What I've Been Reading (Late 2016)...and a Brief Farewell to 2016

This year has been a strange one. Not all of it has been bad: Taiwan's elections turned out pretty well, quite a few major discoveries were made in astronomy, some progress was made in fighting climate change, and on a personal note, my music related endeavors (such as my radio show and my Taiwanese aboriginal music related activities) mostly went well. But there's been a lot of bad news as well. Personally, I suffered a broken leg (perhaps more on that another time - at any rate I am mostly recovered), climate change is becoming much more serious, and much of the international political news has been bad or downright terrible. There have also been what seems like an unusual number of deaths of famous people: aside from many people in the world of popular music, some of whom I've written about in my music blog, people ranging from King Bhumibol of Thailand and Fidel Castro of Cuba to the recent deaths of actress/writer Carrie Fisher and her mother, actress Debbie Reynolds. Of course people die every year, and it is pure coincidence that these people died in a year in which many other things have gone badly. Still, it's no surprise that many people are saying that it's been a terrible year and are in a hurry for it to end. Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that 2017 will be better. In fact, it may be worse, since we have yet to face the real consequences of at least one of the worst events of 2016, the US presidential election. But rather than dwell too much on all this, I am going to talk instead about a few of the books I've read over the latter part of this year, as promised in my last post on my reading. This doesn't quite cover everything; I wrote about Keith Richards' autobiography in my music blog, and I'm almost finished with Jared Diamond's fascinating and educational Guns, Germs and Steel, but that will have to be covered in a later post.


The Elric Saga by Michael Moorcock
Elric of Melnibone is one of the classic characters of fantasy (more precisely, its subgenre swords and sorcery). The original saga was published in bits and pieces and out of chronological order, but was later organized into six books, though most of them consist of essentially separate episodes, reflecting the way they were originally published. These books, in internal chronological order, are Elric of Melnibone, Sailor on the Seas of Fate, The Weird of the White Wolf, The Vanishing Tower, The Bane of the Black Sword and Stormbringer. Elric of Melnibone, though first by internal chronology, was published later than the other material, and was also the first full-length Elric novel, as the other books consist of novellas and short stories originally published separately. Many years later, Moorcock wrote several additional Elric books, but as I don’t have any of these, they aren’t considered here.

I had read Elric of Melnibone and The Weird of the White Wolf in the past, but it was only later that I acquired most of the other books in the series (I still don’t have The Vanishing Tower). I decided to read all five books that I had in internal chronological order. The most obvious comparisons to be made are to Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories and Fritz Leiber’s stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. Elric is (I think deliberately) almost the polar opposite of Conan, as rather than a black-haired, muscular barbarian with a strong distrust of magic, Elric is a physically weak albino with substantial sorcerous abilities who is the last of a long line of emperors of a civilized but extremely decadent race. As such, he is certainly a more unique character, and in many ways a more interesting one. Moorcock’s stories also have the advantage of lacking some of the vaguely racist pseudoscience that Howard incorporated into his tales, such as the idea that humans or other creatures could “devolve” into less advanced species (though even Moorcock and for that matter writers like J.R.R. Tolkien rather overemphasized the idea of inherent racial characteristics). The female characters in the Elric stories are not completely helpless or incapable, though they still far too often end up needing to be rescued from villains who have kidnapped them. In this respect as well as others, Leiber’s stories are superior. One major distinction (though whether it makes one or the other better is of course subjective) is that Leiber’s tales have considerably more humor and plain fun. The Elric stories are suffused with grim melancholy, in keeping with the anti-hero who is their focus. Fafhrd and Grey Mouser are not exactly paragons of virtue – they are mercenaries and thieves – but Elric can be callous and cruel, even if he is more troubled by something resembling a conscience and has more of a sense of right and wrong than most of his people. His friend and companion Moonglum bears a bit more resemblance to the Grey Mouser in particular, but even he can’t keep up his optimism and wit in the face of some of the particularly unpleasant situations the pair encounter.

Ultimately, the Elric stories (and particularly their distinctive protagonist) are intriguing and present an interesting twist on standard fantasy fare, but while at least some of them should be read by anyone who wants to get a full grounding in classic fantasy, I wouldn’t put them at the top of my list of fantasy books to recommend to someone unfamiliar with the genre, unless I knew them to be the type of person who was likely to appreciate their dark and melancholy tone.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells
The Invisible Man is one of several classic novels by the early science fiction writer H.G. Wells, only slightly less famous than the two I’d read in the past, War of the Worlds and The Time Machine. Nevertheless, I was completely unfamiliar with the story, and was somewhat surprised by the character of the titular invisible man and the uses he makes of his discovery. Though he sometimes seems to be a bit exaggerated, and at times the very British behavior of some of the other characters may strike modern readers as a bit odd, they are all distinct and colorful. Wells also obviously gave a lot of thought to both providing a believable explanation for the process by which the invisibility formula was discovered and its potential consequences. The story is not exactly a cheerful one, but it is an interesting one, and the story is well worth reading for anyone interested in classic science fiction.

The Bridge by Iain Banks
This Iain Banks novel is not one of his science fiction novels (which were credited to Iain M. Banks), but rather one of his mainstream, “real world” novels. In fact, he first gained critical fame through the latter, and wrote both types of novels throughout his career (he once said literary types who were dismissive of science fiction would often assume that he wrote science fiction for the money and would be taken aback when he’d tell them that if anything the reverse was true: he wrote mainstream fiction for the money, but sci-fi was what he enjoyed writing most). I’ve read several of his mainstream novels, all of which I’ve found to be quite good, but this one might be the best. It is certainly the most imaginative. This is in part because while the basic frame story is set in the real world, the majority of the novel unfolds in settings that are not part of the real world at all, but part of what might best be described as a dream world, or rather multiple dream worlds folded into each other. As I’d rather not give away too much of the story, I will simply explain this by saying that much of the story centers around a character living on a bridge that seems to go on almost forever in both directions, and is basically a city in itself, with homes, offices, restaurants, hospitals, bars and more, densely populated by apparently normal people. The protagonist suffers from amnesia and doesn’t remember where he came from or what his original name was. From time to time, he experiences vivid dreams, including a series of them featuring yet another protagonist who appears to be a powerful but amoral barbarian warrior who tells his story in some type of Scottish dialect. Interspersed among the bridge-centered story and the dreams of its protagonist is the story of the other chief protagonist, who lives in our real world.

The real world protagonist has much in common with the protagonists of most other mainstream Banks novels. He is Scottish and politically leftist, though he struggles to reconcile his principles with his lifestyle and is often self-centered in spite of his ideals. He is a recreational drug user and is in a long-term relationship, though the relationship is not without its problems. While many of these characteristics are found in other Banks protagonists, each manages to be distinct, and this novel is even further distinguished by the other strands of narrative, which have only the most tangential relationship to the real world. Like Banks’s sci-fi Culture novels (or his occasional non-Culture sci-fi novels), The Bridge shows a highly imaginative writer at work, one who manages to be in turns clever, witty, and philosophical while telling a very engaging and entertaining story.