Books like The Machineries of Joy

Despite some people’s fears, watching a lot of TV as a kid was a gateway to reading for me, not a deterrent. Seeing reruns of old horror anthology series and TV movies made me curious about who had written the stories on which the shows were based.

I discovered Richard Matheson, whose works were among the most adapted by The Twilight Zone and others. This collection features some of his classic imaginative tales that also became classic TV, including “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” (pre-Star Trek William Shatner saw a demon on an airplane wing on The Twilight Zone), “Duel” (Dennis Weaver was menaced by a killer truck in Steven Spielberg’s famous 1976 TV movie) and “Prey” (Karen Black fought a demon doll in one of the Trilogy of Terror).

I don’t think most Lovecraft fans casual or devoted would single out The Music of Erich Zann, given the staying power of the Cthulhu mythos and everything associated with it. But what causes Lovecraft’s work to resonate so many decades later is his mastery over the disquieting, and this story about music channeled from a horrific place played on a street that doesn’t seem to exist by a violinist terrified and compelled to keep playing has stayed with me more than any of Lovecraft’s other stories in the years since I read it. Maybe it’s the musician in me, or maybe it’s the distortions of reality that tend to crop up in my own writing. Either way it’s striking, and a good introduction to the strangeness of H. P. Lovecraft.

Specifically, I'm recommending the short story "Sea Oak." In the expanse of horror fiction, it has to be said that there are very few stories about a kindly old woman who returns from the dead as a pissed-off, vulgar, rotting corpse demanding her nephew start showing his cock (Saunders’s phrasing, not mine) for extra money so that his family can stop being pushovers and start earning some cash. George Saunders, it should be noted, is not remotely a horror author—rather, one of the more offbeat, distinctive writers of short literary fiction of the last quarter century—and Pastoralia is determinedly not a horror collection. But it’s exactly this that makes “Sea Oak” the strangest, least likely zombie story, if you can call it that, that you’ll ever read.

The Twilight Zone, again? Yes, The Twilight Zone again. There are tons of great stories here, but I'm highlighting Lynn Venable's "Time Enough at Last," which is arguably even more iconic than "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." While most would regard it as a science-fiction story more than a horror story, I think it’s one of the best examples ever put to paper of the principle that horror is personal. One person’s inconvenience is another’s world-ending nightmare—and vice versa. Lynn Venable’s broader body of work is not especially well known, but with this one story dropped into a genre dominated by men, Venable turned out one of the greatest and most memorable genre stories there would ever be. So check it out—you know, while there’s still time.

While The Directorate follows a fairly typical path for sci-fi thrillers, its characters are what stand out. The Earth and human colonies on the moon and Mars have united after years of war and created one military/police force. Lieutenant Theresa Gannon is a loyal, young officer suddenly thrust into stardom as the person who foiled a terrorist attack. But as a broiling rebellion heats up and Gannon is now rubbing shoulders with generals and politicians, she starts questioning where her loyalties truly lie. 

If you think you have a crazy schedule, imagine what it would be like to go to work every day on Mars, while living and working on Earth.

Mars’ day is thirty-six minutes longer than ours, so your standing daily meeting at 9am will begin tomorrow at 9:36am, the day after at 10:12am…and eventually, at two in the morning. I loved learning about how the Mars Exploration Rover scientists at NASA ate endless ice cream and checked their Mars-time watches in an attempt to turn their own bodily clocks off and stay awake despite constant jetlag.

Reading about how they turned themselves into robots, especially during our own “Zoom-era” of constant meetings and emails, I wonder how much the demands of our contemporary, hustling, always-on workplaces do the same to us.

Zubrin’s book proposes a tantalizing what-if. Steve Squyres’ Roving Mars presents readers with an exciting and suspenseful blow-by-blow account of an awesome thing that actually happened: the successful landing on Mars of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and the jaw-dropping success of those lovable little robotic beetles. It was hoped that the rovers might function for as long as 90 days. Opportunity performed for 15 years. (Spirit, that slacker, phoned it in for only 6 years.) Squyres, an astronomer, was the principal investigator for the mission, and he proves to be an enormously appealing guide: enthusiastic, excitable, grateful, humble. One of the many likable things about this book is that Squyres lets us see how scientists in charge of a years-long multimillion-dollar one-shot mission with a high chance of failure are every bit as superstitious as village peasants: Squyres makes sure to wear his tattered good-luck jeans to every… show more.

“Mythology, Shakespeare, Cthulhu, oh my!” Not as well-known as his most famous sci-fi work, Hyperion, Dan Simmon’s Ilium is just as impressive. The book bounces back and forth between characters of Greek myth reenacting the events of the Trojan War on the Martian plains, humans reawakening to their purpose on a post-apocalyptic Earth, and a pair of philosophizing robots, all in the shadow of a dark god coming to devour them all. The first in a duology, Ilium weaves its disparate storylines to a climax where readers solve the riddle of how it is that Lovecraft’s monsters are living alongside Shakespeare’s characters and Homer’s epic poem in a world that has suffered a mysterious cataclysm. Any reader of mythology and literary allusion in their speculative fiction will hungrily devour this book. 

Set in the near future, this novel imagines that the Americans and Chinese are racing to get to Mars. Meanwhile, a group of teenagers team up with an astronaut forced to retire in disgrace. One of the teens has invented a new type of drive that might just allow them to beat both governments to Mars. The book is fast-paced, fun, and shows how a team can come together to solve a problem, without ignoring the very real dangers of space travel. It also gives a nod to how technology developed for space travel can help us right here on Earth.

In this future, humanity needs to terraform Mars to provide a second home to a swelling population. The Mars Trilogy follows a group of scientists and astronauts, who gain extended lifetimes through a scientific breakthrough; this device enables us to follow the same characters through more than one normal active career span. 

My favourite book is Green Mars, because as a tree surgeon, I am fascinated by the methods shown of planting miniature trees and other plants, adapted from Nordic and mountainous shrubs. The people are experimenting with frontier lifestyles using available materials, and experimenting on adapting humans to the planet. Big business and inter-planetary politics keep raising their heads, as in any colonisation effort. And a few holdout scientists are saying that Mars is beautiful, precious, and unique, and we should study the red planet as it is, not terraform it.