What Great Minds Lie In The Dust - Dying Earth Books

In a future where humanity has become obsessed with timekeeping and punctuality, a single mysterious figure tries to make a change, by wasting everybody's time.Try reading that in a deep movie trailer voice. “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman is a whimsical and satirical dystopian short story that won both the Hugo Award for Best Short Story and the Nebula Award for Best Short Story in 1965. In this future we have become so obsessed with punctuality that tardiness has become a crime and the duration of your tardiness will be deducted from your lifespan. This law is implemented by installing a device in everyone, this device is controlled by a “cardioplate” which can turn off a person’s heart if his allotted lifetime runs out. The people’s lifetimes are governed by “The Master Timekeeper”, also called “The Ticktockman”, but never to his face. The Harlequin is a superhero of sorts whose only powers are his imagination and defiance. His acts of rebellion are silly public stunts that throw people off their work schedule and cause the unthinkable: delays.“The System had been seven minutes worth of disrupted. It was a tiny matter, one hardly worthy of note, but in a society where the single driving force was order and unity and promptness and clocklike precision and attention to the clock, reverence of the gods of the passage of time, it was a disaster of major importance.”The theme of the story is not exactly subtle as Ellison clearly indicates it in the text:“We no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun's passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don't keep the schedule tight.”This is a terrific little story, the prose is wonderfully stylized, surreal and whimsical. I don’t know how relevant the theme is today, certainly I am late for work every day and I tend to get away with it!_______________________Note: You can read this story for free online, just Google* the title. I don't want to post a download link when I am not sure of the story's copyright status.* I am not sure what would happen if you were to Bing it!

This, as well as the first two books and theoretically the last in the series, is rapidly becoming the most difficult work of SF I've ever read. Why? It's not particularly difficult to follow; the Hero's Quest is rather straightforward throughout. Nor is the main character Severian particularly uninteresting or difficult to like.My main concern, as well as my questionable joy, is in the author's requirement that we take not just an active role in the reconstruction of this tale, but that even a deconstruction, a literary analysis, a creative interpretation, a fuck-you-sideways until you bleed from your eyeballs reinterpretation, might not quite be enough for us to reconcile story elements from action elements from reflective elements from literary elements.I'm assuming, just from my own idiocy, that this is a 4-d topographical map and I must rip out the pages according to odd-numbered reoccurring themes, plaster them together in the shape of the Claw of the Conciliator, and then read the text while standing on my head. And I can't do it while inebriated. This isn't, after all, noir fiction.This is, supposedly, the most brilliant literary mindfuck of a SF novel ever written, only it's so far beyond bizarro fiction that it has usurped James Joyce's throne. Take your pick if you want to liken it to SF Ulysses or SF Finnegans Wake. I mention the last just because this has darkened depths to it where deep literary beasties roam, unseen, and not because it's batshit crazy like the author.I'm not saying that Gene Wolfe is crazy. Not at all. But for all the ways that this *appears* to be sword and sorcery on the surface, and decent sword and sorcery that happens to take place a million years in the future on Earth where the sun is dying and aliens mess with us and tech indistinguishable to magic roams the earth, events, plot elements, and narrative elements will sometimes hit is from out of nowhere and they will make absolutely no sense at all if you are reading on the simple surface.Truly, just the little hints are enough to drive me crazy. Yes, I pick up quite a few, like Severian's little discussion with little Severian about men who decide that living like men is too much for them so they get a special lobotomy so they don't have to reflect or worry about what it means to be a man, that they can live happily like beasts. Little Severian says, "Is that why you go without a shirt? Because you are like the beast men?" "No, I haven't undergone the procedure, but yeah, perhaps I do go without reflection like them." Of course, in the story context, he's saved the kid with his name, vows to be his papa, and proceeds to watch him die, moving on to the next quest without much reflection. Right. (Btw, I'm not checking my review for precise quotations, I'm paraphrasing from memory.)This isn't even the biggest bit of crazy. There's resurrected love interests, either pure memory from an alien juice and another from a time-reversal trick, both of which he loses, aliens with masks as many roles, with the real one being as smooth as unworked clay, as like unformed from conception or story, a mirror for everything else that goes on, and giants who resemble the witches whom Perseus steals the eye and the tooth. Don't get me wrong. It's pretty cool. But when the fiction turns metafiction, when plots get thrown right into some heavy meta-soup and we're left wondering what the hell we just stepped into, we still have the sense that we *ought* to be knowing what the hell is going on. It doesn't let us drop, exactly. It just tries to entice us into rereading the books 5-10 times to try to figure out just what the hell is going on. I have to question myself: Do I care enough to become a devoted scholar of Wolfe and write at least a dissertation on his work? Do I care at least enough to finish through the 4th book?The answer is No, and Yes. It's frustrating to see all those little fishes in the dark water below my feet, see them scurrying away, but I'm not quite hungry enough to get down on my hands and knees and beg Poseidon to make them jump right into my mouth.Maybe someday, when I've burned all my other books and am exiled to a desert island where I have nothing else to read than these four admittedly interesting books will I sit down and devote the rest of life to figuring out just what the hell is going on here. :) I don't quite think I'm alone in this feeling, either.Shouldn't there be a whole cottage industry devoted to figuring this thing out? Where are the scores of scholars? Is this going to go down into history as "The series everyone wants to say is genius but no one has the guts to say they have no idea what's going on"? I'll at least say it. I don't know what's going on. Surface? Sure. Pretty damn straightforward. It's everything else. Gahh!

Volume Four of the Book of the New Sun. Severian the Torturer continues his epic journey across the lands of Urth, a journey as fraught with peril as it is with wonder. Exiled from his guild he is an outcast, but his travels are woven with strange portents. The Claw of the Conciliator, relic of a prophet and promise of a new age, flames to life in his hands. He carries the great sword Terminus Est, the Line of Division. The dwellers in the deep waters offer him a kingdom under the seas. And he is hunted and driven by terrors from beyond Urth. Now all his travels move him inexorably toward a grander fate, a destiny that he dare not refuse. For a devouring blackness gnaws at the heart of the Old Sun, and the fate of Urth rests in the return of the Conciliator, the New Sun long foretold.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.Indistinguishable SF: "Nightflyers and Other Stories" by George R.R. MartinDragons have always been cool, Video games have always been cool, real ale has always been cool. (Union) Rugby has always been cool, Science Fiction has always been cool, and Fantasy has always been cool. Football has always been shit, same as radio 4 depressing plays that the controller seems to think everyone has been to Cambridge/Oxford and therefore they like this sort of thing as it’s so highbrow. Kill a mockingbird yada yada, the Royal Shakespeare Taliban society again shit. Give me dragon slaying and space ship battles any day of the week. There's very little in life that can't be improved by adding dragons. Anyway, since when was a game of thrones considered to be fantasy? To me, it is fantasy with the guts ripped out of it. Take away the undead and the dragons, and you would see no difference to the overall story. It is a medieval soap drama with fantasy elements tacked on. Fair enough, Martins wants to move the genre on - he wants to go beyond epic sagas and doomed heroes, and the romance that underpins all fantasy, but what has he replaced it with? Sex and misogyny.

The Trojan War rages at the foot of Olympos Mons on Mars—observed and influenced from on high by Zeus and his immortal family—and twenty-first-century professor Thomas Hockenberry is there to play a role in the insidious private wars of vengeful gods and goddesses. On Earth, a small band of the few remaining humans pursues a lost past and devastating truth—as four sentient machines depart from Jovian space to investigate, perhaps terminate, the potentially catastrophic emissions emanating from a mountaintop miles above the terraformed surface of the Red Planet.

Elric of Melniboné is a requisite title in the hard fantasy canon, a book no fantasy fan should leave unread. Author Michael Moorcock, already a major player in science fiction, cemented his position in the fantasy pantheon with the five-book Elric saga, of which Elric of Melniboné is the first installment. The book's namesake, the brooding albino emperor of the dying nation of Melniboné, is a sort of Superman for Goths, truly an archetype of the genre.The youthful Elric is a cynical and melancholy king, heir to a nation whose 100,000-year rule of the world ended less than 500 years hence. More interested in brooding contemplation than holding the throne, Elric is a reluctant ruler, but he also realizes that no other worthy successor exists and the survival of his once-powerful, decadent nation depends on him alone. Elric's nefarious, brutish cousin Yrkoon has no patience for his physically weak kinsman, and he plots constantly to seize Elric's throne, usually over his dead body. Elric of Melniboné follows Yrkoon's scheming, reaching its climax in a battle between Elric and Yrkoon with the demonic runeblades Stormbringer and Mournblade. In this battle, Elric gains control of the soul-stealing Stormbringer, an event that proves pivotal to the Elric saga. --Paul Hughes

In a perilous future where disposable duplicate bodies fulfill every legal and illicit whim of their decadent masters, life is cheap. No one knows that better than Albert Morris, a brash investigator with a knack for trouble, who has sent his own duplicates into deadly peril more times than he cares to remember. But when Morris takes on a ring of bootleggers making illegal copies of a famous actress, he stumbles upon a secret so explosive it has incited open warfare on the streets of Dittotown.Dr. Yosil Maharal, a brilliant researcher in artificial intelligence, has suddenly vanished, just as he is on the verge of a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Maharal's daughter, Ritu, believes he has been kidnapped--or worse. Aeneas Polom, a reclusive trillionaire who appears in public only through his high-priced platinum duplicates, offers Morris unlimited resources to locate Maharal before his awesome discovery falls into the wrong hands.To uncover the truth, Morris must enter a shadowy, nightmare world of ghosts and golems where nothing--and no one--is what they seem, memory itself is suspect, and the line between life and death may no longer exist.

This book may be the ultimate secret agent novel.It could also be the most insanely ambitious work of anthropological science fiction.It's also a gold mine for anyone interested in Frank Herbert's work.Let me explain...The Godmakers is a fix-up novel, a cluster of short stories smooshed into the shape of a novel. The plot concerns the adventures of Lewis Orne, an extraordinarily capable agent working for two interstellar agencies. His mission is to prevent a devastating war. As he progresses in his career - yes, Godmakers is also a bildungsroman! - his abilities and achievements escalate. The conclusion sees Orne (view spoiler)[become a god, or a least a very powerful telekinetic. (hide spoiler)]

The war has raged for nearly a year and Earth desperately needs an edge to overcome the Sirian Empire's huge advantage in personnel and equipment. That's where James Mowry comes in. Intensively trained, his appearance surgically altered, Mowry secretly lands on one of the Empire's planets. His mission: to sap morale, cause mayhem, tie up resources, and wage a one-man war on a planet of 80 million--in short, to be like the wasp buzzing around a car to distract the driver...and causing him to crash.

The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath is a novella by H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) published by Arkham House posthumously in 1943 in the collection Beyond the Wall of Sleep. Begun probably in the autumn of 1926, it was completed on January 22, 1927 and was unpublished in his lifetime. It is both the longest of the stories that make up his Dream Cycle and the longest Lovecraft work to feature protagonist Randolph Carter. Along with his 1927 novel The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, it can be considered one of the significant achievements of that period of Lovecraft's writing. The Dream-Quest combines elements of horror and fantasy into an epic tale that illustrates the scope and wonder of humankind's ability to dream.

Who knoweth the spirit of men that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? -Ecclesiastes 3:21Okay, they did resemble elephants, it can't be denied. That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome commensals, the Sulidoror.But aliens should never be judged by human standards, as the Company learned to its cost when Holman's World, now once again known as Belzagor, was given back to the natives and the Company sent packing. Now Edmund Gunderson, once head of the Company's operation on this world, has come back across the galaxy to settle old scores with the Nildoror. If he can even get them to acknowledge his existence. Cover Artist: Gene Szafran

Gwynn and Raule are rebels on the run, with little in common except being on the losing side of a hard-fought war. Gwynn is a gunslinger from the north, a loner, a survivor . . . a killer. Raule is a wandering surgeon, a healer who still believes in just--and lost--causes. Bound by a desire to escape the ghosts of the past, together they flee to the teeming city of Ashamoil, where Raule plies her trade among the desperate and destitute, and Gwynn becomes bodyguard and assassin for the household of a corrupt magnate. There, in the saving and taking of lives, they find themselves immersed in a world where art infects life, dream and waking fuse, and splendid and frightening miracles begin to bloom . . .

In his debut novel, literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer takes us on an unforgettable journey, a triumph of the imagination that reveals the magical and mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. First, Nicholas, a would-be Living Artist, seeks to escape his demons in the shadowy underground–but in doing so makes a deal with the devil himself. In her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. And finally, haunted by Nicola’s sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola’s lover, embarks on a mythic journey to the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city to bring his love back to light. There he will find wonders beyond imagining…and horrors greater than the heart can bear. By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination. This special edition includes the short stories “The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight”; “Detectives and Cadavers”; and “A Heart for Lucretia” and the novella Balzac’s War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss.

This landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light.Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Knights.Contents:The Pastel City, 1971 (novel)A Storm of Wings, 1980 (novel)In Viriconium, 1982 (novel)The Lamia & Lord Cromis, 1971 (short story)Viriconium Knights, 1981 (short story)The Luck in the Head, 1984 (novelette)Strange Great Sins, 1983 (short story)The Lords of Misrule, 1984 (short story)The Dancer from the Dance, 1985 (short story)A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, 1985 (short story)

Prepare for a different kind of singularity in this follow-up to the Hugo-nominated novel Blindsight It's the eve of the twenty-second century: a world where the dearly departed send postcards back from Heaven and evangelicals make scientific breakthroughs by speaking in tongues; where genetically engineered vampires solve problems intractable to baseline humans and soldiers come with zombie switches that shut off self-awareness during combat. And it’s all under surveillance by an alien presence that refuses to show itself.Daniel Bruks is a living fossil: a field biologist in a world where biology has turned computational, a cat's-paw used by terrorists to kill thousands. Taking refuge in the Oregon desert, he’s turned his back on a humanity that shatters into strange new subspecies with every heartbeat. But he awakens one night to find himself at the center of a storm that will turn all of history inside-out. Now he’s trapped on a ship bound for the center of the solar system. To his left is a grief-stricken soldier, obsessed by whispered messages from a dead son. To his right is a pilot who hasn’t yet found the man she's sworn to kill on sight. A vampire and its entourage of zombie bodyguards lurk in the shadows behind. And dead ahead, a handful of rapture-stricken monks takes them all to a meeting with something they will only call “The Angels of the Asteroids.”Their pilgrimage brings Dan Bruks, the fossil man, face-to-face with the biggest evolutionary breakpoint since the origin of thought itself.

The first ever collection of Iain Banks' short fiction, this volume includes the acclaimed novella, The State of the Art. This is a striking addition to the growing body of Culture lore, and adds definition and scale to the previous works by using the Earth of 1977 as contrast. The other stories in the collection range from science fiction to horror, dark-coated fantasy to morality tale. All bear the indefinable stamp of Iain Banks' staggering talent.

Underneath the fading sun, Cugel--a hero--emerges. Well, sort of a hero, but more of a trickster. Less Hector, more Ulysses; less Samson, more Jacob; less Tom, and a lot more Huck. Cugel, however, is less likable than any of the these. Selfish, exploitative, and filled with unlimited self-regard, he continually overestimates his own considerable intelligence and fails where a lesser man might have succeeded.Paradoxically, it is Cugel's flaws and failures that keep us on his side during his picaresque journey, and his personality helps organize what might otherwise seem a disconnect series of tales. Vance's prose is still eccentric but more fluid than in the previous "Dying Earth" collection, and his imagination continues to astound: his descriptions of landscapes, individual flora and fauna are mesmerizing, and his plot inventions--particular the "eyes" mentioned in the title--are a source of continual delight.

Gene Wolfe has turned to the fantastic historical world of Greece, in 479 B.C., when the gods walked the Earth. Latro, a mercenary soldier from the north, has suffered a head wound in battle and has been separated from his compatriots. He has not only lost the memory of who he is and where he is from, he has also lost the ability to remember from day to day and must live out of context in an eternal present, every day rediscovering the shreds of his identity and the nature of the world around him, aided only by a written record that he attempts to continue daily and must read every morning.But in recompense for his unhappy condition Latro has received the ability to see and converse with invisible beings, all the gods and goddesses, ghosts and demons and werewolves, who inhabit the land and affect the lives of others, all unseen. Everyone knows that supernatural creatures are constantly around them and sometimes, under special circumstances, can perceive them—but Latro is now constantly able to penetrate the veil of the supernatural, which is both a triumph and a danger.