Category: Literature

Once again, unable to find any newer fiction that interested me, I’m reading another Sir Walter Scott. It’s The Fortunes of Nigel, and I believe this will be the eighth or ninth Walter Scott that I’ve read. Though Scott’s works are available at Gutenberg and can be read on Kindles, I like having nice old editions of 19th Century classics. I bought this copy of Nigel on eBay from a seller in the United Kingdom.

The book was not expensive, but I was immediately impressed by the quality of the binding and, in particular, the quality of the paper. Though the paper is 111 years old, it is bright white and has hardly yellowed at all (though the heavier paper used for the illustrations has yellowed somewhat). The paper is remarkably thin and opaque. There is no brittleness. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what kind of paper this almost certainly is. The clue is the name Henry Frowde on the title page, over the Oxford University Press imprint.

Henry Frowde, it seems, was not a scholar, but he was a genius at printing and binding. He must have been a bit of a religious fanatic, because he printed a lot of Bibles. One of his innovations was the use of Oxford India paper, which was made from bleached rags and hemp. It was often used for Bibles, and as you’ll see in the Wikipedia article, Encylopedia Britannica used it for their 1911 edition.

So now that’s another item for my next visit to the U.K. — visiting some bookstores that sell old books. I’m guessing that there are several of those in Edinburgh. I am not particularly interested in rare books, nor would I be able to afford them. But I am very interested in beautiful books that are beautifully printed on good paper and beautifully bound. There are many cheaply printed old editions of 19th Century classics. It’s nice to see that the Oxford press adhered to a higher standard.

The Collapsing Empire. John Scalzi. Tor, 2017. This is part one of a three-part series, The Interdependency Series.

I had been gasping for a space opera, and I found one. Scalzi, I think, is one of our best contemporary science fiction writers, and, at age 53, I hope he’s got a long career ahead of him. About five years ago, I read Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and found it to be entirely entertaining. At the time, though the first part of The Interdependency Series had been published, the remaining two books of the trilogy were yet to come. I found this book while experimenting with Google searches that would find recently published space operas (if any even existed).

Space operas seem to be out of fashion. I find that irksome. Though socially conscious novels about social oppression and diversity seem to be what publishers are interested in these days, that’s not what I’m interested in. Social oppression and diversity are what politics is for. Novels are for entertainment and escape. The more one is involved in politics, the more one needs some means of escape — preferably to anywhere other than the here and now. It’s all about imagination.

Scalzi, I think, is not a writer who is greatly concerned with big ideas. I may find, in books 2 and 3 of this series, that he is concerned with the big idea of what happens in failing empires. But Scalzi’s greater concern, I think, is in providing a hot read. I finished this book in two days and immediately ordered book 2.

Often I’m afraid that, having devoured novels all my life, I’ve now read all the good ones, and few good ones are being written anymore. Regular readers here know that one of my quirks is that stories set in the here and now almost always bore the daylights out of me. I just don’t see the point of it. If one consumes as much news as I do, then one is saturated with more than enough stories from the here and now. I make an exception for stories about espionage and international intrigue, probably because they take us to exotic places that I’ll never see and inside such places as MI6 where the news can’t take us — Prague, St. Petersburg, Vauxhall Cross, arctic outposts, top-secret military installations. Another visit to L.A.? No thanks.

Speaking of imagination, I’ve been re-watching Game of Thrones on HBO. I don’t know how much of it I’ll watch, but it’s comforting to visit characters who feel like old friends — the Starks, John Snow, Sam Tarley. Speaking of the Starks and international intrigue, I also have been watching The Citadel on Amazon Prime, which stars Richard Madden, who played Rob Stark.

A few days ago I read yet another article about how reading novels is good exercise for the memory, because one has to remember on page 486 what happened on page 37. Scalzi is a lot like Isaac Asimov in that there is not a lot of action. Rather, the story unfolds as the characters, sitting in rooms (in palaces or aboard space vessels) talk. There’s more exposition than most editors would recommend. But, like Asimov’s characters and dialogues, Scalzi’s characters, both the nice people and the villains, are sharp and interesting. One might be tempted to make a list of Scalzi’s characters (of which there are a great many), the places on multiple planets, or the almost-a-dozen space vessels that Scalzi names, to keep everything straight. But I didn’t, and instead I did brief periodic reviews to make sure that I had it all down.

According to the Wikipedia article, Scalzi’s writing style was influenced by Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Joe Haldeman. Though I haven’t read much Haldeman, I would agree. I suspect that Scalzi also was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s model of empire, drawing on the conflicts among powerful families doing terrible things to amplify their power.

A few weeks ago I mentioned having joined the Tolkien Society. Today I received in the mail a welcome letter and a copy of the April 2023 Amon Hen, the Bulletin of the Tolkien Society.

The packet was hand addressed, with nice U.K. postage stamps. International mail always looks so exotic!

Amon Hen is very nicely printed on heavy paper. The April issue contains some beautiful artwork, a photograph of Tolkien, and seven articles.

Soon I will write a letter to the Amon Hen editor begging them to do an article on Tolkien and his typewriters, hoping that photos of Tolkien with a typewriter exist.

After I saw this letter in the Reddit /r/typewriters group, I Googled for Tolkien’s address to have a look at the house. In that search there was a link to the Tolkien Society.

A Tolkien Society! Now that is cool. According to the web site, the Tolkien Society has existed since 1969, with Tolkien’s blessing. Tolkien also was the society’s first president and remains the honorary president today. It seems to be a fairly small, but viable and active, organization.

One of the first things I noticed is that, each year, they have a gathering at Oxford called Oxenmoot. This year’s Oxenmoot is August 31 through September 3 at Saint Anne’s College. Next year’s World Science Fiction Convention will be in Glasgow, August 8-12, 2024. So I immediately wondered whether an American traveler might be able to attend both WorldCon and Oxenmoot next year on the same trip. I have emailed the Oxenmoot chair to encourage that.

I instantly joined the Tolkien Society for a year, to see what they’re like and what they’re up to. They create some printed periodicals, and I’d paid a bit extra to have those mailed to me in the U.S.

Tolkien, by the way, is known to have loved typewriters. His favorite typewriter was a very expensive Varitype. He did use other typewriters, though, and the letter above clearly was not typed with a Varitype. The characters are very sharp and even, so my guess is that the letter was written with an electric typewriter. Tolkien was known to have had some painful rheumatism in his hands, so an electric typewriter would have been easier for him to use.

I have never been to a World Science Fiction Convention, but I hope do that in August 2024, when it will be in Glasgow.

The annual Hugo Awards for science fiction and fantasy are given at WorldCon. Hugos are voted on by the fans who attend the convention (unlike the Nebula Awards, which are given by Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America).

Preparations for WorldCons begin way in advance. You can follow the progress here. You can also follow the preparations on Facebook by searching for “Glasgow 2024.”

My first thought was to attend only for a day, mostly because Glasgow is such a gloomy city compared with Edinburgh. Yet I respect Glasgow for what it is — an old industrial city working hard to re-invent itself. Though WorldCon is reserving rooms in at least eight hotels, the main events will be at the Crowne Plaza. That’s also where the parties will be, and I think it’s pretty much a certainty that there will be a cèilidh. This may be the only occasion I’ll ever have for attending a proper Scottish cèilidh. So instead of ducking in for only a day, I think I’ll buy a ticket for the entire event and see how it goes.

This year’s WorldCon, by the way, is in China.

The Hopkins Manuscript. R.C. Sherriff, Macmillan, 1939.

This book got to me. I finished it just before sunset, and all evening, as a nearly full moon rose, I was spooked by a sense of unreality as I worked my way out of the world of the novel and back to the real world. I considered pouring myself some Scotch (but didn’t). How did R.C. Sherriff tell his story so compellingly that, in spite of the improbable science of his falling moon, we suspend all disbelief and enter that state of total immersion that, as readers, we long for?

First of all, the novel is beautifully written. As for why it’s so compelling, I think it’s because he tells the story through the eyes of very ordinary people living in very ordinary circumstances — a village and small farm in Worcestershire. The main character is Edgar Hopkins, a former schoolmaster and rather dull man who, upon inheriting some money, settles down on his little hilltop farm and breeds poultry as a hobby. There are side trips by train to London, but it’s on this farm and in the nearby village where most of the story takes place.

The novel was first published in 1939. My copy of the book, which I bought from a used book seller, is a book club edition from 1963. A third edition (or possibly the fourth or fifth including a paperback in the 1950s) was published this year and was reviewed in the Washington Post: The moon falls to Earth in a 1939 novel that remains chillingly relevant.

Robert Cedrick Sherriff was better known as a playwright and screenwriter than as a novelist. He wrote Journey’s End, a play about World War I that opened at London’s Savoy Theater in 1929 and ran for 594 performances. Sherriff was a veteran of that war, and it seems certain that his experiences during the war had much to do with the emotional tone of The Hopkins Manuscript, a strange blend of optimism and pessimism that Sherriff skillfully pulls off. Sherriff was born in 1896 and died in 1975. After the war, in which he was badly wounded, Sherriff led an ordinary life as an insurance adjuster. He returned to Oxford in 1931 to study history. He probably was gay and was probably an ephebophile. Journey’s End was originally written as an all-male play, a fund-raiser to buy a new boat for the Kingston Rowing Club, which he coached. There are two characters in The Hopkins Manuscript that, I think, were inspired by his ephebophilia.

Much of the beauty of this book is in the clear, elegant, and yet modest writing. I’m reminded of Isaac Asimov’s author’s note for Nemesis:

“Another point: I made up my mind long ago to follow one cardinal rule in all my writing — to be clear. I have given up all thought of writing poetically or symbolically or experimentally, or in any of the other modes that might (if I were good enough) get me a Pulitzer prize. I would write merely clearly and in this way establish a warm relationship between myself and my readers, and the professional critics– Well, they can do whatever they wish.”

Asimov steers clear of snark, but it’s clear enough what he thinks of writers who bamboozle the critics (and even some readers) with quirky and affected writing styles. And Asimov is being a touch ironic with his choice of the word merely, because Asimov certainly knew that to write clearly is hard. Only the best writers can do it. I wish I’d known about R.C. Sherriff a long time ago.

My edition of the book includes illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini.