I came across yet another list of the “100 science fiction books everyone should read.” Like every other one I’ve seen, it’s an arbitrary selection and not at all what I would have chosen (though it does earn a point for mentioning The Fifth Head of Cerberus.) Rather than reprint that list here with the usual “bold what you’ve read,” I instead compiled my own. It’s half the length of the other and perhaps just as arbitrary, but I daresay it’s better reading.

A lot of writers you might have expected are missing. In some cases it’s because I haven’t read them yet, but usually it’s deliberate. For instance, I have no desire to re-read anything by Isaac Asimov no matter how historically important he may be, so why include The Foundation Trilogy? (And I think John Sladek is more reliable on the Three Laws of Robish, anyway.)

There are a lot of short story collections mentioned. Partly it’s because I like short stories, but mainly it’s because many writers are better at shorter lengths.

I could easily have made a valid list using just the works of Wolfe, Wells, Lafferty and Dick, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the obsessive.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: the Original Radio Scripts

J.G. Ballard, Chronopolis

Greg Benford, Timescape

Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination, Starburst

Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

Algis Budrys, Rogue Moon

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

Arthur C. Clarke, Childhood’s End

Samuel Delany, Driftglass

Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle, The Preserving Machine, or any other of his better novels or short story collections

Thomas M. Disch, Fun with Your New Head, Camp Concentration

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Diana Wynne Jones, A Tale of Time City

C.M. Kornbluth, The Best of C.M. Kornbluth

Frederick Pohl & C.M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants

Henry Kuttner, The Best of Henry Kuttner

R.A. Lafferty, Nine Hundred Grandmothers, or any other collection of his short stories¹

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

Stanislaw Lem, Solaris, The Cyberiad

Barry Malzberg, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, or whatever else you can find²

Walter M. Miller, Jr., A Canticle for Liebowitz

George Orwell, 1984

Frederick Pohl, The Best of Frederick Pohl

Rudy Rucker, Master of Space and Time, or any collection with Harry Gerber stories

Joanna Russ, The Adventures of Alyx, And Chaos Died

Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow

Robert Sheckley, Dimension of Miracles, or any collection of his short stories

Keiichi Sigsawa, Kino no Tabi³

John Sladek, Tik-Tok, Mechasm

Cordwainer Smith, The Rediscovery of Man

Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

William Tenn, Immodest Proposals, or any other collection of his short stories

James Tiptree, Jr., Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, or any other collection of her short stories

Yasutaka Tsutsui, Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Ian Watson, The Very Slow Time Machine, or any of his early novels

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau

Gene Wolfe, The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, The Book of the New Sun

John C. Wright, The Golden Age trilogy

Yevgeny Zamyatin, We

1. If you need evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with the publishing industry, note that The Collected Stories of R.A. Lafferty still doesn’t exist.↩
2. It is not required to read a lot of Malzberg; a brief glimpse of his universe will suffice for most readers.↩
3. Good luck finding this one. The contract to publish the Kino stories in English fell through shortly after the first volume was printed. You can get a taste of Sigsawa’s work by watching the animated series Kino’s Journey, which heads my short list of anime for people who think they hate anime.↩

I write like
H. P. Lovecraft

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Depending on which sample of text I use, I also write like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dan Brown (ugh), Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams, Chuck Palahnuik, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Defoe, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde or James Joyce. But not R.A. Lafferty or Flann O’Brien. Oh well, nobody else can really write like them, either.

Actually, when I read my writing, it just sounds like me.

Update: A bit of background about that site.

“Sing to the Mountains” is really not all that bad, if you imagine it being sung by the Muppets.

From the comments here.

Here are Dylan’s improved lyrics to “Gather Us In.”

Here’s a little something for Yes fans.

Via Art and Adventure, a different sort of Hobbit.

An old interview with the late Martin Gardner. (Via .clue.)

Dr. Hoo. (Via Pixy.)

Public Library Ninja.

Miku does Mozart.¹

“She was warming to him, he could tell, but …”

1. Background on Hatsune Miku here.↩

Spotted at Costume-Con 28:

Update: I’ve uploaded the first batch of pictures here.

*****

Don’t waste your money and time on Hollywood drivel. Watch The Secret of Kells instead.

Terry Teachout on Flannery O’Connor

Gene Wolfe on J.R.R. Tolkien

John C. Wright on Jorge Luis Borges

(Via TSO and JCW.)

Even if I had a television, I wouldn’t be able to watch Al ‘n’ Me. It’s broadcast only on “Metromedia,” which is not available in most markets at this time. Until that classical-era sitcom receives the wider distribution it deserves, you’ll have to make do with Acropolis Now, featuring such low-lifes as Heraclitus and Aristophanes and their mother the Oracle, and Socrates and Plato. A degree in Classics is not necessary to appreciate the show.

If you prefer modern, interactive entertainment, here’s the do-it-yourself Bayeux Tapestry.

(Via Maureen.)

William Tenn, who wrote some of my favorite stories, died a week ago. I wanted to link to “Bernie the Faust,” which SciFi.com used to host, but when they changed their name from the offensive “SciFi” to the stupid “SyFy,” they dropped the story. However, I did find an interview with Tenn in which he reads “On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi.” The story starts shortly after the forty-minute mark, but the entire interview is worth hearing.

From Joe Carter’s weekly list:

Over the past ten years television—long considered the most embarrassing form of mass media—has come to surpass films and novels as the dominant form of narrative fiction. The advent of the DVD revolutionized television, making it possible (and profitable) to combine the depth of novels with the visual storytelling of film. The result was the greatest period of quality and innovation in the medium’s history—and some of the greatest works of pop culture produced in a hundred years.

Hmm. I quit watching teevee decades ago, when I realized that I could watch the first five minutes of any action/adventure show and accurately predict the rest of the episode. I have not lived in a house with a working television set since 1982. Aside from an occasional Simpsons episode at a friend’s house, I’ve seen very little American television since the first generation of Star Trek.¹

I gather that things have changed, a little. I’ve heard good things about Babylon 5. No less a critic than Barbara Nicolosi has praised Battlestar Galactica. I did have a chance to watch the first few episodes of Firefly earlier this year, and it does merit further investigation. However, Firefly was cancelled after fourteen episodes — perhaps things haven’t changed all that much, after all.

1. I have watched a lot of Japanese animated television these past few years — see my other weblog — the best of which is very good indeed. (I’m tempted to remark that the Japan may be a strange, foreign place, but Hollywood is downright alien.) Most, however, is of no interest whatsoever, just like most American television.↩

stupid minds think alike:  Not true. If it were, there’d be no need to reconcile House and Senate bills.

Bonus quote:

I’m sick of hearing the vampires whine about what a dreadful curse it is to be eternally young and beautiful and rich.

… and none whatsoever for music. I’ve never understood why Robert Zimmerman is considered a great songwriter. I’m not alone.

Post script: Alright, there is one Dylan song — sorta— with lyrics worth noting.

Do you tweet? Are your thoughts expressible in no more than 140 characters? Perhaps you should reconsider. Here are a variety of philosophical arguments against using Twitter. For instance:

Natural Law Argument
(1) It is wrong to do what is not natural.
(2) There is nothing remotely natural about broadcasting the minutiae of your life to all and sundry whenever it takes your fancy.
(3) Therefore, Twittering is wrong.

(Via First Things.)

*****

A useful term:

A related concept is heiwa-boke (hei-WA boh-keh), literally meaning “numbed from too much peace,” which describes the state of literally being made stupid by living in a country that’s overly harmonious, like the Japanese who traveled to Iraq in 2004 to help rebuild the country only to be promptly kidnapped because, well, they were in friggin’ Iraq.

*****

A piece on the Montreaux jazz festival included this note about an unlikely pairing:

The pair [Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock] ended with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — which Lang Lang says inspired him when he heard it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon at 2 years old.

Here’s that cartoon, a classic combination of music and violence. The pianist you hear is likely Shura Cherkassky.

Charles Ives is often celebrated for having anticipated many of the innovations of twentieth-century music. Less often noted is that he also anticipated, if that’s the right word, P.D.Q. Bach. Some years back, an acquaintance for whom I played a recording of Three Places in New England was scandalized by the second movement — real music isn’t supposed to be funny, he said. (Tell that to Mozart.) Here it is, the ideal music for the Fourth of July:

It’s become trendy in recent years to complain that the music of P.D.Q. Bach overshadows that of the composer Peter Schickele. I’ll grant that the humor is hit-and-miss, with misses predominating on the later recordings. Sometimes, though, the jokes work. Here’s the fourth movement of the “Unbegun Symphony.”¹

If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill while waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks tonight, why don’t you invite 35 of your closest friends over with their instruments and run through some American music of a different sort. Here’s the score to Terry Riley’s In C.

1. Strictly speaking, this isn’t P.D.Q. Bach, since Schickele claimed it as his own, so to speak.↩

One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.

Identify the speaker:

1. “I have actually outlived myself.”

2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”

3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”

4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”

5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”

6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”

7. “Beethoven was wrong!”

8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.

9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?

10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?

11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism’”?

12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies’”?

13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?

14. What is 8’37″ better-known as?

15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?

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