Publishers Weekly has called Bisson's prose "a wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision," and John Crowley hails Bisson as a "national treasure!" Any Day Now is truly a literary tour de force. It is a poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from Kentucky to New York City and daringly unique. This road movie of a novel, which begins as a fifties coming-of-age story and ends in an isolated hippy commune under threat of revolution, provides a transcendent commentary on America then and now.
Any Day Now: A Novel
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"An unsettling, funny, freaky reimagining of America, impeccably written, by one of our most consistently interesting transgressors of literary boundaries."
(-Michael Chabon )"He writes like a man who invented language . . . Treat yourself to this book."
(-Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall )"Someone once said everybody has a book inside them, but it takes a writer to get it out. The truth is, not many writers ever even manage it like this. Bisson just wrote his personal masterpiece, a book which will drop you through the floor of your assumptions about coming of age inside the politics and counterculture of the Vietnam era and into a fresh new-old world, in which you'll live, for the duration of this book, as your own."
(-Jonathan Lethem )"The author, a writer of (probably under-appreciated) sf and fantasy novels, here deftly resurrects Sixties America. As history is gradually subverted and chronology reshuffled, the reader is slightly jarred and then fascinated by the dramatic world presented. Highly recommended for its literary quality and creativity of vision."
(--Library Journal)
"In this unsettling but always interesting alternate-history novel, which offers much subversive commentary on contemporary society, Bisson's jazz-like prose summons a utopia whose adherents seek personal freedom only to find that their basic civil liberties can vanish in an instant."
(--Booklist )"Bisson plays off the shared imagery of the bohemian underground, and the story has a thrumming momentum, a sense of slangy sass and jive, light-hearted yet soulful."
(--Washington Post )"Bisson's novel is less an alternate history than a kind of shadow history, explored in a way that only SF can explore it. On his website, Bisson modestly says the novel is 'not exactly science fiction; and not exactly not.' In fact, it's both – and neither aspect would be nearly as compelling without the other. What it is, I think it's fair to say, is the major work of one of our most talented and under-appreciated writers, in or out of the SF fold."
(--Locus Magazine )"Terry Bisson's new novel, Any Day Now, a blend of coming-of-age tropes and alternate history, sweeps us through the turbulent '60s and imagines a 1968 that both RFK and MLK survived. Bisson uses short scenes with minimal exposition and snappy dialogue. This leads to some crystallizing moments . . . It also lets Bisson capture the spirit of the times in single strokes."
(--The Rumpus )"Any Day Now is a fascinating examination of the struggle for self-definition and idealism against both the machinations of authority and the whimsical and cruel vagaries of fate. Clay's journey introduces him to plenty of iconic figures of the time, and even as Bisson deftly shifts history, these now-mythical figures cast as long a shadow as ever. That marvelous juxtaposition of how brutal the quest for peace can be is thoroughly enthralling, creating a truly unique reading experience."
(--Sacramento/San Francisco Book Review )
About the Author
TERRY BISSON is an award-winning writer. He is the author of seven novels, and his short fiction has appeared in Playboy and Harper's, among other magazines. He previously worked as an auto mechanic and as a magazine and book editor. Bisson lives in Oakland, California.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Terry Bisson's _Any Day Now_ is a surprisingly lovely novel of the '60s told in a spare, dialog-heavy, fast-moving style. It begins as a historical novel -- a richly rendered coming-of-age story set in a western Kentucky slowly and a bit unwillingly being dragged into the Fifties and Sixties -- and follows its protagonist from there to college, then to the tumult of early-60s New York, and from there to the communes and social upheaval of the late Sixties in the Western deserts. Each of these settings is rendered revealingly through a few beautiful little moments of observation (the way anyone with a beard and a jazz album in Kentucky is a suspicious "beatnik"; the difficulty of getting insulation to stick to the roof of a geodesic dome with improvised glue). And the book's spare, to-the-point, episodic narrative style keeps the plot hustling along, even if it occasionally leaves us wanting a bit more psychology and characterization than we're given.
The novel is worth reading for the observations and characters alone, and Bisson's eye for detail is often as impressive as his ear for dialogue -- but the realism of the novel's evocation of a vanished age isn't, as it turns out, its only point. There's a second game afoot. Though the book begins as a straightforward historical novel, it soon shades, sneakily, into alternate history; it's done so much on the sly and in the background, cleverly, that readers won't notice it happening right away, but the world of the novel slowly diverges from our own history, heading another direction entirely. It's hard to say much more than this without badly spoiling the experience of reading the book for the first time; suffice it to say the novel is clearly meant as an act of political imagination, a complicated exploration of what might have been, neither entirely utopian nor dystopian (though, amusingly, some reviewers have called it each). The America of the late Sixties that Bisson brings us here is not a place that anyone truly lived in then, but it is nonetheless where many people's imaginations lived, a realistic evocation of the future people in the Sixties imagined for themselves -- a time of revolutionary possibility, militaristic danger, terrifying instability, and deep familiarity all at once.
The book's greatest feat is to evoke that instability, hope, and fear so well: it's set, by the end, in a world where no one can quite tell whether they should be planning for a quiet year of smoking weed in the mountains, or a full-scale civil war. This book is well worth reading as a historical novel, too -- but it's a document of the *imagined* history of the Sixties as well as a realistic evocation of a lot of what Sixties life was about. I hope it will find a wide audience, outside of the SF readership as well as within it.
The novel is worth reading for the observations and characters alone, and Bisson's eye for detail is often as impressive as his ear for dialogue -- but the realism of the novel's evocation of a vanished age isn't, as it turns out, its only point. There's a second game afoot. Though the book begins as a straightforward historical novel, it soon shades, sneakily, into alternate history; it's done so much on the sly and in the background, cleverly, that readers won't notice it happening right away, but the world of the novel slowly diverges from our own history, heading another direction entirely. It's hard to say much more than this without badly spoiling the experience of reading the book for the first time; suffice it to say the novel is clearly meant as an act of political imagination, a complicated exploration of what might have been, neither entirely utopian nor dystopian (though, amusingly, some reviewers have called it each). The America of the late Sixties that Bisson brings us here is not a place that anyone truly lived in then, but it is nonetheless where many people's imaginations lived, a realistic evocation of the future people in the Sixties imagined for themselves -- a time of revolutionary possibility, militaristic danger, terrifying instability, and deep familiarity all at once.
The book's greatest feat is to evoke that instability, hope, and fear so well: it's set, by the end, in a world where no one can quite tell whether they should be planning for a quiet year of smoking weed in the mountains, or a full-scale civil war. This book is well worth reading as a historical novel, too -- but it's a document of the *imagined* history of the Sixties as well as a realistic evocation of a lot of what Sixties life was about. I hope it will find a wide audience, outside of the SF readership as well as within it.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
By Peter Coyote
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
"Any Day Now" is one of the best books on the Sixties I've read (including my own.)Terry Bisson is one of the nation's celebrated Sci-Fi authors (he's won Hugo and Nebula Awards) and has been one of my favorite writers for four decades. (Disclaimer---also one of my closest friends.) He lived the truths he describes in his pages, and in some cases we lived them together. He's one of the most wry and funny minds around, and now he's moved into "reality", which in Terry's case means, "almost" real. I said once that he could snap a tooth out a comb and slide you through an opening no wider than that into another reality without your realizing it. The last third of his book, the "what if" Robert Kennedy has not died is wondrous. Why no national reviewers have deigned to review this book is an order of injustice like considering Newt Gingrich a spokesman for anything but self-interest. I urge you to read it.
Peter Coyote, author, "Sleeping Where I Fall."
Peter Coyote, author, "Sleeping Where I Fall."
Format:Kindle Edition
I'm having a hard time saying whether I enjoyed this book or not. At the beginning of the book, I found the writing style somewhat distracting. It was too similar to some of Asimov's coming of age type writing, but not quite there. Yet, I thought it was a great style for what Bisson was doing. As Bisson seemed to settle into the writing and the subject matter, things went smoother. By about a quarter of the way into the book, I felt I was somewhat into it and interested in what was happening and enjoying myself. And that lasted through the whole middle.
But, in the last quarter, there seemed to be a pacing problem that I can't entirely put my finger on. Events were clearly ramping up. But, as the reader, I didn't really feel like it. Some part of this may be purposeful, due to our somewhat detached and take-things-as-they-come main character. But really there is this surreal huge climax of events we are told about in a somewhat disinterested way as the character fails to *feel* like it is coming to anything interesting at all.
But, in the last quarter, there seemed to be a pacing problem that I can't entirely put my finger on. Events were clearly ramping up. But, as the reader, I didn't really feel like it. Some part of this may be purposeful, due to our somewhat detached and take-things-as-they-come main character. But really there is this surreal huge climax of events we are told about in a somewhat disinterested way as the character fails to *feel* like it is coming to anything interesting at all.
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