And call me Conrad
Feb.11, 2009, filed under Miscellany
Frood and I are not two peas in a pod by any stretch of the imagination. Come March we’ll have been together for 19 years, and the length of my life with him will finally have tipped the scale into being greater than the length of my life without him.
We have different personalities (he’s as laid back as they come, whereas I’m something of a control freak with a tendency to worry) and different interests (he likes reading, I’m an outdoors girl). He likes dressing up and going to busy concerts and I like dressing down and swimming in the sea. I have imaginary friends: sometimes I think he is an imaginary friend. Yet in almost twenty years we have never had a serious argument. We’ve never gone beyond disagreement.
We do have a few precious things in common, besides our sense of humour and penchant for the surreal. One of them is our favourite book, which is odd given that I have no taste for the trashy fantasy with which he covers the shelves. That book is Zelazny’s This Immortal, which I have just finished reading again. I have read this book so many times I couldn’t begin to enumerate them.
This, to me, is great speculative fiction. This is writing of a standard rarely matched, and never bested. While the post-war future setting is intrinsically required for the story, because such a thing could not happen otherwise (unlike a great many stories, in which the setting is no more than a fancy backdrop — I disagree with the premise that all stories should be familiar in some sense), it at no point interferes with or dominates the narrative.
The main character is richly and yet sparsely described. Like a sip of a fine Tokaj, there is great depth and complexity in a bare mouthful. The conflict in which he finds himself is not overplayed, another tendency I find in modern fiction: the conflict can be wound up for the sake of dramatic tension to such a degree that it descends into angst. Angst does not make art.
Zelazny kept this work short, concise and to the point. In doing so he produced a book of lyrical quality that is as brutally fascinating as the cobalt-bomb poisoned Earth he describes.
This, for me, is the gold standard. This is how I would like to be able to write.
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Singularity
~something that is singular as (a) a separate unit, or (b) unusual or distinctive manner or behavior; PECULIARITY;
~the quality or state of being singular;
~a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative exists;
~a point or region of infinite mass density at which space and time are infinitely distorted by gravitational forces and which is held to be the final state of matter falling into a black hole. Sight
