#anna kavan
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« She looked, and saw the black, domed sky arching over her head. And her heart dilated; she felt the great black dome in her heart. She sat under the stars, worshipping them. Her heart opened and grew vast, until the whole sky with all its stars began to pour into her, a mysterious flood of star-strung darkness. She wanted to receive the night sky into her heart. »
— Anna Kavan, Let Me Alone
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I felt I belonged to another dimension, and became silent.
Anna Kavan
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Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armor.
Despairingly she looked all round. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an overhanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world.
Ice, Anna Kavan
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no connection in life more poignant and intense than that between a girl and the copy of her favorite book from adolescence.
#.txt#ice by anna kavan#flowers in the attic#and then there were none#those were mine but tag yrs im curious 👀👀👀👀#rb bait#v c andrews#agatha christie#anna kavan
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The world belongs to heartless people and to machines which can’t give. Only the others, the heroes, know how to give. Out of their great generosity they gave me the truth, paid me the compliment of not lying to me. Not one of them ever told me life was worth living. They are the only people I’ve ever loved. I think only of them and of how they are lost to me. How never again shall I sit beside someone who loves me while the world races past. Never again cross the tropic of Capricorn, or, under the Arctic stars, in the blackness of firs and spruce, see the black glitter of ice in starlight in the cold snow countries.
–Anna Kavan, “World of Heroes”
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Ice (Anna Kavan)
"The book follows a male protagonist who feverishly pursues a young nameless woman from country to country as society collapses due to a beginning of a new ice age. People flee their cities to go south, so a lot of the scenes take place in the wilderness and the forests. The protagonist often fantasizes about the woman being torn to shreds by wild animals as she flees a pursuer, and often compares her to prey animals."
Rogue Male (Geoffrey Household)
"A bored, upper-class British sportsman is found on the grounds of an unnamed European dictator's residence with his hunting rifle in hand, and subsequently arrested. His claim, maintained under torture, that he was stalking the dictator purely as an exercise in the skill of the hunt and that he had no intention of firing is so audacious that it is almost believed — but nonetheless he cannot be allowed to live. To execute such a well-connected Briton would cause an international incident, so his captors decide to kill him by throwing him over a cliff so that his body will show injuries consistent with accidental death. Though badly injured he survives and manages to make his way to the Channel and from there back to England. There he discovers that home does not mean safety, nor an end to the pursuit."
#hunt poll#the hunt#poll#the magnus archives#leitner tournament#Ice#Anna Kavan#Rogue Male#Geoffrey Household
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I had been following the right road, after all.
—Anna Kavan, Ice
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Sean McTiernan's SF podcast (is great) :
SFUltra is a show about a guy who hated science fiction until 2022 convincing himself he actually loves it, one book at a time. It is going pretty well so far. It gets published every two weeks.
Apple Podcasts
Spotify
RSS
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SFULTRA #10 - Ice - Anna Kavan
special 2 eps: Motorman / The Age Of Sinatra - David Ohle
SFULTRA #9 - We Who Are About To… - Joanna Russ
SFULTRA #8 - I, Vampire - Jody Scott
SFULTRA #7 - Babel-17 - Samuel R Delany
SFULTRA #6 - The Dispossessed - Ursula K Le Guin
SFULTRA #5 - Camp Concentration - Thomas M Disch
SFULTRA #4 - Rogue Moon - Algis Budrys
SFULTRA #3 - Electric Forest - Tanith Lee
SFULTRA #2 - Doloriad - Missouri Williams
SFULTRA #1 - High Rise - JG Ballard
SFULTRA #0 - Why Science Fiction?
Patreon :
Perfect Taste Forever is a recommendation podcast about everything that isn't science fiction. It often features miniseries on a specific topic, such as:
Decoy Octopus - the concept of roleplaying
Fuck You - underrated gay novelists
Murder House Sold - true crime
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His previous shows have included lengthy examinations of horror (Hundreds Of Dead Bodies), thrillers (All Units), found footage horror (Hundreds of Pixelated Dead Bodies), whatever I felt like (The Wonder Of It All and Calling All Units) and even old time radio (Kiss Your Ass Goodbye).
As co-host : Live At The Death Factory (Scum Cinema), Bodega Box Office (rap movies) and Self Pity (self pity).
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All Units feed :
#sf#scifi#science fiction#literature#funny#experimental fiction#books#jg ballard#joanna russ#david ohle#anna kavan#jody scott#samuel r delany#ursula k le guin#thomas m disch#tanith lee#missouri williams#the doloriad#motorman
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Read of Ice by Anna Kavan (1967) (193pgs)
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How hard it is to sit at home with nothing to do but wait. To wait—the most difficult thing in the whole world. To wait—with no living soul in whom to confide one’s doubts, one’s fears, one’s relentless hopes.
Anna Kavan, “Airing a Grievance”
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Both of them persecuted her, she did not understand why. But she accepted the fact as she accepted all the things that happened to her, expecting to be ill-treated, to be made a victim, ultimately to be destroyed, either by unknown forces or by human beings. This fate seemed always to have been waiting for her, ever since time began. Only love might have saved her from it. But she had never looked for love. Her part was to suffer; that was known and accepted. Fatality brought resignation. It was no use fighting against her fate. She knew she had been beaten before the start.
Anna Kavan, Ice
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Anna Kavan: Ice (1967)
#anna kavan#penguin classics#penguin modern classics#literature#slipstream#science fiction#cold war#ice age#climate change#dystopic
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Machines in the Head by Anna Kavan - 3/5
Reading Anna Kavan during the aftermath of one of the worst depressive episodes of my life is funny because even if I didn’t like this book, I felt like I understood it. Machines in the Head is a sort of “Greatest Hits” compilation of Kavan’s short stories, pulling from 5 different collections from 1940-1975. Despite this, they all felt like part of the same big work. Almost all of the stories were in first-person, translating the most depressing despair into externally-turned nightmare imagery. The fact that they’re all in first person makes it feel like the narrator isn’t crazy, she’s just having a logical reaction to a nightmarish world. Kavan’s hopelessness isn’t fun to read, nor is it cathartic at all, but I definitely could see where she was coming from. The best stories were the ones that were the most rooted in reality, “Ice Storm” and “World of Heroes”.
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The trees were lovely and frightening to look at. I tried not to feel afraid of the trees. Dear God, let me not start being afraid of things in the natural world. It’s only the human world that is truly fearful.
–Anna Kavan, “Ice Storm”
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