Overshadowed Sci-Fi Books or My Growing TBR

I feel like I have a lot of posts recently that are like "Sorry I don't have a review written. Please enjoy this rambling instead." And hey, here's another one!

Also I feel like I haven't been visiting other blogs so much this week but things have been CRAAAAZY busy at work, which always seems to be what happens whenever I start Monday thinking "Hey, this week looks like it will be really light." I need to stop doing that. The problem is I have less down time than usual to pop on to blogs while I'm in the office, and then by the time I get home* the last thing I want to do is have to read and understand something and then form a coherent thought in response. Instead I've spent a lot of my time playing Dots.The music when you complete a box is very satisfying.

While on the train home today I read a Cracked article all about sci-fi books that you're probably missing out on. Now obviously, I read a lot of Cracked. And link to a lot of their stuff here. I should probably get paid or get a t-shirt or something for all this free advertising I'm sending their way. This article especially won me over in the intro when Brockway pointed out how few book related posts they do

"Perhaps there's good reason for the lack of book-themed content. Perhaps you, as casual Internet readers, don't care about books. Perhaps you, as casual Internet readers who don't care about books, should go fuck yourselves."

Already, we're starting this off on a good foot. And I mean this sincerely. I was still a little worried about what books would be listed or if they'd be anything I'd be interested in.  I mean, Cracked tries, but they're primary audience is guys and not necessarily the most sophisticated ones. Who's to say any of the books they'd recommend would be an interest to me at all? Guess what? They win and I now have 5 sci-fi books I want to check out.

There's a Murakami on the list AND 2 out of the five books feature a female protagonist. My heart soars a little bit when I see that because, honestly, how many female protagonists are there in sci-fi? Probably more than I assume but given all the crap going on with sci-fi and female authors** right now, I think not enough is a safe answer.

The list isn't perfect. No list of "books you should check out" ever will be. I wish there could have been some Butler on there, although she wouldn't have necessarily fit on this list since they were looking for less well-known books from well-known authors and Butler isn't well known enough. Yet. Though she really should be and I was happy to see someone recommended her in the comments.

Go check out the list, enjoy the Duck Tales reference, and add at least one of these books to your TBR pile because at least one of them has to strike your fancy.

Updated to include the names of the books on the list, even though it's only 5 of them and you should go read the article so you hear the reasoning behind why read these. But anyway
5. Idoru by William Gibson
4. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
3. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
2. The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson
1. Kalki by Gore Vidal

*When the trains aren't busy derailing and messing up the whole "getting home" part of my day

**I am linking to one post on Chuck Wendig's Terrible Minds blog, written by guest writer Karina Cooper, gives a good overview of all the crap going on, as well as lots of links out to other pieces you should probably read. Just try to read them all at once or your bound to want to stab lots and lots of things.

50 Essential Sci-Fi Books (most of which I haven't read)

Sarah posted this list of the 50 Essential Science Fiction Books as decided by Richard Davis over at AbeBooks. I love lists so OF COURSE I decided to post the list here and see how I did. Not well, is the answer, but here we go anyway. Bolded titles are the ones I've read

1. A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
2. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
4. When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer
5. Odd John by Olaf Stapledon
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
8. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
9. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
10. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
11. Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak
12. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
13. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
14. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
15. The Death of Grass (or No Blade of Grass) by John Christopher
16. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
17. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
18. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
19. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
20. Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon
21. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
22. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
23. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
24. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
25. Dune by Frank Herbert 
26. Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
27. Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan
28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
29. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
30. Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
31. Ringworld by Larry Niven
32. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
33. Roadside Picnic / Tale of the Troika by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky
34. The Female Man by Joanna Russ
35. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
36. The Stand by Stephen King
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
38. Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster
39. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
40. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
41. Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
42. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
43. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
44. Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo
45. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
46. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
47. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
48. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
49. Acme Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware
50. Embassytown by China Mieville

So 6 out of 50 (I must have miscounted before when I commented on Sarah's post). I'm surprised it's so low given I did take an entire class on Sci-Fi lit in college. But I suppose that focus was more on short stories. There are a few on here I've wantched to check out for awhile (Do Androids Dream) but I honestly haven't even heard of a lot of the titles on here.

"They keep an eye on...overtly free thespian interpretations"

I've decided I'm not clever enough to come up with my own witty titles, so I'll just take a quote out of whatever part of the book I'm in.

I have gone back and forth about what to write about. I realized I never write about the plot in these entries. And then I thought about a line in the play The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged about covering the plot of a play in a footnote and how academic papers gloss over the whole point of a book, the story, for the minutiae. Then I tried writing out the plot a few dif ways but I was getting bored with it. My original and at this point current point for this blog is to act as a book club or classroom and discuss the books assuming they've been read already. This way I can talk about certain moments within the story, which I think are more interesting. I figure if people comment there can be a dialogue about whatever part I wrote about or some other part or what have you. So instead of me writing out a plot summary, here's one from Wikipedia: The Eyre Affair plot.

I've been having trouble trying to decide what to write for this post. As I mentioned I tried a couple summaries but they just bored me. I tried finding a line or 2 I liked, but I couldn't find any I really wanted to talk about. I thought maybe I'd go over a character but it was hard for me to discuss them within this book and how far I've read, since I've read the whole series and know all the other times they pop up. I've written a few paragraphs and I keep deleting them because they aren't going anywhere. So I thought maybe I'd write about why I like this book so much and why I keep re-reading it.

It's on one level a crime drama. There's definitely a fascination with crime stories and most of the NYT Bestsellers fall into this category. Thursday is a veteran of the Crimean War, she was a police officer and now she's with special operations and she's looking for the person that stole a priceless manuscript, Martin Chuzzelwit.

On a different level, it's science fiction. This takes place in an alternate universe where re-egineered dodos are common enough that they're no longer on the endangered species list, there's an entire SpecOps group to police the timeline (SO-12 the ChronoGuard), Crimean War has been going on for over one hundred years and the main villain, Acheron Hades, "can lie in thought, deed, action and appearance" (27). Yet everyone is so blase about these things that it seems more realistic. Because the characters don't get caught up in how crazy things are, the reader doesn't. Even Hades is treated in this type of manner. He can make you turn your gun against yourself using what seems to be mind control, bullets flatten against him, he can project different appearances to disguise himself and while everyone knows he's unusual and dangerous, there is no questioning what he is or how he can do these things. There are those who are skeptical of his abilities but those who know them to be true don't question how he does it.

Then of course, the Prose Portal, which lets you enter any work of literature, and all of Mycroft's inventions are certainly at home in science fiction. But perhaps because of the focus of the book is a world where art is so important that it's hard to categorize the book as science fiction. It falls more comfortably, in my mind anyway, in Fantasy. I think it's the traveling into books that puts it there for me. There's no science that can be used to explain that (although I love the BookWorms). If not fantasy than definitely surrealism.

The book is also a satire, especially with the conglomerate Goliath. As described in the intro to chapter 7:

"...No one could argue that we owe a debt of gratitude to the Goliath Corporation. They helped us to rebuild after the Second War and it should not be forgotten. Of late, however, it seems as though the Goliath Corporation is falling far short of its promises of fairness and altruism. We are finding ourselves now in the unfortunate position of continuing to pay back a debt that has long since been paid -- with interest..." (71)

Goliath is a mega-corporation that has its hand in every piece of the government, including major interests in defense, which just like in our world, is big business. Goliath mimics 1984's Big Brother but because people aren't cowering in fear of Goliath it almost seems more real and more likely a scenario than other more forceful distopias like The Wanting Seed or Brave New World.

I guess what I like best about the book is the humor. There are references to all types of literature, lots of Shakespeare (which I obviously love), ridiculous character names like Jack Schitt and just the general tone of the book makes me laugh. A production of Richard III is treated like a showing of Rocky Horror with people yelling out lines and responses, and even getting in on the act. It's hard to capture the tone of the book in a few lines, since most of the jokes are spread out and the humor doesn't translate unless you've been reading. Here's an example of one of Mycroft's inventions: "In the early seventies he had developed an extraordinarily beautiful machine that did nothing more exciting than predict with staggering accuracy the number of pips in an unopened orange." (102) And of course I like the quote I used in the title.

Fforde, Jasper. The Eyre Affair. Penguin Group, New York. 2001