I'm interesting in the aesthetic history of SF and I'm looking for anything that talks about the progress on how the designs of spacecrafts have evolved over time. I'm not just looking for people namedropping Frank R. Paul and Chris Foss, but instead I'm after discussions of the entire history of spacecraft designs.
I bought this book a while ago but never got round to reading it; a few days ago I saw a post here discussing Cordwainer Smith, and it convinced me to bump this book up to the top of my TBR pile.
Anyway I'm halfway through and this book is goddamn nuts. Cordwainer might be the maddest genius this genre has ever seen.
This book is a collection of short stories set in the same fictional universe of the far future. It's really well written and Cordwainer was an incredibly compitent writer, but I keep getting the feeling that his grip on reality is very loose. His stories have a Brothers Grimm, German Fairytale kinda vibe about them, except told through the gaze of someone that makes PKD seem normal by comparisson. The story Think Blue Count Two, is quite possibly the most unhinged thing I've ever read. There's a part where they immortalize a mouse's brain by laminating it, so it can mentally adopt 'the most beautiful girl in the world', as its daughter and conjure up these ghostly bodies to protect her against wrongdoers. Absolute madness, like holy fuck.
I love it. That disregard for normalcy makes this book feel so original and unlike anything I've ever read before. I've read a lot of crazy books over this last year where the author seems half in, half out of dreaming, but this is a work of total mad genius. I am absolutely loving this.
This is apparently a very great, unknown novel. The booktuber, Bookpilled discovered this at random, since then it's been passed about amongst the vintage sf scene and talked about as one of scifi's best kept secrets. I think the outlaw bookseller and vintage sf also did reviews on it.
Shout out to all my fellow late bloomers.
So the book is like the evil brother of Flowers For Algernon. It is set in a human testing facility inside of a secret prison in the rocky mountains. One of the prisoners, who is also a poet, is given the task of documenting the effects of a drug on the other prisoners that turn them into savants.
I don't want to spoil too much, but the book is damn near perfect and it couldn't have been written by anyone else. The protagonist is a super genuis, he frequently makes references to opera, classical literature, classical art, poetry and is extremely convincing as being this ultra intelligent savant with an eclectic taste in the arts. Furthermore he makes no effort to hold your hand and he just expects you to know all of these references he's making. At points in the book he straight up just goes "fuck it" and starts documenting the prison as if he's writing a soliloquy, giving zero fucks about it's accessibility. But for all it's complexity it makes perfect sense.
One could spend days psychoanalyzing the characters in this book. Each one of them walks the fine line between madness and genius.
The book is also written flawlessly. Some of the most flambouyant prose I've ever seen and it's awesome.
I'd recommend this one.