Crash

by Sam J. Lundwall

Swedish

179 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Sam Thore Jerrie Lundwall (born 24 February 1941), published as Sam J. Lundwall, is a Swedish science fiction writer, translator, publisher and singer. He translated a number of science-fiction-related articles and works from Swedish into English.

Reviews

[Anders · Rating 2 out of 5]

A young Swedish SF author visits an SFWA convention in New York, meets a literary agent twice his age, and has a very brief affair with her. The dalliance, which takes up most of the book, is slightly touching but doesn't interest me much. (Also, isn't a temporary infatuation called a "crush" rather than a "crash"?) The depiction of the science fiction authors and the publishing world does much more for me. This part is presumably a roman à clef; my guess is that Harvey's real name is Harry Harrison (lives in Ireland, fluent in Danish) and that the publisher Walt Wyn draws much from Donald A. Wollheim.

There are also some problems with chronology in this novel. If Janet is 48, she can't have stalked Jacques Brel in Paris when she was 18: at the time, Jacques was still an unknown 20-year-old in Brussels and moreover had not even started singing yet. So either Lundwall's research is not up to scratch, or we're dealing with an alternate world, which would make this book real science fiction (after a fashion) instead of meta-SF.

(An earlier version of this review can be found on my LiveJournal and LibraryThing profiles. I plagiarise my younger self shamelessly.)