So, a couple of quotes from chapter one “Comprehensive Propensities”:

All universities have been preogressively organized for ever finer specialization. Society assumes that specialization is natural, inevitable, and desirable. Yet in observing a little child, we find it is interested in everything and spontaneously apprehends, comprehends, and co-ordinates an ever-expanding inventory of experiences.

He continues,

Of course, we are beginning to learn a little in the behavioral sciences regarding how little we know about children and the educational processes. We had assumes the child to be an empty brain receptacle into which we could inject our methodically-gained wisdom until that child, too, became educated. In the light of modern behavioral science experiments that was not a good working assumption.

Inasmuch as the new life always manifests comprehensive propensities I would like to know why it is that we have disregarded all children’s significantly spontaneous and comprehensive curiosity and in our formal education have deliberately instituted processes leading only to narrow specialization. …

I’m not sure what it is about those passage that struck me. Probably because I’m watching my child grow, discover and learn, and because I’m married to a high school teacher. It seems Mr. Fuller understood the problem with “traditional” education — read, memorize, regurgitate — yet our education system, some 30 years later, is still stuck in that paradigm. The school my wife teaches at was originally based on the idea of breaking this model, and yet I’ve watched as that has been slowly crushed and beat back into the traditional model.

At any rate, there it is for you to consider.

R. Buckminster Fuller. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Pocket Books, 1970, pp. 13, 14.

But it’s a damn fine novel.

I want to like Lovecraft, I really do. I just don’t. At least, not all that much. I like the premise of Lovecraft’s stories, his style, however, is dull. Simply, his language does not engage me and keep me turning pages.

Seeing how this particular novel was, as I understand it, mostly written by Lovecraft’s editor August Derleth, I can forgive some of the dullness. However, I have also read The Lurking Fear and Other Stories and found it only slightly more engaging.

And it’s not that the works were written c. 1920 — I’ve read plenty of novels from the beginning of the last century with no problem and actually enjoyed several of them. Faulkner, for example, is one of my favorite authors (I will acknowledge that his is an acquired taste). If you’ve never read The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying you should. Faulkner has much more engaging dialog and prose than Lovecraft.

I suppose that like Faulkner, beer and wine, Lovecraft too is an acquired taste. But like wine, one I probably won’t develop.

The novel is a weird romp through all of time as a reporter works on a stroy of the Psychoshop — The Black Place were the Soul Changer will exchange any unwanted aspect you have for something else. Suffer from unwanted premonitions? Trade them in for something else, like good luck.

There are elements of Dr. Who, Total Recall, The Minority Report, etc., and I always have to remember that Bester came first. (Though maybe not with this novel. I’m unsure of the timeline for all of these novels. But Bester did have significant impact on all of Science Fiction — he is, after all, one of the founders of the genre.)

There is one flaw in the book. It seems to go along just fine, then about two-thirds of the way through the twist happens and it (sort of) rushes to conclusion. I attribute this to its unfinished state and Zelazny taking over. But who knows what Bester left behind for Zelazny to work with.

Overall, if you like SciFi, you owe it to yourself to pick up any Alfred Bester work. I’ve now read The Stars My Destination, Psychoshop and a couple of short stories. I’ll be picking up The Demolished Man and Virtual Unrealities (a collection of short stories) to fill out my Bester library. (These are all Vintage Press works. They have done very nice reprints with introductions from Greg Bear, Neil Gaiman, Harry Harrison and Robert Silverberg.)

The opening couple of chapters are somber and quite moving. His genuine anger and open honesty are somehow refreshing to read. Likewise, his descriptions of the places he visits (from Toronto to Alaska and Inuvuk to Belize) have made me want to visit many of them.

As the book wears on Neil includes some letters he writes while on the road. While these make for interesting changes in voice and tempo, I feel that he over-uses them. Several middle chapters are made up almost exclusively of letters with virtually no narration in between. While the letters provide a different insight into his feelings “at the moment,” they don’t form as good a narrative as his “regular” prose.

Overall I enjoyed the book, but would have liked the letters to be used more sparingly as interludes and highlights to his journey.

I have just read his short story “Fondly Farenheit.” That is a twisted little story. The narrative is very odd and fresh. If you read it and think “oh, I’ve seen other people do that,” remember that he wrote it in 1954.

Earlier this year I picked up his novel The Stars My Destination (originally published as Tiger! Tiger! in 1956). Everyone, scifi fan or not, should read this book. Neil Gaiman sums it up much better than I can in his introduction: “We meet [Gully Foyle] and are informed that he is everyman, a nonentity; then Bester lights the touchpaper, and we stand back and watch him flare and burn and illuminate: almost illiterate, stupid, single-minded, amoral (not in the hip sense of being too cool for morality, but simply uterly, blindly selfish), he is a murderer . . . a rapist, a monster. A tiger.”

It is a story about us. It is a novel I couldn’t stop reading. It is a novel I will certainly read again.