Thursday, June 17, 2004
What's playing/reading now
Hovhaness' Symphony #2, Mysterious Mountain, Seattle Symphony, Delos 3157. Close my eyes: instant prayer.
Before my vacation, I read Keith Kachtick's Hungry Ghost, which I thought was just outstanding. I tried LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but for some reason, I just can't get into espionage fiction. I liked Le Carre's writing: it surprised me. Brought the book with me to Branson, but I had little time for reading. Maybe another time.
Picked up two promising SF books at the library yesterday: Adam Roberts' Polystom, favorably reviewed here. The story follows a spoiled aristobrat through personal tragedy and immaturity in a universe in which an atmosphere exists in between the planets, permitting aircraft and zeppelins to travel through the solar system. Good writing so far. I gambled on a new writer whose name escapes me at the moment, but the book's name is Phobos. Can't go wrong with a moon, especially these heady days.
I'm still pondering three good possibilities for a science fiction novel of my own, but my own standards will be exacting. Having read a lot of good SF this past year, plus reacquainting myself with Cather, Wilder, and other classic American authors, I'm not going to settle for just any ol' pulp. Whether something I can write will ever see publication, well that's another matter. I have enough unpublished liturgical music in my files to choke a David Haas, so the notion of sitting for hundreds of hours writing a novel that might never see print is not particularly scary. My wife would read it. But she does insist that any romance within would have to have a happy ending. And that could be a problem, because my sense would be to write tragedy.
The thing about SF is that a New Idea can be hard to find. And I'm not going to be the 6352nd SF author who puts alternate Nazis or ice piracy at the center of their ... pulp.
Meanwhile, I wonder if the new KC symphony conductor will program any Hovhaness. If I were on the search committee that would be my one and only question. And if the answer is yes, then we'll really be playing.
