The Joy of Erudition > Recent Status Updates

A story that used the science fiction only as a backdrop, with one person being from Mars, which could just as easily have been a foreign country on Earth. The story is about con men scamming each other.

"The McWilliamses And The Burglar Alarm" has such gems as:
"When we were finishing our house, we found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not knowing it."
This is a comedy about a home with a ridiculously frequent burglary problem, but the attempted solution to the problem keeps bringing more and more problems and expenses and never stops the burglars.

One of the three short stories at the end of this book was much more what I expected from Twain. Witty and funny with wry observations. The other two were lackluster. The fable was just a typical fable with a moral at the end. The story about chasing a turkey was amusing in places, but it just ended abruptly. But the story about the burglar alarm was great!

This takes place in a future where automation has eliminated the need for human labour, so citizens get a universal basic income. Disease has been eliminated, and people live up to 150 years in good health and sound mind. However, rumour has it that true immortality treatments have secretly been developed, but kept secret and reserved for the elite.

I thought this book couldn't get any bleaker, but somehow it DID in its final chapter. This is the second-bleakest book I've ever read!

The rest of the book is humorous short stories; a sharp contrast with the main story.

This book is absolutely brutal and cynical. The message seems to be that humanity is composed of a depraved and belligerent minority and a cowardly sheep majority who fall in line, and that the best thing that can happen to a person is to die early and be spared the misery of life.

This book was actually edited together from three different unfinished manuscripts by Twain's literary executor after his death. Reminds me of Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp's work with the unfinished Conan works after REH's death.

Three boys in a small Austrian town meet and befriend another boy, who says he's an angel named Satan. Not the Satan we know, but the nephew of the more famous Satan. This Satan the Younger (AKA #44), didn't fall like his uncle, but is completely amoral, seeing humans as insects and casually creating and destroying living beings for fun. He mind-controls the boys to love him, and controls them in other ways.

Not sure if I'm supposed to sympathise with Huldbrand's cheatin' heart, but he's treating Undine terribly, and the text seems to want to excuse it.

Yikes! Didn't expect this development!

“What is it, my lord?” Zarozinia said as, with a sigh, he sprawled wearily upon the great bed. “Can speaking help?”

“I’m tired of swords and sorcery, Zarozinia, that is all.”

----
Well, that's not a good sign!

Kings in Darkness was a pretty good story, but he gets a new love interest in this one, and we never find out what happened with Yishana, who had joined their party at the end of the last story.

I wasted time trying to find the poem quoted in the epigraph, which turns out to have been written for this story, even though it's credited to James Cawthorn.

Once again, I was expecting a novel and it turned out to be a collection of short stories. Still, this was a pretty good first story despite the tangent with losing Stormbringer, and seems to have been written as a kind of "nail in the coffin" of certain recurring characters. I don't generally care for stories with castle sieges, but this one was much better than the last book that included a siege.

Okay, I don't care for this part of Elric losing Stormbringer. It was established in the previous book that he can call the sword and it will come to him. And losing it was pointless as a plot complication, since as soon as he returned to his allies, Moonglum just sneaked into the castle for him and came back with the sword, after asking Yishana offscreen to give it back. Complication solved.

I think this is the first place where Moorcock explicitly described Melniboneans as having pointed ears.

"Dyvim Tvar was a man a little older than Elric and he bore the stamp of Melnibonean nobility. His cheek-bones were high and delicate, his eyes slightly slanting while his skull was narrow, tapering at the jaw. Like Elric, his ears were thin, near lobeless and coming almost to a point."

"One writer, Cory, sweet little Cory with her thick glasses, she shook while telling the story of her nephew dying of juvenile leukemia. Tears rolling down her freckled cheeks. The drunks shouted at the televisions, oblivious."

Of all the writers you name-dropped in this book, why didn't you give the full name of this one? I don't even know what you're trying to say in this anecdote. Crudeness is better than pathos?

"My freshman year in college, a guy was telling a story that went, “…so we’re going around this long curve—skreeeeech! vrooooom!—and we pass this police car…”
A listening girl leaned close to me and whispered, “Why do men always use sound effects in stories, but women never do?”
An excellent observation. Learn from it."

I want to be sure I understand what you're saying here, Chuck. Why don't you spell it out for me?

I don't know if Chuck P is so blatantly and repeatedly using the rules he's outlining for writing fiction in this nonfiction book so he can be funny or clever, or if he's doing it to demonstrate or justify the supposed validity of these rules, or if he genuinely thinks it makes for a pleasant reading experience. I'm starting to suspect Ernest Cline read this book and took these rules to heart.