Book meme leftovers
Well that’s probably the least appetising subject heading yet. All it needs is a good dollop of cold semolina and….
Topic: there was a five things book meme doing the rounds a few weeks ago that I thought about but never actually did. Anyway my ‘5th ‘book that influenced you’ was going to be a collection of five half-remembered sf stories that I imprinted on as a teenager and for some reason I’ve been thinking about them today. The first, and this one I do actually remember most of, was Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison. I just like the title image for some reason. The story was some hippy druggy nightmare about LSD trips gradually turning real. I just like the title OK.
There’s a second imagery one, I think by Gene Wolfe, about a man with a face in his stomach who meets a girl with the same condition and they kiss. The third is a Roger Zelazny novel where the science premise has to do with chirality and the existence of a (literally) mirror world where L forms of organic molecules replace D. Or is it the other way round. I can’t remember what happened in the story at all, I just thought it was a neat premise.
The fourth is a longish short story by James Tiptree Jnr that had something to do with rats and a ‘king rat’ forming as a collective rat consciousness but I remember it more for the not-a-love-story going on at the same time. There’s a man and a woman talking about bonsai trees and how their beauty is essentially a product of major tree torture and it ends with one of them asking something along the lines of whether two broken things can ever make a bonsai. So I’m a complete sap but I think that’s my big romance kink right there. It’s probably a major part of what I liked about S7 of Buffy. Because there’s Buffy and Spike and Xander and Anya and they’ve all broken each other beyond hope of repair and yet by the end they seem to find something new. Not something big, noisy and passionate, but small like a bonsai is small. Quiet. I like the quiet.
And my fifth story I think must be classic sf. Because there are Venusians and the point is that Venus is a drab looking place to our eyes but the Venusians have adapted to it by developing a much more finely tuned sense of colour in that part of the spectrum. So to them viewing our beautiful Earth landscapes is a garish epilepsy-inducing experience. Well I always liked the idea (apparently not true) that Inuit languages contain dozens of words for different grades of snow.
Topic: there was a five things book meme doing the rounds a few weeks ago that I thought about but never actually did. Anyway my ‘5th ‘book that influenced you’ was going to be a collection of five half-remembered sf stories that I imprinted on as a teenager and for some reason I’ve been thinking about them today. The first, and this one I do actually remember most of, was Shattered Like a Glass Goblin by Harlan Ellison. I just like the title image for some reason. The story was some hippy druggy nightmare about LSD trips gradually turning real. I just like the title OK.
There’s a second imagery one, I think by Gene Wolfe, about a man with a face in his stomach who meets a girl with the same condition and they kiss. The third is a Roger Zelazny novel where the science premise has to do with chirality and the existence of a (literally) mirror world where L forms of organic molecules replace D. Or is it the other way round. I can’t remember what happened in the story at all, I just thought it was a neat premise.
The fourth is a longish short story by James Tiptree Jnr that had something to do with rats and a ‘king rat’ forming as a collective rat consciousness but I remember it more for the not-a-love-story going on at the same time. There’s a man and a woman talking about bonsai trees and how their beauty is essentially a product of major tree torture and it ends with one of them asking something along the lines of whether two broken things can ever make a bonsai. So I’m a complete sap but I think that’s my big romance kink right there. It’s probably a major part of what I liked about S7 of Buffy. Because there’s Buffy and Spike and Xander and Anya and they’ve all broken each other beyond hope of repair and yet by the end they seem to find something new. Not something big, noisy and passionate, but small like a bonsai is small. Quiet. I like the quiet.
And my fifth story I think must be classic sf. Because there are Venusians and the point is that Venus is a drab looking place to our eyes but the Venusians have adapted to it by developing a much more finely tuned sense of colour in that part of the spectrum. So to them viewing our beautiful Earth landscapes is a garish epilepsy-inducing experience. Well I always liked the idea (apparently not true) that Inuit languages contain dozens of words for different grades of snow.