Some recreation is pleasant. All three of these novels are
as hard to put down as they are easy to pick up.
The Martian by Andy Weir
Perhaps you have seen the trailers for The Martian, a film due to be released in 2015. If you read the
novel by Andy Weir, you’ll know why the studios bid for it. Mark Watney is
stranded on Mars and must find a way to survive until the next Mars mission. He
needs more skills than MacGyver to do it. Nor is this just about Watney. There
are the people back on earth and the crew of the ship that left him behind.
This is hard science fiction done right, and you don’t have to be an SF fan to
like it.
Wool by Hugh Howey
Even though e-book sales are way up, total book sales –
including e-books – have continued their long decline in the US; print sales
have plummeted. Accordingly, it is harder than ever to catch the interest of a
traditional publisher. Each of the major publishers typically receives 10,000
unsolicited manuscripts per month and rejects nearly all of them. More than
ever they prefer to stick with established authors with guaranteed sales. For
unknown authors the odds of a new title ever selling more than a few hundred
copies are tiny.
So, it is always pleasant to see someone break out against
the odds. Erika Leonard’s Fifty Shades
trilogy originally was self-published as was (less dramatically but still
successfully) David Wong’s John Dies at
the End and, for that matter, Andy Weir's The Martian. All found traditional publishers after sales took off, of course.
Hugh Howey has joined their company with the originally self-published Wool.
You might think you have had enough of post-apocalyptic
novels, but Howey shows there is still life in the genre. Perhaps you have
heard of decommissioned missile silos converted into underground
condos for those expecting the end of civilization in their
lifetimes – yes, they are a real thing. Wool
is set inside a silo where survivors struggle to…well…survive until the world
outside becomes less toxic. If that environment sounds claustrophobic, for many
of the residents it is. The tale, focusing on a technician named Juliette who
to her puzzlement is appointed sheriff, is surprisingly exciting. Politics below
the surface remain as disruptive as they ever were above. By the end of the
novel we learn a dark secret that sets us up for a sequel. I’m looking forward
to it.
The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal
As of last month I had read 21 of Gore Vidal’s 26 novels and
short story collections, including two of the five detective novels he wrote
under a pseudonym, plus a large proportion of his essays, dramas, and
screenplays. You might suspect I enjoy his work – and you’d be right.
Some teachers of creative writing are honest enough to say
(despairingly) that they help only at the margins – a grammar correction here
and some advice on plotting techniques there. Fundamentally, students who are
good writers are good when they start the class and the rest don’t get
appreciably better. Writers do evolve, but for the most part they do so on
their own by writing and then judging their own work. (Some judge so harshly
that they stop writing.) Hence the old saying “the first million words don’t
count.” Gore Vidal was a good writer from the start, and his very first novel Williwaw, written in 1944 at age 19, is
still considered one of the better war novels to come out of World War 2. Yet
he himself said in later years that “I didn’t find my voice" until The Judgment of Paris, written in 1950
and published in 1952.
This was one of the Vidal novels I had missed, and it is out
of print. So, when a third-party seller listed a first edition hardcover on
Amazon for $7.00 a few weeks ago I clicked “Add to Cart.”
The Judgment of Paris
is a literary novel of the sort rarer today than it once was. Philip, a young
man of secure but not lavish means, spends a year in Europe and Egypt after the
war. His goal is partly just to experience more of the world than his home on
the Hudson in upstate New York, and partly to find his own direction and sense
of self. Three women influence that direction by their arrival in his life and
by their different philosophies: Regina Durham, Sophia Oliver, and Anna Morris. One doesn’t
need to be much of a classical scholar to see the allusion and to guess where
this is going. Philip must make a choice in the end, as we all must do – not of
a partner, since it is unlikely he’ll see any of the three again after
returning home, but of his own values.
This is an intellectual novel in the best sense, and it is
beautifully written. The young Gore did indeed find his voice.