that has never happened before: "He was not satisfied with the way his mind was working. Something was out of phase. He did not recognise it as hope."

So much good stuff! But I guess I am required to vote for … to vote for…

Got to Dog of the South, that was all I needed to see.

Ha, that's what I almost...what I almost...

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Finished Offshore last night, it was excellent. Ended up voting for Hitchhikers for sentimental reasons.

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1980

Engine Summer by a mile, lots of books I like on here but only one I love

Belated agreement, amused that we were (presumably) the two voters for this.

It’s been on my list for ages/pvmic