Welcome to the first-ever edition of OGWiseman Recommends! Look for my new story “The Archivist” in your email next Sunday, January 17th. But for now, on my “off” weeks I will instead have several regular features, of which this is one. Please enjoy!
In this space, I will recommend-with-explanation some of my absolute favorite stories for your between-newsletter sci fi consumption. In the interests of not making this harder for myself than it needs to be (and because novels are awesome), I’m not limiting myself to just recommending short stories. In fact, this week it’s entirely novels. :)
If you want to support what I’m doing here, the best way to do that is to email this post (or my story from last week) to three people you know who love to read, and share this post on your social media:
This set of recommendations will take two parts. I know that among my readers I have both sci fi newbies and veterans, and all are welcome! So we’ll start with some IF YOU LOVE THEN TRYs for those coming from non-sci fi reading backgrounds, then some HIDDEN GEMS for the vets.
(Please Note: Substack does not support underline functionality in its editor (?!), so I’ve written book names inside quotations even though it bothers me to do so.)
And now without further ado! :)
* * *
IF YOU LOVE David Foster Wallace, Jon Franzen, and other Very Serious Literature written by and for people with detailed opinions about the purple prose of John Updike, THEN TRY “The Book of the New Sun”, by Gene Wolfe.
https://bookshop.org/books/shadow-claw-the-first-half-of-the-book-of-the-new-sun/9780312890179
I have read this book twice. I understood a lot more of it the second time through. And yet, during the second pass I also noticed so many new things I didn’t understand that overall, the picture was perhaps less clear after the second try, despite all I had learned. If that last sentence seems paradoxical and overly complicated, then I’ve given you some flavor of the knots into which this book can tie one’s brain.
Keep in mind, however, that I am still recommending this book to the adventurous of spirit. It is rewarding in the same way wandering through a museum full of amazing paintings that one knows nothing about would be rewarding. Of course one is missing huge amounts of it, but that’s not the point. The pleasure is in the panoply stretching endlessly before one’s eyes in all directions, and on that mark, this book unforgettably delivers.
For Example: The central character is Severian, a member of the Guild of Torturers, which in this far-future world is definitely not a metaphor. And it just gets weirder from there.
Devotees of this book speak of it in the hushed tones of monks discussing scripture. It contains multitudes. It’s so hoity-toity that it’s written as a tetraology (four-book series) because a trilogy would just be so basic. There is a chapter-by-chapter companion volume of annotation and concordance written by someone other than Mr. Wolfe. Beware should you wish to wade in its waters, for the tides are strong and can pull you in.
IF YOU LOVE thematically heavy, relationship-centered stories like “Terms of Endearment”, by Larry McMurtry or “Little Women”, by Jane Austen, THEN TRY “Lilith’s Brood” (a.k.a. “Xenogenesis Trilogy”), by Octavia Butler.
https://bookshop.org/books/lilith-s-brood/9780446676106
Butler is a titan of Sci Fi, completely changing the game during the second half of the 20th century with her conceptual imagination and unforgettable voice. She’s best known for work like “Kindred”, which brought a new kind of racial consciousness into Sci Fi, but my personal favorite of hers is this trilogy, which my lovely fiancee recently described as asking the question: “What is gender, really?”
I rush to assure you that, although this book is progressive—and even radical—in its politics, there are no easy answers in Butler’s stories. No one is without sin and no one is without suffering. She addresses questions of gender (and love, and commitment, and identity, and sacrifice) by introducing alien creatures called Oankali, a species who do not divide neatly into traditional male-and-female hemispheres.
What the Oankali want and why are not things I will spoil in this space, but the answers are worth the time spent alone in a room. Butler’s prose shoots out in a small but insistent jet that gives a sense of the immense mass of her world-building bearing down on it, somehow making a hundred pages of characters in a room talking move at an electric and uninterruptible pace. She uses alienness as a profound form of mystery, and leaps around in time to subvert reader expectation. Like so many relationships themselves, Butler’s books are as much about what is NOT said as what is said.
IF YOU LOVE Raymond Chandler, Lee Child, and other purveyors of butt-kicking, name-taking, wise-cracking, town-painting crime fiction, THEN TRY “David Mogo, Godhunter”, by Suyi Davies Okungbowa.
This is the first piece of Nigerian fiction I’ve read, and it won’t be my last. It answers the question I never knew I always wondered about, namely: What if Raymond Chandler grew up in Nigeria and wrote a story where the world was heavily populated with gods? Yes, please and thank you, sign me up.
This story’s pace and verve put me in mind of “Altered Carbon”, by Richard Morgan (which, if you haven’t, go read the first book, it’s great even though the sequels and the Netflix show were not). What really sets it apart, though, is how richly and lovingly the author captures Lagos and makes us feel like we’ve actually been there. Not easy to do at all, especially not on the way to a pleasantly plot-heavy story and a lot of god-related world-building! The author has another coming out in early 2021, the first in an epic fantasy series. I’ve already pre-ordered.
IF YOU LOVE poetry, or strangely-structured novels like “Invisible Cities”, by Italo Calvino, or just very off-beat things that combine the totally epic with the intensely personal, THEN TRY This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
https://bookshop.org/books/this-is-how-you-lose-the-time-war/9781534430990
It’s giving nothing away to tell you what this book is about: Two super spies on opposite sides of a war fought with time-travel as a mature technology leave each other letters and eventually fall in love. In fact, understanding that much going in will likely enhance the experience, because this is a book you need to have patience with understanding (like so much poetry). It will help if you somewhat know where it’s going.
I read this book in one sitting, and if you can clear a few hours to sit down with it, I found that to be a very rewarding experience. It comes at you in waves, and creates a cumulative, tidal feeling that leaves a deeper impression than a book this short should be capable of. The book has a velocity that seems palpable even as it remains undefinable.
After finishing, I looked for information on how the co-authors wrote it. Did they each write one character’s letters? Did they sit in a room together and take turns typing? It’s not shocking this isn’t the #1 interview question they get, but someone should have asked! Inquiring fellow sci fi writers want to know!
* * *
This week, I also have three HIDDEN GEMS for you. This is especially for any veteran sci fi readers out there who have maybe read all the ones I recommended above, or for noobs who just want to read something a little more off the beaten path.
HIDDEN GEM #1 - “Wyrm”, by Mark Fabi
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/522220.Wyrm
This book is an incredible combination of surprisingly-accurate-for-1997 Computer Hacker story, R.A. Salvatore-style high fantasy adventure novel, and pretty-darn-well-done screwball romantic comedy. It concerns the Y2K bug, a world-spanning A.I. created to help run a computer game, and an irascible, refuses-to-grow-up hacker who gets caught in the middle and ends up on the run from the FBI.
Honestly, it shouldn’t work. It should be stupid, and predictable, and it kind of is, but like the best John Grisham novels it somehow succeeds not despite these flaws but because of them, resulting in a totally readable novel that feels less of-its-time than it should and contains some genuinely funny bits.
HIDDEN GEM #2 - “The Moondark Saga” (Book One, “Warrior”), by Donald McQuinn
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1869581.Warrior?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=Q74Wu2vR19&rank=1
Criminally under-read despite the cover proclaiming them “Science Fiction Bestsellers!”, these books have one of the greatest science fiction premises I’ve ever encountered: Twelve modern people are frozen in a cryogenic creche during a nuclear war and emerge hundreds of years later into a world that has returned to a medieval (castles and swords and arrows) level of technology. But the twelve still have all the knowledge of modern humans and are armed to the teeth with modern weapons!
What ensues is a truly magnificent story of epic scope, one that I’ve been recommending to people since these books literally changed my life when I read them obsessively and repeatedly as a teenager a couple of decades ago. I loved these books so much that I wrote to the author, struck up a friendship with him, and have kept in loose touch for years. He’s a retired Marine, in his 90s now and still kicking ass. I’ll probably be buried with a copy of these books.
HIDDEN GEM #3 - “Cain”, by James Byron Huggins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/573621.Cain?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=qnsxEB5uff&rank=7
What I love about this book is that it knows exactly what it is—a good and evil, explicitly Christian, extremely violent morality tale written by someone who is not nodding or winking at ALL at the silliness of what he’s doing. I mean, the main character’s name is literally “Soloman”. Like “King Solomon” from the bible, but also like “Solo Man”, cause he’s the only one who can defeat the devil, and he has to do it on his own. If you can write that without laughing over the keys, you’re a true believer.
Honestly, though, it’s just so fun, and this book has it all: A Priest with a heavy conscience, scientists who dismiss the hubris of playing with the powers of God, and a shootout between the hero and the devil in a literal gothic castle. Look again at that cover. I mean, come ON.
Anyway, you gotta be a fan of this kind of semi-campy thing and revel in it, but if you can laugh instead of rolling your eyes, like I can, it’s a bunch of fun. Also look out for Huggins’ other masterpieces, like “Norwegian Jesus battles a Giant Lizard-Monster” (“Leviathan”), and “Special Forces Jesus saves Christianity with Knife-Fighting” (“The Reckoning”). All truly top-shelf stuff. If they hadn’t already made a pretty famous documentary called “Jesus Camp” that would be an amazing name for a James Byron Huggins biopic.
Well, that’s my post for the week! Hope you enjoyed and found something you might want to check out. I’ll be back in seven days with my second original story, entitled “The Archivist”. Have a great day!