Most people read Nietzsche totally wrong, he denounces it all in order to rise above. It's knowing the difference, it's not about wallowing in it. It's the whole mountaintop mentality.

Most people cannot really understand Nietzsche. People often accuse him of being one of the fathers of National Socialism and Aryanism (due to the ubermensch concept). However, he denounced Aryanism and Anti-Semitism and he attacked Wagner for being so corrupted by Aryanism, Christianity and Anti-Semitism.

"Cyberiad" by Stanislaw Lem. Same thing as with "Hunchback", gone through the translated version which was absolutely hilarious sci-fi parody. Nice to see how it works in English.

Failsafeman, yeah, it's quite unfortunate that so few have read Vance in general!! Sounds like you found yourself "Tales of the DYing Earth"? Ah, those books are so marvelously written, even "Rhialto the Marvelous" (hah!), where it seems as though Vance was in a particularly bitter and surly mood .. the descriptions of magics and the petty squabbles of the wizards is so entertaining, and i'd have loved to learn more about the Sandestins, but Vance always leaves us with plenty of enigmas, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I didn't realize that those M. John Harrison books were also depictions of a dying earth culture. I'll really have to get my hands on them. I read one of his books last year, "Light", and it was quite excellent .. but I have a feeling he has better.

Oh yes, all the time! I find though that when I do this I read a lot of short stories and maybe some non-fiction work. Novels tend to capture my full attention for a longer period of time, and if I haven't been engrossed within a certain number of pages or I can tell right away that the style is simply not appealing (and I hold style in very high regard I guess) I simply give up and consider the effort to not be worthwhile.

Sounds fascinating. I think it is pretty sad that most of us anglophones only read books written in English. We miss out on a great many things and chances are if you name even a really well-regarded Latin American author who's not Marquez, for example, or a German one who's not, I don't know, Kafka even, nobody you ask other than real literature buffs will have even heard of him.

Like the poor sci-fi/fantasy literature thread...we're the only Vance fans here. But that won't happen to this thread, no no!



Hot fucking damn...I loved Stalker (easily one of the best sci-fi movies ever made, right up there with Blade Runner and Brazil), but I didn't know it was based on a book! (or short novel, whatever.) I'll have to check those brothers out, they sound interesting, and I've never heard of them.



Oh shit! Read For Whom the Bell Tolls, in my opinion his best. Just amazing, captures the violence of war (even though it's only a very small part, geographically and chronologically) very realistically and viscerally, more so because it's not embellished. Some of Hemingway's stuff is a little dull (The Sun Also Rises, though interesting in concept, was just rather bland after reading his others), but For Whom the Bell Tolls is a fantastic novel. A Farewell to Arms is good too, but I can't say as much about that one since I last read it about 5 or so years ago...may be about time for a re-read.



I've read Die Verwandlung, but not In der Strafkolonie...maybe I should. Das Urteil (The Trial, for you non-German-speakers) has got to be my favorite Kafka work, though; the relationships between the characters, the father & son in particular, are just amazing. The scene/symbolized struggle in the father's bedroom is great, my favorite in the book. And of course, like all Kafka, there's more symbolism than you can shake a stick at.



Oh, it's complete, you just have to appreciate it on a symbolic level. My German lit professor (himself a native German, visiting from Augsburg) was really great at helping me to understand it (i.e. he didn't just tell me what was going on, he helped me to reach my own conclusions). You just have to ask certain questions about certain strange events in the story, for it to become clear...who IS "the friend"? What exactly is he doing, if his business is failing and he doesn't have a social life? The way I understand it, the "son" and his "friend" are actually two sides to the same person; namely, the social, businessman side, and the artistic, reclusive side (Kafka once said something to the effect that artists ought to be reclusive, removed from social lives and business lives, so that they could study their inner selves). The former has "exiled" the latter in favor of himself, which is why he's been so successful in his social life and business; when the father "sentences him to death", it is in favor of the artistic side of his son, and the "jumping into the river" is just a metaphor or symbol. If you think about it that way, it makes a lot of other weird things make sense...for example, why the father (after their metaphorical/symbolic power struggle in the bedroom) says that he has been in contact with the friend the whole time (it's just another side of his son), and why no one seems to care when the son jumps into the river "the traffic continues over the bridge" or something like that is the final line, which implies no one stopped to watch him kill himself, which in turn implies that there wasn't really anyone killing themselves...anyway, I could go on about this, but my analysis is a year old and I don't have the original text or my original paper on it sitting in front of me, so I'll leave it at that. I'm not saying that's the One True Interpretation or anything, but that's why I got out of it. One thing I love about Kafka, as I mentioned before, is the fact that the symbolism is genuinely deep enough to be analyzed to this extent, without ever straying into silly deconstruction.

Yea, Vance is simply a superb author. I've read quite a bit of his stuff so far, and all of it I've loved. With his books I always feel the unique need, upon finishing them, to immediately go back and read my favorite parts over again. Well, except for The Book of Dreams, as the ending was rather emotional and depressing. That part where all the Paladins begin to leave Howard Alan Treesong was tragic. Abandoned by his own split personalities!

Next I think I'm going to read the Lyonesse series, which is supposed to be right up there with the Demon Princes and the Dying Earth.

Riddley Walker is extremely unique, but I haven't gotten far enough to say much more than that. It's written in Hoban's primitive version of English with slang and misspellings to reflect the crude post-apocalyptic atmosphere, so it's kind of dense at times. I'm a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, and it comes highly recommended, so I'll get my way through it eventually.

Speaking of post-apocalyptic stuff, A Canticle for Leibowitz is absolutely amazing. The scope is huge, spans thousands of years, and it's a beautiful novel, full of Latin, and it touches on just about everything, from religion and ethics to politics, science, war, human knowledge, etc. And it has a sense of humor to boot! It's too big to cover in a paragraph:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_For_Leibowitz

The Essential Conan includes: The Hour of the Dragon, The People of the Black Circle, Red Nails, The Devil in Iron, A Witch Shall Be Born, Jewels of Gwahlur, Beyond the Black River, Shadows in Zamboula, and The Hyborian Age.

Those first three are the main stories and are novella-ish. I've only read the first one.

The only other Chesterton book I've read is Orthodoxy. The Man Who Was Thursday is fiction, isn't it? With blatant religious undertones, of course.

As for Bradbury, Fahrenheit is the first I've read from him. I've heard that his Mars chronicles are pretty good. Sadly, I still haven't read 1984. I want to badly, but I just haven't gotten around to it.

Yes, that was a brutal ending! And then, the girl asks Gersen, "what happens now?" and he says, "Nothing. It's finished." And that's it .. the quest, the mammoth undertaking, si done and there's this overwhelming sense of bleakness ... as though with a huge burden being lifted from Gersen there's no purpose and little hope of any meaningful future. Of course Vance never wastes time on drawing out endings and it's something I appreciate him for .. it's quite possible that Gersen gave all his money to the IPCC (hahahaha) and went off to start a farmer's life with Alice and Navarth the mad poet!

I have still only read the first voluem of Lyonesse. It's definitely Vance, but it feels as though he has toned down his usual flamboyance a bit for this series. It's probably what I would recommend to a "normal" person who loves "high fantasy" if they wanted to start enjoying Vance. I can't say too much about it until I crack the rest of the trilogy, though.

The last Vance I read was his "Planet of Adventure" saga. It's another multi-volume (though these are pretty saga, this time about a space explorer from Earth landing on an alien world in a pod after his ship and crew are destroyed by an unknown force and exploring all the societies and cultures of this strange planet, all the while trying to figure out a way to get home. It's funny how a Vancian planet is often a lot like a bizarre, foreign country ... there's a lot of culture shock but his protagonists manage to adapt, and in the end even though there are four alien races on this planet vying for control, all of whom appear to have enslaved men to a certain degree, its' the <i>men</i> of the planet that are the interesting characters; the aliens are more of a background, which we only get hints about.. There were some really choice passages in these books though, and some brilliant dialogue.

I've got "The Night Land" and will probably read it soon. The faux-seventeenth century writing style does put me off a little bit.

I absolutely love Hodgson's "House on the Borderland" and, unlike Terry Pratchet, who wrote an essay about Hodgson's novel in this book of horror commentary I have, I feel that the slight romantic elements were very necessary to the power of the story and not at all unsubtle or overdone. Maybe that isn't the case with "The Night Land". But yeah, it annoyed me how Pratchet only really seemed to grasp what was on the surface of "House on the Borderland", without really bothering with the deeper metaphysical/theological implications that are suggested by the book. The borderland is clearly not only connected with a distant dimension in space and time but with the afterlife and our conceptions of heaven and hell. The spontaneous cosmic journey to the end of time in the second half of the book is one of the most disturbing and brilliantly strange things I've ever read.

That's brilliant; I never thought about it in this light, but it makes a sort of sense. However, aren't you talking about the short story "The Judgement"? I saw this earlier and didn't comment because I had to go home and look it up in my "Complete Short Stories of Kafka". Did he re-use this idea for the nnovel "The Trial"? If so, I'd better re-read that, since I just read "The Judgement" last year and the questions I had kept me returning to it .. I must have read it three times over. And yes, I definitely got the sense that there was something "fishy" about the way the son kept talking about his friend, and the father seemed to know this individual as though he were his own flesh, too. So many layers. Argh, now I awnt to read Kafka again.

I only got through the first Amber book. I may yet try the series again, but I've discovered that I have to be careful with Zelazny as his self-conciousness, which you point out and which I think gets in the way of me fully enjoying his work, often gets in the way of my immersion in his tales. Does he ever take himself seriously?

Just got done reading King's Christine. Like with the The Shining, it had some minor and major alternating sections compared to the movie release. Like where the movie had the car that was killing people more ambiguous of who it was. The book flat out told you who it was. The book was almost told entirely in first person as well. Overall, it had some entertaining moments.

Haha, Christine is an awesomely fun read.

It was the first time I read it. He seems to have a crude narrative to guide you along the read. For instance, him using "shit" references throughout the book, which was hilarious at times.

I plan on going to the library today and seeing if they have First Blood.

While I'm sure that most of you will disagree I find the concept of Metaxiosis in Nietzsche's works pretty similar to the ideology of Anarchism, in which the old ideals are overturned for the creation of new ones.

On another note, I got The Worm Ouroboros for Christmas, and have yet to read it. I'm wondering what the fantasy readers here think of it.

Notes from the Underground

The book that I read most recently for pleasure was Asimov's The Gods Themselves. I liked it, but I had some problems with the way he discards characters. You spend most of the first part of the book focused on a guy named Fremont, and after the first part is over, he never appears again, except for other characters talking about him. The science was interesting, and the plot was great, though.

"The Last Question" by Asmiov is my favorite of his. Check it out.