Summer & Fall Reading

I read this summer Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base by Anne Jacobsen (2011; 2012). It's an interesting and pretty thorough history but not always very well written, especially in regards to airplanes and aviation. Anyway, the author asserts that the supposed crashdown at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 involved a Soviet flying saucer built using captured Nazi technology and mutated Mini-Me pilots, all without providing any evidence at all. Her description of Bob Lazar's account of seeing flying saucers and dead or injured pilots at Area 51 led me to believe that a similar scene in The Shape of Water (2017) was inspired by Mr. Lazar's supposed experience. So one fiction from another.

In September I read Ghosts, edited by Grant Overton and published in 1927 by Funk & Wagnall's. "The Two Drovers" by Sir Walter Scott tells of a most terrible event in the lives of two former friends. "Kari Aasen in Heaven" by Johan Bojer is a beautiful and charming fantasy. And "A Source of Irritation," a story of the Great War by Stacy Aumonier, is very funny. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving is in Ghosts as well. Reading that story got me started on thinking and writing about H.P. Lovecraft, the Hudson River, and other recent topics.

In October I read A Fan's Notes: A Fictional Memoir by Frederick Exley (1968). The late Mr. Exley gave us another view of the Hudson River. Reading his book led me to write about still more topics during this past month (November-December 2025).

Also in October, I read The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth (1989). I afterwards found out that Mr. Forsyth died earlier this year. I wrote about him and Martin Cruz Smith on November 10, 2025. They are two of the writers we lost in 2025.

Not long ago, I found a paperback book called Soviet Science Fiction, edited by Isaac Asimov and published in 1962 by Collier Books. I read it in October. There are six stories in its pages. All are good and reveal a different kind of sensibility than what you will find in western science fiction. If I had to name a favorite, it would be "Infra Draconis" by G. Gurevich (1917-1998), who was born in the month following the abdication of the Russian tsar. It made me think a little of Gateway by Frederik Pohl (1977).

In October I read The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester (1976). As with his earlier novels, this one is experimental, only more so. To meet the zeitgeist of the 1970s, it's also a little trippy. Bester mentioned Richard Nixon several times in his book. There's nothing wrong with that, but authors who include people and events of their day risk seeing their works becoming quickly dated. People of today, driven insane by their contemplations of our current president, should remember that. Their rants will not play well in the future and may prove incomprehensible to readers and viewers of the future. That's especially true of science fiction that is set in the future, for no one fifty or a hundred years from now is going to care or think about or talk about Nixon or Trump or almost anybody else from the past. They may not even know who those people are. In short, don't make your fiction outdated in the moment that you create it.

Anyway, there is a creature in The Computer Connection--I forget its name--that can be to added to The Internet Ooze, Blobs, Jellies, & Slime Database. In a book of extremely rapid-fire ideas and extrapolations, I found the earliest instance that I can remember of one fictional character addressing another as "dude," also the first instance of one character saying to another, "Wait for it, wait for it." I haven't seen the most recent Mission: Impossible movie, but reading a plot summary makes me think that there are similarities between it and Bester's novel, specifically in the attempt to evade the scrutiny of an otherwise all-seeing computer intelligence. But then we saw the same kind of thing in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

In October I started to read Norstrilia by Cordwainer Smith (Ballantine Books, 1975). I didn't get very far: I had read too much science fiction and reading another such novel seemed to be even more too-much. So I turned to another type of story. (See below.) But in reading the first pages of Norstrilia, I came upon some of the the same kinds of themes (or yearnings) that I had found in The Computer Connection, namely: a) Immortality; and b) Mental telepathy or psychic powers. There is a lot of both in science fiction. They seem to be the twin desires or fantasies of an awful lot of science fiction authors. Mental telepathy or psychic powers are a subject of almost no appeal and no interest to me. As soon as I come across them in one book I begin to think about reading another. But if I think not about myself and my own tastes and instead about what writers tell us about themselves in the subjects that interest them and about which they write, then these things become more interesting and revealing. Thinking about them offers the reader the opportunity to explore ideas and gain insights into science fiction and its various authors. For example, an interest in mental telepathy or psychic powers would appear to be closely tied to the science-fictional concept of the superior man, or superman, so common in the 1930s, rampant in the 1940s, and continuing into the decades that followed. I imagine that some science fiction authors feel themselves superior to ordinary humans, a feeling that probably comes from a sneaking suspicion that they are in fact the opposite. One thing that science fiction authors don't seem to realize is that if we could read each other's minds, writing would necessarily come to an end. Why should I read what you write if I can simply see it in its original? Why wade through things conveyed by the imperfect medium of language when we can draw directly from the source? Put another way, if there were mind-reading, then that would make an end to storytelling and reading. (Even if mind-reading were possible, the mind cannot be read like words on a printed page. There actually wouldn't be any "reading" at all, but a kind of immersion in the mind-state of another person.) As for immortality, we all might seek it, but the only way open to us would seem to require the existence of God and a promised afterlife. (The idea of uploading our minds into a forever-android or -computer is both ridiculous and sophomoric.) That's probably too much for most science fiction authors, however, for men and women of this type are ultimately science-minded and science-oriented. Contemplation of God and an afterlife is probably too icky for writers of this type.

So instead of reading Norstrilia, I turned to a crime and detective novel, The Screaming Mimi by Fredric Brown (1949). That was a good choice for me. Brown's novel is closer in time and space than is Norstrilia, closer also in terms of its culture and setting (i.e., 1940s Chicago). It's more immediate and familiar than is a science fiction novel. Norstrilia and stories like it are too distant, too remote (it's set 25,000 years in the future on a far-distant planet), and, frankly, too much of the author's own personal fantasy. The Screaming Mimi, on the other hand, takes place in the real world, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. (We should admit, however, that even hardboiled detective novels are fantasies.) I would add that The Screaming Mimi and stories like it are ultimately more human, even if some of its plot points, moreover its climax, are somewhat mechanical or not entirely plausible. (Mechanical, that is, as the word relates to the mechanics of storytelling.) By the way, there is a lot of drinking in The Screaming Mimi. And I mean a lot of drinking. Brown seems to have known whereof he wrote.

In November I read Time of the Great Freeze by Robert Silverberg (1964). We're probably not allowed to read books like this one because it's not about global warming but instead about global cooling. I know, heresy. I'm surprised Montag the fireman hasn't come around to burn my copy into ashes, but then that would send more world-ending carbon into the atmosphere. Anyway, I read it and enjoyed it (despite the fact that there isn't even one woman in sight). It's really a boy's adventure book except that it's set in the future. Towards the end, men in aircraft arrive to save the day. That makes me think of the events in the middle sequence of the film Things to Come (1936).

In November I read A Walk Out of the World by Ruth Nichols (1960), with nice illustrations by Trina Schart Hyman. Ruth Nichols was still a teenager when she wrote her first book. I found it to be a pure, gentle, innocent, and beautiful fantasy. It was almost certainly inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. The climax is refreshing. This is a woman's version of the end of a conflict versus that of a man.

Finally, I started reading McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales (2003) in November. I find Stephen King's and Michael Crichton's stories to be two of the poorest in the book so far. The late Mr. Crichton's is very nearly pointless and gratuitous in the extreme. Elmore Leonard's is the best so far--and by a long shot, no pun intended--but then I have heard he was a good writer. And now I find that Elmore Leonard was born in 1925. I have written this year (and recently) about other people born in 1925, including Flannery O'Connor, Jack Matthews, Lou Feck, June Lockhart, Alec Penstone, and a man named Floyd, whom I saw in October at a Veterans Administration clinic in distant Appalachia.

There is in Thrilling Tales a story with needless product placement (Lego, UPS, etc.) by Dan Shaon. So now we know that such a practice goes back at least as far as 2003. I'll keep railing against it wherever I find it. The book opens with an old-fashioned adventure story, written in the naturalistic tradition, about a hunt for a Megalodon. It's a self-aware story, though, and includes an inside joke/insider information in its mention of Bernard Heuvelmans. That one is by Jim Shepard. Finally for now, there is an elephant story by Glen David Gold, one to go along with another, "Hoity-Toity" by A. Belayev, in Soviet Science Fiction. These would make the beginnings of an anthology, or, if you will allow it, an elephanthology.

Copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley