Daily Archives: September 26, 2024

Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 SF Books (5) Robert Silverberg – To the Land of the Living

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(5) ROBERT SILVERBERG –
TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING (1990)

 

Straight outta the afterlife!

Robert Silverberg is a prolific author of fantasy and SF – one whom deserves his own Top 10 list from either his novels or short stories (or both!). Ironically, this is not the novel I would recommend as introduction to Silverberg – that would be his epic planetary romance, Lord Valentine’s Castle, which combines elements of fantasy and SF to please fans of either genre.

However, it is his posthumous fantasy here that earns my Top 10 SF entry. Evolved from his story “Gilgamesh in the Outback”, his contribution to the posthumous fantasy anthology series, Heroes in Hell. Everyone who has ever lived and died throughout humanity’s history – and prehistory – finds themselves reborn in the afterlife, a mysterious and vague limbo. It is not unlike terrestrial existence – one can even die in it but is then reborn elsewhere – but more plastic in its reality, as geography and even memory can be unreliable or untrustworthy.

Like limbo, humanity’s main purpose in the afterlife is to find ways to pass eternity – or for protagonist Gilgamesh (of the Sumerian epic) to find a way back to life, mirroring his epic quest.

 

FANTASY & HORROR

 

Yes – it’s the third of four posthumous or afterlife fantasies by an SF author in my Top 10 SF Books

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – Fantasy & SF: Top 10 Books (5) Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor – Welcome to Night Vale

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(5) JOSEPH FINK & JEFFREY CRANOR –
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE (2012 – present)

 

“A friendly desert community, where the Sun is hot, the Moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome to Night Vale.”

Surreal horror and humor podcast styled as a community radio broadcaster in an American desert town – although my familiarity with it is more from the novels, which served as my introduction to the Night Vale setting, a desert town where all conspiracy theories are real as well as other urban myths and other surreal fantasies.

In other words, a fantasy and conspiracy kitchen sink setting, where the laws of time and space and nature in general don’t apply, or at apply only spasmodically. The citizens of Night Value simply roll with it, accepting surreal fantasy side by side with mundane reality.

“The news from Lake Wobegon as seen through the eyes of Stephen King”. Alternatively the Illuminatus Trilogy filtered through H.P. Lovecraft and crammed into one desert town. Or the surreal dream logic of David Lynch on crack or acid flashback (or both).

The Sheriff’s Secret Police along with all the other government surveillance agencies and spy satellites, Old Woman Josie surrounded by angelic beings all named Erika, the Glow Cloud (all hail the Glow Cloud!) and plastic pink flamingos that warp time and space.

And then you have the really dangerous entities and eldritch abominations – the car salesman loping like wolves through their yards, the mysterious hooded figures in the town’s forbidden dog park, the City Council (in the council building draped nightly in black velvet) and worst of all, the Library and its most dangerous part, the fiction section filled with lies…

 

SF & HORROR

 

As a fantasy and conspiracy kitchen sink setting, it pretty much throws SF and horror elements to mix them all together.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****
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Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (Special Mention) (16) Wars of Years & Days

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Collage of paintings representing battles of the Hundred Years’ War by Blaue Max for Wikipedia “Hundred Years War” under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

(16) WARS OF YEARS & DAYS

 

Yes – all wars are literally wars of years or days (well, except for the Anglo-Zanzibar War of forty minutes or so) but this special mention is for the wars named by historians as such for their duration.

Of course, those titles may not be exact – the Hundred Years War lasted 116 years (intermittently).

Speaking of which, the Hundred Years War between England and France from 1337 to 1453 is one of the most prominent wars named for their duration, at least by years, famed for such things as Joan of Arc and the Battle of Agincourt.

Another would be the Thirty Years War, a war I have to concede that I know less well than I should, given that it is the definitive war of early modern history, largely ending wars of religion in Europe while also the origins of modern international law between states with the Peace of Westphalia.

There’s also the Seven Years War, which I similarly have to concede I know less well than I should, as no less than Winston Churchill claimed it as the first world war.

However, the Hundred Years War and Thiry Years have particular resonance as some historians have argued for a second Anglo-French Hundred Years War from 1689 to 1815, for no less prize than global predominance, while others have argued for the two world wars as the Second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945.

As for the most prominent war of days (or is that day war), the prize would have to go to the Six Day War, the third Arab-Israeli War in 1967 – in which Israel won a crushing victory and one which still shapes the Middle East today, among other things through the territory obtained by Israel from it.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

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