Paul di Filippo :
Paul McAuley :I don't get to re-read books that often--the pressure of "the new" is too constant. But I do acknowledge that even novels crafted as eternal works of literature can have hidden temporal flaws and biases that cause them to boast an unforeseen limited shelf life. This happens more often, I think, with books published in the reader's own lifetime. The hot and critically lauded item published in 1990 that you loved looks lame twenty years later. For a counter-example, consider the work of Dickens. Everything bad, good and indifferent has been said about him already. He's remote enough from us that his image is fixed pretty solidly when we first encounter him. To read Dickens in 1985 and then to re-read him in 2011 is hardly to add any "distance" at all to his work. There's not enough parallax to afford a new perspective. If you liked him in 1985, you'll probably like him just as much in 2011.
Of course, all of this ignores the aspect of our topic today which concerns how the individual reader changes over time, discarding old favorites and acquiring new ones, as her mind alters with experience. Also, of course, the culture does the same thing at large. Melville, famously, was abandoned then rediscovered.
In any case, all this theorizing is perhaps a stall to avoid naming names, so let me get to some examples of Stuff That Holds Up Well, based on my personal re-reading.
John Crowley's Aegypt
Robert Heinlein's The Door Into Summer
Philip Dick's The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik
Brian Aldiss's Report On Probability A and Greybeard
A. E. van Vogt's Slan and The World Of Null-A
Loved 'em the first time around, and love 'em still!
Plus de détails iciAny book worth its salt should be able to withstand a second reading, but there are some that
excite and move me at every re-encounter. Here are a few:
Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard. A man finds himself stranded on a traffic island after a car crash. At first he can't escape. And then he doesn't want to. A powerful, deceptively simple updating of the Robinson Crusoe story.
Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. A man comes to a wounded American city, leaves as a hero-poet. After the fall of New Orleans, it's more relevant than ever.
Libra by Don DeLillo. Oswald as tragic hero.
Neuromancer by William Gibson. Still fresh and startlingly original, despite a thousand imitators.
The Inheritors by William Golding. Neanderthals encounter modern humans, with fatal results. All of Golding is worth reading and rereading, but this is my favourite.
Climbers by M. John Harrison. A beautifully written, intricately structured memoir/novel about memory, obsession, and the unrelenting reality of the world.
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. LeGuin. Diagrammatic, yes, but the sections set on Anarres are truly powerful and moving, and it's one of the few SF novels to attempt to portray a genuinely original society from the inside.
Child of God by Cormac McCarthy. America primeval.
Picnic on Paradise by Joanna Russ. Alyx, a barbarian kidnapped by the future, leads a gang of squabbling tourists across an alien wilderness. Alyx is the template for every tough, wisecracking kickass heroine in cyberpunk, the new space opera and much else, but she's the original and best, tough and funny and tender and wise.
Rabbit, Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. The vastly detailed life and times of Updike's American Everyman are, like America itself, inexhaustible.
The Once and Future King by T.H. White. A marvellously eccentric fantasy about King Arthur, the Round Table, and the Matter of Britain that begins as a juvenile comedy and ends in tragedy and renewal. The death of Beaumont gets me every time. And no one does
infodumps like White, who seems to know everything about Medieval Britain, which he remakes into a world that never was but should have been.
Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack. The fall of America, as told to her diary by a young girl. The best, and chronologically the first, of Womack's Ambient
sequence.
