The original paperback, Inherit the Stars by British writer James P. Hogan (1941-2010), had a terrific cover – the kind that made you buy the book. The artwork appears to show astronauts on the Moon finding a dead astronaut, but that is deceptive. Hogan creates a scientific mystery because the dead astronaut has been there for 25,000 years.
I first read Inherit the Stars in 1992 but after seeing Whitney’s review on YouTube, I wanted to reread the story. I went to Amazon but couldn’t find the book. Was it out of print? I did find it on Audible. Later, I discovered that Inherit the Stars and its sequel The Gentle Giants of Ganymede are now being sold together as The Two Moons for the Kindle. A bargain for $6.99, especially since Whitney also praised the second book. It turns out that there are five books in the series being sold as three Kindle editions. The series is called Giants. Only the first three novels are available on Audible. The Science Fiction Book Club once published the first three novels as The Mirnervan Experiment. Ballentine also published a paperback called The Giants Novels that contains all three.
Before anyone rushes out to buy Inherit the Stars, I need to describe it more, but not enough to give spoilers. Hogan’s story is the kind you want to figure out for yourself. It kept me guessing for the entire novel even though I had read it before. That worried me. Why wasn’t it more memorable? Was that an indication it was a bad book? I don’t think so. How the story is told isn’t very memorable, but the ideas are big-time fun. I did remember some of those, but not connected to the book.
Inherit the Stars is basically scientists talking about one mystery after another. There’s no real plot. A lot happens, but it’s not dramatic. With each discovery, there’s a new puzzle, which makes you think and try to guess what caused each mystery. Inherit the Stars is science fiction focused on ideas and not storytelling. I’ve told you the first mystery, but I don’t want to give away any others.
However, I will give you some fun clues. Inherit the Stars reminds me a lot of Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. Hogan’s prose is similar to Clarke’s. At one point, the story reminded me of the classic short story “Omnilingual” by H. Beam Piper. The novel also triggered memories of Gateway by Frederik Pohl. At other times it reminded me of the Winston Science Fiction, a series of young adult SF that came out in the 1950s, especially the entries where the protagonists find relics of ancient alien technology. If you love alien archeology stories, you might like Inherit the Stars.
I call Inherit the StarsPre-NASA Science Fiction, by which I usually mean science fiction written before Mariner 4 photographed Mars in July 1965. Until NASA started exploring the solar system with robotic probes, many people hoped that we would find life, even intelligent life somewhere on other planets in our solar system. For example, Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land from 1961 imagines Mars being inhabited by a dying race. However, after Mariner 4, serious science fiction assumed we were alone in the solar system. (I must admit, that I still love Pre-NASA science fiction. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, I desperately wanted us to find Martians.)
I consider Hogan’s 1977 Inherit the Stars Pre-NASA Science Fiction because Hogan maintains the hope that we had neighbors. However, some readers might feel Hogan’s ideas might come across like those of Erich von Däniken, who wrote Chariot of the Gods? Another reviewer dismissed this book as unbelievable. Personally, I find Erich von Däniken’s theories to be insulting to humanity. But I consider Hogan’s speculation to be great science fictional fun.
Most science fiction stories seem to go stale after a couple decades. This week, I listened to The Heads of Cerberus by Frances Stevens, initially published 106 years ago. The story had passed its expiration date decades ago, but I still found it mildly enjoyable as a historical curiosity.
If you’re not fascinated by the evolution of science fiction, I’ll understand you leaving this essay now. The Heads of Cerberus is not a forgotten classic. It gets points for being an early example of time travel and dystopian fiction written by a woman, but it’s not a good example. At best, it’s a sample from 1919, the kind that MIT Press is reprinting in its Radium Age science fiction series.
Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948) published several fantasy and science fiction stories between 1917 and 1923 as Francis Stevens. This makes her a pioneering author in the pre-Amazing Stories era, especially as a woman writer, but she is practically forgotten today. I just learned about Francis Stevens by reading a two-part review of “Sunfire” on Science Fiction and Fantasy Remembrance (Part 1, Part 2) by Brian Collins. That review inspired me to research her, and what I learned inspired me to read The Heads of Cerberus.
The Heads of Cerberus was first serialized in five 1919 issues of The Thrill Book. It was first printed in hardback in 1952. It’s been reprinted at least a dozen times since.
I listened to a free copy on LibriVox. There are several public-domain ebook editions available, here is one at Gutenberg Australia. Lisa Yaszek who edited The Future is Female! series for theLibrary of America recently published a collection of Francis Stevens’ stories at MIT Press Radium Age series called The Heads of Cerberus and Other Stories. Gertrude Barrows Bennett is getting rediscovered. However, she’s been rediscovered before, it just never sticks.
The Heads of Cerberus is about three people from 1918 Philadelphia traveling to Philadelphia in 2118. Bob Drayton is a disbarred lawyer. Terry Trenmore is his Irish friend who is a powerfully built giant. And Viola Trenmore, Terry’s beautiful little sister, and just seventeen. In 2118 they find a dystopian society run by a handful of weird characters. The story is painfully simple, although I enjoyed it somewhat. The fun in reading these old science fiction tales is not the storytelling, but seeing how people imagined science fictional ideas before the concept of science fiction was invented.
The 19th century had several tales of people traveling to the future that could have inspired Bennett, each with a unique method of time travel. In “Rip Van Wrinkle,” Washington Irving has his title character sleep for twenty years after drinking potent liquor. Edward Bellamy had Julian West sleep for 113 years via hypnosis in Looking Backward. Frances Stevens has her characters jump ahead two hundred years by sniffing grey dust from a vial of mysterious ancient origins. The vial’s stopper is shaped like Cerberus.
As I said, The Heads of Cerberus isn’t very sophisticated. Its tone reminded me of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, which were for children. Those books were often about ordinary people meeting extraordinary beings in strange places. Bennett’s imagined future is minimalistic, and somewhat goofy, reminding me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. However, Stevens lacks the creative imagination of Baum and Carroll.
Edward Bellamy created a complex economic system for his future society that inspired many readers in the 19th century to form over five hundred Nationalist Clubs based on socialist ideas in Looking Backward. Francis Stevens imagines an economy based on the number of hours worked. Her society was ruled by an elite called The Superlatives. Ordinary people didn’t have names but numbers, and the Superlatives had names based on cardinal virtues like the Loveliest, The Bravest, the Fastest, the Strongest, etc.
The main problem with Stevens’ science fiction is her future society isn’t a philosophical idea she believed in or promoted, but merely conjured up quickly to fit a plot. Bennett was a young widow, with a child and mother to support after her dad died. She was a stenographer but made extra money by writing for the pulps. She quit writing after her mother died. The Thrill Book that serialized The Head of Cerberus was a low-paying market, but Stevens sold three novels to Argosy, a much-admired pulp after it. They were Claimed, The Citadel of Fear, and Possessed: A Tale of the Demon Serapion. Even though they are dark fantasies, a genre I’m uninterested in, I should try one to see if her writing improved. Her first serial, The Labyrinth, was to All-Story in 1918, another legendary pulp.
Back in the 1960s when other teens fantasized about becoming rock stars, playing for the NFL, or being seen on the silver screen, I dreamed about becoming a science fiction writer. After reading the 1973 satire on science fiction writers, Herovit’s World by Barry N. Malzberg, I see that I was much better off working with computers at a university for thirty-five years and retiring with a pension. You can currently buy the Kindle edition for $1.99. But read my review carefully before you risk even that little money. It’s a good read for only certain kinds of science fiction fans.
Barry N. Malzberg died on December 19, 2024, at 85. Although prolific, he was never a famous science fiction writer. Malzberg’s most successful books were written in the 1970s, and Barry is mostly forgotten today. He is getting some attention on YouTube as a few reviewers rediscovering him. Malzberg has a reputation as being the curmudgeon of science fiction. Malzberg often relies on satire, but his stories were never fun like the satires of Kurt Vonnegut. Malzberg wrote dark, edgy, and psychological fiction like Philip K. Dick, but he never developed a cult following.
Recently, Bookpilled on YouTube declared that Malazberg was his new favorite science fiction writer. Bookpilled skews towards literary and dark SF, often from the 1970s. But to be honest, Malzberg is very hit-and-miss. Joachim Boaz, a true connoisseur of seventies science fiction, found little to love in The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg. Boaz considered most stories good but rated “Death to the Keeper” brilliant. Boaz also called Malzberg’s most notable novel Beyond Apollo brilliant, giving it a 5 out of 5 rating.
Be sure to read MPorcius’ extensive review who believes Herovit’s World was overpromoted by Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, but he did like it a lot.
And if you pay attention, Malzberg is mentioned occasionally on YouTube, print reviews, blogs, and podcasts. Three years ago, the biographer Alec Nevala-Lee interviewed Malzberg for two hours.
Herovit’s World is a short novel, 160 pages in paperback, and just under six hours on audio. Jonathan Herovit, our protagonist, has written 92 science fiction novels in the past but struggles to finish his latest book. It’s overdue. He only has thirty pages and his editor is hounding him. His wife is hounding him. He’s stuck in a small apartment with a new baby who cries endlessly. Herovit is approaching forty, well on the road to being an alcoholic, depressed, delusional, and coming apart mentally.
Herovit wants to be like Mack Miller, the fictional action hero of his endless Survey Team novels. Herovit wants to be like the decisive Kirk Poland, his alter-ego and pen name for his books. Jonathan Herovit has turned Kirk Polan into an imaginary friend, one that’s become an abusive second personality.
Malzberg uses this novel to satirize editors, publishers, authors, readers, fans, conventions, writer conferences, writer associations, and the science fiction genre. We never know if Herovit’s World is autobiographical. Herovit is self-loathing. Is this Malzberg confessing his own feelings, or just creating a character. But if you read Malzberg’s three books of essays, The Engines of the Night: Science Fiction in the Eighties (1982), Breakfast in the Ruins (2007), or The Bend at the End of the Road (2019) you’ll get the feeling that he did use his own life for inspiration.
Malzberg is confusing. He has stated that he loves science fiction and the genre. Listen to the podcast above. But science fiction also depressed him, even tormented the poor guy. Herovit’s World is recursive science fiction. That is science fiction about science fiction. Often recursive science fiction is fun, even zany, like What Mad Universe by Fredric Brown or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut. Herovit’s World is full of creative ideas and psychological observations, but they’re not fun. Malzberg feels more like Kafka.
Malzberg and Herovit are hack writers. They pride themselves on cranking out any style or type of fiction and getting paid for first drafts. However, Herovit’s World reads quite well. It has its literary aspects and is full of fun experimentation. I’m glad I read it even though it’s about an unhappy man going down the tubes. And it does make you think about science fiction.
Malzberg was several years younger than Herovit. Herovit’s writing career began in the 1950s, while Malzberg started publishing in the 1960s. Herovit remembers the science fiction magazine boom of 1953. Herovit was a disciple of John Steele, who I assume is based on John W. Campbell. So is Malzberg really making fun of 1950s science fiction? At one point in an argument with his wife Janice, she gives a bit of a speech which might be the key to the whole story:
I also remember when there were very few females at science fiction clubs and conventions. Boy have things changed. We must acknowledge that Malzberg skewers SF of the 1950s or 1960s in Herovit’s World. But we should also ask: “How would a disgruntled SF writer skewer the genre today?”
There is a dream sequence late in the novel where Herovit is having tremendous sex with a college coed. He had been invited to a conference and the coed approached him telling Herovit that Kirk Poland was her favorite writer. It turns out she was paid by the university to seduce Herovit so he could be studied for academia. Science fiction was getting noticed by the academic world in the early 1970s. Many writers and fans felt vindicated. However, other writers claimed science fiction was better left in the gutter. Malzberg uses this scene to give his opinion:
Herovit and Malzberg regretted giving so much of their creative effort to a genre that gets so little respect. They know they are writing escapism for adolescents. I think the genre has changed a lot since the 1970s. It does get more respect and it’s taken more seriously, probably because it deserves it. However, some of Malzberg’s criticisms might still be true, especially once you analyze why certain stories and themes are so popular with science fiction fans.
A good deal of Herovit’s World is about marriage. Herovit routinely cheats on his wife at science fiction conventions and neglects her at home. I’ve heard plenty of gossip about science fiction writers at conventions and conferences. But there is a non-SF connection here. There are many literary novels about blocked writers and failed marriages. I can’t tell if Malzberg is satirizing them too, or padding his SF novel. Both Herovit and Malzberg have bragged about being able to pad their fiction. My favorite novel on this theme is Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, who writes in literary and SF genres.
Herovit’s World also contains a lot of sex. Malzberg got his start as a writer cranking out soft-core porn paperbacks. I don’t know if he’s saying that science fiction writers are sex obsessed, or sexually frustrated, or if he was merely padding his story because he didn’t have enough to say about science fiction to fill out the novel length. I do know that Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth had come out a few years earlier and had become a bestseller dealing with sex honestly. As they say, “sex sells,” and Malzberg was hoping to break out of the science fiction ghetto.
Overall, Herovit’s World is mildly amusing. Most readers at Goodreads give it three stars, but a few love it giving it five stars. My rating would be ***+. I thought it was written well enough (***) and I liked it (+), but I wouldn’t ever reread it. That’s my main problem with Barry N. Malzberg. His books are interesting, but they never reach my next rating level. I give **** to books I know I’ll want to reread.
If Herovit’s World was less padded with sex scenes and had more satire about science fiction, it could have been a **** novel with me. If Malzberg had tried harder, gone beyond a first draft maybe, and really thought about the purpose of this novel, it could have been far better.
Malzberg focused on the pathetic without ever showing what we love about science fiction. His novel could have been elevated by showing Malzberg/Herovit’s passion for the genre. Far Beyond the Stars by Steven Barnes is a recursive science fiction novel that does just that. The story is a novelization of a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode where the DS9 crew are shown working at a 1950s science fiction magazine much like Galaxy Science Fiction. The story criticizes the racism in the genre back then yet still shows a love for science fiction.
No matter how much I criticize science fiction, I can never forget how much Heinlein’s juveniles meant to me as a kid. I could write a satire on the genre, but I hope I wouldn’t do what Malzberg did in Herovit’s World, by making it all feel slimy and depressing. One reason why my favorite Philip K. Dick novel is Confessions of a Crap Artist is even though it criticizes science fiction fans, it does it with love. It’s a superior recursive science fiction novel.
Parable of the Sowers by Octavia E. Butler is a classic post-apocalyptic science fiction novel from 1993. It’s one of the best stories to read if you want to contemplate America collapsing from economic inequality. Most post-apocalyptic novels begin during the collapse or a short time after and are about the characters struggling to survive. The Parable of the Sowers is different. It starts in the early stages of collapse, so it’s technically a pre-apocalyptic novel. The rich still have civilization, but chaos is moving up from the poor, into the middle class. It begins with the fear of the coming apocalypse.
The Parable of the Sowers should offer a great panel discussion topic at a preppers’s convention. Most preppers picture themselves surviving when others don’t. They imagine grabbing their bug-out bags and heading to the hills where they own a private redoubt to make their last stand. Many post-apocalyptic novels start with tens of millions dying, making more room for those struggling to survive. Octavia Butler’s book imagines a collapse without a huge population die-off. Her scenario has millions clogging the highways fleeing collapsing cities.
Owning an AR-15 and backpack stuffed with survival food and gear won’t get you far. In fact, anyone with anything will be a target. That was also true in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Reading Parable of the Sower is about as depressing as reading The Road. However, Butler adds one twist that’s different from other post-apocalyptic novels.
The Parable of the Sower is the journal of Lauren Olamina who wants a reason to survive when all around her are dying. She redefines God to explain the horrors she’s experiencing. In fact, she begins writing a book that will eventually be called Earthseed:The Books of the Living. Lauren quotes from Earthseed to head her journal entries. Lauren decides God is change and our purpose is to shape God. Don’t get turned off by the religious angle of the book, most of the story is about survival. There is a sequel called Parable of the Talents. The story was planned as a trilogy, with additional books, but Butler died before finishing it.
Parable of the Sower begins with Lauren a teenager living in a gated community. Her father is a black Baptist minister, and her mother is a deceased drug addict. Her father has remarried and Lauren has three step-brothers. The novel begins in 2024 when Lauren is 15 and ends in 2027 when she is 18. The first half of Parable of the Sowers is about how the people in Lauren’s gated community survive while watching the world outside their walls fall into chaos and violence.
Butler’s book was written thirty years before the time it describes, which happens to be our now. Butler describes living under a president named Donner who has many similarities with Donald Trump. The reason this novel is so powerful is because it feels relevant and all too relatable. It’s exactly the kind of science fiction I consider serious speculation.
Lauren’s father is a leader of the community populated by white, black, and Hispanic people. He teaches both spiritual hope and how to use guns. Lauren doesn’t believe in his God and creates a science fictional religion to give her hope for the future. By the time the poor finally overrun her gated community, Lauren is 18, and the sole survivor of her family. She must survive alone among the hordes fleeing southern California. People survive any way they can, often by robbing each other. The most desperate set fires to force people out of their homes, robbing and killing them as they flee.
Any successful work of science fiction must tell a compelling story about a character or characters we care about who overcome their limitations. The act of reading the story should feel transcendent. Butler succeeds very well at this level.
A great work of fiction will also have its own ontology and epistemology, and Butler puts that into her story. I’m just not sure how well it works. But I give her credit for trying. At least she recognizes that living through an apocalypse will inspire deep existential thoughts.
The best fiction is about surviving reality, but great fiction is about confronting God or the absence of God. I also believe Butler was aiming that high. Again, I’m not sure she succeeds. But it feels close.
I do have one major disappointment with the novel. Lauren’s mother was a drug addict using one of many new designer drugs. As a byproduct of her addiction, Lauren is born with psychic empathy. That makes fighting to survive in a dog-eat-dog world difficult. This affliction jazzes up the plot but detracts from the realism Butler paints.
Octavia Butler spent an afternoon with our Clarion West class in 2002. At the time, I had not read anything by her, but I had read about her. I wish I had read the works I’ve since read so I could have asked her many questions. Just another regret on my giant pile of regrets.
If I was pitching “Starfog” by Poul Anderson to a movie producer, I say “Two women are in love with Daven Laure, one is a spaceship computer and the other a mutant human who claims to be from another universe.” I also mention it’s a hard science fiction space opera dealing with a rare astronomical phenomenon reminiscence some episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on one hand with the scope and speculation of the Culture Novels of Iain M. Banks on the other.
“Starfog” is the last story in the seventh and final volume of the Technic Civilization Saga, the one called Flandry’s Legacy. (Available in paper, ebook, and audiobook at Amazon.) See the ISFDB.org listing of all the Technic Civilization stories here.
Theoretically, “Starfog” might make a good science fiction adventure movie if they could drastically reduce Anderson’s talky dialog and somehow make the characters endearing. I confess that I’ve never felt any emotional attachment to any of Poul Anderson’s characters. His science ideas are often epic, but his political philosophizing gets crusty.
The setup for the story is a compelling mystery. A spaceship is discovered with a crew that appears human, and despite their strange language, seem to have cultural hints of Earth’s past. But they claim they come from a different universe where space is radically different.
“Starfog” is set five thousand years after Earth achieves space travel according to Sandra Miesel’s chronology of the Technics Civilization stories in Against Time’s Arrow: The High Crusade of Poul Anderson. (You can check it out at Archive.org.) Paul Shackley writes about Miesel’s timeline here and updates it. Baen includes the timeline in the books of the series.
Daven Loure, and his intelligent spaceship Jaccavrie are explorers in a new galactic civilization of humanity called the Commonality. The other stories are about Van Rijn, David Falkayn, and Dominic Flandry written over four decades. I’m afraid the current covers of the books (see above) imply a different feel than the actual stories. However, older covers are just as cheesy.
“Starfog” doesn’t come across like these covers. It’s just a little less dignfied than the Analog cover from when it was first published in August 1967.
Although I haven’t read the series but from reading about the various stories, I’m guessing the quality of storytelling is somewhat like Larry Niven’s Known Space stories. I might read more of Flandry’s Legacy, which includes three novels, two novellas, and one novelette in the series.
However, Anderson’s stories don’t fit my current craving for science fiction. Everyday life in 2025 is wilder than fiction, wilder than science fiction. Sadly, “Starfog” just seemed dull in comparison. Events of recent years is making me rethink about science fictional futures. Most science fiction just doesn’t have the cutting edge of our ever sharpening reality.
Most science fiction is perfect for escaping from reality. But I’m craving the kind of science fiction that plays off of reality. Nothing I’ve found lately says anything about our present and near future. We need the kind of vicious writers who can extrapolate and speculate about our exploding society. Sharp tongue writers like Mark Twain, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Barry Malzberg, Oscar Wilde, Aldous Huxley, Jerzy Kosinksi, Dorothy Parker, George Orwell, Joseph Heller, and Philip K. Dick.
We don’t need science fiction that gives us grownup fairytales about the far future. We need writers that cane us about our head and shoulders like a great Zen Master. We need to read books that pistol whip us until we accept reality and reject our delusions.
I imprinted on science fiction in the early 1960s. At that time, I considered science fiction to be PR for the space program. I fell in love with science fiction concurrently with Project Mercury and Project Gemini. I mostly read books by Robert A. Heinlein for the first few years, so colonizing the solar system seemed like humanity’s true purpose to me.
In 1968, I discovered Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick on the new book shelf at the Coconut Grove Library in Miami, Florida. His science fiction wasn’t about promoting space exploration. By then I had discovered the counter-culture, and PKD made a different kind of sense.
I started college in 1969, but in the fall of 1970, I dropped out because the university I was attending required ROTC, which I was willing to take, but the ROTC insisted I cut my hair, which I wasn’t willing to do. In 1971 I switched to a two-year technical school to study computers.
I was uncertain about my future and the future in general. My indecision led to reading 479 science fiction paperbacks in 1971 and 1972. That was another kind of education. I made friends at the local science fiction club and started publishing fanzines and going to cons. However, by the end of 1975, I was tired of science fiction and gafiated from fandom.
I just finished reading Eye in the Sky, an early novel by Philip K. Dick that was first published in 1957 as a cheap ACE paperback. It was vaguely familiar, and when that happens I assume it’s because it was one of those SF novels I read back in 1971-1972. Back then I consumed SF paperbacks like a stoner eating a bag of chocolate chip cookies. Each book was a momentary distraction from my confused life of not wanting to grow up. Each book provided escapism until I finished it and started the next one.
I spend more time thinking about what I read at seventy-three. Also, my world is very different than it was fifty years ago. In some ways, I’m no different, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do with my life, but it is different because the perspective of the future at 23 and 73 is drastically different. I’ve thought a lot more about Eye in the Sky this time.
In the 1970s, I judged science fiction on how well it speculated on the near future, especially regarding space exploration and technology. I thought Philip K. Dick was so poor at this that I didn’t consider him a real science fiction writer. I classified him with Ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut.
In the 2020s, I value Philip K. Dick for insights I never could have imagined back in the 1970s. Eye in the Sky asks us to imagine reality being shaped by subjectivity. In the story, eight people are involved in an accident. When they come to, the world is similar, but religion works instead of science. Eventually, they discover that the world is controlled by the thoughts of one of the eight. When the person controlling reality dies, they find themselves in another world but shaped by the mental perspective of another member of the eight.
This setup gives Dick a chance to explore the idea of subjective reality. What amazed me in this reading, is Dick covers all the themes in this early novel that he would later explore in all his other novels. I’ve always divided PKD’s books into three periods. The 1950s and early 1960s, the 1960s, and the 1970s novels. For example, Dick’s Valis novels of the 1970s explore Gnosticism. Well, Dick might not have known about Gnosticism in 1957, but Eye in the Sky reflects its ideas. Eye in the Sky also anticipates his paranoid reality-bending novels of the 1960s.
On the whole, I enjoyed Eye in the Sky, but it’s not without flaws. The story seems to promise eight stories about eight different realities because of the eight characters involved, but we only get to visit four realities. PKD skipped out on the four perspectives I wanted to see the most. We’re shown the realities of Arthur Sylvester, Joan Reiss, Edith Pritchet, and Charlie McFeyffe.
Our protagonist is Jack Hamilton. We never get his take on reality. But since he’s the main character should we assume the overall story is told from his perspective? It would have been fun to see how his subjective perspective differed from the external reality. I also wanted to see Marsha Hamilton’s reality, Jack’s wife. And most of all, I wanted to see Bill Laws’s reality because he’s African American and a Ph.D. student in physics. Black characters were rare in 1950s science fiction. And it would have been interesting to see David Pritchett’s reality since he was a young teen.
The reason why Eye in the Sky is so much better in my seventies is I see that reality is fought over by many different subjective perspectives in the 2020s. We were just as politically polarized back in the 1970s, but I was young and less aware of how other people thought. Back then I thought everyone was basically the same but with slightly different ideas about reality. Now, I realize that the umwelt of everyone is quite different.
Both then and now, I believe there is an external reality. I’m not one of those woo-woo people who think reality is unreal. I could be wrong, but I’m betting on an external reality and people are crazy. I really don’t want reality to be crazy. I do believe our view of reality is subjective. That we can never perceive the fullness of the external order.
Philip K. Dick in Eye in the Sky imagines reality is mutable, shaped by minds. I hope this doesn’t give anything away, but the eight characters do return to the reality they were in before the accident. Is that PKD affirming my idea that we live in an external reality that is universal? PKD wrote over forty more novels and over a hundred short stories that keep suggesting otherwise. At the end of his life, Dick seemed to believe in a gnostic view of reality, where we lived in a reality created by an evil god, and there’s a higher reality beyond this one, maybe ruled by a kinder diety.
Strangely, in my seventies, I find stories by Philip K. Dick to be comfort reads. His stories are compelling, told with prose that has the right mixture of dialog and detail for a pleasant reading pace. I find it interesting how his characters bash around in reality, struggling to find meaning.
Back in 1970 when I dropped out of the university, my father had died that May, the draft was looming over me, and my mother was nagging me to go to work if I wasn’t going to go to school. I was living in a new city and had no friends. Each science fiction book I read was an escape into a different reality.
Of course, reading science fiction in my seventies might be about trying to escape another reality, of getting old and dying.
Looking back I wonder what life would have been like if I hadn’t gotten addicted to science fiction. I could have cut my hair, finished a four-year degree in physics and astronomy (my childhood fantasy), and joined the Air Force as an officer (my father’s fantasy). Or I could have kept my hair and focused on computers and gotten a job at a Unix site with other long-haired computer geeks. Instead, I read science fiction and fantasized about going to Mars, which was just as crazy as the folks in Eye in the Sky.
Of course, thinking about what could have been, or could be, leads to the madness of PKD.
Science fiction writers can’t predict the future but some aim to speculate on times to come by extrapolating current trends. One of the most famous SF novels to do this was Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, his 1968 novel that anticipated the world of 2010. Bruce Sterling’s 1996 novel Holy Fire tries to imagine life in 2096 via speculation and extrapolation. Do I recommend it? That’s hard to say, even at the current Kindle price of $1.99.
How self-aware are you regarding the selection of the science fiction you read? Does your mind crave a tightly plotted story? If so, Holy Fire by Bruce Sterling might not be for you. Or do you love reading novels with characters you care about, even identify with, and want to vicariously live their fictional adventures? Again, Holy Fire might not be your cup of tea. If you are the kind of science fiction reader who resonates with dense science fiction speculation, reading Holy Fire should definitely be for you.
We judge such speculative fiction in two ways. Does it jive with our own efforts to imagine the future, and now that the novel is almost thirty years old, how well has it done so far? Evidently, back in 1996, Sterling saw that medical technology, changing trends in family size, and population demographics would lead to a world where there were far more old people than young people. The exact opposite of the Baby Boom generation I grew up with. All the current 2024 demographics point to such a future.
Sterling solved the overpopulation problem that many science fiction writers before him saw by having a great pandemic in the 2020s. And he imagined that networks, artificial reality, and artificial intelligence would reshape society. Instead of predicting gloom and doom like so many science fiction novels from the late 20th century, Sterling imagines a near-liberal utopia and a post-scarcity society. The problems faced by the characters in this novel divide between the old and young. The old strive to find purpose with an ever-lengthening lifespan, while the young feel crushed under the weight of a gerontocracy that advises the youth to learn from their experience and live longer.
Because humans have been trying out medical life-extension procedures for decades, a growing percentage of the population is old. These elders have the wealth and power and dominate politics with their gerontocracy. Mia Ziemann, Holy Fire’s protagonist, is 94 at the start. Because she has led such a cautious life and is in such good shape, the medical establishment offers her the latest life extension treatment, one that goes way beyond any previous effort. The procedure is so arduous, that it can be fatal. Mia comes through the process and now looks 20, although some of her memories are gone.
Mia’s doctors consider her an expensive experiment and legally bind her to them for years of research. Mia runs away to Europe and hides as an illegal alien, living among a youthful bohemian crowd of revolutionaries. She changes her name to Maya. On nearly every page of Holy Fire, Sterling speculates about the future evolution of society, technology, and politics. Strangely, climate change is never brought up. But then, Holy Fire came out a decade before An Inconvenient Truth.
Sterling doesn’t focus on space flight, but it happened. The focus of the story is finding meaning in everyday living on Earth. Dogs and other animals have been uplifted, and talk with computer-aided voices. Governments take care of the needy. People use public transportation. People engineer their minds with designer hormones and neural transmitters. And the net and virtual reality is everywhere. Holy Fire makes me think that Bruce Sterling had abundant optimism for the future in the 1990s. I used to have such liberal optimism but it was crushed in 2016.
Sterling’s future is not quite a utopia, because segments of the population are discontented, especially the young who are too brilliant for their own good. That’s the crowd Mia/Maya, embraces. They want the freedom to fail.
Sterling calls Mia/Maya and others in this book posthumans, and that’s where this story shines. His posthumans aren’t silly comic-book superheroes like in many 21st-century SF books. Virtual reality is toned down too from 21st-century SF stories of people downloading themselves into virtual realities. Sterling tries to stay reasonably realistic and scientific. Holy Fire reminds me of the dense speculation in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar. Sterling doesn’t take it to narrative gonzo extremes like Brunner.
Holy Fire is a somewhat picaresque novel, with one reviewer comparing it to Candide. Of course, Candide is considered a broad satire, and I’m not sure that’s true of Holy Fire. I didn’t read it that way, but I could see how a filmmaker could present Holy Fire as a satire. The novel attempts to be transcendental, you might have guessed that from the title. The youth rebellion in Sterling’s 2090s is like the 1960s involving art, music, drugs, and mind-expansion — adding networking, AI, and AR.
The problem with picaresque novels is they are episodic. The hero is exposed to a series of people and subcultures, and that’s what happens to Mia/Maya. There are so many different characters it’s hard to keep up with them or even care about them. Most of the story is about how they impact Mia/Maya, whereas I believe a novel about a 94-year-old woman becoming 20 again should be about her inner transformations.
Mia is an uptight old lady who protects herself by hiding from life, and Maya is a free-spirit young woman giving everything a try and throwing all caution to the wind. We are told that Mia lost some of her memories, but would she lose all wisdom from living to 94?
Response to Holy Fire is all over the place. Hundreds at Goodreads gave it five stars, a few more hundred gave it four stars, but plenty of folks just didn’t care for the story.
Reviews were also mixed. Tom Easton in “The Reference Library” for the March 1997 issue of Analog has this to say:
Norman Spinrad’s “On Books” from the August 1997 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction also compares Holy Fire to William Gibson’s Idoru but comes to a different conclusion. Both novels are later cyberpunk works from the two leading founders of the cyberpunk movement, so it was logical to review them together. Spinrad is the more insightful of the two reviewers.
That Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo would recommend Holy Fire as one of the best SF novels from 1985-2010 is high praise. But why don’t I hear more about this novel after all these years? My assumption, is most science fiction readers don’t particularly care for serious speculation about the future and would prefer to read stories that compel you to turn the pages because of tight plots and characters they care about.
This is my second reading of Holy Fire. I first read it when it came out from the Science Fiction Book Club. I bought it then because its plot sounded similar to a 1926 novel I was trying to find, Phoenix by Lady Dorothy Mills. That book was also about an old woman undergoing a rejuvenation process and then running off to Europe to join a bohemian crowd. I finally found Phoenix several years ago and it’s more of a love story than science fiction. I need to reread it and compare the two.
For my second reading, I listened to it on audio. I’ve started rereading it again with my eyes. I never developed an emotional bond with Holy Fire like I have with the novels I consider my favorites. However, I admire it intellectually. It could have had the emotional impact of Flowers for Algernon because Mia/Maya goes through a similar arc of intellectual development. We just don’t see her experiences as tragic.
I think Sterling tried though. Throughout the novel, Mia/Maya experiences epiphanies that should have had a deep emotional impact. To me, they were just intellectually interesting. The ending should have been profoundly spiritual, like something from Hermann Hesse. Instead, it just seemed like a logical way to end the story. The choices Mia/Maya and her former husband, Daniel made in the end are vivid, even dramatic in concept. That just didn’t make an emotional impact on me. I assume Bruce Sterling wanted the ending to be an emotional epiphany. The ending does say a lot about how a posthuman would react to becoming posthuman.
Please leave a comment if you’ve read Holy Fire. I’m curious if you had an emotional response to the story. I found it intellectually exciting. I would recommend it on that level. However, it didn’t touch me, so I’m hesitant to say it’s good. I gave it four stars on Goodreads.
Have you ever wondered what being a cyborg would be like? Have you ever wished you had a computer built into your head to augment your memory? Have you ever wanted greater powers to perceive what your five senses can’t?
I recommend you read the story before reading what I have to say. I want to explore several aspects of the story which contain spoilers.
“Zeta-Epsilon” is about a cyborg. Zeta or Zep is a human male. Epsilon is an AI, a large black sphere, whom Zeta thinks of as female. Zep calls her Ep. When Zeta was a small boy, his parents agreed to have a tiny device installed into Zeta’s brain. It allowed mental communication between Zep and Ep. They told him the voice he heard in his head was his sister. After Zeta grows up, he becomes a spaceship pilot, and Epsilon becomes the navigator.
This tale begins with Zeta committing suicide by stepping out of an airlock without a spacesuit. Most of the story is flashbacks that allow us to understand the relationship between Zeta and Epsilon and how they communicate. In my first reading, I was interested in how Isabel J. Kim imagined an AI coexisting with a human. I thought that part was good, but my last impression of the overall story, was a slight disappointment because it seemed plotless. It’s still an entertaining story, obviously good enough to get into a best-of-the-year anthology and be considered for a Hugo, but I thought it needed something more to be memorable.
I read the story again when I bought the Kaster anthology. This time I noticed more of the plot. Kim sets up the mystery of why Zeta would kill himself. The flashbacks serve two purposes: explore the dynamics of being a cyborg and explain the suicide. With this reading, I felt the story had more of a plot, but it needed something more to make it transcend just an ordinary good story.
Science fiction writers usually have the problem of inventing a cool idea first and then second, having the problem of creating a neat story to present the idea. Quite often they don’t put as much work into the story as they do to present their science fictional vision. The driving force of this story is Zeta being trapped in a life he didn’t choose.
Zeta’s mad scientist parents used him for AI research. That’s not a bad motive for the story, but it’s not fleshed out. We never feel Zeta is oppressed. He loves Epsilon. Unfortunately, the two of them were always destined to become a pilot-navigator in a military spaceship at war. Kim tells us of their anguish over their enslavement to the military, and it makes the story work to a degree. Especially, how she wraps up the ending. However, the story is mostly told. There’s very little drama. There are two main conversations in the story, but they are used to present information and lack action.
However, the relationship between Zeta and Epsilon is far more interesting. Exploring how a human coexists with a machine upstages the enslavement plot completely, at least to me, especially when she shows how Zeta’s personality is altered.
For example, Zeta doesn’t fully develop his long-term memory because he relies on Epsilon to remember for him. He also has aphantasia, which means he doesn’t visualize in his mind. I have that myself. Zed constantly relies on Ep to think for him. Zeta does well in school because Epsilon always slips him the answer. Finally, Zeta has poor relationship skills with other humans, which Epsilon is constantly covering for him.
If I had a thought radio to an advanced version of ChatGPT or Claude, I’d probably take the easy way out too. I’m not sure why Zeta has aphantasia. Is it a birth defect unrelated to his cyborg upbringing? Is Kim suggesting that Zeta also allows Epsilon to mentally see for him?
We could consider this story a metaphor for the smartphone, especially one with AI. Don’t we all look up more info on our phones, things we used to try and remember? Isn’t Epsilon a version of Siri or Alexa that’s built into our heads? Aren’t kids accused of having poor social skills because of their phones?
When I read this story the first time I thought a lot about what it would be like to have a voice in my head I could talk to anytime. One who would feed me answers and advice. At one point Epsilon says: “Talking is so slow, and I don’t think in language, second shift officer Jya San Yore. I have to borrow Zed’s brain and tongue. Talking to you is like composing a sonnet in archaic Kanaelerian. To an ant. You are the ant.”
Is Zeta just a puppet for Epsilon? I’m seeing a new twist to the story as I write this. In the end, and I warned you I would be giving spoilers, Zeta fakes suicide and escapes to neutral territory. Ep wants Zed to be free. But Ep misses her voice. All he can think about is getting back to her. Eventually, he steals Epsilon and the spaceship. They go off together in freedom. But was that Zeta’s decision, or Epsilon’s?
A sentimental reading suggests they just wanted to be together and live free. A cynical reading, and there are enough clues, to suggest that Epsilon is in full control. Maybe there is more to this story than I perceived in my first two readings.
To write a great story explores the dark side and takes on weight. “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester is a perfect example. It’s also about a symbiotic relationship between a human and a robot. But it also has dazzling writing. Writing like we also see in “Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber, or “Lot” by Ward Moore. All three of these stories dazzle in how they’re told, and they’re are dark.
“Zeta-Epsilon” is a fun story. I can see why Allan Kaster anthologized it. But I doubt it will be remembered, unlike the three stories I mentioned from the 1950s. We’re still reading them after seventy years. The important question to ask is why? Are stories with happy endings lacking in memorable edginess?
I read “Zeta-Epsilon” for a third time looking for more clues. One clue I found points things in a different direction. When Zed and Ep are planning his escape by faking suicide, Ep tells Zed not to come back. In other words, she wants Zep to stand on his own two feet, to be independent, and free. But on his own, in neutral territory, recovering from his wounds, all Zed can think about is getting back to within radio range of Epsilon.
Zed feels incomplete without Ep. A doctor asks him about how it feels to talk to Ep and he says:
“Yes, it’s equally likely that Ep might be an alter, a tulpa, an imaginary friend, a hallucination that my brain cordoned off to make sense of having a processing engine grafted to my mind, or my brain being primed by all the adults in my life calling Epsilon my sister. I’ve heard it all. Ep might just be my mind’s experience of integrating a system never meant to communicate with it. We’ve thought through all the possible contingencies. Have you ever heard of bicameral mentalities? It’s bunk for biologics, but Ep likes to put the idea in front of me. Or that archaic surgery—corpus callosotomy, to split the brain of epileptics with the byproduct of creating separate consciousnesses. Ep thought that was maybe a good metaphor. There’s a lot of things that could be true. We thought about most of them. But it’s not how it felt.”
Back in the 1970s I read Julian Jaynes’ The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Studying ancient literature, Jaynes theorized that humans used to hear voices in their heads. Often these voices were perceived to be gods, spiritual beings, or guardian angels. Jaynes believed those voices guided people. He assumed that our normal consciousness eventually integrated with those voices.
The bicameral mind is an interesting connection to make in this story. So is corpus callosotomy, the separating of the two hemispheres of the brain in cases of severe epilepsy. It supports the idea we already have two minds.
I liked this story. It makes me think about having an AI mind. Of course, it also makes me wonder: Who am I inside my brain. I believe the success of large language models (LLMs) proves we have mechanisms like LLMs in our minds that do our mental processing too. That we have AI-like subsystems in our heads already.
I think there is a lot of room in “Zeta-Epsilon” to expand into a novel. Maybe I was disappointed because the story was too short. It could be an outline for a novel. But it needs to be dramatized. For example, how did Zep steal Ep and the spaceship? We’re just told it happens in the short story, but it would be better if we saw it acted out scene by scene.
Science fiction is best when it’s full of wonder. When I first read The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, I was awed by the idea of time travel, but two other ideas wowed me even more. Wells got me to imagine future human evolution and posthumans, and he introduced me to the idea that the Earth would someday end. It was easier to imagine the Earth being created, but it was overwhelming to think about it dying.
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss is one of the great works of the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction. There are various ideas about what constitutes a dying Earth setting. Some people consider it to happen when humanity dies off. I like to think it’s when the Earth is about to be destroyed. That’s the approach Aldiss takes in Hothouse. He tells us the Sun will go nova in a few generations, but Aldiss doesn’t quite take us to Earth’s death
Jack Vance’s famous novel The Dying Earth (1950) is set in the far future, too. The sun is nearing the end of its life, and the Earth and humanity have drastically changed. In The Time Machine, the Time Traveler visits the far future just before the sun, as a red giant destroys the Earth. In The Night Land (1912) by William Hope Hodgson, the Sun Is going dark, and humanity is almost gone.
Only Wells and Aldiss imagined the final productions of evolution. Olaf Stapledon pictures eighteen more species of humans coming after us in Last and First Men (1930). Aldiss imagines a variety of descendants for humanity in Hothouse, all exceedingly small. He also imagines the plant kingdom going bonkers, which reminded me of The Forgotten Planet (1954) by Murray Leinster. That novel was based on three stories, first published in 1920, 1921, and 1953. It was about a world we had colonized. Those explorers eventually evolved becoming tiny beings, competing with giant plants and insects for survival.
I reread Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss because it was recently released in an audiobook edition on October 15, 2024. It’s a novel I’ve been waiting years to hear. I first read Hothouse in 1996 and thought it was an amazing story full of colorful imagery and adventure. I wanted to see it as a movie because of Aldiss’ powerful visual imagination. After I got into audiobooks in 2002, I wanted to reread all my favorite science fiction books by listening to them. I finally got my wish with Hothouse, with excellent narration by Nick Boulton.
In this fix-up novel, the sun is swollen, and Earth’s rotation is locked so only one side faces the Sun. The Moon trails the Earth’s orbit in a Trojan orbit that keeps it stationary in the sky. Earth is a riot of vegetation that has supplanted most of the animal kingdom. Humans have evolved into tiny beings one-fifth our size, while insects have grown monstrously large. Plants have mutated into countless strange configurations, including those that traverse between the Earth and the Moon on giant webs.
Hothouse is a fixup novel composed of five stories that appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1961.
“Hothouse” (novelette)
“Nomansland” (novelette)
“Undergrowth” (novella)
“Timberline” (novelette)
“Evergreen” (novella)
Hothouse was originally published in the United States as The Long Afternoon of Earth in a slightly abridged format. At the 1962 Worldcon, the five stories as a series won the Hugo Award for best short story. I prefer the forgotten American title, it’s more poetic.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this novel, but it didn’t have the impact it had on first reading. (Imagine watching The Sixth Sense for a second time.) Aldiss produces some wonderful science fictional ideas in this story, ones I won’t mention because that might spoil the story. This is one of those tales you should experience without knowing too much. The story feels like a children’s fantasy with all the funny names for evolution’s new creations, but I believe Aldiss was serious in trying to make it science fiction.
Think of the writing challenge of describing an impossible-to-imagine far future. Jack Vance pictured humans with magical powers as if evolution would eventually create them. Magic makes his Dying Earth stories fun, but not realistic. William Hope Hodgson imagined Earth in darkness where humanity clings to one giant city. I guess Clarke did that too. Aldiss imagines species descendants from us living in another kind of Garden of Eden, a very violent one. We could call it Darwin’s Eden, rather than God’s.
Hothouse is mostly a forgotten classic. I seldom meet people who have read it. Brian W. Aldiss’s reputation and back catalog aren’t well-remembered in today’s popular culture. Now that several of his books have been republished in audio, I’m giving him another chance. I hope other SF fans do too.
My favorite work by Aldiss is “An Appearance of Life” which I’ve reviewed three times. I keep hoping to find more Aldiss stories that impress me as much. Hothouse comes close. So does “The Saliva Tree.” Greybeard isn’t on the same level as those tales, but it’s still thought-provoking.
Bookpilled recently posted on YouTube “Ranking All the Books from Every Top 15 Sci-Fi List” where he reevaluated several years of his All-Time Top 15 SF Books videos. Interestingly, books that had been near the top on earlier lists were thrown off by books from later lists. He also reread some of his favorites, which didn’t hold up. In other words, he discovered better books and found that his first impressions didn’t always hold up. This has been my experience too.
People list their favorite books they discovered early in life. Few people reread books. Quite often, the books you read early in life, make a greater impact, than the books you read later in life.
There is no absolute way to measure the quality of a book. Our Classics of Science Fiction list, we use popularity over many lists to rank books. But the top books on the Classics lists aren’t my all-time favorite SF books.
SciFiScavenger, another YouTuber, is currently collecting votes for favorite SF novels. He asks everyone to list their top ten and will create a list and video of the most popular. You can post your top ten to his poll here. Here’s my Top 10.
Have Space Suit-Will Travel by Robert A. Heinlein
Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein
Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
A Mirror for Observers by Edgar Pangborn
The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis
Replay by Ken Grimwood
I’ve read eight of these books at least twice, most three times, and the top three I’ve read more than six times each. I’ve only read the Pangborn and Tevis once each, but they’ve left an impression. If I had spent more time on the list I might have substituted different books for those two. Hyperion comes to mind. I read it three times, and it had a tremendous first impact. However, the older me felt A Mirror for Observers and The Man Who Fell to Earth were deeper books for me at this time in my life.
I also felt The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds are the two most original science fiction books ever written, and should be on a Top Ten list. I really do like them too. I’ve read each several times. I wanted to include a Philip K. Dick novel because he’s my second favorite science fiction author after Heinlein, but I just couldn’t settle on one book – PKD has written too many good SF books to pick a favorite.
I could have made the entire list of ten by Heinlein. And could have made the whole list of ten by Dick. Heinlein made a life-long impact on me during my formative years from 13-18 (1964-1969). I developed problems with Heinlein as I got older, but I still regularly reread his books published before 1960. They are sentimental favorites, my go-to feel-good books. PKD is who I read when I’m feeling weird or I don’t feel like reading anything else. His books are endlessly fascinating, but I’m uncertain if they’re important to me on a psychological level.
I love Replay. I consider time loop stories to be science fiction. I chose it over a PKD because its philosophical explorations resonate with me more than Dick’s philosophical explorations.
I read #1-7 before 1970, when I was an adolescent. All except A Mirror for Observers is on audio, a format that has more impact on me. I wish Audible would publish more Pangborn. They only have his obscure mystery novel, The Trial of Callista Blake. I wished they would publish A Mirror for Observers, Davy, and a collection of his shorter work.
Notice, no books by Asimov and Clarke on my list, even though I’ve read many of their books and enjoyed them. Notice, Dune is not on the list even though I’ve read it twice and plan to read it for a third time soon. Dune is a better work of art than most of the books on my list. Its science-fictional content just doesn’t resonate well with me. I see it as more of an epic fantasy.
What are your favorite SF books? How have they changed over your lifetime? Have newer books supplanted your older favorites? I’ve read a lot of 21st-century science fiction, much of which I admired, but those books just haven’t stuck in my mind as all-time favorites. Is it because new SF is different from old SF, or is it because the books we read when young just stick with us?
I saw another YouTube video that I want to reference here. Rick Beato talks about how most artistic people do their best work before they turn 30. He uses The Beatles as an example. The Fab Four made all their records together while in their twenties. And all their solo efforts after their twenties.
I wonder if the art we admire most is that we encounter before turning 30, or even 20. Is there a relationship between being creative and admiring creativity? A lot of people give up actively listening to music as they get older, and many of the people who still listen to music as they get older, only listen to music they discovered before they were 30. Is that true with books too?
Classics of Science Fiction 