Reviews

bold and uncompromising future poetry

AE Bookshelf: William Gibson

BY D.F. McCourt

It’s hard to imagine we’ve made it five years without tackling the incredible oeuvre of William Gibson, the author we are so eager to claim as Canadian that we have forgiven his American birth. Gibson burst onto the scene in 1984 with Neuromancer, the novel that launched a thousand terrible imitations (and a half dozen or so very good ones). Since then, he’s given us ten more novels, a wealth of short fiction, and a string of radically political non-fiction. So where to start?

A brilliantly rendered cosmic experiment

Philip Jose Farmer’s Magnificent Experiment: Riverworld

BY Duff McCourt

Socrates, Abraham Lincoln, and Neil Armstrong sit down for tea. It’s not the opening of a poor joke, but rather a potential scene from Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld. In Riverworld, the entirety of humanity is resurrected naked and youthful along the banks of a single immense river that winds through an intricate valley on a vast and temperate planet. Peoples ancient and modern mingle in what can only be described as a cosmic social experiment.

You should read this book, if you haven’t already.

A Canticle for Leibowitz: Monks, Nuclear Apocalypse, and the Second Coming

BY Paul Jarvey

This book surprises with its first six-century jump, from dirt-eating survivalism to rediscovery of electrical power, and then shocks with its second leap to a rebuilt world of interstellar travel. That the spectre of nuclear apocalypse hangs over this renaissance, neither forgotten nor properly respected, is only to be expected. But, again, this is not a story about governments or fallout victims. It’s a story about vultures and about the desperate unkillable thread of humanity that remembers itself.

This a book you read as you might swim in an ocean. You submerge yourself at this point or that, absorbing it, living it.

PHILIP K. DICK, by the Exegesis

BY D.F. McCourt

There are three books, actual bound paper artifacts, that sit near at hand on my desk: Webster’s New Explorer Dictionary and Thesaurus, the King James Bible and the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare. Though all three of these texts are available freely online, I find great value in having them within reach to flip through. Not only do they represent the foundations of modern literature but they, all three of them, are inexhaustible wellsprings of inspiration and reliable remedies to all flavours of writer’s block. For the first time in many years, there is a fourth book I am thinking of adding to this company: The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.