Saturday, November 01, 2014

Sam J. Lundwall. Alice’s World (1971)

 

    Sam J. Lundwall. Alice’s World (1971) A Confederation mission to Earth 50,000 years after the Exodus finds a world in which people's hallucinations are real and fulfill their deepest desires. The Captain ends up the supreme commander of an invasion force engaged in and endless war. One of his crew members lives in a blissful liaison with her mate. This is Ray Bradbury country crossed with Lewis Carroll, where science and fantasy mix, where reality and dream are indistinguishable, where Alice creates and uncreates the world around her. Lundwall does a better than average job of conveying the experience of his characters, especially the irony that the Captain understands fully that the dreams of humankind have become real, yet is trapped by them as much as everyone else.
     Well done pulp fiction, the kind that in the 1960s prompted endless arguments about whether it’s Literature. Of course it is. Wikipedia has a good article on Lundwall at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_J._Lundwall ***

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Mice in the Beer (Ward, 1960)

 Norman Ward. Mice In the Beer (1960. Reprinted 1986) Ward, like Stephen Leacock, was an economics and political science professor, Leacock...