Guiding a Young Science-Fiction Fan

—B.M., St. Paul, Minn.

Many aunts (and parents) would kill to be able to ask this question; the words "voracious reader" and 13-year-old boy aren't often used in the same sentence. And "Brave New World" is science fiction, although not of the "Beam me up, Scotty" variety.

There's an odd temporal snobbery in literary criticism—fiction set either in the future or the past comes from the wrong side of the tracks. It's even been called "paraliterature." In an essay, Margaret Atwood, whose most recent novel, "The Year of the Flood," might fairly be described as science fiction, says the term "has acquired a dubious if not downright sluttish reputation" because of the "bug-eyed-monster-bestrewn-space-operas" wing of the genre. She points out there is also intellectual science fiction, or speculative fiction, as she prefers to call it—Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker"; Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five"; Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451."

Science fiction looks easy to write, but it's most emphatically not. James Blish, a science-fiction author and critic, denounced much of it as, "Call a rabbit a smeerp stories: If they look like rabbits but you call them smeerps, that makes it science fiction." Ursula K. Le Guin said she lost interest in science fiction as a girl because it was about "starship captains in black with lean rugged faces and a lot of fancy artillery."

So Aunt B.'s mission is to gradually nudge the boy along the spectrum from Godzilla and 50-foot women to H. G. Wells, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Douglas Adams.

Then he'll be ready for some great contemporary science-fiction writers: William Gibson, China Miéville, Neal Stephenson, Connie Willis, David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro and Richard Powers.

Remembering an early encounter with science fiction, George Orwell wrote: "Back in the 1900s, it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H.G. Wells. There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined." That's a gift indeed.
By CYNTHIA CROSSEN

Ghost Writers A new wave of posthumous releases from authors like Vladimir Nabokov, David Foster Wallace and Ralph Ellison raises thorny questions abo

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

After author David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September, his longtime agent, Bonnie Nadell, found herself lost in a maze of words. Scattered on two different computers and in hard copies stashed around the cluttered garage where Mr. Foster Wallace had worked in Claremont, Calif., she discovered multiple versions of his final, unfinished novel. She had no idea which draft he preferred. Mr. Wallace's novel about I.R.S. agents, due out next fall, is being assembled based on the author's notes. "A great deal of it is a puzzle," she said of the novel, titled "Pale King."

A new wave of posthumous books by iconic authors is stirring debate over how publishers should handle fragmentary literary remains. Works by Vladimir Nabokov, William Styron, Graham Greene, Carl Jung and Kurt Vonnegut will hit bookstores this fall. Ralph Ellison and the late thriller writer Donald E. Westlake have posthumous novels due out in 2010.

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Illustration by Peter Ferguson
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The posthumous works may generate as much controversy as enthusiasm. Many are incomplete or appear in multiple drafts, raising thorny questions about author intent. Others, dug up from the archives of authors' early and less accomplished work, could be branded disappointing footnotes to otherwise lustrous literary legacies. An unfinished murder mystery by Graham Greene, which is being serialized in the literary magazine, "The Strand," was slammed on the Los Angeles Times's literary blog, Jacket Copy, as "a far cry" from Greene's later works, such as "The Power and the Glory."

While some attribute the surge in posthumous publications to macabre coincidence, others say publishers are more aggressively seeking works by famous dead authors because they have established audiences—an irresistible prospect for a struggling industry. New works by literary giants are "about as much of a sure thing as you could have in a business with few sure things," said Robert Miller, publisher of HarperStudio, a HarperCollins imprint that released a collection of previously unpublished Mark Twain essays and short stories this past spring.

Mark Twain's first executor released only a fraction of his unpublished work—a trove of papers that included some 700 manuscripts—for fear that less polished pieces would damage the author's reputation. Today, nearly 100 years after Twain's death, all but 50 or 60 of those manuscripts have been published, says Robert Hirst, editor of the recent Harper collection "Who Is Mark Twain?" Some critics have charged that many of Twain's posthumous works should have been left in the dustbin, but Mr. Hirst argues that even the flawed works have value.

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Excerpts

* 'Suicide Run,' by William Styron
* 'Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction,' by Kurt Vonnegut

"You can learn a lot about how he thought and wrote that you can't learn from reading an edition of 'Huckleberry Finn,'" Mr. Hirst said. "I don't think anything we publish can damage his reputation."

Vladimir Nabokov instructed his family to burn his final novel, "The Original of Laura," after his death. He had sketched out the novel on 138 index cards, a process he used to write "Lolita" and other works. Nobody, not even Mr. Nabokov's son and literary executor, Dmitri Nabokov, knows the exact order the author intended for the cards.

For decades, Dmitri Nabokov kept the manuscript locked in a Swiss bank vault, allowing only a select group of Nabokov scholars to read it, and occasionally suggesting in interviews that he would destroy the novel. In 2008, more than 30 years after his father's death, he announced to a German magazine his decision to publish the work, saying that his father had appeared to him in a vision and told him to "go ahead and publish."

Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar and biographer at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, said he initially felt the novel was too "raw" and that Mr. Nabokov's directive to destroy it should be heeded. He first saw a draft in 1985, when Vera Nabokov, the author's wife, allowed him to read it. After her death in 1991, he reread the manuscript and changed his mind

Old Kings, New Game Ex-champions meet again, but the stakes have changed

What a piece of Cold War nostalgia! Fused together by their similar names, through four marathon matches over four years, they were like Siamese twins. Karpov and Kasparov. Kasparov and Karpov. So for a schoolboy of the 1980s, to see their names paired again in Spain—where they played their final world championship match in 1987—was a Proustian experience.

The match they played this past week to mark the 25th anniversary of their first world-title bout was the highlight of a chess conference in the city of Valencia. The two Russians played 12 games of speed chess over three days. And just as he did in the '80s, Garry Kasparov emerged victorious, winning 9-3.

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Garry Kasparov, right, and Anatoly Karpov in Spain this week.
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Before the match he told the Spanish newspaper El País that the quality of the chess was unlikely to equal that of the five month, 48-game struggle of 25 years ago. "In this case," he said, "nostalgia will be a positive thing, and the duel will serve to put a spotlight on chess again." Some things never change, though—both players grumbled about the lighting in the hall.

Chess in the second half of the 20th century was overwhelmingly a Soviet phenomenon. But the Soviet Union is gone, Spain far more prosperous, and players' fees denominated in euros. As for the players, Anatoly Karpov is scarcely recognizable—the ax-faced and hungry master of 25 years ago is now a well-fed elder statesman. He's still an active pro, if in steep decline. (He worked hard for this one, though, spending weeks training with a team of grandmasters and a supercomputer.)

Mr. Kasparov hasn't played professionally for years, devoting himself instead to Russian politics. To prepare for this match he spent time with the Norwegian wunderkind Magnus Carlsen—the next great champion of the game, Mr. Kasparov says. (It will be at least two years before Mr. Carlsen gets his chance to prove that.) With the Soviet monopoly ended, chess has largely shed its political import.

Chess never mattered that much in the past. In 1809 Vienna Napoleon lost to the "Turk"—ostensibly an early chess-playing machine but in fact a man in a box, operating levers to move the painted effigy's wooden hands. The emperor swept the pieces from the board and shouted "Bagatelle!"—a trifle. Only in exile on St. Helena did he take chess seriously.

Jesus' Reflections on War

What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. -James (4: 01-03) ______________________________________ Chapter Five from ‘Messages from Jesus’ WAR "Sweet Jesus, is it a sin to kill in war?" "Thou shalt not kill. War, among other things, is cause and effect, resulting from and in karmic debt. Karmic experiences are destined to happen over and over, unless the chains of karma are broken and love reigns. The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill,' along with love, non-violence and forgiveness, would rid the earth of this karma, and world-wide peace would be maintained for generations to come. "In the meantime, war continues to exist because of mankind's misuse of free will. If a country or individual feels they must go to war, it has to be done only for the sake of a higher cause such as preserving true freedom and true equality of mankind, and even then, done without malice or seeking vengeance.