Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Forums

 Thoughts about Outside the Norm Forum

In the comments to my last Outside the Norm blog, Emil proposed an Outside the Norm online class. I countered with the idea of an Outside the Norm forum/discussion group.

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of days, and I think that we could do something really cool in the WWE Forum if we all read (or re-read) and discussed the same book.  This could work like a physical book club, except for the wine and the cheese on sticks.

Here’s what I’m thinking:

All who want to participate could nominate a book that they feel is outside the F and SF norm (see below for notes on this) and the members could vote on a dozen books or so. (Maybe Dave could set up a poll like the ones for the GMRC reviews). The person who nominated the book would be responsible for leading the discussion on that book, since we will assume that he or she has read it before.  We could reserve 2 weeks to read the book and two weeks to discuss; then we could move on to the next one. We could probably work up a list of the first dozen books by the end of July and be reading book 1 by August.

When I decided to do the Outside the Norm blog, I wanted to read not just female SF writers (although that was an important part of it). I was also interested in reading non-US, non-UK writers. The following writers were on my list: Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Hannu Rajaniemi, Doris Lessing, Ben Okri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Karen Lord. So far, I’ve only managed to read a couple of these authors. I started with a couple of Margaret Atwood books that I’d had for a while. That experience made me think more about the question of genre. So, I branched out a bit in my thinking and have written about novels that many readers would call capital “L” literature. I think they offer the same reading experiences as the best F and SF. These are the types of issues that I’d like to explore/discuss.

So… who’s in? What do you think about the plan?

Blessed are the cheese makers. 

I'd be very glad to help in any way I can.

I don't think I'll be able to commit to taking part unfortunately.  I'm way behind in my GMRC and we're trying to get a bunch of stuff done on the site for WorldCon so I'm not getting much reading done as it is.  I think it's a great idea though and would love to participate if I could.

Anybody else?

Rhonda, a group read sounds like a great idea if we can pull it off.  Like DrNefario, I always have a big stack of stuff I'm reading, so the lead time you suggest works well for me.

There are so many, many possibilities!!

It's hard to limit my nominations, but I'll try.  Two favorites of mine are Albanian literary heavyweight Ismail Kadare's Palace of Dreams (1981, 208 pages), a Kafkaesque story of a bureaucratic functionary working to sort and analyze the dreams of the citizens of a totalitarian state, and Canadian-American Rivka Galchen's (daughter of Israeli emigrants) much ballyhooed Atmospheric Disturbances (2008, 256 pages), which is about a psychiatrist who's wife has been replaced by a near-perfect doppelganger while at the same time he's been receiving coded messages from a secretive organization about weather control.  Is he insane, or just what's going on here?

A couple of books that I haven't read, but would like to are Dutch author's Cees Nooteboom's (another literary heavyweight) The Following Story (1991, 115 pages), a story about a man who wakes up dislocated in time and space, while Russian Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby:  Scary Fairy Tales (2009, 224 pages) is fairly self explanatory.

A handful of other names:  Angela Carter, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Kobo Abe, Jorge Borges, Victor Pelevin, Hilary Mantel, Alfred Jarry, Raymond Queneau, Edith Wharton, Felipe Alfau, Osamu Dazai, Julio Cortazar, Naguib Mahfouz, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, Witold Gombrowicz, Roberto Bolano, Michal Ajvaz, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Robert Coover, Isabel Allende, Scarlett Thomas, Wendy Walker, Junot Diaz, Brooks Hansen, Stephen Fry, Bruno Schulz, Kathy Acker, as well as more genre-centric names such as Kelly Link, Stanislaw Lem, Mark Z. Danielewski, Margo Lanagan, Catherynne M. Valente, Jean-Christophe Valtat.  Well, as you can see, I could go on and on and on... 

Quality fantasy and science fiction needn't rely on swords and spaceships...

@Engelbrecht: That's a huge list!  I was going to say that the Guardian List on the site would be a good source of books for this reading group.  Many of those are certainly Outside the Norm and the list includes several of the authors you mention,  If you pick from the list you can tag them as you go too.

@Rhonda & Dave:  The Guardian list sounds like a fine great place to start.  Any of the books that Rhonda mentioned are fine with me - I'm easy!  The Bulgakov would be fine as well, if we wanted to do a Russian book for Emil.  It's a great book!  A few more list that I might add from the Guardian are:
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Blindness by Jose Saramago

@dustydigger:  How in the world did you ever leave SF for 20 years?!    I've had my own absences here and there over the years, but nothing like that.  BTW, welcome, and thanks for your "reading this month" idea - I'll be posting there soon.

@Emil:  I like Cisco - his The Divinity Student (1988) was excellent, but for some reason I liked his The Traitor (2007) less well.  I keep meaning to read more of his work, but just haven't gotten around to it.  For Russian SF, I can't recommend Victor Pelevin highly enough.  Some "Russianesque" books I've recently enjoyed that you might like are Heart of Iron and The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia, Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente, and Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts.

Rhonda,  your list sounds great!  I wouldn't mind rereading We - it's been decades since I read it.  Oman Ra is a terrific novel.  I hope we all really enjoy it.

I've read some Calvino and liked it, and have recently decided to read more.  My excellent local library has one of his books waiting for me.  Stanislaw Lem is fantastic!  I've read almost twenty of his books and have two of his on my very short favorites list (BTW, Lem is Polish, not Russian).  I've read Lessing's Briefing for A Descent into Hell and liked it, but never got around to the Shikasta series.

@Scott  Yes, Edith Wharton:The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton 

@dustydigger:  Uganda sounds like a terrifying experience - no wonder you're drawn to the lighter side of genre?  Have you read Barbara Hambly or Spider Robinson's Callahan books?  Fluffy and fun!  Jo Walton's Tooth and Claw might work for you as well, as might Nina Kiriki Hoffman or Walter Moers or Martha Wells.

@ Rhonda, sounds good!  Um, just what does "July" mean?     Time flies when you're having fun, and I see that July is already just around the corner...

I haven't read Wharton's ghost stories, but they're on my list...

@Emil,  The Divinity Student is a perfect quickie read - only 149 pages!

What is it about the Darkover books that has you ensnared?  I've never read any of them, having been put off by both the length of the series and the fact that I was underwhelmed by Bradley's "masterpiece", The Mists of Avalon.

@Emil, How far have you gotten in the series?  For some reason, when you described Darkover, Norton's Witch Worlds books came to mind, even though it doesn't sound like there are too many parallels.

I hate those kind of books!  They're right up there with the "In the tradition of xyz" books.  Usually horrible, LCD fare, at least from what little I've read!