Some books I've read
William Sloane:
To Walk the Night (1937)
The Edge of Running Water (1939)
I'm not sure why I acquired these, but a lot of what I pick up now is after praise on Metafilter. I don't read fiction like I used to, but these two short novels were a fun read. Sloane was an American writer of forgotten plays and of these two works that bridge science fiction and horror. A recent edition of both books is introduced with praise by Stephen King, but they're not reminiscent of his stuff, although The Edge of Running Water is set in Maine. Sloane could write good prose, and if he'd done mainstream novels his stuff would probably have been good enough to be published and noticed, but not unusual enough to be remembered.
Both books involve a level-headed male viewpoint character who reports on an experience that starts out prosaically but gradually gets weirder. Sloane doesn't resort to Lovecraftian purple prose, which has helped these books age well. While reading them I was picturing the 1950s, although they were written twenty years earlier; Edge involves a semi-mad scientist inventing a device that generates something very like a black hole, an inconvenient thing to have in a wooden house on a Maine headland.
Mary Doria Russell:
The Sparrow (1996)
Once again I think I may have seen this book praised on Metafilter, and I did finish reading it despite growing annoyance at its lameness as a piece of science fiction. I can't recommend it. Nothing about it is remotely plausible, starting with the Jesuits mounting an interstellar expedition in 2019. They want to discover the source of some mysterious music picked up by SETI, but this idea gets lost among a lot of other poorly conceived stuff about the aliens they discover, and then the supposedly brilliant humans use up too much shuttle fuel farting around and can't get back to their main ship. It may have won a raft of SF awards, but don't bother.
To Walk the Night (1937)
The Edge of Running Water (1939)
I'm not sure why I acquired these, but a lot of what I pick up now is after praise on Metafilter. I don't read fiction like I used to, but these two short novels were a fun read. Sloane was an American writer of forgotten plays and of these two works that bridge science fiction and horror. A recent edition of both books is introduced with praise by Stephen King, but they're not reminiscent of his stuff, although The Edge of Running Water is set in Maine. Sloane could write good prose, and if he'd done mainstream novels his stuff would probably have been good enough to be published and noticed, but not unusual enough to be remembered.
Both books involve a level-headed male viewpoint character who reports on an experience that starts out prosaically but gradually gets weirder. Sloane doesn't resort to Lovecraftian purple prose, which has helped these books age well. While reading them I was picturing the 1950s, although they were written twenty years earlier; Edge involves a semi-mad scientist inventing a device that generates something very like a black hole, an inconvenient thing to have in a wooden house on a Maine headland.
Mary Doria Russell:
The Sparrow (1996)
Once again I think I may have seen this book praised on Metafilter, and I did finish reading it despite growing annoyance at its lameness as a piece of science fiction. I can't recommend it. Nothing about it is remotely plausible, starting with the Jesuits mounting an interstellar expedition in 2019. They want to discover the source of some mysterious music picked up by SETI, but this idea gets lost among a lot of other poorly conceived stuff about the aliens they discover, and then the supposedly brilliant humans use up too much shuttle fuel farting around and can't get back to their main ship. It may have won a raft of SF awards, but don't bother.