Being Gorgeous

18 Aug 2004
Babel-17 - Samuel R. Delaney - Gollancz 2004
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There are, in essence, two types of SF writer - the tale tellers and the stylists. The tale tellers are those who describe extremely odd things in clear, simple straightforward prose. Their model is the story told around the camp fire, or perhaps the scientific paper. To them, writing is a craft rather than an art. Philip K. Dick and Ursula Le Guin are perhaps the greatest exemplars of this approach, but all the early SF writers - Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein - fall into this category.

The stylists, on the other hand, believe in being gorgeous. For them, exotic, glittering environments require exotic, glittering prose to match. Most of the cyberpunk brigade, William Gibson foremost among them, are in this group, but one could also include Gene Wolfe (at least in his Book of the New Sun days) and latterly Jon Courtenay Grimwood and John Clute, whose book "Appleseed" is an almost unreadable example of sophisticated prose. But the original stylist, the granddaddy of them all, is Samuel R. Delaney.
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Diary of a Quirkyalone

13 Sep 2004
The Lady in the Lake and Other Novels - Raymond Chandler - Penguin Classics 2001
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I'm not sure that it was exactly wise of Penguin to put three novels back to back like this - Chandler was not one for varying his locations or plotlines significantly and they are all quite similar. Reading the three stories together does give one a chance, however, to appreciate what a fascinatingly odd and enigmatic character Philip Marlowe is.
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Misrepresentation of the People?

17 Sep 2004
The Bookseller of Kabul - Åsne Seierstad - Virago 2004
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In November 2001, while reporting on the fall of the Taliban, the journalist Åsne Seierstad met a bookshop owner in Kabul called Sultan Khan. His life had been a constant battle to protect the art and literature of Afghanistan from the various authoritarian regimes that sought to ban or censor them - first the communists, then the Mujahedeen, and finally the Taliban (whose soldiers, apparently, burnt any book containing pictures of living things but left the heretical texts because they couldn't read). Seierstad was impressed - anyone would be - by his heroism in trying to save his culture. She decided to write a book about his family, not because it was typical of Afghan families in general but because it inspired her. The result, however, is more of an inditement of Sultan Khan and his culture than a celebration.
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