NOT A STUNT: SF(13) SAMUEL R. DELANY

When I renewed my reading of science fiction back in June, I had in mind that Samuel R. Delany was a writer I was particularly interested in. (Astute readers will guess where this is heading.) The only thing I had ever read by Delany were a few scattered pages from his novel Hogg, possibly to this day the most obscene prose I have ever read. More on that later. But what I knew of Delany was intriguing. He was born in 1942, came from a middle-class African American Harlem background, and attended the Dalton School, that progressive Upper East Side Manhattan institution favored by affluent, artistic parents and characters in Woody Allen films. He began publishing sf around the age of nineteen and has always been considered among its more literary, experimental, and taboo-shattering practitioners. He is gay and often addresses questions of gender and sexuality in work that in addition to fiction includes memoirs and critical studies. Although he never completed a university degree himself, he is also an academic with a string of creditable appointments and currently heads the creative writing program at Temple University in Pittsburgh. Wesleyan University Press keeps much of his backlist in print.

What's not to like?

The only Delany book on the Pringle list is Nova (1968), but I bought up a range of his secondhand paperbacks, including his two most highly regarded works in their Wesleyan editions, Dahlgren (1974) and Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984). Now I have to decide what to do with all these things, because reading them no longer seems like a possibility.

Delany was only twenty-five years old when he wrote Nova, which still makes it his fifth published novel. It's a space opera involving a crew of misfits led by a Lorq von Ray, a dashing, though facially disfigured, young captain who comes from a fabulously wealthy family with something of a pirate background. His nemesis, Prince Red -- and that is actually his name not a title -- comes from a rival, equally wealthy family, and has a mechanical arm that is responsible for our hero's scars. If I refrain from retelling anymore of the plot, it is not out of concern for inserting spoilers. I just like to keep these posts a reasonable length.

The book lost me two different ways. It has aged badly. However innovative the plotting and characters may have been in 1968, it reads today like a novelized version of any number of sy-fy network franchises. And when the literary flourishes appear, they come off as glaring attempts at elevating the style to some notion of what a modernist novel should be. The narrative also shows its age by the attention it pays to the tarot and the Holy Grail legend -- I could smell the patchouli oil and see the tie-dyed wall hangings as I read those parts.

So I am not a convert. I also read The Einstein Intersection, a Delany novella that was more fun that Nova but towards the end didn't make much sense. I quit worrying about that when I read elsewhere that ambiguous resolutions are a Delany trademark. But still what to do with Dahlgren, Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand, and The Fall of the Towers trilogy. I remember Dahlgren as a million-copy bestseller when it came out that I considered reading at the time although I was already over science fiction. Many critics labeled it a masterpiece, and William Gibson writes the introduction to the Wesleyan reprint. But a Harlan Ellison review of the original publication reported giving up on it less than halfway through its 800 pages. And Philip K. Dick called it "a terrible book..I just started reading it and said this is the worst trash I have ever read. And I threw it away." And I respect Philip K. Dick.

I think the jury is still out on Delany more than I had been led to believe. And then there is the question of Hogg. When I was in the book business, I was offered 100 copies of Hogg from a publisher I had never heard of. He told me it was by Delany but was not sf and was "sexually graphic." I asked for a sample, mostly to make sure that it looked professionally published, and bought them. Since I knew we would be selling it based on Delany's name and its rarity the copy had been on my desk for several days before I even bothered to thumb though it.

I am not easily shocked. Actually I am more appalled that people read books and see movies like Eat, Pray, Love than I have ever been shocked by pornography. But what the hell was Delany thinking? What did he need to get off his chest? I hope he doesn't force it on his students at Temple.

Hogg is now in print from FC2, and reviews on sites like Good Reads and Amazon range from "disgusting filth" to "an important examination of the limits of human ... " We sold the first thirty copies or so for $10, then raised the price to $50. On ABE Books that original edition now ranges from $14 to over $100.

Both my read and unread Delany paperbacks are headed for the public library donation box. They should fetch the library between fifty cents and two dollars apiece.

BOOKS DISCUSSED

NOT A STUNT: SF(12) FREDERICK POHL & C.M. KORNBLUTH

Science Fiction as a prescient guide to future technology and society has never much interested me. I read recently that Jules Verne kept abreast of all the latest scientific journals just to up his odds on getting something right. But even with his background research he came up mostly with plots that today are absurd given almost any background in science. Occasionally you read that some writer predicted the internet or the types of computers that we now take for granted. And they "predicted" manned spaced flight, but who couldn't see that coming? But we've only gone to the moon, which is a far cry from the type of intergalactic travel on which much of sf depends. Who is holding their breath for travel faster than the speed of light, time machines, or telepathy as the common means of human communication? These are useful plot devices, as are our encounters with alien life forms. If we were to travel to other galaxies and meet up with aliens, they would be nothing like ourselves or else they would zipping around the galaxies as well. They would most likely be below our evolutionary development, anywhere from an early hominid or more likely a bacteria. If aliens came to see little ol' us, they would necessarily be so far advanced technologically that they might consider us lichens.

That said, there are moments in Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) where well-heeled advertising executives take off for a round of golf or a game of tennis and appear to be playing something very much like a Wii machine. But I don't think this constitutes a "prediction" of the Wii. It is an natural development from Pohl's and Kornbluth's imagining of a future world where space is so limited and the atmosphere so dangerous that anyone who can afford to stays inside.

If there are predictions in this novel, they are much more disturbing than executive pastimes or even the hint of severe global warming. In The Space Merchants, Earth has been monetized, states have been incorporated into commercial zones, and the government has forgone the fantasy of elected officials and allowed corporations to place their own candidates in the senate and the house. Given the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporations' free speech rights when it comes to political contributions, this development may far outweigh whatever foresight the authors showed when combining physical exercise with video games. The author team has also forecast the replacement of "commies" with "consies," dangerous environmentalists who, possibly because of some genetic defect, do not see the total exploitation of Earth and neighboring planets as a necessarily good thing.

The Space Merchants is a thriller in which Mitchell Courtenay, a Star Class Copysmith for the most prestigious ad agency in the universe, has been assigned the plum job of preparing a campaign for the colonization of Venus. This involves convincing pioneering sorts that it will be patriotic, exciting, and lucrative to make the move while not letting them know the planet is a hellhole. But corporate intrigues find Courtenay drugged and shipped to a Central American industrial plant where the algae used in manufacturing most of earth's food stuff is grown in conditions so degrading they could be confused with those on the banana plantations Dole maintained about the time the book was written. But Courtenay's innate abilities as a copywriter can serve him well even there, as well as in the Consie underground that he sees as his ticket out.

I read a review more or less contemporaneous with the novel that used it as a example of sf's failure as social criticism, an evaluation based on the fact that Madison Avenue types, the target of the satire, became one of the novel's most enthusiastic audiences. But of course they did. Didn't New Jersey and New York mafiosi tune in weekly to The Sopranos? Doesn't Hollywood loves to "expose" itself in films like The Bad and the Beautiful and The Player. Had The Space Merchants come out ten years later, I'm sure the producers of Mad Men would have placed a copy on Don Draper's nightstand. And he would have loved it.

NOT A STUNT: SF(11) ROBERT SILVERBERG & JAMES BLISH

I have over the past months read enough mid-century sf to notice several recurring themes, and to have settled on a favorite. Several novels involve The Next Step in Human Evolution, and possibly as a subset of these novels are those that hinge on the question, Is Mankind Ready to Join Intergalactic Society? There are both novels that describe an Apocalyptic Event and those that concerned with life post-apocalypse. And there are those stories, for the most part zany adventures, set in somewhat dystopian but recognizable future versions of our own society, or rather that which could be imagined by the first generation of Post WW II writers. (Everybody smokes in these stories.)

But my favorite genre centers around Man's Encounter with Alien Intelligence. The best book I've read, make that the best sf book I've read this year is The Cold Dark Years by Brian W. Aldiss. (See NOT A STUNT: SF (7) BRIAN W. ALDISS) This short, dark comedy describes our disastrous, for them at least, encounter with gentle, advanced beings who cover themselves in their own excrement and with whom we cannot communicate. Things do not go well.

The last two books I've read are Downward to the Earth by Robert Silverberg and A Case of Conscience by James Blish, two very different novels that concern earth's involvement with intelligent life on newly discovered planets.

Silverberg conceived his novel while in Africa in 1969. By this time, most African nations had achieved independence, and Silverberg's novel takes place on the planet Belzagor, formerly Holman's World, a decade or so after relinquishment. This is the policy adopted by earth to return planets with advanced life forms to their original inhabitants, ceasing whatever colonial or industrial activities we had imposed upon them.

Silverberg's hero, Gunderson, was an administrator on Holman's World. Haunted by his experiences of the place, he is determined to understand at last the mysteries of the Nildor, the blue, elephantine creatures that are the planet's dominant life form. He arrives with a small group of well-heeled human tourists, there for a package tour. They are the novel's comic relief. What he finds are the rundown vestiges of the colonial period, and a planet where what few humans stayed behind after relinquishment have in one way or another gone native. (Yes, the spirit of Joesph Conrad hangs over this novel, and Silverberg, after he wrote it, worried that it was nothing more than a pallid Conrad imitation. It's both more than that assessment while not being anywhere near the Conradian model.)

Gunderson is there to witness the rebirthing ceremony central to Nildor culture, a ceremony they had always kept secret from the colonialist settlers. As he journeys from the tropic zone to the misty highlands -- this is all sounding sillier than it reads -- he encounters old acquaintances in their new post-relinquishment incarnations. There's Van Beneker, happy to be a tour guide until things break down completely. A very unfortunate couple at an abandoned outpost who have been invaded by a parasitic organism. It is using their bodies for the several year gestation period of its young. A former lover, once rather finicky about alien life forms, now walks around clothed only in a transparent, clinging amoeba that is both pet and garment. She tends to her husband Kurtz, who has undergone the rebirthing ceremony Gunderson has returned to experience. Kurtz is now a deformity in constant pain.

Gunderson's rebirth, when it occurs, goes rather better. He comes through it with only an inner transformation, a new, spiritual consciousness that gives him a messianic vision and purpose that I don't think readers are supposed to find as creepy as I did. As he leaves the mountains, he sees himself as "the resurrection and the light," and I thought we had already had one of those. With this religious denouement, Silverberg overplays his hand.

Religion is front and center in James Blish's A Matter of Conscience. Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez is both a biologist and a Jesuit priest. He is part of a four-man team on Lithia, a planet that earth must classify as either suitable for human interaction or a hands-off zone.

Lithians are ten-foot tall reptiles balanced and their hind legs and with opposable thumbs that have gotten them pretty well advanced as a civilization. They are also an atheist's dream come true. Lithians are moral, peaceful, crime-free, and get along just fine with absolutely no concept of God or the spiritual.

Of the four men there to determine Earth's future relations with the planet, one sees its unusually high levels of lithium as a gold mine for the creation of nuclear weapons. Another thinks that for that same reason our policy should be hands off. One seems to be on the fence, and Father Ramon decides that the planet is the creation of Satan, designed to challenge humanity's faith. Their split vote ties up any final decision in committee where Father Ramon is relieved to assume it will languish for years.

Back on Earth, Father Ramon is excommunicated for heresy, since his theory about Lithia is a form of Manichaeism that grants Satan creative powers. But he has other problems. Just as his team departed the planet, a Lithian gave them an unhatched Lithian egg, which grows up to be a unruly young reptile with his own popular TV program and possibly the ability to muster the discontented youth of Earth into a seditious force. At this point I thought Egtverchi -- Lithians have unfortunate, unpronounceable sf names -- was going to become the Anti-Christ and Blish was prefiguring the Left Behind series. But no, Egtverchi stows away on a ship bound for Lithia, where, with his human concepts of right and wrong, he may prove to be the serpent in the garden of that particular Eden. The climax of the story can be interpreted either as God moving in his mysterious ways or a thermonuclear accident.

I don't go along with those reviews that call these books challenging and thought-provoking. That's the hermetically sealed sf world patting itself on the back for moving away from old-fashioned space operas. But I am beginning to find them irresistible entertainment, particularly when they are short, moderately well written, and feature lots of monsters.

NOT A STUNT: SF(10) Poul Anderson

Poul Anderson's Tau Zero (1970) has been my first encounter with hard sf. But this is not as spicy as it sounds. Hard science fiction is science fiction that takes its science seriously, or uses science as an integral plot element. This would distinguish hard sf from space operas, visionary fiction, social criticism, or those novels that are just zany romps through future worlds. Perhaps a few of the books I've been reading were "hard" to some degree, but I never took any of the science elements seriously. Mr. Anderson, however, is a trained physicist, and he is able to write persuasively about the predicament of his space pioneers.

What he writes about relativity and space travel all seems plausible, but then again I am an easy mark since I know nothing about the serious science at work here. Before reading this book all I knew about "tau" was that it was a letter in the Greek alphabet that appeared in crossword puzzles and came in handy while playing the various Boggle-style games I play online. (The fact you can add an "s" makes it doubly useful ) Apparently it is also a measure of speed when discussing the possibility of spacecraft approaching the speed of light. The lower the tau the faster the craft is traveling. Tau Zero would be the speed of light itself.

The fifty scientists, along with the crew members, have signed on for a trip aboard the Leonora Christine to check out an earth-style planet in a nearby galaxy. What for them will be a five year journey will use up 30 years of earth time. Even if they just go and come back they will find an earth void of most of the acquaintances and changed in God knows how many ways. If the planet is habitable, they are to stay, and eventually more colonists will join them.

Guess what? Something goes wrong. They pass through a previously undetected gassy nebula, and the jolt knocks out their retro rockets. In other words they continue to accelerate but have no means of stopping when they get to where they are going.

But these are smart people, remember. Plans are made to go off course to an empty-enough realm of space that shutting off their radioactive shields will not incinerate the ship, make the needed repairs, and then go on...somewhere...some nice galaxy that may have a habitable planet.

Meanwhile, life aboard the Leonora Christine becmes a soap opera. It is the duty of these brave pioneers to choose up partners they can start procreating with on their new planet. As tension mounts with the various catastrophes, the ship becomes a kind of intergalactic Peyton Place. Who's going to be with whom? Who's restless with their first partner? What clandestine affairs are taking place? Is mutiny brewing?

This all plays out with the level of character development you expect from a TV series like one of the Stargate franchises. And that is how it should play out. Tau Zero is 188 pages long. The last thing I would have wanted while reading it is another 100 or so pages of serious character development, which Mr. Anderson, and I do not mean this in a mean way, would have probably botched.

The cool stuff is the scientific predicament. They make the repairs, but there is no where to go. The ship travels faster and faster. Earth, or at the very least human life, almost certainly no longer exists. They are by now hundreds of millions of years into the future, and as their speed increases so does their mass. The Leonora Christine is not longer a spaceship that goes really fast, it has taken on the mass of a small star, and those little bumps the passengers occasionally feel are the galaxies they burst through, leaving who knows what level of destruction in their wake.

Then guess what happens? (Should I be posting "spoiler alerts:" on these blog posts?) They have traveled so far, so fast, that the universe has begun to shrink, just like scientists always said it would, although I don't think they necessarily say that anymore. The Leonora Christine now has to stay along the edge of this contraction so they can find the sweet spot that will allow them to ride out the next big bang.

Think about it. Riding out the next big bang while trying to get back together with your old girlfriend. That is one hell of a plot device.

There is a happy ending. They survive the big bang, and they are still traveling so fast that all they have to do is find a new galaxy about five billion years old and look for a habitable planet. It may be unrealistic to think they get lucky their first time out, but Mr. Anderson cuts them a break. Tau Zero concludes on a green planet, with twenty-five couples ready to start making babies for a new civilization.

Poul Anderson is an author who takes up several shelves in the sf section of any used bookstore. Although I enjoyed this, I am not inclined to read any further into his oeuvre. I don't mind sf writers with right wing political agendas or the misogynist attitudes of their day. But I cannot forgive Mr. Anderson for being a founding member of The Society for Creative Anachronism.

NOT A STUNT: SF(9) THEODORE STURGEON

Dear Mr. Sturgeon,

This letter is something of an apology. I confess I had never considered you a serious writer. It's not as though I had ever read one of your books, but to me you were just another writer with a dozen or more titles in the science fiction section. I could see that you had won both the Nebula and Hugo awards, and that other sf writers frequently blurbed your books using the word "genius," but let's face it. All you guys have won both the Hugo and Nebula awards and you are always calling one another geniuses. Also, you are named after a big ugly fish.

But now I have read one of your books -- More Than Human, to be precise. I may hold off on the genius bit until I read a little more, but I confess I was impressed. The book has an interesting structure that makes for unusual, episodic plotting that comes together nicely in the end.

Congratulations all around.

You new BFF (Best FAN Forever)

Dee

I ended up not sending the above letter. I thought the end was a bit cute, and Theodore Sturgeon died in 1985. But I have found much to admire about the man. He does command an enormous amount of respect among fellow writers, and he is the author of Sturgeon's Law:

"Ninety percent of SF is crud, but then ninety percent of everything is crud."

More Than Human is one of those "next step in human evolution" novels, but rather than taking the grand, cosmological vision of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Sturgeon's novel has a much darker tone. The representatives of Homo Gestalt, those possibly destined to replace us mere homo sapiens, are a motley crew. There is the telekinetic girl from an abusive background, two young African American girls who transport themselves naked wherever they want to go, a baby that appears to have Downs syndrome but is actually the brains behind the whole thing, and an exceptional young boy who kills the woman who I think may have been his mother. These five form a single being who, lacking any social contract with others of its kind, also lacks any sense of morality.

But enough about More Than Human. Theodore Sturgeon shot to the top of my admired author list when I learned he was the author of Killdozer, the 1944 short story that is the basis for the 1974 film of the same name.

Over twenty years ago, I turned on the television one Saturday afternoon and caught all but the first few minutes of the movie that I later learned was called Killdozer. This event had, over the years, taken on a dreamlike quality for me. When I told friends that I had watched a movie that involved a piece of heavy earth-moving equipment possessed by an alien intelligence, I found no one inclined to believe me. When they asked who supposedly starred in this film, things only got worse. Killdozer stars Clint Walker, Carl Betz, and Robert Urich. That's right, an actor most people thought disappeared when they cancelled Cheyenne in 1962, the man who played the father on The Donna Reed Show, and the most uninteresting actor in the world, if you exclude his performance in Invitation to Hell, a made-for-tv movie from 1984 where Urich and Joanne Cassidy move into a suburb and are asked to join a country club that has on its premises an actual doorway to hell. Whereas over the years I have found others who have seen Killdozer, Invitation to Hell appears to have been a movie for my eyes only.

When I saw Killdozer I didn't even know its title until I could find that day's newspaper. And even then I knew only its title. If I stumbled across it now, I would have searched it out on Internet Movie Database by one of its star's names and known all about it within minutes. I would have learned that Theodore Sturgeon not only wrote the short story but was a coauthor of the teleplay. (It was a made-for-tv movie, probably hoping to cash in on the short heyday of mechanized horror prompted by Steven Spielberg's made-for-tv movie Duel. Jerry London, the director of Killdozer did not have a career that followed the same path as Spielberg's. His filmography includes 90 projects, all done for television, including such highlights as eight episodes of The Rockford Files, twenty episodes of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and two episodes of JAG. )

Killdozer also has its own Wikipedia entry, has provided the name for a rock band, and was once mentioned by both Conan O'Brien and Bevis and Butthead. It is also the title story in volume three of The Complete Short Stories of Theodore Sturgeon.

So the wonders of technology have once again unwoven the rainbow, and Killdozer is no longer my closely held secret. At least it is not available on video. Amazon lists two out-of-print versions, an American VHS tape and a import DVD titled Killdozer le viol cosmique.

So answer this question, true or false:

Alan Rudolph's first film was titled Barn of the Naked Dead.

You should have the correct answer in about 30 seconds.

NOT A STUNT: SF(8) WARD MOORE

Ward Moore (1903 - 1978), one of the writers on the Pringle list, was new to me. And now it turns out that I have gone and read the wrong book.

I think I know how it happened. Since I was not familiar with Moore, I did in depth research on him. I read his entire entry on Wikipedia. His novel on the Pringle list is Bring the Jubilee (1953), an alternative history that imagines modern America if the South had won the Civil War. But while scanning sentence summaries of his other works on Wikipedia I noticed this brief entry:

Greener Than You Think , a novel about unstoppable Bermuda grass.

"Unstoppable Bermuda grass." I liked the sound of that. I honestly forgot the novel I was supposed to be looking for and checked Greener Than You Think out from the library. This is no ordinary Bermuda grass we are talking about.

The novel opens in Los Angeles with a down-on-his-luck salesman named Albert Weener answering, against his better judgment, a newspaper ad promising "$50 or more daily to top producers." It ends, decades later, with Weener, Josephine Spencer Francis, and a few others trying out a new formula of weed killer in a world that has already been consumed by mutant Bermuda grass, grass that grows 100 feet tall and can root not only in soil but in concrete, brick, wood, glass, and I suppose the decomposing humanity left in its wake.

This is a very funny book, with a cast of characters that includes Weener and Miss Francis --she's the kitchen scientist who creates the growth formula that mutates the grass-- along with stock characters such as a constantly fulminating newspaper editor, a drunken ex-Naval officer, and a battalion of inept politicians and scientists. Several reviewers on Good Reads have complained that the characters are unlikable. I can't remember who it was, but I know I recently read an established novelist wondering why Amazon reviewers so often make that complaint. Who says characters have to be likable? Especially in the rarified field of apocalyptic comedy. Miss Francis, at least, keeps working on a solution, right up to the very end. As she insists, these things take time. But Albert Weener is Moore's brilliant creation. He's a self-absorbed hustler who during the course of the novel stumbles into becoming one of the wealthiest men in the world. It is not until those final few days, as the grass consumes Europe and the British Isles, that he begins to think this situation might be getting really serious.

Ward Moore wrote very little. He worked in a bookstore in Chicago, was maybe briefly in the Communist party, moved to California, and wound up the book editor for Frontier, a West Coast magazine along the lines of The Nation. At times Greener Than You Thnk gets a bit long-winded, but it has the distinction, as far as I know, of being the most enjoyable end-of-the-world novel out there.

NOT A STUNT: SF(7) BRIAN W. ALDISS

This whole SF thing started because I spent most of last January reading J.G. Ballard novels. Even though I knew they would be science fiction and that I officially neither liked nor read science fiction. I had always made an exception of Ballard and Philp K. Dick. Everything else I had turned my nose up at since around 11th grade.

But when I read a book of Ballard's essays and reviews, I had to come to grips with how seriously he took the field. It was enough to make me take another look, especially once I stumbled across Jim Pringle's 100 Best Science Fiction Novels. Here was list covering the years 1949 - 1985, sprinkled with books I had read as a teenager, and with the added attraction of providing a limited set of titles that did not require my trying to make my way through the current field.

Hence, these to date seven blog posts on specific science fiction writers or novels, and a stack of used paperbacks on my desk that would not be out of place on the shelf of the worlds geekiest ninth grader, circa 1975. (I have had more than one friend, who for some unfathomable reason does not read my blog, take a look at this pile and ask, "What is this about?")

One of Ballard's particular enthusiasms was Brian W. Aldiss, some one I had never read although I knew that he was generally considered "good." I have always had a hard time dealing with the fact that he had written books with the titles Frankenstein Unbound and Dracula Unbound. Without ever having cracked one, I had written them off as quickie pastiche novels of the lowest order. But now I want to read them, because I want to read everything Mr. Aldiss has ever written.

Aldiss has three books on the Pringle list: Non-Stop (1958), Hothouse (1962), and, Greybeard (1964). I read them all and thoroughly enjoyed them. But what really knocked me out was a short book I read for extra credit, The Dark Light Years (1964). If there is anything I dislike more than having someone give me a book to read, it is the impulse I sometimes have to fight back to do the same. The Dark Light Years is that book. Really, you ought to read it. It's great.

The plot, such as it is, goes something like this. After centuries of zipping around the galaxies, humankind has found all manner of extra-terrestrial life, but never of such intelligence that we would hesitate either putting them in earth's new Exozoos or using them as target practice. But then we encounter the Utods, beings with several million years of racial memory, along with the ability to man spacecraft. The only problem is that they look like six-legged hippopotami, except for when they retract their legs and resemble giant, recumbent yams, and their vocal system is so complex we cannot possibly master it, although they have an irritating habit of repeating whatever we say. Oh, and they cover themselves with their own excrement. That's the deal breaker.

Man and Utod is is that trainwreck that has been waiting millennea to happen. . We transport a few specimen to earth, put them in a zoo, study them, puzzle over them, hold scientific debates about them, and since we are convinced, wrongly, that they feel no pain, we vivisect them. Occasionally we hose them down, although they clearly do not like it. They are touched if confused when one of the scientists observing them takes a crap in their cage. None of this really amounts to much since by the end of the novel a "Contained War" between Brazil and England has turned into a true intergalactic conflagration, and they are essentially wiped out, along with most of everything else.

One reviewer on Good Reads called this the most depressing book she had ever read. I don't think she appreciates just how dark comedy can be. In the other Aldiss books I read, people take journeys and learn things. The semi-savages living in "quarters" on the giant spaceship in Non-Stop, struggle their way to "Forward" and discover the mystery of their circumscribed lives. The three-foot-tall arboreal humanoids in Hothouse learn that fending for themselves will involve more than simply following the old ways. (Hothouse is actually pretty silly but fun, and you get to discover the surprising role of the morel mushroom in human evolution.) Greybeard inhabits an post-apocalytic England where he must confront the fact that his world will die out, and that what ever shows signs of surviving is beyond his help or comprehension.

In The Dark Light Years, nobody learns squat. Mankind, very much concerned with both the day-to-day problems of being such superior beings as well as concerned about our own future, continues to spread death through the universe as surely as those first Europeans spread small pox and flu to the New World. But all is not lost. London we learn has been destroyed, but there are plans to rebuild. On a limited scale, of course.

NOT A STUNT: SF(6) GEORGE ORWELL

I am pretty good at literary quizzes, and I especially like those where you identify a work based on its first line. I always get this one right: "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." That's the opening of 1984 by George Orwell. I have never read 1984.

Orwell's novel is the first on the list of David Pringle's Best 100 Science Fiction Novels, the list I have been choosing from for these blog postings. It is the one book on the list that I can tell most any of my friends that I have never read and expect always the same response, "I can't believe that."

Is it unimaginable that I have never read 1984? I have read a lot of other books. According to my Good Reads list, I have read 84 books since the first of the year. Even though that number may be inflated because so many have been relatively short sf novels, I still consistently rank above the national average for "books read per year," which according to the Washington Post is four It's just that in my case none of them has ever been George Orwell's 1984.

Friends ask, "Didn't you have to read it in high school?" No, I did not. I am a victim of American public school education, 1957 - 1969. We didn't have to read books. We made books reports, choosing I suppose from a list of acceptable titles. (1984 was possibly on these lists.) But never in my English classes were we all assigned the same book for outside reading, and there were certainly no such things as Summer Reading Lists. It was during this time that I read several of the other books on the Pringle list: Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters; several by Ray Bradbury, who was my idol at the time; and, in seventh grade about half of us read Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon. (This was only a year after the Cuban missile crisis and we all still thought we might be blown up in the near future. I think Alas, Babylon remains popular on reading lists for early teens. Apocalypse never goes out of style.)

I could blame Aldous Huxley for the fact that I never read 1984. I had around that same time read Brave New World and found it dull. It was a poor introduction to dystopian fiction, as well as probably a denser and more adult novel than a thirteen-year-old needed to read. I have ever since associated the Huxley and the Orwell novel, and never picked up the latter.

So what difference does it make if I go to my grave having never read 1984? As with most rhetorical questions the answer, I think, is obvious. None whatsoever. There are no more pop tests in my future. I don't think I will lose any friends having revealed my dark secret. And I still get that question right on Famous First Line quizzes.

I am feeling brazen. Here are some other things I have never read.

1) Anything by Charles Dickens from beginning to end. (There might be an exception for A Christmas Carol, although it could be that I have seen so many film adaptations so may times that I feel I know it by heart."There is more gravy than grave about you, Marley.")

2) No Faulkner since 9th grade. And then I only had a go at The Sound and the Fury and felt pretty much at sea the whole way through it.

3)Very little that would have been considered "age appropriate" when I was in elementary school and junior high. No Black Beauty or Old Yeller - saw the movies. (Films adaptations of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells made me want to read the originals, which I discovered were long and had few if any of the Ray Harryhausen monsters found on screen. A TV presentation of John Huston's Moby Dick lead to a disastrous encounter with that novel when I was around eleven. I have read it a couple of times since)

4) Nothing by Dostoevsky.

5) None of the following: Tony Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, John Irving, Jack Kerouac, or Stephen King.

I have a copy of 1984 sitting in front of me now. I still don't know if I will read it. For one thing it has the wrong cover. The one pictured above is the proper cover. It also has that ugly, Signet Classic typeface -- so dark it looks like a stain, narrow margins. Whether I ever read it or not will remain my own, dirty little secret.

NOT A STUNT: SF (5) CLIFFORD D. SIMAK

My disdain for science fiction reached its peak in the mid to late seventies. I was working in a used bookstore, and more and more of what went into the sf section featured dragons or gladiators with leopard heads on the cover. It was the fantasy invasion, and the baleful influence of J.R.R. Tolkien was everywhere. Spaceships gave way to cliff dwellings reached only by young couples in loin cloths riding pteradactyls. Overnight it seemed aliens went from looking like respectable, multi-tentacled, horny invaders from another galaxy to gnomic helpmates. Who could take such crap seriously?

I was egged on in my disdain by a co-worker who shared my feelings. He, too, had read science fiction as a child. (We were now in our ultra-mature mid-twenties.) We noticed that just about every other science fiction paperback we shelved had won a Hugo, a Nebula, or a some kind of award. How hard could it be, we wondered. We decided to have a contest to see which of us could win a Hugo or Nebula award before the other. It could be in any category, although we admitted that Life Time Achievement was setting the bar to high. The only requirement would be that the story, novella, or novel had to end with this sentence:

I never knew kweqwolhs could cry.

The idea probably kept us amused for the better part of an afternoon, but I thought of it again when reading Clifford D. Simak's Way Station. This novel did not win a Hugo or a Nebula, but it is saturated with the kind of writing that had convinced me by the mid seventies that science fiction was a second-rate genre no longer worthy of my attention.

The plot concerns one Enoch Wallace. (Now this sounds like a Twilight Zone introduction.) Enoch is a Civil War veteran who 150 years later continues to maintain his family's home in the backwood of Minnesota. Thanks to a visit by an intergalactic traveler, Enoch runs a way station for other such travelers and also never ages. People in the backwoods of Minnesota keep to themselves, we are made to understand, and so the oddity of Enoch's perpetual youth is noted but never inquired about. (And I thought I left my neighbors alone.)

Way Station does a have a plot, and if it had been written by some one else, say someone with a sense of humor, it could have been pretty good. Of course Enoch is not a sophisticated man, although over a century of contact with species from across the galaxies has given him a perspective on life not likely to be shared by his Minnesota hillbilly neighbors. But there is a deadly earnestness to the prose that expresses this thoughts that would not be out of place in a high school literary magazine.

He stood upon the rock and stared out across the river, watching the lazy hawk and the sweep of water and the green carpeting of trees, and his mind went up and out to those other places until his mind was dizzy with the thought of it. And then he called it home.

Simak's treatment of his very special female character, a mute young lady from an abusive backwoods family who can heal the broken wings of butterflies, is especially cringe-inducing. But she does have her good points, as when she turns out to be the key link between some pissed off aliens and the annihilation of the earth. ("A little child shall lead them.")

Of the mid-century sf I have read over the past month or so, this is the third novel to concern itself with mankind's readiness to enter the galactic fraternity of advanced beings. The topic must have been in the air during the 1950's, a neat fit with threats of atomic annihilation, UFO sightings, and cold war politics in general. Looking ahead to what comes up next on the Pringle list, writers soon seem determined to prove that their dystopian vision of the future could outdo that of their peers.

NOT A STUNT: SF(4) ALGIS BURDRYS

Since my return to science fiction I have read a novel that takes a billion years in the future, one set about 30,000 years in the past, and at least one placed in a future with which we have more or less caught up. And then there are those set comfortably out of range in say the 2300's, a time lapse that allows maximum leeway for the writers to toy with what might be possible developments of the technology they were living with as they wrote.

Rogue Moon, by Algis Burdrys, was written in 1959 and takes place in 1959. That makes it a special sort of period piece. I was only eight years old at the time, but the settings and much of the adult behavior Burdrys depicts reminds me of the more mature television and films I saw then. Rich people drive sporty cars and live in ultra-modern glass houses overlooking the ocean. Everyone drinks a lot. Scientists slave away long hours in the lab and have trouble "relating" to others. What sets Burdrys' 1959 apart from the real thing or any other version of it is the nature of the scientists' endeavors. They have perfected a "matter duplicator" capable of sending a man to the moon. This marvel is a joint project of the military and the private sector, and in one priceless, throwaway moment, a moment that probably did not strike Burdrys the way it struck me, Dr. Edward Hawks, the head of the project, tries to adjust the temperature in his office by fumbling with the recalcitrant knobs of his window unit. So the government can send men to the moon but won't fork out for central air.

Each man they send to the moon dies. They die in their effort to penetrate an alien-built labyrinth where one wrong turn means instant death. But each man adds some knowledge to the mapping of the labyrinth, and I guess it says something to the quality of the U.S. soldier that volunteers do not seem in short supply. Hawks has also perfected the process of storing a duplicate of the hapless volunteer, one that can be reconstituted after the real self dies on the moon. Unfortunately, those duplicates invariably go insane, having experienced their own deaths.

Enter one Al Barker, described on the back of the 1960 Gold Medal paperback edition as a "suicidal maniac whose loving mistress was Death." Like all good jacket copy, this has only a tangential relationship to the actual character. He is a one-legged, millionaire adventurer who loves to take chances. Vincent Connington, the odious personnel director of the company funding the moon project, thinks Barker is just the man to survive these missions, and he turns out to be right.

But wait, everything I'm writing implies that Rogue Moon has much more plot than it really does. What Burdrys gives us is a group of characters who all seem to loathe one another, and long, I mean really long conversations about scientific progress, life, and death. I suspect some of it was meant to be weightier than I was finding it. It reminded me at times of the dull parts of the old Outer Limits series, which as I child I thought given to too much talk and not enough monster -- an opinion reconfirmed by the dvd release of the series. But Burdry's finishes things off with an excellent set piece on the moon, and some final twists about the nature of the project that make for a satisfying last dozen pages or so. And by the way, the whole thing is really short.

I liked it. And I really liked the 1960 paperback with its spooky cover and the blurb line "A GREAT SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL!" The blurb is left unattributed since it obviously originates from the publisher and not some outside source.

NOT A STUNT: SF(3) ARTHUR C. CLARKE

Jan Rodericks is the last man on earth. Since he has spent the previous 80 earth years in another galaxy, making the journey there and back by traveling faster than the speed of light, he has aged only a few months during his time away. In his absence there have been major changes on the home planet. Adults have not only quit reproducing, they have died away either by natural causes or suicides that seemed like the most reasonable choice a the time. The most recent generation of children, ages five to fifteen, have so greatly developed their new psychic/spiritual powers, prompted by an unexplained leap in the evolutionary process, that they now live as a kind of single consciousness on the continent of Australia. The slightly repulsive, fungoid image this prompts, at least in my mind, is to be put aside in the face of the miracle of it all. The Overlords, an ominous name for the benign aliens that have shepherded earth through this transformative process for the past century or two, are leaving the planet. They have asked Jan Rodericks to radio them reports.

As the no-longer-human children become part of the Overmind --another creepy sounding but supposedly good thing--Jan Rodericks has this to say. (The following is condensed from several pages of the book.)

"The whole network is beginning to glow...There is a great burning column like a tree of fire...Now it looks like the curtains of the aurora, dancing and flickering across the sky...Something is happening to gravity...of course, the atmosphere is escaping...The buildings round me, the ground, the mountains -- everything is like glass...The light! From beneath me--inside the earth--shining upward, through the rocks, the ground, everything--growing brighter, brighter, blinding--"

That's the conclusion of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. and my god how I wish I had read it when I was fifteen years old. Not that I didn't enjoy last week, but forty years ago it might have beat out Dune for top spot in my reading career. There are twelve foot aliens that look like the medieval image of Satan, but they're nice. Earth becomes a kind of Utopia where people make quick transglobal flights in their private jet cars. This Jan Rodericks person stows away on a starship to witness first hand other galaxies. And finally it is the children who are the focus of it all. They are new beings, ready to play their part in a grand, cosmic drama. And Clarke accomplishes it all in just over 200 pages.

I have never give Arthur C. Clarke his due respect. For years I thought that he has done the "novelization" of the 2001: A Space Odyssey screenplay -- hardly respectable work for one of the triumvirate of sf writers that included himself, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein. His work on 2001 was much more complicated than that. He had wanted the novel to come out well in advance but Kubrick wanted it as a tie-in to the film's release. There is also a story of Clarke exiting the film's premiere at intermission, possibly in tears, but I could be making that part up.

Clarke had a distinguished career in the RAF, developed ground radar systems, and after the war worked on the technology that would eventually lead to communication satellites. In 1956, the 39-year-old author emigrated to Sri Lanka, where he could indulge both his love of scuba diving and his taste for young men. The latter predilection was fully acknowledged by Clarke after a disastrous, brief marriage to an Presbyterian in Florida. In 2000 he was made a Knight Batchelor for his literary accomplishments, and he died in Sri Lanka in 2008. Like so many of his SF peers, he wrote a phenomenal number of books, both sf and nonfiction. One bibliography lists 66 titles, along with his work as a television presenter.

His other book to make the Pringle list is The City and Stars, a 1956 reworking of a 1948 novella, Against the Fall of Night. Perhaps he didn't rewrite it enough, or perhaps the project was misguided to begin with, but reading it made me think Clarke had temporarily forgotten how write in the three years since Childhood's End.

The trouble starts with the first sentence.

Like a glowing jewel, the city lay upon the breast of the desert.

(Imagine writing that sentence and thinking, "Damn, I'm good.")

This is earth a billion years in the future, and the city, Diaspar, is a self-enclosed, technological paradise on a planet otherwise turned to desert. The Central Computer keeps things running, and residents live for a couple of centuries then go back into the computer's memory banks until they are reborn a millennia or so later as adolescents without navels. It sounds boring as hell to me, but the populace seems satisfied except for our hero, Alvin. (Everyone is on a first name basis in Diaspar, and I checked and it would still be a couple of years after the novel that David Seville created the singing chipmunk that would co-opt that name for the next fifty years.) Alvin has never lived before. He is a "unique" and has an itch to find out what really lies outside the insulated glass walls of Diaspar.

But the writing is mostly just terrible. Clarke describes one tedious wonder after another, never letting us simply experience his fully imagined strange world. And the dialogue, never his strong point, often reads like more exposition with quotations marks slapped around it.

Why is this book on the 100 Greatest list? Judging from comments on Good Reads, it is a favorite of those who read it around the age of twelve. That makes sense. It is a Boy's Own Adventure story, perfect for a noncritical audience that wouldn't mind that Childhood's End is brainier, funnier, and more sophisticated.

NOT A STUNT: SF(2) WILLIAM GOLDING

What three things do Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, Elfriede Jelinek, and Claude Simon have in common?

1) There are all three Nobel Laureates, having won the award for Literature in 2008, 2004, and 1985, respectively.

2) If you are like me, you had never heard of them until they won the Nobel.

3) Again, if you are like me, after each won you dutifully glanced at one or two of their novels and thought, "There is no way in hell I would ever make it through one of these things."

The international obscurity of the recipient of the top international literary award not always but often often seems to be one criteria used by the selection committee. But occasionally it can go the other way. When William Golding won in 1983 I wondered, "Why did the author of the international bestseller Lord of the Flies and a handful of other novels nobody reads merit a Nobel Prize?

Like most of my literary prejudices, this one was based on my experience working with secondhand books. No matter how many copies of Lord of the Flies might pile up, twice a year it was assigned in school and you sold out. (Fourteen-year-old boys across America began chanting, "Kill the pig. Drink his blood.") In that same William Golding section were a few pitiful copies of novels with unpromising and strangely similar titles like The Spire and The Pyramid. They never sold. Look at some statistics on Good Reads, and this still seems to be the case. LOTF is on 276,585 lists. Other William Golding novels are on as few as six readers' lists, and the only title to reach an even 300 is The Inheritors.

I was that 300th reader of The Inheritors. It made David Pringle's list for the year 1955. The secondhand copy I picked up was a trade paperback with a cover illustration of a crudely carved human figure. On the back were three positive reviews, one by George Plimpton; a photograph of the smiling, avuncular author; and, of course, the line "A novel by the author of Lord of the Flies." What was missing, anywhere on the book, was any indication of its subject matter. Possibly Mr. Golding was then at such a height of his fame that no plot teaser was deemed necessary. Or it could be that the publishers wisely did not want to discourage the reader with the news that they were buying a novel where all the main characters were Neanderthals.

I'm glad I didn't write this blog posting immediately after I finished The Inheritors. At that time I was vague on a few of the plot points, and I had not been all that wrapped up in the adventures of Lok, Ha, Nil, Liku, Fa, the old woman, and the little one. But the book has grown on me, largely because I realize that it succeeds at not being ridiculous. This is not some prequel to Clan of the Cave Bear. It's a 200 page, slice-of-life novel covering a few days in the life of a species soon to become extinct.

This group has a rudimentary language that still requires extensive miming to carry its meaning. They preserve a fire but do not know how to kindle one. For meat, they chase the hyenas away from animals freshly killed by larger predators. Other than that its grubs and shoots, like on Survivor Man.

Then along come the homo sapiens, with their fancy canoes and complete sentences, and it's all over. They, which is to say, we, have no compunction about killing these forest devils, although their young ones make cute pets. Our forefathers wreak their casual havoc and then go sailing across the lake to better hunting grounds. End of story. End of species. Beginning of life as we know it.

I'm still not sure about that Nobel Prize, but I am 99% sure that I enjoyed The Inheritors more than I would anything by whoever Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio is.

NOT A STUNT: SF(1) EDGAR PANGBORN

Thirty thousand years ago, remnants of the Martian race left their dying planet and settled on earth. They live in vast underground and submarine complexes, monitoring the development of mankind and waiting for the moment that Union between the civilizations might be possible. (Those first twenty thousand years or so must have been pretty tedious.)

Fortunately this is not the subject matter for a pseudo investigation on either the Discovery or the History Channel. It is the basis for Edgar Pangborn's 1954 novel A Mirror for Observers. I said I was going to read some old sf, and this has been my first foray into the world of mid-20th century science fiction. Did I love this book? No. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Did it have mind-bending concepts that hold up after sixty years. Not by a long shot.

For a novel culminating with a pandemic that destroys an enormous amount of the earth's population, it was a surprisingly cozy tale. There is Elmis, the good Martian observer, pitted against humanity-hating Namir, the renegade bad Martian. They walk among us, passing easily as human so long as they do not run short of a deodorant spray that disguises their Martian scent, although they still have to be careful around horses. Elmis has been dispatched to Lattimer, Massachusetts, where he is to monitor the progress of a young boy with the ridiculous name of Angelo Pontevecchio. He is "special," and Martians are always on the lookout for humans that might help lead the species forward to a condition warranting Union. Unfortunately, Angelo has also attracted the attention of Namir, and so the fight for -- well, not really his soul. Just the direction he will take in what could be an extraordinary life.

The coziness comes from the small-town New England atmosphere, the setting in a boarding house filled with eccentrics, and the guilelessness of young Angelo. Then there is Sharon Brand, a little girl also filled with potential greatness and whom I found somewhat cloying.

After trouble in Lattimer, the plot jumps a decade or so. Angelo resurfaces in New York City, living with friends from his hometown who in fact are none other than the evil Martians. They have started a kind of ultra-nationalist political group and host cocktail parties in a swanky penthouse apartment. Sexy women work for them and vie for Angelo's -- well, again, it's not his soul exactly. But they want to keep him distracted. Events rush to a conclusion, with Angelo and Sharon, now a concert pianist, reunited just as most of the world dies from a virus released by the bad Martians. The couple end up running a hardware store in New England, and they still have greatness in them.

Peter S. Beagle, who authored several bestselling fantasy novels in the 1960's and knew Pangborn, writes in the Afterward, with breathtaking understatement, that Pangborn has often been accused of a "besetting sentimentality." Pangborn has Elmis the good Martian truly love humanity, which allows Pangborn to love his own characters. I had a real fondness for the Martians. They live for centuries, but their human bodies grow morbidly obese as they age, and that Martian smell gets harder and harder to disguise.

Pangborn himself was an interesting character. He was born into a literary family in 1909. His father was an attorney who also worked as an editor for Webster's dictionaries. His mother, Georgia Wood Pangborn, was a successful author of supernatural fiction. (You can read anthologies of her stories on Google Books. I have looked at them, and they are very much "of their day.") Pangborn briefly attended both Harvard and the New England Conservatory of Music, did military service, and for years sold what he termed hackwork to pulp magazines. When he was forty-two, Galaxy Magazine published his short story "Angel's Egg", and his mature career began. His biggest seller was the sf adventure novel Davy. I remember frequently looking at it in its mass market paperback edition and thinking it looked too long, and that the nearly naked man on the cover and the blurb about post-apocalyptic sex would never make it past my parents. (I was 12 at the time.) Pangborn never married and lived with his sister on a small farm outside Woodstock, New York. Beagle describes him as a kind, thoughtful man, resigned to his relative lack of fame, and who wore his hair in braids. He died in 1976.

A Mirror for Observers was not a bad re-introduction to sf. I wanted to read these books in crummy old paperback editions, but this was a Bluejay Special Edition from the 1980's. Hence the afterward by Peter S. Beagle. But I do have some very beat-up pb's of Arthur C. Clarke novels to look at next.

THIS IS NOT A STUNT AND DON'T CALL IT SCI FI

There's a lot of ground to cover here, but I am going to try to keep it short.

When I decided to start a blog the one thing I knew I did not want it to be was a stunt. You know, like that woman who cooked all the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Or the guy who tried to live with zero carbon footprint. One man read the Bible and aspired to live strictly by its rules for one year. Another read the Encyclopedia Britannica, perhaps because some one else had already laid claim to the Oxford English Dictionary.

These are stunts, done with a book deal in mind if not already in place, and, in the best of all possible scenarios, Hollywood will come knocking. Although I doubt that guy who read the OED is holding his breath for a call from Dreamworks. An on-air chat with Terry Gross is a real possibility, and in the most extreme cases, stunters might make it onto Oprah.

So No Stunts, I swore, No Stunts!

Without benefit of any sort of transition -- When I was an adolescent I read a fair amount of science fiction. I think I was more or less done with it by the end of eighth grade.That was when Frank Herbert's Dune was serialized across an unheard of four issues of Analog Magazine, and when I finished it I thought that there could not only never be a better science fiction novel, there could never be a better novel period. (I was allowed to subscribe to Analog because it was the only science fiction magazine that never had half-naked women on the cover.) By college I was telling people, should the topic come up, that I did not like science fiction. Invariably, whomever I told that then felt compelled to recommend the one science fiction novel I was sure to like. "No, really, this is perfect for people who don't like science fiction."

Over the years I would sometimes read something that somehow "transcended the genre." What that meant in practical terms was Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. But Dick now has three volumes in the Library of America, right up there with Emerson and Melville. And Ballard really isn't always science fiction. At least not the ones I read.

Around the first of this year I went on a serious Ballard binge, and of course it is science fiction, at least by his definition. It's an exploration of inner rather than outer space. It got me thinking about the genre again, and reading Ballard's memoirs and essays really got me interested. There, I learned that to call the genre sci fi marked you as a hopeless parvenue. Properly speaking it should be referred to as sf. And I came across Ballard's review of The Billion Year Spree, Brian Aldiss's 1974 survey of the genre. Looking for a copy of that, I came across David Pringle's 100 Best Science Fiction Novels: 1949 - 1985. I was intrigued.

For one thing, I was surprised how many of the best from the 1950's were the ones I read in the 1960's. And since I worked around used books for thirty years, there were very few titles on the list that I could not visualize in their twenty- to thirty-year-old paperback editions.

So I have decided to give them a try, but this is not a stunt. For one thing, I have absolutely no commitment to this project. I do not intend to read them all, and I have no interest in rereading what I've read before, even if it was forty years ago. (Following a disheartening experience in the 1980's, I have always thought that Ray Bradbury novels need to come with the warning lable, Do Not Read Past the Age of 25.) I am not going to try reading them in order, but I do have one fetishistic preference. I want them to be in crummy mass market paperback editions. If I can't find those, or if those editions have exorbitant, collectors' prices, I want my copies to come from the library with broken bindings and lots of stains. And, yes, I will write about them for Potato Weather. Maybe.

But even though I may write about them on occasion, this is not a stunt. I expect no book contract, and if Dreamworks calls, I'm sorry, I can't come to the phone.