dead brains don't dance

Prompted by loveandgarbage (and again, in passing, by blue_condition while I was still writing mine down), in honour of World Book Day on Thursday, here are eight essential works of fiction, limited to but one per author. Most of these are not going to shift; a few may get swapped with books I list lower down, or others, without notice.

Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie. A wonderful, complex tapestry of a book, linked across time and geography, across the psyches of a group of people born at the moment of India’s independence. Writing that it’s the history of the first fifty years of India as a post-colonial nation is a truth, but pretty much everything else in in there too and without worthyness either; it’s a wonderful read too.

Honourable mention: Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a fairy story, if you like, a book that makes me smile every time I read it.

Always Coming Home, by Ursula K. Le Guin. Is this a novel? It’s future anthropology; it’s an exploration of humanity in a post-disaster Northern California that resonates with our present world on every level; it’s the story of Stone Telling that threads through the rest of the book, and provides a context and a challenge to any simplicites of interpretation and value that readers might otherwise be tempted to apply. Extraordinary.

Honourable mention: too many to choose from (and where would Dave Langford be without the ansible?) but Four Ways to Forgiveness is a particular favourite; four novellas that, only linked exoterically in the most tentative of ways, make together a whole that both clarifies and transcends each.

Mother London, by Michael Moorcock. First time I picked this up, I nearly gave up in the first section (without any sort of context, it didn’t seem promising), but then I got sucked in to discover what is, I think, the best novel I’ve ever read about London or about anything else. It’s difficult, nay, impossible to describe adequately in brief: the history of London, of three people, of those around them, since the blitz? That says nothing; it says nothing about the humanity, the humour, the tragedy or the anger; the enclosure of communities by gentrification, the police riot at Carnival, Cod Pieces and the Palm House at Kew. All life is there...

Honourable mention: Blood, I think, if only for its wonderful evocation of a Deep South fractured by dimensional rifts.

Ingathering: The Complete People Stories, by Zenna Henderson. I grew up with the People; their stories as they appeared in various short sf collections I found in Worthing Library helped keep me (relatively) sane through adolescence. Blessings, indeed, to the NESFA for republishing the lot in a definitive collection, and blessings to Zenna Henderson for writing of hope and sharing and joy in the face of despair and adversity in a way that helped me then and, still, now, is as fresh as when first read.

The Book of the Night, by Rhoda Lerman. The end of the first millenium CE and the end of the second, the Church of Rome and the Celtic church, collide on Iona in one of the most extraordinary books I possess. Language dances and forms lists of connection across pain and meaning; a moment of inattention and you too might be transformed into a cow.

Boy Peace, by Jay Gilbert. This is a story of healing, of a woman who’s a war photographer in a time (not very long ago) when it was considered extraordinary that a woman might do such a thing. Jagged and hurt, physically and spiritually, she joins her brother in the community he lives in, in a country house and smallholding in Herefordshire. The book is a beautifully observed gem that deserves far wider knowledge than it has (I only discovered it because my first partner’s best friend at school is the author’s daughter :)

More Than Human, by Theodore Sturgeon. The original and best account of the birth of a gestalt organism and the interactions between its parts and with mundane humanity. One of the most beautiful books ever written; not just an essential part of sf 101, but a book that anyone, sfnal or no, with an ounce of sensitivity could surely not fail to love.

Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut. In my opinion (and who else’s counts, eh? :) Vonnegut’s best novel. A dark exploration of the contradictions of meaning and motivation that are, it seems, an inseperable part of the politics of conflict; an American who broadcast Axis secrets from Germany under the cover of Nazi propaganda tells his life as he, having finally been captured in his NYC apartment, awaits his fate in an Israeli jail. This book, I suppose, sits in tandem with Slaughterhouse 5 but, IMO, is far better: the latter is an essential read for its description of the Dresden firebombing, but lacks the inner cohesion of Mother Night.

bubbling under

The City, Not Long After, by Pat Murphy

Permanence, by Karl Schroeder

The Sorceress and the Cygnet, by Patricia McKillip

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, by Samuel R. Delany

Report on Probability A, by Brian Aldiss

The Incomer, by Margaret Elphinstone

Kleinzeit, by Russell Hoban

Rats and Gargoyles, by Mary Gentle

Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire, by Doris Lessing

Fourth Mansions, by R.A. Lafferty

River of Gods, by Ian McDonald

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman

Perdido Street Station, by China Mieville

The Secret of Life, by Paul McAuley

A Spectre is Haunting Texas, by Fritz Leiber