#17: The End of Eternity (1955) by Isaac Asimov

“He loved a complex of factors; her choice of clothes, her walk, her manner of speech, her tricks of expression. A quarter century of life and experience in a given Reality had gone into the manufacture of all that. She had not been his Noys in the previous Reality of a physioyear earlier. She would not be his Noys in the next Reality.”

The Eternity in the title doesn’t refer to time directly, but rather an organization that acts as the Platonic overseers of the course of human existence. This Eternity exists outside of the timestream and is a stratified, bureaucratic organization. At the top are “Computers,” the deciders as Bush would say. They use the other kind of computer (called a “Computaplex”) to plan changes in human existence (“Reality Changes”), and those changes are executed by Technicians, the bastardized workforce of Eternity. These changes are often slight–a jammed clutch here, a stolen notepad there. Ideally, Eternity uses the M.N.C. (“minimum necessary change”) that will cause the M.D.R. (“maximum desired response”) to human history. The end goal is a society without war, without crime, and without space travel.

Okay, a couple of things about Eternity. One, it’s a rather bland outfit. It’s essentially a boy’s club housed in a clean, grey, metal atmosphere–no women. Throw data in a computer, check a chart, get a response, ride the timewave, make the change, back home again. Two, the outfit was originally a wholly commercial enterprise. Eternity bought goods in surplus in one century and turned around and sold them to centuries of need. They got into the reality change game much later. Third, they ride through time in “kettles,” and the trips involve no perceived movement–like a carnival ride that never starts because the carny’s too wasted to pull the lever. And finally, I can’t stress enough, THERE’S NO WOMEN! One can only assume the sexual frustration going on in the workplace, and we all know how successful and efficient an organization run solely by men is.

The main character is a dedicated fellow named Technician Andrew Harlan. He’s the pet boy of one of the big wig Computers, a chap named Twissell. Harlan is obsessed with “Primitive History,” which is basically anything before the 27th century. Eternity didn’t exist before the 27th, and there’s no way of traveling back before the moment of Eternity’s creation. So Harlan satiates his Primitive appetite with an odd assortment of leftover goodies: a stack of newspapers from the early 20th century, a beaten copy of works by H.G. Wells, and some writings by the mysterious W. Shakespeare. Twissell sets Harlan up as the mentor to Brinsley Sheridan Cooper, who (**here be spoilers**) is going to go back and teach the creator of Eternity, the almighty Mallansohn, how to create Eternity. Did you catch that? Eternity is created by Eternity. But before that can happen, Harlan falls for a real woman, Lambent Noys, and the whole thing becomes jeopardized by lust. (**end spoilers**).

I will be the first to admit that I’m not a huge, huge fan of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), and neither is David Pringle. Pringle says in his entry on End of Eternity that Asimov is the Agatha Christie of sf, but that he’d just rather read Christie if given the choice. He includes EOE in his 100 list because a) Asimov is too big of figure not to include and b) EOE is straight sf (not a mystery, and not a galactic retelling of Gibbon–Pringle’s idea, not mine–as The Foundation Trilogy). I’m glad to say that Pringle is a little harsh in this instance. Sure Asimov has some crazy prose (re: Noys’ appearance, “Isn’t she built like a force-field latrine?” huh???), and characters keep saying things like “Great Time!” But Asimov makes an interesting statement in this novel. Basically, he says that the bland–passivity legislated paternalistically by a bunch of guys who don’t have girlfriends and ride around time in kettles–will kill humanity. We need the danger of the unknown and the possibilities of an uncharted future to keep us alive.

#16: A Mirror for Observers (1954) by Edgar Pangborn

“He wallowed in Mark Twain and Melville; I knew he was startled by Dostoevski, and amused by the thin wind of fallacy that blew through the unsanitary beard of Marx.”

“Do you think Christ could live any longer in the twentieth century than he did two thousand years ago? Galileo recants again, Socrates drinks the hemlock again, every day of every year.”

Quite the opposite of Hal Clement’s writing, Edgar Pangborn’s (1909-1976) writing comfortably fits within the soft or social sf camp. A painter and composer in addition to being a writer, Pangborn is relatively forgotten now. However, before his literary devotee Ursula K. Le Guin was churning out novels lacing scientific exploration with emotion, he was paving the way for the New Wave. His work is decidedly literary, slow moving, and filled with grand ideas. A Mirror for Observers, for instance, is no less than the chronicling of social shepherds fighting genocidal mania. Yikes!

The novel is basically comprised of two sections, both collections of missives written by a Martian named Elmis who is living among humans and battling another Martian named Namir for control over the direction of Angelo Pontevecchio, a young genius living in a rough section of Latimer, MA. Martians (who refer to themselves as “Salvayans”) abandoned their planet 30,000 years ago when it became uninhabitable. Since then, they’ve acted as Observers of human culture and history here on Earth. That is until recently, when Namir and a group referred to as “Abdicators” broke away from the Observers. They’ve concluded that humans are nasty apes who might as well kill themselves off and allow the Salvayans to take control of the Earth’s surface. The Salvayans, by the way, have lived all these years in interconnected subterranean cities spread across the globe.

Elmis shows up as a boarder at young Angelo’s house. He’s had a little plastic surgery (to make him look human), and he’s going by the name Benedict Miles, a Canadian ex-pat working on a book. He introduces Angelo to the literature of ethics and the ideas of the beautiful life. Miles/Elmis is, among other things, a great lover a music, which leads him also to befriend a young piano prodigy named Sharon. But Angelo is confused, and he falls too often under the influence of a young punk and gang leader named Billy Kell (who happens to have a close relationship with…you guessed it, Namir the Abdicator). After a street war, Angelo disappears and Elmis spends years looking for him.

Part two. Angelo is a grown man who goes by the name “Abraham Brown.” He’s still under the influence of William “Billy” Kell. William is part of a neo-fascist group known as the Organic Unity Party. I don’t need to tell you that Namir is involved. There’s also a scientist working on pandemic-producing chemical warfare, a suicide, and a grown up Sharon bringing down the house with her piano recitals.

Pangborn grew up surrounded by writing. His mother, Georgia Wood Pangborn, was a successful writer of ghost stories. And while I was a little disturbed by Elmis’ relationship with Sharon and an overall strange description of children by Pangborn (“That March day was like a little girl fresh out of her bath, cool, sweet, ready for mischief.”), the novel is intensely thought provoking and another example that sf is a diverse form of literature and more than the picture drawn by detractors: base escapism meant for children, with no literary merit.

#15: Mission of Gravity (1954) by Hal Clement

“I want to know why a fire glows, and why flame dust kills. I want my children or theirs, if I ever have any, to know what makes that radio work, and your tank, and some day this rocket. I want to know much–more than I can learn, no doubt.”

David Pringle once said that Hal Clement (Harry Clement Stubbs, 1922-2003) wrote as if he had a slide ruler next to the typewriter. Clement was one of the fathers of a subgenre in science fiction known as “hard sf,” and Mission of Gravity is usually considered one of the first novels of this type. Like any genre, subgenre, or the like, the meaning of what hard sf is creates debate. In my mind, sf is literature that has ideas for protagonists, and hard sf is sf storytelling where accurate scientific ideas play those roles. There’s no question in my mind that MG is a hard sf novel.

Clement is a world builder. His creation in MG is a large planet called Mesklin. Mesklin is shaped like a very wide but quite short top. And like a top, it spins quickly. A Mesklin day lasts about 18 minutes. The shape of the planet and the speed of its rotation also create variable gravity on the planet. At the equator, Mesklin’s gravity is about three times that of earth. At the poles, somewhere around 700 times. Before the novel begins, an important human research vessel crashes near one of the poles and human Charles Lackland has made contact and developed a limited relationship with a Mesklinite trader ship captain named Barlennan. Mesklinites look much like centipedes. They’re also instilled with a deep fear of falling (mere inches at the poles could be fatal).

Most of the novel follows the adventures of the Mesklinite crew as they journey from the “Rim” (equator) to the pole, in order to retrieve the information gathered by and stored in the earth research vessel. They’re guided, at first in person, later through instant communication, by Lackland. Barlennan and Lackland respect and trust each other, and because of it, the Mesklinites, who are rather primitive in some ways, ask for more and more human knowledge about the sciences.

Though he was also a painter (under the name “George Richard”), Clement was trained in science, and he spent most of his life as a high-school science teacher. Perhaps this explains why his dialogue and character development are wooden. Really, the narrative seems often to exist solely to give structure to Clement’s scientific points. But that’s not to say the novel isn’t enjoyable. In fact, the journey of these strange centipedes is oddly compelling, and I think Joseph Campbell would have been proud of Clement’s presentation of the hero’s journey. But as Peter Nicholls once said, the reader is introduced to these fantastic and believable creatures from another world, and then they open their mouths and “sound exactly like Calvin Coolidge.” Fascinating Calvin Coolidges though I must add.

#14: More Than Human (1953) by Theodore Sturgeon

“Does a superman have super-hunger, Gerry? Super-loneliness?”

Theodore Sturgeon (pen name of Edward Hamilton Waldo, 1918-1985) imagines superman in More Than Human without cape, nice haircut, and cartoon ethics. Rather superman is the whole of a gestalt human made from mutant freaks with paranormal powers. The “head” of this homo gestalt–the future of humanity–is Lone, and his formation of the gestalt is the focus of the first section of MTH, which is a collection of three interconnected novellas. At the beginning of the novel, Lone is pitiful. He’s an “idiot” without language or social skills who uses strong telepathic powers to find food and shelter. But his life changes drastically when he’s taken in by a grieving farm couple. They put him to work, teach him how to speak, and provide for his needs. Eventually, Lone moves on with his life. He builds a shelter in the woods and takes in three refugees: a telekinetic girl and twin teleports. Together, they find the rest of their oneness: a super-computational baby and a street urchin.

Section two takes place after Lone has died. The gestalt reforms with a new “head,” though a particularly inexperienced and ethically questionable one. They go to live in the moneyed home of someone from Lone’s past. However, this living experiment ends in murder.

The final section revolves around the “normal” human Hip Barrows. Hip’s mind has been blasted into fragments for an unknown reason. The gestalt’s telekinetic, Janie, helps him to piece it back together. Meanwhile, the gestalt as a whole searches for a conscience.

Sturgeon’s strong suit has always been considered the short story format, so perhaps it’s not a surprise that his best-known and best-loved novel is actually a collection of three novellas. MTH is filled with pathos–starting with the pathetic idiot Lone struggling with basic existence and ending with a new lifeform painfully piecing together an identity and the will to do right. The book can be awfully dramatic and overwrought with emotion at time because of it. In particular, the third section features a love story that I found sour to the taste. But I also marveled at Sturgeon’s daring for the time. For instance, his new species is multiracial. The gestalt’s twin teleports are black, though to the rest of the gestalt they are just other parts of the whole. Sturgeon also has two non-mutant characters named Alicia and Evelyn Kew who blatantly reflect the attempts of 20th-century man to control, manipulate, and destroy female sexuality. They live in a de facto prison with their father as warden. Father Kew keeps them ignorant of the outside world (they’ve never seen or heard of an automobile), ignorant of their bodies (they’re forced to dress and bath in absolute darkness), and completely sheltered from human contact. Chilling.

#13: Ring Around the Sun (1953) by Clifford D. Simak

“It had been the blade at first, the razor blade that would not wear out. And after that the lighter that never failed to light, that required no flints and never needed filling. Then the light bulb that would burn forever if it met no accident. Now it was the Forever car.”

Ring Around the Sun (1953) is a yarn about androids, parallel earths, mutants, and the death of capitalism. Now Clifford Donald Simak (1904-1988) wasn’t a socialist, but he was certainly a believer in some kind of sf agrarian populism–cornfields, barns, and robot labor. Simak grew up in rural Wisconsin, which would explain both his philosophy and the fact that most of his stories take place, at least in part, in rural Wisconsin. RATS is no exception.

Things start off simple enough. We see the day-to-day life of Jay Vickers, a Wisconsin native living the writer’s life in rural New York. Vickers lives alone, has a friendship with the odd old man on his street, and pines for a high-school sweetheart–straight out of a John Mellencamp song–who disappeared one day after a cinematic walk in the valley. Then things get a little Twilight Zoney. First, everlasting gadgets appear: razors that don’t need to be sharpened, light bulbs that never burn out, lighters that perpetually light. Then big ticket items: cars that run silently forever and houses that function solely on solar energy. World governments secretly fear a coup behind the appearance of these things, even more so when their makers start giving away free food substitutes. Vickers is mysteriously drawn into this milieu by a secret government agent.

Along the way, Vickers finds the door to the ring suggested in the title (a metaphor for a series of parallel earths that circle the Sun in separate timelines), and the key is a child’s top. The worlds are waiting, limitless and virgin expanses suited to cure humanity’s need for lebensraum. A genetically separate strand of humans with extraordinary abilities (“mutants”) have a population redistribution plan that involves these earths. They figure giving away cheap housing, everlasting goods, and free food will ruin Earth’s economy and cause a revolution (so the governments were right to be afraid!). The revolution will bring folks to these parallel earths (it’s complicated). Actually, folks are already waiting for something like this. There are rumors in the media about time travel, and many citizens spend their free time in Pretentionist clubs–groups that pretend to be living in a different time and place. For instance, one club lives like the world is as described in Pepys’ diary (perhaps they are called Pepys Peeps). Anyway, the mutant plan also happens to involve Vickers.

Growing up in a rural Midwestern town myself, I must confess that I sometimes have Simakian fantasies, though I’m not a true believer. Agrarian life is fine in Thomas Hart Benton paintings, but it can be a real bitch in reality. That’s not to take away from Simak’s work though. I find his concept of time interesting in particular. Time travel isn’t possible, rather there are unique timelines that can be traversed, in the case of RATS, by (paranormal?) mental capabilites. And I think his fantasy of elbow room would appeal to many, no? How often do we hear murmurs of overpopulation, overuse, and a human-caused environmental instability? And of course, city life can be a drag.

#12: The Space Merchants (1953) by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

“Increase of population was always good news to us. More people, more sales. Decrease of IQ was always good news to us. Less brains, more sales.”

“But–and here’s what makes this campaign truly great, in my estimation–each sample of Coffiest contains three milligrams of a simple alkaloid. Nothing harmful. But definitely habit-forming. After ten weeks the customer is hooked for life. It would cost him at least five thousand dollars for a cure, so it’s simpler for him to go right on drinking Coffiest–three cups with every meal and a pot beside his bed at night, just as it says on the jar.”

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919) and Cyril Kornbluth (1923-1958) first met back in the 30s as members of an influential group of sf fans in New York known as the Futurians (also in the group were Isaac Asimov, Damon Knight, and James Blish). The pair, which Thomas Disch referred to as “magnificent smart-alecks,” was unique. Kornbluth, for instance, was rumored to never brush–his teeth were literally green–and he drank black coffee not because he liked it but because writers were “supposed to.” The Space Merchants (originally serialized in Galaxy as “Gravy Planet”) was the first collaboration of many between Kornbluth and Pohl, though their partnership abruptly ended when Kornbluth died at the age of 34 from a heart attack.

I had always heard SM was a funny novel, a humorous take on Wall Street advertising agencies and corporate culture. While the humor is there, I fear readers don’t take Kornbluth and Pohl, who himself worked in advertising for a time, seriously enough. SM is deeply disturbing in its accurate, though metaphorical, depiction of a world handed over to marketing firms.

The narrator is Mitch Courtenay, a high-powered ad man in the dominate agency of the time. He’s given the task of marketing Venus to consumers in order to create a workforce that will strip the planet of its resources. Like all commercial goods and ideas in society, Venus’ true value to the consumer is not revealed through advertising; rather the planet is portrayed as an escape for the individual, a greener-grass community. In reality, Venus is barely inhabitable, and its future residents will live in industrial slums, work long hours, and garner very little pay. Mitch’s obstacles, however, are not the minds of the consumers. Rather, he fears two things. First, the competition. The world of SM is one in which corporations operate in a manner similar to the mafia. Hits are taken out on competing companies, a made man (i.e., executive) can only be offed by permission, etc. So will the Venus account be forcibly taken from him? Perhaps even by another executive from within his own firm? The other obstacle is the “Consies” (Conservationists). Consies believe environmental exploitation is wrong, and they act as a cell-based terrorist organization to stop it. Almost immediately, there are attempts on Mitch’s life.

Eventually, Mitch is given a taste of the consumer life when an enemy (internal office competitor? competing company official? the Consies?) switches his identity to that of a worker in a Costa Rica plant. This plant harvests a genetically manufactured, organic meat substitute known disgustingly as “Chicken Little.” Working in this plant is indentured servitude with all the trimmings: perpetually growing debt to the company, inflated charges for all services and goods (including bathroom time), malnutrition, and a dangerous work environment. But does this experience shake Mitch out of his well-fed corporate haze?

Pohl and Kornbluth’s world is fascinating: police are private agencies who have enforcement contracts with citizens, marriages come in varying degrees of contractual length, Congress represents corporations and not states, and the biggest celebrity in the US is a little person who’s the only human who’s actually been to Venus and who happens to be a womanizing drunk. Short marriages, ridiculous celebrities, corporate control of government, advertising that appeals to sex and death urges…no, it’s nothing like our world. Thank god it’s just science fiction.

#11: Bring the Jubilee (1953) by Ward Moore

“The historian is always conscious of destiny. The participants rarely–or mistakenly.”

One of the staples of the sf literary diet is the alternative history/alternative reality subgenre. Really, this type of storytelling has been around since the first person thought “what if blumpity blump happened instead of…,” which I imagine was a long time ago (what if Ung crushed Grok’s skull with a rock instead of Bron’s). In the modern age, there are two main events sf writers have tended to ask the what if question of–World War II and the Civil War. I would guess this is because both are often perceived to have been “won” by the “right” side. So wouldn’t it be scary if the bad guys came out on top for once. One of the defining novels of this subgenre is…wait for it…that’s right…Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee.

Joseph Ward Moore (1903-1978) was certainly not prolific, but because of Bring the Jubilee and his earlier novel Greener Than You Think, he’ll always have a place of honor in the field. BTJ is the story of Hodge Backmaker, a child of the 20s living in a world where the Confederacy won “The War of Southron Independence.” The United States is a backwater collection of 26 states barely surviving, while the Confederacy encompasses not only the southern part of our US, but also much of Central and South America. So while New York is a city of 1 million in the 1940s, with folks still driving horses and Brooklyn acting as a neighboring city, the real centers of industry and growth are St. Louis (finally we come out on top of Chicago!!!), Washington-Baltimore, and Leesburg (formerly known as Mexico City). The United States has also driven out all black folk, seen large anti-Asian (murdering) campaigns, and exists in a state in which most of its inhabitants live indentured to the few landed families left. The Confederacy, on the other hand, abolished slavery and has an open immigration policy. Along with Britain, which also rules British America (Canada), and the German Empire, which grew unfettered during the Emperor’s War (WWI), the Confederacy is a world superpower.

Now Hodge is a historian by profession, and since the great eastern schools in the United States are just hollow shells of learning, he joins an interesting commune in Pennsylvania known as Haggershaven. Haggershaven is an alternative to the university system. Scholars, researchers, intellectuals live together on a farm, sharing both chores and intellectual pursuits. Among these folks is the inventor of a time machine. What better device is there for a historian than a time machine? Well, the problem is…

I’m glad David Pringle made me sit down with this one; it would have sat on my “to read” shelf forever if not. And that would have been a shame. The novel is fascinating. Moore’s characters are either actors or spectators. Hodge is the latter. At times this is a saving attribute, other times not so much. While on the one hand he befriends an intellectual from Haiti named Enfandin, he also spends his early adulthood loyally working for a member of the Grand Army–an organization that plays a similar role in the alternate US that the Ku Klux Klan played in the real South after Reconstruction. And there are other fascinating aspects about this world: the 40s and 50s are almost like the 19th Century of our world, only with gadgets (almost steampunkish if you ask me); familiar figures take on new roles (Henry Adams is the author of Causes of American Decline and Decay); Freud seems not to have developed psychiatry, rather a fellow at Haggershaven is doing that work; and there’s a damn time machine, people!

#10: The Paradox Men (1953) by Charles L. Harness

“He had not the faintest idea who he was.”

“If the man with the spear could have reasoned first and hurled second, his descendants might have reached the stars within a very few millennia.”

Charles Leonard Harness (1915-2005) was closer to being a true pulp writer than most of the folks on Pringle’s list, but he was also a major influence on many sf writers (particularly Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss), even if most fans have never heard of him or read his work. Writing was always a secondary pursuit in his life, regardless of whether that’s the way he wanted it to be or not. A native of Texas, he spent most of his adult life as a patent lawyer out East. He also, like a many sf writers from his generation, had a strong background in science, particularly chemistry, and one passion from his childhood was building his own radio from scrap parts. His writing style was schlock-y, but his science background came through in the end, as it does in The Paradox Men.

Harness always had more of a following in the UK than he did in the States, which has led to a sparse and uneven printing history for TPM. Its first form was a novella, and when it was expanded to book-length form, the title was Flight Into Yesterday. It wasn’t until a later revision and expansion that the book gained the title it is generally referred to by today.

The story itself is a bit of a mess: part swashbuckling adventure, part space opera, and part meditation on the paradoxes of Einsteinian physics and Toynbeean history. The main character is a forgetful fellow known as Alar who has taken up with a society of thieves rebelling against the repressive, slave-sanctioning imperial government of America in the 22nd Century. Alar, like all thieves, wears a protective shield that stops projectiles but not hand-held weapons. Thus, swordplay is in vogue and the best of the best have unusual weight in an otherwise gadget-filled society. An East-West war is on the verge, and a group of Toynbeean historians has built a spaceship they hope will help usher in the next Toynbee civilization, T-22 (also the original working title for Harness’ novella). A fascinating idea really considering Arnold Toynbee has next to no presence in history departments these days. But I digress.

At the heart of the narrative is a time paradox. This spaceship or one just like it crashes on Earth five years before it has been built. One of the passengers is Alar, who has no idea who he is and who exhibits superhuman powers. Gone missing during this same time period is Kennicot Muir, the founder of the thieves’ group. His wife, Keiris, is now a slave wife of mover-and-shaker Haze-Gaunt, who happens to keep as a pet a weird tarsier (also a survivor from the crash) that has the ability to speak but only the phrase “Don’t go! Don’t go!” Crazy enough for you? Well, there’s also a former circus freak named Meganet Mind who can answer any question, a major crash into the Sun, and an appearance by a Neanderthal.

Aldiss calls Harness’ work “Widescreen Baroque,” by which he means a story that transcends space opera and allows its characters to act in an unfettered manner. And while I won’t lie and say that The Paradox Men is my favorite novel of the first ten on David Pringle’s list, Aldiss’ description is true. You never know what’s going to happen on the next page.

#9: Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

“There had been no warning when the great ships came pouring out of the unknown depths of space. Countless times this day had been described in fiction, but no one had really believed that it would ever come. Now it had dawned at last; the gleaming, silent shapes hanging over every land were the symbol of a science man could not hope to match for centuries.”

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (b. 1917) is one of the big guns of sf. He, Robert Heinlein, and Isaac Asimov are often referred to as “the Big Three.” British by birth, Sri Lankan by residency, he’s had a long and illustrious career. I personally think he’s one of the most fascinating and brilliant sf writers ever, and there’s no question that he’s unique. Clarke has a background in physics and mathematics, and he served for a time in the RAF. He’s also an accomplished skin diver, and he’s been a featured commentator on science for sources worldwide. It’s no surprise then that his work is often thought of as part of the “hard science” subgenre of sf. But that’s not the whole story. Clarke’s work also shows a fascination with the spiritual and, in the case of Childhood’s End, the occult. (He’s even been a fan of Yuri Geller.) This all adds up to what Peter Nicholls has called “the Arthur C. Clarke Paradox”–a belief in the power of science to make human life better while simultaneously looking to a higher intelligence (but not a god) to help usher human progress along.

As I said before, Childhood’s End features Clarke’s intertwining of hard science and spiritualism, and it’s one of his best novels. The first section of the book takes place during the first years after a worldwide shock. An alien species nicknamed “the Overlords” arrives in gigantic spaceships that they park in the skies above all the major human settlements across the globe. (V and Independence Day copied this powerful image, but ACC was there first.) Despite the menacing image, the Overlords are on a peaceful mission, and they become caretakers of the planet and usher in a scientific and intellectual utopia, while simultaneously refusing to reveal their physical appearance. Then the shocker comes when they finally do–they look just like demons: wings, horns, and all. They even smell like brimstone.

The second section of the book details the utopia the Overlords have created: almost no crime, a leveling of classes and races, complete freedom of movement and access to information, a 20-hour workweek, and the elimination of mechanical and menial tasks. I have one word for it…SWEET! Granted, the rule of the Overlords has the smell of the British Empire (Clarke has lived in Sri Lanka as a rich, white ex-pat Brit since the mid-50s), and there are some serious restrictions in the society they create. Most severely, the Overlords allow no space travel for humans. Now that would piss me off, but otherwise I could get use to the Overlord utopia. Come on short workweek!

The third section features two narratives. One concerns the journey of a human who discovers a way around the sanction on space travel. The other is the basis for the book’s title. Clarke reveals the end of humanity’s “childhood.” And while I won’t tell you what that is, I’ll let you know that it was the inspiration for a certain Led Zeppelin album cover. And if Led Zeppelin put it on an album, don’t you think you should sure as hell read it?

#8: Fahrenheit 451 (1953) by Ray Bradbury

“Let me take you to the empty place in my fire engine.”–13th Floor Elevators

“Those who don’t build, must burn.”–Faber

Most people in the US read Bradbury’s (b. 1920) Fahrenheit 451 at some point. Perhaps because of Bradbury’s puritanical view of comics, fast cars, and music piped straight into the ear, high school teachers seem to be big fans and throw the book at students year after year, especially during a lesson on censorship and/or during banned books week. And why not? Fifty years later, don’t we see faint glimpses of Bradbury’s world around us: iPods, shrinking pedestrian zones, aggressive driving, flatscreen tvs, and the general sense of a faster world with less leisure time?

So you know the story: fireman Guy Montag rebels against a book-burning America after meeting a strange young girl, seeing a woman burn with her books, and actually sitting down with a couple of texts himself. What a strange and clumsy character Montag is–not really the stuff of legend. He’s almost unable to make decisions without some sort of input from another: his boss Beatty, a seventeen-year-old neighbor, the reclusive Faber. But he’s a man trapped in a morally confusing job with the status quo of society sleeping next to him in bed every night–a recipe for confusion. But Montag also has balls enough to recite poetry, burn the bejesus out of his superior, and cross the river to the land of intellectual hoboes. So let’s give him credit for that at least.

Something that really sticks out to me, having now read the book four times in my life, is how much more complex society is in the novel than how the official line (“It’s a book about censorship”) suggests. Bradbury suggests, I think, that it’s our society that creates the situation of Fahrenheit 451, not a fascist government coming to power and shoving censorship down the throats of its citizens. Literature becomes smaller and smaller (condensed novels, magazines, comic books, etc.) while more and more groups lash out at insensitivity and offensiveness in literature. This equation leads to voluntary book burning, and we can assume that’s when government stepped in to use the intellectual climate for its own agenda. Years later, most people don’t care. They get to drive as fast as they want, they have entertaining (maybe) and interactive tv to watch, and their homes are fireproof (what else could you ask for?). This all leads to a kind of amnesia. Firefighters don’t remember that they used to put out fires, not create them, and Montag’s wife Mildred can’t even remember how she met him. By the way, do you remember the major events of 2005 still? Or even what happened over the last summer? Just checking.

But what are Montag, Faber, and Granger (hobo intellectual) fighting for? The rights of the minority to be able to read? An eventual evangelism of the classics? The rebirth of literature itself? I think most of us come away from the novel thinking we know the answer. Most students would say free speech and the right to obtain and collect intellectual property. But what about literature itself? The depths, peaks, and valleys of it. The good and the bad. Sorrow and happiness. While Montag is able to elicit an emotional response from Mildred’s friend when he reads “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold to her, literature might be dead to him, too. Truffaut seems to have had the same thought. In the end of his film adaptation, Montag and the rest of “the Book People” pace through a snow covered field unemotionally reciting his or her “book” over and over. Is there any meaning left?