Totalitopia Plus ...

PM Press has a series of small books on "Outspoken Authors." They are a mix of short fiction (usually at least one previously unpublished story), perhaps some essays, a lengthy interview, and a more than decent bibliography. This time I've read the John Crowley one, as I've read a number of his previous books with considerable pleasure.  For me, the interview was revelatory, and the overview of Paul Park's books made up by far the most interesting items in the volume.  Oddly, the fiction just seemed to me too diffuse--well-written but without real heart.  The new story ("This Is Our Town") which opens the book is sets the tone for all that follows, and later stories like "Gone" (a curiously passive account of aliens) and "And Go Like This" (headed by a Buckminster Fuller quote which was clearly the springboard for the story) seem pointless exercises. Crowley can be excellent, but this volume is neither representative of his work, nor a good starting point, despite its undeniable literary qualities. 

Loose (SF) Canon

Charles Platt was a seminal figure in science fiction from the 1960s (New Worlds days, in London) through the early 1990s, as a writer, editor, and witness to the scene (mostly in America, to which he emigrated in 1970).  Loose Canon (2001) collects a bunch of his essays that appeared in various venues such as Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, as well as some zines published by Platt himself.  In a simple sense, the book exemplifies his disillusion with the science fiction sphere as place for literary experimentation as well as technological optimism.  Thus it often reads angry, bitter, and cynical, but it always reads true. One may not always agree with Platt, but his views are always cogent and worth reading.

Another Borges

Having just read Doctor Brodie's Report, I still felt the need for more Borges, so I turned to the anthology Extraordinary Tales, by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated in 1971 by Anthony Kerrigan, and originally published in Spanish in 1953. Basically, it's a collection of passages, often of some kind of transformational scenes (mythological, philosophical, historical), from the editors' wide reading through world literature. Most source are verifiable, but some are not (or the passages that are given do not appear in the work cited), so there is some of the usual Borgesian playfulness. Overall, the tales are moderately interesting, but there are no real classics. Again, not first-tier Borges, but not without interest.

Doctor Brodie's Report

In the Afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges notes that these eleven short stories are the first he has written since 1953.  Thus they can be considered late-Borges, which is different from classic-Borges, which includes such first-class tales as "The Aleph," "Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius" and many others.  Though the tales collected in Doctor Brodie's Report appeared in English in such venues as The New Yorker (five stories), The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, they remain second-rate Borges, but they are all worth reading.  The best stories in the book are the first, "The Gospel According to Mark," and the last, titular story "Doctor Brodie's Report."