B List: Charles Dickens--Barnaby Rudge.................................................278/634
C List: John Steinbeck--East of Eden.......................................................434/601
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, which I had never heard of, is a science fiction novel, a rarity on the A list, from 1971. As I have often found to be the case with science fiction books, the concept is more interesting to me than the execution. In the beginning of the book dead people from all ages of history, up to around 2008 as far anyone can tell, have been resurrected on some kind of strange planet. Several of the characters are well known personages from history. The main character is the Victorian adventurer Sir Richard Burton, and Alice Liddell and Hermann Goring are among the others who show up. I liked it in the early part of the book when the characters kept picking up bits and pieces of information about historical developments, scientific discoveries, and so on, that occurred after their earthly deaths. However as the book goes on the attachments to their former lives on earth fades and there is sort of endless fighting and constant violent death and resurrection. It is not a cheery vision of the afterlife. Hermann Goring, who keeps dying and getting resurrected in the same places as Burton, is not exactly portrayed sympathetically, and no one really likes him, but he is not someone who is, or can be, completely shunned by the other resurrected people as might be expected by today's mores, and at first he is even able to amass a considerable amount of power among the dead. I assume we are building up to some important climax in what remains of the book.
The story has a number of characteristic late 60s-early 70s touches. Everyone is resurrected naked and hairless in their 25 year old bodies and there is, initially at least, a lot of sex (Burton bags Alice Liddell and Goring gets a six foot tall voluptuous Swede). Nothing resembling modern feminism makes an appearance even as a wild rumor. The women exist to have sex with and fight over, and there isn't a single one who makes a pretension towards leadership in the primitive world of the resurrection. Human civilization appears to have come to some kind of catastrophic end in 2008, since a massive number of people died in that year but in no later one. Pollution and overpopulation are given as two of the causes of the disaster, which is in keeping with popular thought at the time. It was a prescient year to land on for some kind of crisis however.
Philip Jose Farmer was born in 1918 in Terre Haute, Indiana, and died in 2009 in Peoria, Illinois. He graduated from Bradley University in Illinois when he was 32. He looks to have written fifty books or more. Judging by this and the plot outlines of some of his other novels, he inclined towards a dystopian view of life.
Due to its being summer and my not having as much time to read as well as the unusual circumstance of having two 600 page novels by major figures from the past (in my literary upbringing anyway) coming up at the same time, I am on something of a hiatus from East of Eden, with the exception of one day when I left my Dickens book in Vermont. It is not that I don't like it. As I believe I said in last month's entry, I like it much more than I was expecting to, and I find it oddly calming, which is good for me now, because my life at the moment is a little more overwhelming and full of annoying stressors than I would like. I like the way the characters, especially the male characters, talk in Steinbeck. It doesn't resemble the way anyone talks in real life, especially nowadays, but I wish they did. The conversation is deliberate, and focused on matters of substance in a searching, well-disposed way. I suppose it reminds me of what I think of as a good college class, that being about the extent of my experience of halfway intelligent conversation. But anyway, that is wherein the book's charm consists for me. I will go back to it when I finish the Dickens and am writing up the report for that, which will take me at least a week.
