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Walking Practice, Dolki Min

The debut novel of a South Korean illustrator, recently translated and published in English, and one of four winners of the Otherwise Award this year. The narrator is an alien living in Seoul who must concentrate on presenting a human appearance, or they’re liable to sprout arms and legs and eyes in odd places. They enjoy dating people online, arranging to meet them at home for sex and then, well, eating them. Yes, the narrator presents as both male and female during the story, and the title refers in part to the different gaits required to pass as each gender. 

The prose tries to maintain a chatty tone, which I found grating. I know almost nothing about contemporary Korean literature, so I’ve no idea if it’s a popular style there (although I recall something similar in Greek Lessons (2011, South Korea) by last year’s Nobel laureate Han Kang when I read it earlier this year). I’ve read enough translated fiction, and even fiction in its original language and then translated into English (Swedish and French fiction, mostly) to know there’s a difference between translation and transliteration – and sometimes the latter often fails to take culture into account, both the original and that of the language being translated into (the same occurs all the fucking time from UK to US English, of course). The English translation of Roadside Picnic (1972, USSR) by the Strugatsky brothers didn’t work for me because it relied too much on American idioms, and I don’t expect to find them in a Russian novel. Larsson’s Millennium trilogy was translated by an American who’d lived and studied in Denmark but was unfamiliar with many elements of Swedish culture and society. It showed. On the other hand, the English subtitles for a Swedish detective show I watched recently failed completely to transliterate a common Swedish expression because there was no obvious way to do so and keep the original sense.

Then there’s the writing system… Korean, of course, has its own writing system, Hangeul, and it’s very different to the variations on the Latin alphabet used by many other languages. An afterword by the translator points out the difficulties she had representing the author’s Hangeul orthographic tricks in the Latin alphabet. The nearest she could manage was through varying the kerning – which, as she admits to worrying about, does indeed look like bad typography or misprints.

Obviously, there’s more to Walking Practice (2023, South Korea) than the tone of its narrative and the fact the English reading experience is a poor copy of the Korean reading experience. There’s a cinematic feel to the story, but unlike a movie there’s no story arc or resolution. Korean cinema doesn’t follow Hollywood story paradigms – it’s something to do with cats at present, isn’t it? – which is a good thing, and I’ve seen many excellent South Korean films. In future, I think, I’ll stick to their movies.


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Subspace Explorers, EE ‘Doc’ Smith

There is a Brian Aldiss story, ‘Confluence’ – I’ve referenced it a number of times in reviews – which consists of amusing dictionary definitions of words from an alien language. Such as “SHAK ALE MAN: the struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping”. And, “YUP PA: a book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. Sadly there’s no word that means “a book in which everything is understandable except a person’s reason for reading it”. Which is certainly true when it comes to the works of EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and most especially Subspace Explorers (1965, USA). It was a reread for me, but I last read it when I was twelve or thirteen, and I remembered pretty much nothing of it. Sadly, I cannot go back to that state of blissful ignorance.

Several centuries from now – exactly when is impossible to tell as the world-building is extremely poor – the Earth is split into a WestHem and EastHem: the first is a corrupt democracy controlled by corrupt unions, and the second is a tyranny masquerading as communism. In fact, the entire political set-up of the novel is cobbled together from US knee-jerk right-wing myths: communism evil! unions bad! politicians corrupt! big government bad! monopolistic corporations good! There are also colonies on a number of other worlds, all of which were settled, and are run, by corporations. Spaceships travel through subspace to journey between these worlds and “Tellus” (the Latin name for Earth, which Smith, bizarrely, used in all his fiction). 

A spaceship, the Procyon, suffers some sort of catastrophe in subspace. There are only five survivors – the first officer, the astrogator, the daughter of the owner of the biggest oil company in existence and wed to the first officer only hours earlier, her friend who is also the girlfriend of the astrogator, and a scientist who later turns out to be the giantest brain in all of human history. The oil magnate’s daughter is an oil dowser, and the subspace wreck has given her super mind powers, which she then teaches to the other four…

Meanwhile, the nasty old unions in WestHem are trying to break the corporations, who want to automate everything in order to keep down inflation (er, what?). The copper miners threaten to strike, because copper is apparently vital in the future. But the psionic five can dowse for metal, and they find a huge copper deposit on another planet for GalMet, the mining monopoly, also based offworld. The copper miners’ strike fails, so the milk truck drivers go on strike, because centuries in the future milk is once again delivered to people’s homes in bottles and this is so vital to life on Earth that a strike could cause society to collapse… The corporations break the strike using giant-sized battle tanks to deliver the milk (yes, really).

Anyway, the corporations defeat the nasty unions, inadvertently triggering a nuclear war, but never mind, the corporations’ “superdreanought” spaceships manage to destroy the missiles before they cause any important damage. The corporations trigger a WestHem election, but lose it to a coalition of all the political parties – which are all corrupt and evil, of course. But never mind. “Enlightened self-interest”, AKA unregulated corporate operations, will win out eventually. Then the corporations’ blockade of Earth Tellus is broken by a mysterious fleet of superdreadnoughts from an unknown planet.

Then it turns out one corporation, previously unmentioned in the novel, has for more than 200 years been running a secret world with a strictly-regimented “feudal” society (it’s not feudal, of course, because Smith clearly doesn’t know what feudalism is). That’s where the mysterious fleet came from. (The Company Agents are all electrically-charged, and they wear rubber-soled boots, so if anyone touches them – which is just, no, just too fucking stupid for words.) Our hardy heroes, the five from the shipwreck mentioned earlier, with the amazing mind powers, who by now have taught pretty much everyone on the corporation-run planets their amazing mind powers, free the Company serfs on The Company World. But the Company serfs had been infiltrated by agents from a secret world settled by the USSR! And with only five pages to go our hardy heroes defeat them too! 

I went into Subspace Explorers with low expectations. It not only failed to meet them, it dug a bottomless pit and then dived into it. Reading the infantile take on politics and economics used by Smith, his hatred of unions and valorisation of unregulated corporations, the implication inflation is more dangerous to a nation than nuclear war, I can only wonder how many of the techbros responsible for the shit state of the world today were influenced by it. We may mock sf and its “Torment Nexus”, but right-leaning politics as understood by a five-year-old such as that described in Smith’s novel, has probably caused more damage. Subspace Explorers is not just bad, it can cause brain damage. Techbros may well name-drop the Culture, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn Musk, Altman, Andressen, Thiel et al have read and assimilated this novel.

If you ever meet anyone who claims to like Subspace Explorers, back away slowly from them. Then turn around. 

And run.


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Witch World, Andre Norton

I remember reading some novels by Norton back in the 1970s, but I don’t remember if Witch World (1963, USA) was one of them. Probably not. Nothing in it seemed remotely familiar. Or particularly good. Although it was on the Hugo Award shortlist in 1964. The only memory I have of the novels by Norton I read back then is that they were science fiction adventure stories, on a par with something like the Hardy Boys. And with, I seem to recall, mostly teenage or young adult protagonists. Enjoyable, but not memorable. To a teenager, at least.

And I think you’d have to be a teenager to put up with the awful cod-mediaeval dialogue Norton uses in Witch World. The plot is simple: Simon Tregarth – who is not a teenage or young adult protagonist – is on the run after a life of adventure post-war, not always on the right side of the law. He meets a man who promises him a new life, where he will never be caught. Tregarth goes with him, and learns the man is the guardian of the Siege Perilous, a magical stone which can send people to other worlds. Tregarth gets sent to one. Cue adventure.

The world is vaguely mediaeval, with the odd bit of high tech, which even Tregarth thinks is weird in inconsistent. There’s also magic, but he doesn’t blink an eye at that. Nor the fact it’s only women who can perform magic, and they lose the ability if they’ve had sex (which is a bit annoying for Tregarth, as he fancies one of the witches big time). But then it turns out he has magical abilities – a man! inconceivable! – and he’s definitely not a virgin.

Anyway, Tregarth joins the Guards of Estcarp, and plays a pivotal role in a war against the Kolder, human invaders from another world – Norton comes within an inch of describing them as “Yellow Peril” – who turn those they capture into robot zombies. Despite proving unstoppable for much of the novel, Tregarth manages to stop them. There are, of course, a few diversions along the way – failing to defend the trader city of Sulcarkeep, meeting the misogynist Falconers of the mountains, a pogrom against those of the “old blood” in Karsten, a forced marriage in Verlaine, and even discovering the tomb of one of the ancient race who occupied the planet before the humans arrived. It’s all very thrilling…

Witch World went on to spawn a series of more than twenty books over four decades, not all by Norton alone. I have the second book of the series, Web of the Witch World (1964, USA), but I very much doubt I’ll be reading any further.


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The Affirmation, Christopher Priest

I’ve read a number of Priest’s novels over the years – I think the first was The Glamour (1984, UK) back in the late 1980s. And there was a period in the late 1990s when I read each new novel by him as it hit paperback. That ended with The Separation (2002, UK), which I seem to recall had a troubled publishing history. It was nearly a decade before his next book appeared, by which point he’d sort of dropped off my radar, before slowly creeping back intermittently over the next couple of decades.

Which is not to say I didn’t like what I’d read, and I’d always admired his writing, and sort of planned to catch up with the works I’d missed. Hence, The Affirmation (1981, UK), which was originally published 44 years ago, and joined the SF Masterworks series in 2011. It’s also the first novel to feature the Dream Archipelago, which Priest returned to several times, in a collection and a further three novels.

In 1976, twenty-nine year old Peter Sinclair suffers a breakdown after a string of appalling luck over a few weeks – his father dies, he’s made redundant, his landlord evicts him, and his girlfriend dumps him. He decides to write his autobiography as a form of recovery. But as he writes, he searches for a “greater truth” by disguising its setting. So the UK becomes Faiandland, London is Jethra, and everyone in Sinclair’s life is given another name.

In this “autobiography”, Sinclair has won a lottery for immortality treatment, and travels south by ship to Collago, an island in the Dream Archipelago. There is a side-effect to the treatment: amnesia. So Sinclar must document his life in order to help the clinic’s therapists restore his memories. But this version of Sinclair has written an “autobiography” too, about his life in London…

The narrative drifts back and forth between Sinclair in the UK and Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago, each one muddying the other. UK Sinclair is clearly in a bad state. He’s rescued by his sister, and then his girlfriend turns up and the two reconcile and move in together. It does not go well. Faiandland Sinclair is not sure he wants to be immortal, even after entering into a relationship with the Dream Archipelago avatar of his girlfriend.

The Dream Archipelago is first presented as an invention of Sinclair, which explains its inconsistencies and the somewhat unharmonious names. It’s equatorial, the northern continent is inhabited, the southern continent is uninhabited, but there’s a war and the islands form a neutral zone. The point being Sinclair’s invented world is not very convincing. But Sinclair is so invested in it – intellectually and emotionally – that he has trouble determining which is which. Details slip and slide between the two, especially after Sinclair has taken the treatment and is trying to regain his memory.

The Affirmation is… unsettling, and cleverly done. Priest covered similar ground in later novels, and in a manner that was more sophisticated. Which is hardly surprising. He had a singular oeuvre, which is definitely worth exploring, and I clearly have more catching up to do.


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More longer

I mentioned my other blog a few months ago. I post longer, less-frequent reviews there. I also promised to post links here to those reviews. I forgot. Here are the last three:

From the 2024 Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ten Percent Thief by Lanya Lakshminarayan (see here).

And from this year’s Arthur C Clarke Award shortlist, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley (see here).

And, sadly, a book that didn’t make any award shortlists, The Mars House, Natasha Pully (see here).


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Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie

I still think Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013, USA) was a much-needed shot in the arm for space opera. It had been taking on more and more characteristics of military sf, after New British Space Opera was co-opted by US authors and editors and became New Space Opera. But that’s an argument for another day. There was lots to like in the two sequels to Leckie’s debut, as well. Also the two pendant novels published since, Provenance (2017, USA) and Translation State (2023, USA) (although less so for the latter, I thought). I’ve yet to read Leckie’s fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (2019, USA).

Lake of Souls (2024, USA) is Leckie’s first collection, containing stories originally published between 2006 and 2019, and including a story original to the collection. The contents are organised in three sections: stories from the Imperial Radch universe, stories from the universe of The Raven Tower, and, opening the collection, stories unconnected to either.

Collections are by definition mixed bags. It probably comes as no surprise the stories set in the universes of Leckie’s novels are (mostly) better than the unconnected ones. Having said that, of the three Imperial Radch stories, only one reads like the same universe as the novels, one could possibly be in that universe, but the third appears to have no connection at all (it’s some sort of fable). 

The unconnected stories… the title story is a first contact that goes wrong, and reminded me of several similar pieces from the 1990s, two stories are based on premises that are definitely creaking at the seams these days, but ‘The Justified’, which is a very modern type of sf, and the Le Guin-ish ‘Another Word for World’ (big clue in the title there) are better.

The seven stories set in the world of The Raven Tower are more consistent, although the longest one, ‘The God of Au’, makes a jump two-thirds of the way in and nothing after that makes sense. I quite liked ‘The Unknown God’ and ‘Beloved of the Sun’, but the others are not especially memorable. Having said that, I suspect a collection of only fantasy stories might have been a better collection than Lake of Souls.

I was not really surprised on reading Lake of Souls to discover Leckie’s short fiction wasn’t up to the standard of her novels. While the world-building was generally done well, even if some of the premises were badly shop-worn, in several stories she failed to stick the ending. There are authors whose short fiction is much better than their novels, James Tiptree Jr, for example. It seems Leckie is the opposite.


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Seeker, Jack McDevitt

Seeker (2005, USA) is the final volume in the Alex Benedict omnibus I bought while it was on offer, and I still haven’t decided yet if I’m going to read further in the series. Because… they’re really bad, they’re terrible science fiction, but… they’re easy reads, you can polish one off in an afternoon, and there’s a certain fascination in seeing how poorly McDevitt builds his future federation. How the fuck this novel won the Nebula Award in 2006 is a mystery up there with, well, the commercial success of Oasis.

These stories are set nearly 10,000 years in the future, but you would never guess it. Houses have AIs, people travel between planets, cars fly, and, er, there’s probably a few other gizmos mentioned. But in terms of culture and society, McDevitt’s future resembles early twenty-first century USA – there are no characters, for example, with names that might seem out of place in present-day Los Angeles or New York. Having said that, there’s a single mention of “dark skin”, and even a paragraph on that old white sf bullshit by old white sf writers where all the races have interbred until everyone has “olive skin”. Homo sapiens has been around for over 100,000 years and we still have races. That’s not going to change in 10,000 years, even if McDevitt doesn’t like putting non-white people in his novels.

McDevitt mentions the Bataan Death March (I’ve met a survivor of this, by the way), and I still find it really bad craft where things that would be known to a late twentieth-century person are known to a twelfth-millennium person, but they know very little of the one hundred centuries in between, or even of events that happened a decade or so earlier. 

The plot of Seeker – and I’m wondering if McDevitt borrowed the structure of his novels from Clive Cussler; certainly the conceit that they’re written by narrator Chase Kolpath, Alex Benedict’s pilot and assistant, is taken from Sherlock Holmes… An opening prologue describes a man trapped in a hotel after an avalanche – something else not solved after 10,000 years – and lamenting he never got to reveal the shocking discovery he and his wife had made.

Cut to the novel’s present, thirty-some years later. A woman – apparently they also have trailer trash 10,000 years in the future – offers Benedict an antique cup for sale. It proves to have come from the Seeker, a ship which disappeared in the 26th century after delivering a group of political dissidents to a colony world. The location of the world was never revealed, and the colony has been lost ever since. And become legend.

Of course, Benedict finds the ship. And the colony. As he and Kolpath investigate, Kolpath is assaulted by a man with a history of violent assaults on women – apparently not solved after 10,000 years – and then Benedict and Kolpath narrowly escape death when a shuttle they had planned to fly on is blown up by a bomb, killing all the passengers – something else not solved 10,000 years in the future.

I’m pretty sure you could rewrite Seeker and set it at the turn of the millennium. A lost historical colony somewhere in the Pacific, perhaps. A lost ship. Abandoned ships like the Marie Celeste were pretty common during the Age of Sail. Cussler has probably already written such a novel (his Iceberg (1975, USA) involves a lost ship mysteriously re-appearing, for example). It would be difficult to hide in the opening years of the twenty-first century the survival of a colony lost for hundreds of years, but I’m sure a creative author could figure something out. Such an author would not be Jack McDevitt.


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The Whole Man, John Brunner

I have a distinct memory of reading this in 1986 while I was studying at People’s College in Nottingham. Weirdly, the only thing I remember is actually reading the book, not the plot nor any of the details of the story.

The Whole Man (1964, UK) was nominated for the Hugo in 1965 – not an especially good year. It lost to Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer (1964, USA), which I thought poor, and shared a shortlist with Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964, USA), which I hated, and Cordwainer’s Smith’s The Planet Buyer (1964, USA), which would have been an acceptable winner had it been a complete novel…

Gerald Howson was born the son of a terrorist leader in a UK where UN troops were brought in to stabilise the country. He is disabled, but also proves, after puberty, to be an enormously powerful telepath. In a world in which telepaths are routinely used by the UN to telepathically impose peace in areas where violence is about to erupt. And for psychiatric therapy.

The novel is fixed up from three stories, ‘City of the Tiger’, ‘The Whole Man’ and ‘Curative Telepath’, although the novel is split into sections called ‘Molem’, ‘Agitat’ and ‘Mens’, which is Latin for “mind over matter”. The first section is Gerald’s childhood living rough in a UK occupied by UN Peacekeepers. In the second, Gerald is at the WHO clinic in Ulaanbaatar, where he learns about telepathic therapy and catapathic groupings, which is when a powerful telepath retreats into a dreamworld and takes several people with them. Gerald is called into “cure” one such group, but it all proves to be a waste of time as the telepath had merely “taken a holiday” – not the phrase the book uses, but near enough. Gerald then returns to his hometown for a vacation, meets a group of students, helps save the life of one who commits suicide at a house party, and so discovers a path to his own happiness.

I’ve long thought debut novels should not appear on award shortlists, chiefly because the effort invested in debut novels by publishers is so much more than that put into novels by established authors – and with good reason, the publisher wants the debut novelist to have a career, it’s good for them, good for the novelist, good for readers. But does set expectations the debut novelist is unlikely to ever meet. Likewise, I can think of no reason why fix-up novels should appear on award shortlists. True, 1965 was in the early days of the Hugo Awards, but surely there were enough novels qua novels that year not to have to nominate a novel fixed up from stories published between 1958 and 1959, more than 6 years earlier?

The fix-up nature of The Whole Man is obvious – it has no actual plot, just three situations with self-contained story arcs. The world-building is a bit crap, the telepathy is not thought (ha!) through completely, and despite being set in some indefinable near-future everything reads like 1950s UK. Brunner’s treatment of a disabled protagonist in a 1965 novel is all that you would expect of a disabled protagonist in a 1958 short story.

At the time I remembered originally reading this novel, I also recall reading a novel which claimed spiders were so generally found repulsive there was a theory they were extraterrestrial. Absolute nonsense, of course, I’d always thought I’d read that in The Whole Man. Apparently not. No mention of spiders at all. Ah well. It seems likely I’ll remember The Whole Man as the one without the spiders as there’s little else to make it memorable.


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Dragonquest, Anne McCaffrey

This is the second Pern novel and reading both I’ve learned whatever assumptions I’d held for many years about the series – based on reading McCaffrey’s Killashandra trilogy back in the 1980s, and reviews of the later share-cropped books in the series – were mostly wrong. Okay, so there are dragons, and a world that has fallen from a technological past to a sort of semi-enlightened (and somewhat sanitised) Middle Ages. And romance. Although not as much romance as I’d expected. In fact, the first two books in McCaffrey’s long-running Dragonriders of Pern series are pretty much straight-up science fiction. With perhaps an over-emphasis on the emotional relationship between the dragons and their riders.

These days, that’s nothing new or unusual. Although I do wonder how I would have responded to the  books had I read them as a teenager in the late 1970s. Not so differently, I’d like to think – it was only a couple of years later I was reading, and admiring, CJ Cherryh’s fiction, and I was already a fan of Tiptree’s short stories, and, yes, aware “he” was a woman.

In the first book, Dragonflight (1968, Ireland), queen dragon rider and chief Weyrwoman, Lessa, had travelled back in time 400 years and brought forward five weyrs to help combat Thread, which had begun falling again after several hundred years. As Dragonquest (1971, Ireland) opens, the old weyrs don’t like the way things are run in the present and cling to “tradition”, which has brought them into conflict with the holds. This might sound slightly familiar in the current political climate.

Then the Thread begins to fall outside the timetable calculated for it, putting further pressure on the weyrs, especially Benden Weyr, the one led by Lessa, and the most respected, admired and generally all-round wonderful weyr of them all. After stumbling across some ancient technology – a microscope! a telescope! – the hold lords and the weyrs hatch a plan to send dragons to the Red Star, the neighbouring planet where Thread originates.

It’s all very dramatic, and McCaffrey handles the slow introduction of details from the legendary past into her world with admirable constraint. Having said that, the chief villain abruptly disappears three-quarters of the way through the novel, and is effectively written out of the story. A dragonrider ignores orders and makes a trip to the Red Star, which proves reckless and comes to exactly the end expected. Lessa is more in the background in this novel – if anything, Dragonquest never seems entirely sure who its chief protagonist is. On the other hand, this does mean McCaffrey can spend more time rounding out her world.

I plan to finish the original trilogy – I have The White Dragon (1978, Ireland) on the TBR – but I don’t think I’m going to dash out and read all the remaining books in the series – 24 novels to date, not all wholly by McCaffrey. I’m certainly not, however, going to diss the books any more, as I was clearly wrong on what I’d assumed about them. The two I’ve read so far are fun, well-crafted, quite plainly science fiction, perhaps a little dated in parts… but there were many many actively bad sf novels written back then, and these are not among them.


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Replay, Ken Grimwood

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Andromeda Bookshop in Birmingham was the biggest importer of US books, predominantly science fiction, into the UK. Every month, the shop posted a catalogue of the latest arrivals to subscribers. I bought a lot of books from it over the years, even when I lived in the Middle East. Replay (1987, USA) by Ken Grimwood was in every catalogue because Andromeda owner Rog Peyton loved the novel so much.

I remember liking Replay a great deal when I last read it in the late 1980s or early 1990s. But you know what they say about revisiting books decades later… Replay this time around was not actively bad, just not as good as I remembered it. Perhaps because its story takes place between 1963 and 1988, and that period is now so much further in the past it seems unconnected to the present.

The story is simple: Jeff Winston dies in 1988 at the age of 43 of a heart attack, and wakes up 25 years earlier as an 18 year old student in Atlanta. He soon realises he’s going to live his life all over again. But this time he has knowledge of the future, of the decades he lived in his previous life. He uses that knowledge to place sports bets and buy stocks and shares, building up a huge fortune, and living a life of luxury and ease… before dying of a heart-attack in 1988.

And finding himself once again back in 1963. This time he marries his college girlfriend, makes enough money to live comfortably, and… still dies of a heart attack in 1988. The third time, he embarks on a life of drugs and orgies, but then he sees a movie in 1972, Starsea, which could only have been made by another replayer. He meets the producer, Pamela, but the two argue about their purpose, the reason they are replaying their lives. After her second film flops, Pamela goes to see Jeff and the two fall in love… and Jeff dies of a heart attack in 1988.

The next replay, they meet up, rekindle their relationship, and decide to tell the world about the years ahead. But the US government uses their information to protect and expand its interests abroad, making even more of a fuck up of its foreign policy than our current history, and ushering in World War III.

With each replay, however, Jeff and Pamela have been re-awakening later, so much so that on their fourth replay, Pamela awakes only hours before her fatal heart attack…

Replay’s premise is a powerful one – reliving your life over and over, remembering past lives – and Grimwood hits all the obvious story beats. There’s a lot he leaves out, by necessity. I didn’t find his description of the film Starsea convincing – even a decade later, was there any movie that could match 2001? –  and there were a few details here and there that were off (an American could never own an oil field in Abu Dhabi, for example). 

Replay is a fun, if a little mawkish, read. It seems more like historical fiction now, obviously, than it used to, but it’s written as if it were contemporary. It dates the book. And, the ending is, well, a little… banal. The pay-off for all those pages is a let-down.

Replay is in the original Fantasy Masterworks series (despite being science fiction, huh). It also won the World Fantasy Award. Grimwood wrote five novels in total, and was working on a sequel to Replay when he died of a heart attack at age 59. One of his earlier novels, Elise (1979), about an immortal French woman born in 1683, apparently now sells for silly money.