John Calvin Bachelor's 1983 Science Fiction novel The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica is a strange mishmash of old Norse and English sagas, largely focusing on Beowulf and stories of Thor and Odin, with a world on the brink of destruction and the promise of a new society.
The novel follows Grim Fiddle, a Swede destined to become the ruler of a nation at the southernmost pole of the planet and follows him from conception through to old age. Much of the novel takes place at sea, and Bachelor does an interesting thing for science fiction, in that he sets the majority of the novel away from society or in smaller locales where the inhabitants live in a traditional manner, deftly sidestepping both descriptions of futuristic cities, the causes of the the destruction of global civilization and any chance to see our narrator's world through any lens but his own.
The narrative works quite well as saga, following Grim's journey across the years and the globe, moving ever southward and painting a darker and darker picture of the societies he leaves behind, but with little description of the titular republic until the final fifty pages.
An intriguing read.
Moving towards the end of the 70's in my reading of David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Books, Brian Stableford's The Walking Shadow (1979) takes a look at issues of time travel, futurism, and the question of destiny.
The book focuses on Paul Heisenberg, the author of a book called Science and Metascience and a scientific celebrity who, in front of thousands of people, appears to have been replaced by a perfect silver statue of himself. The statue is actually a sort of placeholder, and over a century later is replaced by Heisenberg again, who hasn't aged a day.
He now finds himself in a dystopian future, one in which many others have discovered how to jump forward in time, and who now view him as a sort of prophet. Upon awakening different factions of the government attempt to bend him to their cause while revolutionaries work to set him free.
The novel follows Heisenberg through his jumps across time and go to places few of us would expect to be waiting in our planet's future. I really don't want to go into specifics as part of the novel's structure works to have him figure out his new surroundings and attempt to find his place in it.
A fascinating read, and not likely to be my last from Stableford.
Having now hit the year of my birth (1976) in my copy of David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Books published in English from 1945 to 1985, the stories are getting a little different for me; Although some of the concepts and technology still requires me to look them up, I'm getting to the point where I'm sharing the same (or at least a similar) frame of reference with the author and the target audience.
Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is a little different from most of the science fiction I've come across, as much of the story can either be viewed as a tale of a telepath or the ravings of a crazy person.
The story, taking place in 1976, follows Consuela (Connie) Ramos, a 37-year-old woman who begins to book by being unjustly sentenced to a mental institution by her niece's boyfriend and also happens to be receiving telepathic transmissions, and visits, from a few hundred years in the future.
The book moves back and forth between Connie's psychic visits to a pretty Utopian future world (it's not perfect, but pretty close) and her attempts to escape or graduate from the institution she finds herself in (which is pretty similar to Ken Kessey's 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest).
A lot of what I really liked about the novel (which I viewed as actual visits from the future, btw), was how easy it would be to discount Connie's experiences and assume they are a fantastic world she has created for herself, but I found the book to be much more interesting if viewed as actual visits from and to the future.
A Fascinating Read!
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