Post by RS Davis on May 4, 2005 13:40:07 GMT -5
Book Review: The Loose Cannon Canon"
by: Garry Reed
I was noodling around on the net when I cursored upon a book about science fiction called "Loose Canon" by Charles Platt, described as a combination HL Mencken and PJ O'Rourke. My curiosity quickly kindled since I'd teethed my adolescence on SF, I'd named my website "Loose Cannon" and I've admired Mencken and O'Rourke.
The last time I wrote book reports was junior high school, and those were based on dust jacket blurbs, Cliffs Notes (the "Dummies" books of their day) and Classics Illustrated comics. But this isn't a book report. It's a book review. Slightly different parameters. So, I ordered the book and actually read it. Honest.
Hopefully, you've noticed the single "n" in Platt's "Loose Canon." Since a canon is a principle or precept, and a loose cannon is one who rants and raves, the result is a lit-crit rail that chronicles the speculative fiction of the 70s and 80s, with occasional toe-dips into the 50s and 60s. Aside from some original observations, this book reprints articles published between 1981 and 1996 in obscure fanzines like the Brit Interzone and the cyberpunk Science Fiction Eye.
Almost immediately, I learned why I quit reading SF in the early 80s. The genre had become pessimistic and boring and lost its ability to arouse a sense of wonder. The last great book I read – twice – was "Dune." But the sequels stunk and the movie was even more odiferous. And in the end even my idol, Heinlein, forgot how to write stories (plot, plot and plot) and produced rambling wrecks that I couldn't force myself to finish.
Article after article in Platt's Loose Canon chronicles his "grim view of American Science Fiction," even while pining for its renaissance, an attitude arising from a genre that birthed, then burst, his childhood dreams by failing to deliver. He's angry, among other reasons, that early SF failed to develop into belles-lettres as he insists it should have.
Since I was a fan and not a fanatic, I could enjoy Platt's plaints as a meander through my own memories. Here was Philip Jose Farmer's "The Lovers," about an illicit affair between a white male human and a beautiful alien female humanlike creature that taught me the stupidity of racism. (My mother tried to confiscate it until I convinced her it was "only" science fiction.) Here was Alfred Bester and "The Stars My Destination," the first time my awe button had been punched by any kind of writing. And Ray Bradbury, described by Platt (in a masterfully managed Mixmaster of metaphors) as an idiot savant who became regarded as a stylist only because "he was the one-eyed man in a country where others were deaf to nuance." In Bradbury's defense, as a teen I was blithely ignorant of anything called style – I read strictly for content (plot, plot and plot) - until Bradbury's style leapt off the page at me in "Something Wicked This Way Comes." But I suppose one can make the case that when style overwhelms story it's a failure of style.
As a self-declared libertarian (he rates his own page at Advocates for Self-Government) Platt has little to say about libertarians in general and libertarian SF writers in particular. He complains that "few libertarian science-fiction writers show the humor" of Murray Leinster's old work from the 50s. (As I've observed myself, few libertarian writers, period, show humor.) There's an affirmative article on libertarian anarchist Victor Koman, but he savages Ursula K. Le Guin whom he brands as a communitarian on the basis of "Buffalo Gals Won't You Come Out Tonight," published in 1987, in which she wrote "drivel" rather than "honest drivel." Of course, the Libertarian Futurist Society inducted le Guin's "The Dispossessed" into its Hall of Fame in 1993, so I dunno. Guess she cashed in her Communitarian membership card for Libertarianism. You tell me. I quit reading SF in the early 80s, remember?
Due to the ages of its pages, the book's eventual value is nostalgia. Happily, Platt reminded me of the following:
Growing up Nerdish in a small Nebraska town, science fiction was my great liberator and educator. It taught me to think beyond the city limits, the state lines, the national borders, and conventional boundaries of all breeds. It left me primed for Objectivism and ripe for the libertarian fields beyond. Thanks to science fiction, I left that little town long before I left that little town.
So thanks for that, science fiction. And thanks, Charles Platt, for reminding me.
- by Garry Reed
