Reading: THE MAGICIAN by W. Somerset Maugham
Music: Pogue's "Peace and Love" and Utopia's "Anthology: 1974-1985"
Link o' the Day: Ansible

Whew!

Productive night. Got a lot of revision on the Whisps story finished and fixed a minor hole in the background that needed fixing. I'm glad I caught it just the same, though. I Finished up a new proof of the voice acting book and worked out the cover using someone else's original cover graphic. (The trick was getting it to work for a book cover.) All in all, I feel like I've had a productive, yet non-rushed evening.

I'm in the middle of a couple of books all at once. I have your usual SF and fantasy selections which sit in various parts of the house depending on where I feel like reading (bedroom, bathroom, etc.) and my backpack which is where I stick the book I'm giving priority reading for the bus and lunch breaks. My primary book is THE MAGICIAN by W. Somerset Maugham. (C'mon now... who's surprised by now? I've been on a real Maugham kick lately.)

It's caught my interest for a couple of reasons. First, he's using as a model for one of his main characters the personage of Aleister Crowley.(1) For those who don't know, he was a famous fraud/con-man during the earlier decades of the 20th century who styled himself a magician and keeper of dark, kaballistic secrets. For those on the outside, he seemed quite the buffoon. For those who followed hermetic lore seriously, he was quite the character--sort of like the precursor to anton LeVay, but an even snapier dresser. Apparently Maugham met the real-life Crowley a few brief times and the character stuck enough in his mind where he built a book based _loosely_ on a similar character. Fiction, mind you. Not biography.

And like many disaffected youth, I had a dabbling interest in such things during my stormy teen years, so I was somewhat familiar with Crowley's reputation already. Thankfully I grew out of that phase as far as taking it seriously goes,(2) but I've always had a kind of fascination with the people and the culture that sprung up around those people. Unsurprisingly, I'm also a great re-reader of Umberto Eco's FOCAULT'S PENDULUM which gets pretty deep into this sort of thing as well.

So there's Crowley and that culture, but there it's also interesting to compare the style of THE MAGAICIAN, an early work, to some of Maugham's later works. His later works are less wordy and the style is more confident. In THE MAGICIAN you can see a little bit of the new writer. Mind you, it's still very good writing, even brilliant in places, but when you compare it to THE RAZOR'S EDGE or CAKES AND ALE, the difference is more obvious. I need to find a copy of OF HUMAN BONDAGE soon, methinks.

All right, enough bookish babble. On to today's link which is the fanzine Ansible compiled and edited by Dave Langford, a man with so many Hugos on his shelves that he probably rivals the British army in number of rockets--and well-deserved. He writes pretty good fiction, but he's also one of the best fan writers around. I highly recommend THE SILENCE OF LANGFORD available from NESFA. (Dave was one of the first to contribute a piece to Sleight of Hand.)

Enjoy!

Notes:
(1) Bonus points - Crowley's name inspired what name for what fictional character that appears in a work by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett? (Double bonus points: what rock star purchased a house owned by Crowley?)

(2) I mean no disrespect to those who follow the pagan traditions. The kaballistic fad of the early 20th century seems to me more the result of a bunch of bored wannabe-scholars than an actual faith or religion.