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Is Seeing Through Someone Else’s Eyes Truly Seeing? — The Forgotten Sci-Fi Classic, Cirque, by Terry Carr (1977)
Some books, even great books, are destined to elude your grasp. You will go your entire life without reading them or even hearing their name. A book that could conceivably change your life, or simply allow you to disappear into a haze of literary delight, will remain on the shelves. But every now and then, by luck or fate, one of these books swims into your life, and you realize how easily you might have missed it. Clicking too quickly through a web page or not stopping to linger on a dusty bookshelf, and the moment would disappear — as would the book in question.
For me, that’s exactly what happened when I found Terry Carr’s little masterpiece, Cirque (1977): I was browsing a used bookstore’s out-of-the-way science fiction section with my son, and had actually already found what I was looking for. So while he continued to sort through the Star Trek novels, I killed time by scanning the spines, now and then pulling a volume I just as quickly pushed back. Until I found Cirque.
Admittedly, the cover is what got me. A very uniquely late 70’s, early 80’s science fiction cover, depicting an abstract head cracking open, with a blob-like brain emerging, sprouting tentacles and a cloud of light. A vague city appears on the man’s…
